140
PARTISAN REVIEW
If
a poet "dies" it is usually because he has committed hirnself
in one way or another to
Ie monde serieux:
to one of the many con·
ventions which take themselves seriously as a total way of life and
erect their values into absolutes. The convention might of course
be
that either of a tycoon or a theologian, to name extremes of material
and ideal whose values between them constitute a respectable society,
or both; Wordsworth in becoming sexually respectable, in
a respected Poet Laureate and in writing ecclesiastical sonnets
have been trying to make the best of all the worlds.
If
the aging eagle lives he does it by becoming more and more
obstinately an authentic voice, as Hardy did, to some extent, Yeats
even more so. The "voice" is here the key word. Certainly in the
of Yeats, what matures and lasts is the kind of vocalization which is
highly personal and individual both in rhythm and choice of
this develops till in the end it is difficult to distinguish between man
and poet, or to decide what is theme and what is poetry.
Of Mr. Eliot I should say with all the circumspection I can muster
-this at least one ought to learn from him-that poetically
~1-'t::o."~UK
he has decided to live rather than to die. Whether he will actually
us more poetry seems uncertain; there are indications in the text
he may not. But the book is a reaffirmation of poetry as a way of life
and of the poet as an authentic individual voice. And the two,
the
way of life, the moral maturation of the poet, and the voice, the craft,
are no longer held apart but are brought together, almost fused.
All the essays in this book seem to me to be carefully selected and
carefully placed in relation to one another so that they bring out
this
indivisible concern with moral and artistic maturation and thus seem
to lead deliberately to the last of all, on Yeats. Mr. Eliot says "It is
my
experience that towards middle age a man has three choices: to stop
writing altogether, to repeat himself with perhaps an increasing skill
of
virtuosity, or by taking thought to adapt himself to middle age and
find a different way of working." And he says, shortly afterwards "But
maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing
new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the same intensity
as
the emotions of youth."
"What Yeats did in the later and middle years" he says, "is a
great
and permanent example--which poets-to-come should study with rever–
ence--of what I have called Character of the Artist: a kind of moral
as well as intellectual excellence."
Yeats's morality, as Mr. Eliot makes clear, was in the vigor of
his
