142
we keep up continuity, our literature of the past will become more
and
more remote from us until it is as strange to us as the literature of
I
foreign people. For our language goes on changing ; our way of life
changes, under the pressure of material changes in our environment
in
all sorts of ways; and unless we have those few men who combine
an
exceptional sensibility with an exceptional power over words, our
OWl
ability, not merely to express, but even to feel any but the crudest
emotions will degenerate.
This was delivered as a lecture in 1943, although it was not pub–
lished until 1945. It therefore runs concurrently with the writing
of
Notes Towards a Definition of Culture
which, though published only
in 1948, was begun, as Mr. Eliot tells us, four or five years before.
III
tone, however, strikes me, at least, as markedly different- in fact almost
contradictory. I am referring not only to the mellowness and cheerful–
ness infusing the whole book-the thin-lipped assertions that poetry
i
only a "superior amusement" and that we ought to "scrutinize our read·
ing by precise theological standards" have not only vanished but taken
their damp souls with them. I mean something more positive
than
that. The general tone of
Notes Towards a Definition of Culture
was
not only laudatory of times past, it was genteelly despairing of
any
future at all : the logical ground being apparently that there was
110
future except in the past where all good had centered round the parish
pump;
~nd
the past is almost by definition unobtainable. That
Mr.
Eliot, as it were, with the other hand, was able to express a hope fer
poetry-which means, in terms of his opinions on drama and dramatic
communication, a hope also for a people it may be worth while com–
municating with-is an important matter, even if there are as yet
DO
signs that he has decided how that people would be constituted. It
is
also a very significant thing that he feels this essay is "worth preserv·
ing" and that it fits in with what is clearly a planned and not
I
haphazard selection of his past and current work.
What then is the principle of selection? The interest in poetry
and
the making of poetry is paramount. But the book is also about particular
poets ; and it is therefore also about poets as men, not, admittedly,
in
the circumstantial biographical sense, but as whole minds in contact
with their world. The choice of poets might nevertheless seem at
fIrst
sight unusual and in need of explanation. Milton, Goethe, yes, not
re–
markable. But Sir John Davies, Byron, Kipling and Yeats. What
OIl
earth have all these in common in Mr. Eliot's mind? There is the old
quest for the philosopher-poet: Davies, for example, had, in Mr. Eliot'.
opinion, some marked capacity for fusing thought and feeling and
OIl
this ground-admitting the daring and actual disparity of the com-
