Chapters 4
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1 00 - Preface 2:50
Three essays on poetry of the 17th century. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. HOMAGE TO JOHN DRYDEN. THREE ESSAYS ON POETRY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. BY T. S. ELLIOTT. PREFACE. The three essays composing this small book were written several years ago for a publication in the Times Literary Supplement, to the editor of which I owe the encouragement to write them, and now the permission to reprint them. Inadequate as periodical criticism, they need still more justification in a book. Some apology, therefore, is required. My intention had been to write a series of papers on the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, beginning with Chapman and Dunn, and ending with Johnson.
This forbidden fruit of impossible leisure might have filled two volumes. At best, it would not have pretended to completeness. The subjects would have been restricted by my own ignorance and caprice. But the series would have included Aurelian Townsend and Bishop King, and the authors of Cooper's Hill and The Vanity of Human Wishes, as well as Swift and Pope. That which dissipation interrupts, the infirmities of age come to terminate. One learns to conduct one's life with greater economy. I have abandoned this design in the pursuit of other policies. I have long felt that the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even much of that of inferior inspiration, possesses an elegance and dignity absent from the popular and pretentious verse of the Romantic poets and their successors.
To have urged this claim persuasively would have led me indirectly into considerations of politics, education, and theology, Which I no longer care to approach in this way. I hope that these three papers may, in spite of, and partly because of their defects, preserve in cryptogram certain notions which, if expressed directly, would be destined to immediate obloquy, followed by perpetual oblivion. T. S. Eliot.
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2 01 - John Dryden 28:35
1. John Dryden If the prospect of delight be wanting, which alone justifies the perusal of poetry, we may let the reputation of Dryden sleep in the manuals of literature. To those who are genuinely insensible of his genius, and these are probably the majority of living readers of poetry, we can only oppose illustrations of the following proposition. That their insensibility does not merely signify indifference to satire and wit, but lack of perception of qualities not confined to satire and wit and present in the work of other poets Whom these persons feel that they understand. To those whose taste in poetry is formed entirely upon the English poetry of the nineteenth century, to the majority, it is difficult to explain or excuse Dryden.
The twentieth century is still the nineteenth, although it may in time acquire its own character. The nineteenth century had, like every other, limited tastes and peculiar fashions, and like every other, it was unaware of its own limitations. Its tastes and fashions had no place for Dryden. Yet Dryden is one of the tests of a Catholic appreciation of poetry. He is a successor of Johnson, And therefore the descendant of Marlow. He is the ancestor of nearly all that is best in the poetry of the eighteenth century. Once we have mastered Dryden, and by mastery is meant a full and essential enjoyment, not the enjoyment of a private, whimsical fashion, we can extract whatever enjoyment and edification there is in his contemporaries.
Oldham, Denham, Or the less remunerative Waller, and still more his successors, not only Pope, but Phillips, Churchill, Gray, Johnson, Cooper, Goldsmith. His inspiration is prolonged in Crabbe and Byron. It even extends, as Mr. Van Doren cleverly points out, to Poe. Even the poets responsible for the revolt were well acquainted with him. Wordsworth knew his work. And Keats invoked his aid. We cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden. And to enjoy Dryden means to pass beyond the limitations of the 19th century into a new freedom. All, all of a peace throughout, thy chase had a beast in view. Thy wars brought nothing about. Thy lovers were all untrue.
Tis well an old age is out, and time to begin anew. The world's great age begins anew. The golden years return. The earth doth like a snake renew her winter weeds outworn. Heaven smiles and faiths and empires gleam like wrecks of a dissolving dream. The first of these passages is by Dryden, the second by Shelley. The second is found in the Oxford book of English verse. The first is not. Yet we might defy anyone to show that the second is superior on intrinsically poetic merit. It is easy to see why the second should appeal more readily to the nineteenth, and what is left of the nineteenth under the name of the twentieth century. It is not so easy to see propriety in an image which divests a snake of the quote-unquote winter weeds, and this is a sort of blemish which would have been noticed more quickly by a contemporary of Dryden than by a contemporary of Shelley.
These reflections are occasioned by an admirable book on Dryden which has appeared at this very turn of time, when taste is becoming more fluid and ready for a new mould. It is a book which every practitioner of English verse should study. The consideration is so thorough, the matter so compact, the appreciation so just, temperate, and enthusiastic, and supplied with such copious and well-chosen extracts from the poetry. The suggestion of astutely placed facts leads our thoughts so far that there only remain to mention as defects which do not detract from its value to omissions. The prose is not dealt with, and the plays are somewhat slighted. What is especially impressive is the exhibition of the very wide range of Dryden's work shown by the quotations of every species.
Everyone knows Macflegno and parts of Epsilon and Akitophel. In consequence, Triton has sunk by the persons he has elevated to distinction, Shadwell of Saddle, Shaftesbury, and Buckingham. Triton was much more than a satirist. To dispose of him as a satirist is to place an obstacle in the way of our understanding. At all events, we must satisfy ourselves of our definition of the term satire. We must not allow our familiarity with the word to blind us to differences and refinements. We must not assume that satire is a fixed type, and fixed to the prosaic, suited only to prose. We must acknowledge that satire is not the same thing in the hands of two different writers of genius. The connotations of quote-unquote satire and of quote-unquote wit, in short, may be only prejudices of 19th century taste.
Perhaps we think, after reading Mr. Van Doren's book, a just review of Dryden may be given by beginning with some other portion of his work than his celebrated satires, but even here there is much more present, and much more that is poetry than is usually supposed. The piece of Dryden's, which is the most fun, Which is the most sustained display of surprise after surprise of wit from line to line, is McFlecknoe. Dryden's method here is something very near to parody. He applies vocabulary, images, and ceremony which arouse epic association of grandeur to make an enemy helplessly ridiculous. But the effect, though disastrous for the enemy, is very different from that of the humor which merely belittles, such as the satire of Mark Twain.
Dryden continually enhances. He makes his object great in a way contrary to expectation. And the total effect is due to the transformation of the ridiculous into poetry. As an example may be taken a fine passage plagiarized from Cooley, from lines which Dryden must have marked well, for he quotes them directly in one of his prefaces. Here is Cooley. Beneath the dens where unfledged tempests lie, and infant winds their tender voices try. In Mugflecknoe this becomes, where their vast chords the mother's trumpets keep, and undisturbed by watch and silent sleep, near these a nursery erects its head, where queens are formed and future heroes bred. Where unfledged actors learn to laugh and cry, where infant punks their tender voices try, and little maximans the gods defy.
The passage from Cooley is by no means despicable verse, but it is a commonplace description of commonly poetic objects. It is not the element of surprise so essential to poetry, and this Dryden provides. A clever versifier might have written Cooley's lines. Only a poet could have made what Dryden made of them. It is impossible to dismiss his verses as prosaic. Turn them into prose, and they are transmuted. The fragrance is gone. The reproach of the prosaic leveled at Dryden rests upon a confusion between the emotions considered to be poetic, which is a matter allowing considerable latitude of fashion, and the result of personal emotion in poetry, and in a third place there is the emotion depicted by the poet in some kinds of poetry, of which the Testement of Villon is an example.
Again, there is the intellect, the originality and independence and clarity of what we vaguely call the poet's point of view. Our evaluation of poetry, in short, depends upon several considerations, upon the permanent and upon the mutable and upon the transitory. When we try to isolate the essentially poetic, We bring our pursuit, in the end, to something insignificant. Our standards vary with every poet whom we consider. All we can hope to do, in the attempt to introduce some order into our preferences, is to clarify our reasons for finding pleasure in the poetry that we like. With regard to Dryden, therefore, we can say this much. Our taste in English poetry has been largely founded upon a partial perception of the value of Shakespeare and Milton, a perception which dwells upon sublimity of theme and action.
Shakespeare had a great deal more. He had nearly everything to satisfy our various desires for poetry. The point is that the depreciation or neglect of Dryden is not due to the fact that his work is not poetry, but to a prejudice that the material, the feelings out of which he built, is not poetic. Thus, Matthew Arnold observes, in mentioning Dryden and Pope together, that, quote, their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived in the soul, end quote. Arnall was, perhaps, not altogether the detached critic when he wrote this line. He may have been stirred to a defense of his own poetry, conceived and composed in the soul of a mid-century Oxford graduate. Pater remarks that Dryden, loved to emphasize the distinction between poetry and prose, a protest against their confusion coming with somewhat diminished effects from one whose poetry was so prosaic."
But Dryden was right, and the sentence of Pater is cheap journalism. Hazlitt, who had perhaps the most uninteresting mind of all our distinguished critics, says, Dryden and Pope are the great masters of the artificial style of poetry in our language, as the poets of whom I have already treated, Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, and Milton, were of the natural."
In one sentence Hazlitt has committed at least four crimes against taste. It is bad enough to lump Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, and Milton together under the denomination of quote-unquote natural. It is bad to commit Shakespeare to one style only. It is bad to join Dryden and Pope together. But the last absurdity is the contrast of Milton, our greatest master of the artificial style, with Dryden, whose style, vocabulary, syntax, and order of thought is in a high degree natural. And what all these objections come to, we repeat, is a repugnance for the material out of which Dryden's poetry is built. It would be truer to say, indeed, even in the form of the unpersuasive paradox, that Dryden is distinguished principally by his poetic ability.
We price him, as we do Mallarmé, For what he made of his material. Our estimate is only in part the appreciation of ingenuity. In the end, the result is poetry. Much of Dryden's unique merit consists in his ability to make the small into the great, the prosaic into the poetic, the trivial into the magnificent. In this it differs not only from Milton, who required a canvas of the largest size, but from Pope. Who required one of the smallest. If you compare any satiric, quote-unquote, character of Pope with one of Dryden, you will see that the method and intention are widely divergent. When Pope alters, he diminishes. He is a master of miniature. The singular skill of his portrait of Edison, for example, in the epistle to Arbuthnot, depends upon the justice and reserve, the apparent determination not to exaggerate.
The genius of Pope is not for caricature, but the effect of the portraits of Dryden is to transform the object into something greater, as were transformed the verses of Cooley quoted above. A fiery soul, which, working out its way, fretted the pygmy body to decay, and o'er-informed the tenement of clay. These lines are not merely a magnificent tribute. They create the object which they contemplate. The poetry is purer than anything in Pope except the last lines of the Dansead. Dryden is, in fact, much nearer to the master of comic creation than to Pope. As in Johnson, the effect is far from laughter. The comic is the material. The result is poetry. The Civic Guards of Rhodes The country rings around with loud alarms, and raw in fields the rude militia swarms, mouths without hands.
Maintained at vast expense. In peace a charge, in war a weak defense. Stout once a month they march, a blustering band, and ever, but in times of need, at hand. This was the morn, when, issuing on the guard, drawn up in rank and file, they stood prepared, of seeming arms to make a short assay, and hastened to be drunk. The business of the day. Sometimes the wit appears as a delicate flavor to the magnificence, as in Alexander's feast. Soothed with the sound, the king grew vain, fought all his battles o'er again, and thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain. The great advantage of Dryden over Milton is that while the former is always in control of his ascent and can rise or fall at will, and how masterfully, like his own Timotheus, he directs the transitions, the latter has elected a perch from which he cannot afford to fall, and from which he is in danger of slipping.
Food alike those pure intelligential substances require, as doth your rational, and both contain within them every lower faculty of sense whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste, tasting, concoct, digest, assimilate, and corporeal to incorporeal turn. Dryden might have made poetry out of that. His translation from Lucretius is poetry. But we have an ingenious example on which to test our contrast of Dryden and Milton. It is Dryden's opera, called The State of Innocence and Fall of Man, of which Nathaniel Lee neatly says in his preface, Milton did the wealthy mind disclose, and rudely cast what you could well dispose. He roughly drew on an old-fashioned ground, a chaos, for no perfect world were found till through the heap your mighty genius shined.
In the author's preface, Dryden acknowledges his debt generously enough. The original being undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced.
The poem begins auspiciously. Lucifer. Is this the seat our conqueror has given? And this the climate we must change for heaven? These regions and this realm my wars have got. This mournful empire is the loser's lot. In liquid burnings, or on dry to dwell, is all the sad variety of hell. It is an early work. It is, on the whole, a feeble work. It is not deserving of sustained comparison with Paradise Lost. But all the sad variety of hell. Dryden is already stirring. He has assimilated what he could from Milton, and he has shown himself capable of producing as splendid verse. The capacity for assimilation, and the consequent extent of range, are conspicuous qualities of Dryden. He advanced and exhibited his variety by constant translation.
And his translations of Horace, of Ovid, of Lucretius are admirable. His gravest defects are supposed to be displayed in his dramas, but if these were more read, they might be more praised. From the point of view of either the Elizabethan or the French drama, they are obviously inferior. But the charge of inferiority loses part of its force if we admit that Dryden was not quite trying to compete with either, but was pursuing a direction of his own. He created no character, and although his arrangements of plot manifest exceptional ingenuity, it is pure magnificence of diction, of poetic diction, that keeps his plays alive. How I loved! Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours that danced away with down upon your feet, as all your business were to count my passion.
One day passed by, and nothing saw but love. Another came, and still t'was only love. The suns were wearied out with looking on, and I untired with loving. I saw you every day, and all the day, and every day was still but as the first. So eager was I still to see you more. While within your arms I lay, The world fell moldering from my hands each hour. Such language is pure Dryden. It sounds, in Mr. Von Doren's phrase, like a gong. All for Love, from which the lines are taken, is Dryden's best play, and this is perhaps the highest reach. In general, he is best in his place when dealing with situations which do not demand great emotional concentration. When his situation is more trivial, and he can practice his art of making the small great.
The backtalk between the Emperor and his Empress Nurmahal in Aurangzeb is admirable purple comedy. Emperor Such virtue is the plague of human life, A virtuous woman, but a cursed wife. In vain of pampas chastity you're proud, Virtue's adultery of the tongue, when loud, I with less pain a prostitute could bear Than the shrill sound of virtue, virtue, hear. In unchaste wives there's yet a kind of recompensing ease. Vice keeps them humble, gives them care to please. But against clamorous virtue, what defense? It stops our mouths, and gives your noise pretence. What can be sweeter than our native home? Thither for ease and soft repose we come. Home is the sacred refuge of our life, secure from all approaches but a wife.
If thence we fly, the cause admits no doubt. None but an inmate foe could force us out. Clamors our privacy's uneasy make. Birds leave their nests disturbed, and beasts their haunts forsake. But drama is a mixed form. Pure magnificence will not carry it through. The poet who attempts to achieve a play by the single force of the work provokes comparison, however strictly he confines himself to his capacity, with poets of other gifts. Corneille and Racine do not attain their triumphs by magnificence of this sort. They have concentration also, and in the midst of their phrases, an undisturbed attention to the human soul as they knew it. Nor is Dryden unchallenged in his supreme ability to make the ridiculous or the trivial great.
Those lines are the work of a man whose verse is as magnificent as Dryden's, and who could see profounder possibilities in wit and in violently joined images than ever were in Dryden's mind. For Dryden, with all his intellect, had a commonplace mind. His powers were, we believe, wider, but no greater than Milton's. He was confined by boundaries as impassable, though less straight. He bears a curious antithetical resemblance to Swinburne. Swinburne was also a master of words, but Swinburne's words are all suggestions and no denotation. If they suggest nothing, it is because they suggest too much. Triton's words, on the other hand, are precise. They state immensely. But their suggestiveness is almost nothing.
That short, dark passage to a future state, that melancholy riddle of a breath, that something or that nothing after death, is a riddle, but not melancholy enough in Dryden's splendid verse. The question, which has certainly been waiting, may justly be asked. Whether, without this which Trident lacks, verse can be poetry. What is meant to decide what poetry is? Trident's use of language is not, like that of Swinburne, weakening and demoralizing. Let us take, as a final test, his elegy upon Odom, which deserves not to be mutilated. Farewell. Too little and too lately known, Whom I began to think and call my own. For sure our souls were near allied, And thine cast in the same poetic mould with mine.
One common note on either lyre did strike, And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike. To the same goal did both our studies drive, The last set out the soonest. did arrive. Thus Nysus fell upon this slippery place, whilst his young friend performed and won the race. O early ripe, to thy abundant store what could advancing age have added more? It might, what nature never gives the young, have taught the numbers of thy native tongue. But satire needs not those And wit will shine through the harsh cadence of a rugged line. A noble error, and but seldom made, When poets are by too much force betrayed. Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their prime, Still showed a quickness, and maturing time But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.
Once more, hail! And farewell, farewell, thou young, but ah, too short, Marcellus of our tongue. Thou browsed with ivy and with laurels bound, but fate and gloomy night encompass thee around. From the perfection of such analogy we cannot detract. The lack of nebula is compensated by the satisfying completeness of the statement. Dryden lacked what his master Johnson possessed, a large and unique view of life. He lacked insight, he lacked profundity. But where Dryden fails to satisfy, the nineteenth century does not satisfy us either, and where that century has condemned him, It is itself condemned. In the next revolution of taste, it is possible that poets may turn to the study of Dryden. He remains one of those who have set standards for English verse, which it is desperate to ignore.
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3 02 - The Metaphysical Poets 25:30
S. Eliot. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Two, the metaphysical poets. By collecting these poems from the work of a generation more often named than read, and more often read than profitably studied, Professor Grierson has rendered a service of some importance. Certainly, the reader will meet with many poems already preserved in other anthologies, at the same time that he discovers poems such as those by Aurelian Townsend or Lord Herbert of Cherbury, here included. But the function of such an anthology as this is neither that of Professor Sainsbury's admirable edition of Caroline Poets, nor that of the Oxford Book of English Verse. Mr. Grierson's book is in itself a piece of criticism, and a provocation of criticism.
And we think that he was right in including so many poems of Don elsewhere, though not in many editions, accessible, As documents in the case of quote-unquote metaphysical poetry. The phrase has long done duty as a term of abuse, or as a label of a quaint and pleasant taste. The question is to what extent the so-called metaphysicals formed a school, in our time we should say a movement, and how far this so-called school or movement is a digression from the main current. Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult to decide what poets practice it and in which of their verses. The poetry of Dunne, to whom Marvel and Bishop King are sometimes nearer than any of the other authors, is late Elizabethan, its feeling often very close to that of Chapman.
The courtly poetry is derivative from Johnson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin. It expires in the next century with the sentiment and witticism of prior. There is finally the devotional verse of Herbert Vaughan and Creshaw, echoed long after by Christina Rossetti and Francis Thompson. Creshaw, sometimes more profound and less sectarian than the others, as a quality which returns through the Elizabethan period to the early Italians. It is difficult to find any precise use of metaphor, simile, or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and, at the same time, important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. Donne, and often coolly, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically, quote-unquote, metaphysical.
The elaboration, contrasted with the condensation, of a figure of speech to the The elaboration contrasted with the condensation of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus, Cooley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to chessboard through long stanzas to destiny, and done, with more grace, in A Valediction, the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought, Which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader. On a round ball a workman that hath copies by can lay in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and quickly make that which was nothing all.
So doth each tear which thee doth wear A globe, yea, world, by that impression grow, Till thy tears, mixed with mine, do overflow this world. By water sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so. Here we find at least two connections which are not implicit in the first figure, but are forced upon us by the poet. From the geographer's globe to the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, Some of Don's most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts. A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of associations of bright hair and of bone. This telescoping of images and multiplied association is characteristic of the phrase some of the dramatists of the period which Donne knew, not to mention Shakespeare.
It is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Turner, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language. Johnson, who employed the term metaphysical poets, apparently having Donne, Cleveland, and Cooley chiefly in mind, Remarks of them that, quote, the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together, end quote. The force of this impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact that often the ideas are yoked but not united. And if we are to judge of styles of poetry by their abuse, enough examples may be found in Cleveland to justify Johnson's condemnation. But a degree of heterogeneity of material, compelled into unity by the operation of the poet's mind, is omnipresent in poetry.
We need not select for illustration such a line as Notre âme est un trois mains cherchant sonniquerie. We may find it in some of the best lines of Johnson himself, the vanity of human wishes. His fate was destined to a barren strand A petty fortress and a dubious hand, he left a name at which the world grew pale, to point a moral or adorn a tale, where the effect is due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree, but the same in principle, as that which Johnson mildly reprehended. And in one of the finest poems of the age, a poem which could not have been written in any other age, The exequi of Bishop-King, the extended comparison is used with perfect success. The idea and the simile become one in the passage in which Bishop illustrates his impatience to see his dead wife under the figure of a journey.
Stay for me there. I will not fail to meet thee in that hollow veil, and think not much of my delay. I am already on the way, and follow thee with all the speed desire can make or sorrows breed. Each minute is a short degree, and every hour a step towards thee. At night, when I betake to rest, next morn I rise near my west of life, almost by eight hours sail, than when sleep breath his drowsy gale. But hark, my pulse, like a soft drum, beats my approach, tells thee I come, and slow, however my marches be, I shall at last sit down by thee. In the last few lines there is that effect of terror, which is several times attained by one of Bishop King's admirers, Edgar Poe. Again we may justly take these quatrains from Lord Herbert's Ode, stanzas which would, we think, be immediately pronounced to be of the metaphysical school.
So when from hence we shall be gone, and be no more, nor you, nor I, as one another's mystery, each shall be both, yet both be one. This said, in her uplifted face, her eyes which did that beauty crown, were like two stars that, having fallen down, look up again to find their place. While such a moveless, silent peace did cease on their becalmed sense, one would have thought some influence their ravished spirits did possess. There's nothing in these lines, With the possible exception of the stars, a simile not at once grasped, but lovely and justified, which fits Johnson's general observations and the metaphysical poets in his essay on Cooley. A good deal resides in the richness of association, which is at the same time borrowed from and given to the word becalmed.
But the meaning is clear, the language is simple and elegant. It is to be observed that the language of these poets is, as a rule, simple and pure. In the verse of George Herbert, this simplicity is carried as far as it can go, a simplicity emulated without success by numerous modern poets. The structure of the sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice. It is a fidelity to thought and feeling. The effect, at its best, is far less artificial than that of an ode by Gray. And as this fidelity induces variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music. Without whether in the eighteenth century could be found two poems in nominally the same meter so dissimilar as Marvel's Coy Mistress and Crescia's St.
Teresa. The one producing an effect of great speed by the use of short syllables, and the other, an ecclesiastical solemnity by the use of long ones. Love, thou art absolute soul, Lord of life and death. If so shrewd and sensitive, though so limited, a critic, as Johnson, failed to define metaphysical poetry by its faults, It is worthwhile to inquire whether we may not have more success by adopting the opposite method, by assuming that the poets of the seventeenth century, up to the revolution, were the direct and normal development of the precedent age, and without Prejudicing their case by the adjective metaphysical, consider whether their virtue was not something permanently valuable, which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared.
Johnson has hit, perhaps by accident, on one of their peculiarities when he observes that their attempts were always analytic. He would not agree that, after the dissociation, they put the material together again in a new unity. It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is not found in any of the prose good as it often is. If we accept Marlowe, a man of prodigious intelligence, these dramatists were directly or indirectly It is at least a tenable theory, affected by Montaigne. Even if we except also Johnson and Chapman, these two were notably erudite, and were notably men who incorporated their erudition into their sensibility, their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought.
In Chapman especially, there is a direct, sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling, which is exactly what we find in Donne. In this one thing, all the discipline of manners and of manhood is contained. A man to join himself with the universe in his main sway, and making all things fit, one with that all. And go on round as it, not plucking from the hole his wretched part, and into straits or into naught revert, wishing the complete universe might be subject to such a rag of it as he, but to consider great necessity. We compare this with some modern passage. Know when the fight begins within himself, A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head. Satan looks up between his feet.
Both tug. He's left himself in the middle. The soul wakes and grows. Prolong that battle through his life. It is, perhaps, somewhat less fair, though very tempting, as both poets are concerned with the perpetuation of love by offspring, To compare with the stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert's Ode, the following from Tennyson. One walked between his wife and child, with measured footfall firm and mild, and now and then he gravely smiled. The prudent partner of his blood leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good, wearing the rose of womanhood. And in their double love secure, the little maiden walked demure, pacing with downward eyelids pure. These three made unity so sweet, my frozen heart began to beat, remembering its ancient heat.
The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Don or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning. It is the difference between the intellectual poets and the reflective poets. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think, but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odor of a rose. A thought to Don was an experience. It modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience. The ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other.
or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking. In the mind of the poet, these experiences are always forming new holes. We may express the difference by the following theory. The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial. Difficult or fantastic, as their predecessors were, no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinizelli, or Cino. In the seventeenth century, a dissociation of sensibilities set in, from which we have never recovered, and this dissociation, as is natural, was due to the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.
Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language went on, and in some respects improved. The best verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands better than that of Dunn or Marvell or King. But while the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the country churchyard, to say nothing of Tennyson and Browning, is cruder than that in the coy mistress. The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age began early in the eighteenth century and continued.
The poets revolted against the radiosinative, the descriptive. They thought and felt by fits unbalanced. They reflected. In one or two passages in Shelley's Triumph of Life, in the Second Hyperion, there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died. And Tennyson and Browning ruminated. After this brief exposition of a theory, too brief, perhaps, to carry conviction, we may ask, what would have been the fate of the quote-unquote metaphysical had the current of poetry descended in a direct line from them, as it descended in a direct line to them? They would not certainly be classified as metaphysical. The possible interests of a poet are unlimited. The more intelligent he is, the better.
The more intelligent he is, the more likely that he will have interests. Our only condition is that he turn them into poetry, and not merely meditate on them poetically. A philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved. The poets in question have, like other poets, various faults, but they were at best engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for the states of mind and feeling. And this means both that they are more mature and that they were better than later poets of certainly not less literary ability. It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy or in any other subject.
We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more elusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate, if necessary, language into his meaning. A brilliant and extreme statement of this view, with which it is not requisite to associate oneself, is that of Mr. Jean Epstein, La Poésie d'aujourd'hui. Hence, we get something which looks very much like the conceit. We get, in fact, a method curiously similar to that of the metaphysical poets, similar also in its use of obscure words and of simple phrasing.
Oh, Geranium diaphane, guerrroyeur sortilège, sacrilège monomane, emballage, dévergondage, douche, oppressoir des vendanges des grands soirs, layette aux abois, tirse au fond des bois, transfusion, représailles, relévailles, compresses et l'éternale potion, angelus, n'en pourvoir plus de débâcle nuptial, de débâcle nuptial. The same poet could write also simply. Jules Lafourque and Tristan Corbiere, in many of his poems, are nearer to the school of dawn than any modern English poet. But poets more classical than they have the same essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind. Pour l'enfant amoureux de cartes et de stampes, l'univers est égal à son vaste appétit.
Ah, que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes, aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit. In French literature, the great master of the seventeenth century, Racine, and the great master of the nineteenth, are more like each other than they are like anyone else. The greatest two masters of diction are also the greatest two psychologists, the most curious explorers of the soul. It is interesting to speculate whether it is not a misfortune that the two of the greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and Dryden, triumph with a dazzling disregard of the soul. If we continued to produce Milton's and Dryden's, it might not so much matter, but as things are, it is a pity that English poetry has remained so incomplete.
Those who object to the quote-unquote artificiality of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to look into our hearts and write. But that is not looking deep enough. Racine, or Don, looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts. May we not conclude, then, that Don, Kresha, Vaughan, Herbert and Lord Herbert, Marvel, King Cooley at his best, are in the direct current of English poetry. And that their fault should be reprimanded by this standard rather than coddled by antiquarian affection. They have been enough praised in terms which are implicit limitations, because they are metaphysical or witty, quaint or obscure, though at their best they have not these attributes more than other serious poets.
On the other hand, we must not reject the criticism of Johnson, A dangerous person to disagree with, without having mastered it, without having assimilated the Johnsonian canons of taste. In reading this celebrated passage in his essay on Cooley, we must remember that by wit he clearly means something more serious than we usually mean today. In his criticism of their versification, we must remember in what a narrow discipline he was trained. But also how well trained. We must remember that Johnson tortures chiefly the chief offenders, Cooley and Cleveland. It would be a fruitful work, and one requiring a substantial book, to break up the classification of Johnson, for there has been none since, and exhibit these poets in all their difference of kind and of degree, From the massive music of dawn to the faint, pleasing tinkle of Aurelian Townshend, whose dialogue between Pilgrim and Time is one of the few regrettable omissions from this excellent anthology.
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4 03 - Andrew Marvell 31:28
Three essays and poetry of the seventeenth century by T. S. Eliot. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Andrew Marvell. The tercentenary of the former member for Hull deserves not only the celebration proposed by that favorite borough, but a little serious reflection upon his writing. That is an act of piety, which is very different from the resurrection of a deceased reputation. Marvel has stood high for some years. His best poems are not very many, and not only must be well known from the Colton Treasury and the Oxford Book of English Verse, but must also have been enjoyed by numerous readers. His grave needs neither rose nor rue nor laurel. There is no imaginary justice to be done.
We may think about him, if there be need for thinking, for our own benefit, not his. To bring the poet back to life, the great, the perennial task of criticism is in this case to squeeze the drops of the essence of two or three poems. Even confining ourselves to these, We may find some precious liquor unknown to the present age. Not to determine rank, but to isolate this quality, is the critical labor. The fact that, of all Marvel's verse, which is itself not a great quantity, the really valuable part consists of a very few poems, indicates that the unknown quality of which we speak is probably a literary rather than a personal quality, or more truly, that it is a quality of a civilization, of a traditional habit of life.
A poet like Donne, or like Baudelaire, or LaForgue, may almost be considered the inventor of an attitude, a system of feeling or of morals. Don is difficult to analyze. What appears at one time a curious personal point of view may at another time appear rather the precise concentration of a kind of feeling diffused in the air about him. Don and his shroud, the shroud and his motive for wearing it, are inseparable, but they are not the same thing. The seventeenth century sometimes seems for more than a moment to gather up and to digest into its art all the experience of the human mind which, from the same point of view, the later centuries seem to have been partly engaged in repudiating. But Don would have been an individual at any time and place.
Marvel's best verse is the product of European, that is to say, Latin culture. Out of that high style developed from Marlowe through Johnson, for Shakespeare does not lend himself to these genealogies, the 17th century separated two qualities, wit and magniloquence. Neither is as simple or as apprehensible as its name seems to imply, and the two are not in practice antithetical. Both are conscious and cultivated, and the mind which cultivates one may cultivate the other. The actual poetry of Marvel or Cooley, of Milton and of others, is a blend in varying proportions. And we must be on guard not to employ the terms with too wide a comprehension, for like the other fluid terms with which literary criticism deals, The meaning alters with the age, and for precision we must rely to some degree upon the literacy and good taste of the reader.
The wit of the Caroline poets is not the wit of Shakespeare, and it is not the wit of Dryden, the great master of contempt, or of Pope, the great master of hatred, or of Swift, the great master of disgust. What is meant is something which is a common quality to the songs in Comus and Cooley's Anachreontics and Marvel's Horatian Ode. It is more than a technical accomplishment, or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch. It is what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace. You cannot find it in Shelley or Keats or Wordsworth. You cannot find more than an echo of it in Lander, still less in Tennyson or Browning. And among contemporaries, Mr. Yeats is an Irishman, and Mr.
Hardy is a modern Englishman. That is to say, Mr. Hardy is without it, and Mr. Yeats is outside of the tradition altogether. On the other hand, as it certainly exists in La Fontaine, there is a large part of it in Gaultier. And of the magniloquence, the deliberate exploitation of the possibilities of magnificence in language which Milton used and abused, there is also use, and even abuse, in the poetry of Baudelaire. Wit is not a quality that we are accustomed to associate with, quote-unquote, Puritan literature, with Milton or with Marvel. But if so, we are at fault partly in our conception of wit, and partly in our generalizations about the Puritans. And if the wit of Dryden or of Pope is not the only kind of wit in a language, The rest is not merely a little merriment, or a little levity, or a little impropriety, or a little epigram.
And, on the other hand, the sense in which a man like Marvel is a Puritan is restricted. The persons who opposed Charles I and the persons who supported the Commonwealth were not all of the flock of rabbi Zeal of the land busy, Or of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association. Many of them were gentlemen of the time, who merely believed, with considerable show of reason, that government by a parliament of gentlemen was better than a government by a steward. Though they were to that extent liberal practitioners, they could hardly foresee the tea-meeting and the dissidence of dissent. Being men of education and culture, even of travel, some of them were exposed to that spirit of the age, which was coming to be the French spirit of the age.
This spirit, curiously enough, was quite opposed to the tendencies latent or the forces active in Puritanism. The contest does great damage to the poetry of Milton. Marvel An active servant of the public, but a lukewarm partisan and a poet on a smaller scale, is far less injured by it. His line on the statue of Charles II, It is such a king as no chisel can mend, may be set off against his criticism of the Great Rebellion. Man ought and might have trusted the king. Marvel, therefore, More a man of the century than a Puritan speaks more clearly and unequivocally with the voice of his literary age than does Milton. This voice speaks out uncommonly strong in The Coy Mistress. The theme is one of the great traditional commonplaces of European literature.
It is the theme of O Mistress Mine, of Gather Ye Rosebuds, of Go Lovely Rose. It is in the savage austerity of Lucretius and the intense levity of Catullus. Where the wit of Marvel renews the theme is in the variety and order of the images. In the first of the three paragraphs, Marvel plays with a fancy which begins by pleasing and leads to astonishment. Had we but whirled enough in time, this coyness lady were no crime. I would love you ten years before the flood, and you should, if you please, refuse till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow vaster than empires and more slow. We notice the high speed, the succession of concentrated images, each magnifying the original fancy.
When this process has been carried to the end and summed up, The poem turns suddenly with that surprise, which has been one of the most important means of poetic effect since Homer. But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near, And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. A whole civilization resides in these lines. Pallid amors aequa pulset pedi pauperum tabernas regum queturis. And not only Horace, but Catullus himself. Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. The verse of Marvel has not the grand reverberation of Catullus' Latin, but the image of Marvel is certainly more comprehensive and penetrates greater depths than Horace's. A modern poet, had he reached the height, would very likely have closed on this moral reflection.
But the three strophes of Marvel's poem have something like a syllogistic relation to one another. After a close approach to the mood of dawn, then worms shall try that long-preserved virginity. The grave's a fine and private place, but none, I think, do their embrace. The Conclusion. Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball, and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life. It will hardly be denied that this poem contains wit. But it may not be evident that this wit forms the crescendo and diminuendo of a scale of great imaginative power. The wit is not only combined with, but fused into, the imagination. We can easily recognize a witty fancy in the successive images, my vegetable love, Till the conversion of the Jews.
But this fancy is not indulged, as it sometimes is by Cooley or Cleveland for its own sake. It is structural decoration of a serious idea. In this it is superior to the fancy of l'Allegro, il penseroso, or the lighter and less successful poems of Keats. In fact, this alliance of levity and seriousness by which the seriousness is intensified, is a characteristic of the sort of wit we are trying to identify. It is found in Le squelette était invisible au temps heureux de l'art païen of Gautier, and in the dandism of Baudelaire and La Forgue. It is in the poem of Catullus, which has been quoted, and in the variation by Ben Johnson. Cannot we deceive the eyes of a few poor household spies? Tis no sin loves fruits to steal.
But that sweet sin to reveal, to be taken, to be seen, these have since accounted been. It is in Propertius and Ovid. It is a quality of a sophisticated literature. A quality which expands in English literature just at the moment before the English mind altered. It is not a quality which we should expect Puritanism to encourage. When we come to Gray and Collins, the sophistication remains only in the language and has disappeared from the feeling. Gray and Collins were masters. But they had lost that hold on human values, that firm grasp of human experience, which is a formidable achievement of the Elizabethan and Jacobian poets. This wisdom, cynical perhaps, but untired, in Shakespeare a terrifying clairvoyance, leads toward, and is only completed by, the religious comprehension.
It leads to the point of the ANSI TOULEURS A CRACKER DAN LA MAIN of BOUVARD AND PECUCHER. The difference between imagination and fancy in view of this poetry of wit is a very narrow one. Obviously, an image which is immediately and unintentionally ridiculous is merely a fancy. In the poem, Upon Appleton House, Marvel, falls in with one of these undesirable images, describing the attitude of the house toward its master. Yet thus the laden house does sweat, and scarce endures the master great, but where he comes the swelling hall stirs, and the square grows spherical, which, whatever its intention, is more absurd than it was intended to be. Marvel also falls into the even commoner error of images which are overdeveloped or distracting, which support nothing but their own misshapen bodies.
And now the salmon fishers moist, their leathern boats begin to hoist, and like Antipodes in shoes, have shot their heads in their canoes. At this sort of image, a choice collection may be found in Johnson's Life of Cooley. But the images in The Coy Mistress are not only witty, but satisfy the elucidation of imagination given by Coleridge.
This power reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities. Of sameness with difference, of the general with the concrete, the idea with the image, the individual with the representative, the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects, a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order, judgment ever awakened steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement.
Coleridge's statement applies also to the following verses, which are selected because of their similarity and because they illustrate the market's yura, which Marvel often introduces in a short line. The tawny mowers enter next, who seem like Israelites to be walking on foot through a green sea, and now the meadows fresher dyed, whose grass With moisture color dashed, seems as green silks but nearly washed. He hangs in shades the orange bright, like golden lamps in a green night, annihilating all that's made. The whole poem, from which the last of these quotations is drawn, The nymph and the faun is built upon a very slight foundation, and we can imagine what some of our modern practitioners of slight themes would have made of it.
But we need not descend to an invidious contemporaneity to point the difference. Here are six lines from the nymph and the faun. I have a garden of my own. But so with roses overgrown and lilies, that you would it guess to be a little wilderness, and all the springtime of the year it only loved to be there. And here are five lines from the nymph's song to Hylus, in The Life and Death of Jason, by William Morris. I know a little garden close, set thick with lily and red rose, where I would wonder if I might, from dewy dawn to dewy night, and have one with me wandering. So far the resemblance is more striking than the difference. Although we might just notice the vagueness of allusion in the last line to some indefinite person, form, or phantom, Compared with the more explicit reference of emotion to object, which we should expect from Marvel.
But in the latter part of the poem, Morris divaricates widely. Yet, tottering as I am and weak, still have I left a little breath to seek within the jaws of death an entrance to that happy place, to seek the unforgotten face once seen, once kissed. Once reft from me anigh the murmuring of the sea. Here the resemblance, if there is any, is to the latter part of the coy mistress. As for the difference, it could not be more pronounced. The effect of Morris's charming poem depends upon the mistiness of the feeling and the vagueness of its object, the effect of marvels upon its bright, hard precision. And this precision is not due to the fact that Marvel is concerned with cruder or simpler or more carnal emotions.
The emotion of Morris is not more refined or more spiritual. It is merely more vague. If anyone doubts whether the more refined or spiritual emotion can be precise, he should study the treatment of the varieties of discarnate emotion in the Paradiso. A curious result of the comparison of Morris's poem with Marvel's is that the former, though it appears to be more serious, is found to be the slighter, and Marvel's nymph and the fawn, appearing more slight, is the more serious. So weeps the wounded balsam, so the holy frankincense doth flow, the brotherless heliades melt in such amber tears as these. These verses have the suggestiveness of true poetry, and the verses of Morris, which are nothing if not an attempt to suggest, really suggest nothing.
And we are inclined to infer that the suggestiveness is the aura around a bright, clear center, that you cannot have the aura alone. The daydreamy feeling of Morris is essentially a slight thing. Marvel Takes a slight affair, the feeling of a girl for her pet, and gives it a connection with that inexhaustible and terrible nebula of emotion which surrounds all our exact and practical passions and mingles with them. Again, Marvel does this in a poem which, because of its formal pastoral machinery, may appear a trifling object. Clorinda. Near this. A fountain's liquid belt tinkles within the concave shell. Daemon. Might a soul bathe there and be clean, or slake its drought? Where we find that a metaphor has suddenly repped us to the image of spiritual purgation.
There is here the element of surprise, as when Villon says, Necessité fait jamais prendre.
The surprise which Poe considered of the highest importance, and also the restraint and quietness of tone which make the surprise possible. And in the verses of Marvel which had been quoted, there is the making the familiar strange and the strange familiar which Coleridge attributed to good poetry. The effort to construct a dream world which alters English poetry so greatly in the nineteenth century, a dream world utterly different from the visionary realities of the Vita Nuova or of the poetry of Dante's contemporaries, is a problem of which various explanations may no doubt be found. In any case, the result makes a poet of the nineteenth century of the same size as Marvel, A more trivial and less serious figure.
Marvel is no greater personality than William Morris, but he had something much more solid behind him. He had the vast and penetrating influence of Ben Johnson. Johnson never wrote anything so pure as Marvel's Horatian Ode, but this ode has that same quality of wit which was diffused over the whole Elizabethan product. And concentrated in the work of Johnson. And, as was said before, this wit which pervades the poetry of Marvel is more Latin, more refined than anything that succeeded it. The great danger, as well as the great interest and excitement of English prose and verse compared with French, is that it permits and justifies an exaggeration of particular qualities to the exclusion of others.
Dryden was great in wit, as Milton in magniloquence. But the former, by isolating this quality and making it by itself into great poetry, and the latter, by coming to dispense with it altogether, may perhaps have injured the language. In Dryden, wit becomes almost fun, and thereby loses some contact with reality, becomes pure fun, which French wit almost never is. The midwife placed her hand on his thick skull with this prophetic blessing, Be thou dull. A numerous host of dreaming saints succeed of the true old enthusiastic breed. This is audacious and splendid. It belongs to satire, besides which Marvel's satires are random babbling. But it is perhaps as exaggerated as, oft he seems to hide his face, but unexpectedly returns.
And to his faithful champion hath in place bore witness gloriously whence Gaza mourns, and all that banned them to resist his uncontrollable intent. How oddly the sharp-done task phrase, whence Gaza mourns, springs out from the brilliant but ridiculous contortions of Milton's sentence. Who, from his private gardens, where he lived reserved and austere, as if his highest plot to plant the bergamot, could by industrious valor climb to ruin the great work of time and cast the kingdom's old into another mold. The peat no shelter now shall find within his party-colored mind. But from this valor sad, shrink underneath the plaid. There is here an equipoise, a balance and proportion of tones, which, while it cannot raise marvel to the level of Dryden or Milton, extorts an approval, which these poets do not receive from us, and bestows a pleasure at least different in kind from any they can often give.
It is what makes Marvel a classic, or classic in a sense in which Gray and Collins are not, for the latter, with all their accredited purity, are comparatively poor in shades of feeling to contrast and unite. We are baffled in the attempt to translate the quality indicated by the dim and antiquated term wit into the equally unsatisfactory nomenclature of our own time. Even Cooley is only able to define it by negatives. Calmly, in thousand shapes appears. Yonder we saw it plain, and here it is now, like spirits in a place we know not how. It has passed out of our critical coinage altogether, and no new term has been struck to replace it. The quality seldom exists, and is never recognized. In a true piece of wit all things must be, yet all things there agree.
As in the ark, joined without force or strife, all creatures dwelt, all creatures that had life. Or as the primitive forms of all, if we compare great things with small, which, without discord or confusion, lie in that strange mirror of the deity. So far, Cooley has spoken well. But if we are to attempt even no more than Cooley, we, placed in a retrospective attitude, must risk much more than anxious generalizations. With our eye still in marvel, we can say that wit is not erudition. It is sometimes stifled by erudition, as in much of Milton. It is not cynicism, though it has a kind of toughness which may be confused with cynicism by the tender-minded. It is confused with erudition because it belongs to an educated mind, rich in generations of experience.
And it is confused with cynicism because it implies a constant inspection and criticism of experience. It involves, probably, a recognition implicit in the expression of every experience of other kinds of experience which are possible, which we find as clearly in the greatest as in poets like Marvel. Such a general statement may seem to take us a long way from the nymph and the faun, or even from the Horatian ode, but it is perhaps justified by the desire to account for that precise taste of marvels which finds for him the proper degree of seriousness for every subject which he treats. His error of taste, when he trespasses, are not sins against this virtue. They are conceits, distended metaphors and similes, but they never consist in taking a subject too seriously or too lightly.
This virtue of wit is not a peculiar quality of minor poets or of the minor poets of one age or of one school. It is an intellectual quality which perhaps only becomes noticeable by itself in the work of lesser poets. Furthermore, it is absent from the work of Wartsworth, Shelley, and Keats, on whose poetry nineteenth-century criticism has unconsciously been based. To the best of their poetry, wit is irrelevant. Art thou pale for weariness of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth? Wandering companionless among the stars that have a different birth, and ever-changing like a joyless eye that finds no object worth its constancy. We should find it difficult to draw any useful comparison between these lines of Shelley and anything by Marvel.
But later poets who would have been the better for Marvel's quality were without it. Even Browning seems oddly immature in some way beside Marvel. And nowadays we find occasionally good irony or satire which lack wit's internal equilibrium, because their voices are essentially protests against some outside sentimentality or stupidity. Or we find serious poets who are afraid of acquiring wit lest they lose intensity. The quality which Marvel had, This modest and certainly impersonal virtue, whether we call it wit or reason or even urbanity, we have patently failed to define. By whatever name we call it, and however we define that name, it is something precious and needed and apparently extinct.
It is what should preserve the reputation of Marvel. C'était une belle âme. Comme on ne fait plus à Londres. End of section three. End of homage to John Dryden. Three essays on poetry of the 17th century by T. S. Eliot.