HOMAGE TO
JOHN DRYDEN
THREE ESSAYS ON POETRY OF THE
SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
T. S. ELIOT
PUBLISHED BY LEONARD AND VIRGINIA WOOLF
AT THE HOGARTH PRESS, TAVISTOCK SQUARE
LONDON, W.C.1
1924
TO
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
PREFACE
The three essays composing this small book were written several yearsago for publication in the "Times Literary Supplement," to the editor ofwhich I owe the encouragement to write them, and now the permission toreprint them. Inadequate as periodical criticism, they need still morejustification in a book. Some apology, therefore, is required.
My intention had been to write a series of papers on the poetry of theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries: beginning with Chapman and Donne,and ending with Johnson. This forbidden fruit of impossible leisuremight have filled two volumes. At best, it would not have pretended tocompleteness; the subjects would have been restricted by my ownignorance and caprice, but the series would have included AurelianTownshend and Bishop King, and the authors of "Cooper's Hill" and "TheVanity of Human Wishes," as well as Swift and Pope. That whichdissipation interrupts, the infirmities of age come to terminate. Onelearns to conduct one's life with greater economy: I have abandoned thisdesign in the pursuit of other policies. I have long felt that thepoetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even much of that ofinferior inspiration, possesses an elegance and a dignity absent fromthe popular and pretentious verse of the Romantic Poets and theirsuccessors. To have urged this claim persuasively would have led meindirectly into considerations of politics, education, and theologywhich I no longer care to approach in this way. I hope that these threepapers may in spite of and partly because of their defects preserve incryptogram certain notions which, if expressed directly, would bedestined to immediate obloquy, followed by perpetual oblivion.
T. S. ELIOT.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
I. JOHN DRYDEN
II. THE METAPHYSICAL POETS
III. ANDREW MARVELL
I. JOHN DRYDEN
If the prospect of delight be wanting (which alone justifies the perusalof poetry) we may let the reputation of Dryden sleep in the manuals ofliterature. To those who are genuinely insensible of his genius (andthese are probably the majority of living readers of poetry) we can onlyoppose illustrations of the following proposition: that theirinsensibility does not merely signify indifference to satire and wit,but lack of perception of qualities not confined to satire and wit andpresent in the work of other poets whom these persons feel that theyunderstand. To those whose taste in poetry is formed entirely upon theEnglish poetry of the nineteenth-century—to the majority—it isdifficult to explain or excuse Dryden: the twentieth century is stillthe nineteenth, although it may in time acquire its own character. Thenineteenth century had, like every other, limited tastes and peculiarfashions; and, like every other, it was unaware of its own limitations.Its tastes and fashions had no place for Dryden; yet Dryden is one ofthe tests of a catholic appreciation of poetry.
He is a successor of