The Sense of the Present

It is proof of our respect for a critic that he sometimes forces us to disagree with him. We can even admire him most and learn most from him, if he is a good critic, at the very moment he repels us most. And so if I mention T. S. Eliot in this essay only to disagree with him, that is not because I want to depreciate his contribution to literature but, on the contrary, because I think him still the most central and enlightening critic of an important school of writers. I must admit a certain diffidence in using the term “school of writers,” and that term will have to be left somewhat vague. The school is at least vague enough to include D. H. Lawrence, Mann, Yeats, Jung, Joyce, Toynbee, and Eliot himself. What these writers have in common is—in the most general sense—that they have turned to primitive myth in search of faith, of philosophy, and of aesthetic norms. Finnegans Wake, the most exhaustive of all poetical researches into the relation between primitive and modern man, is perhaps the classic production of this school.

Of these writers Eliot is the most sensitive and instructive theorist-critic, and it is largely with his work that this essay has to do. I wish simply to offer a few notes in support of my conviction that Eliot has sometimes gone quite wrong in his criticism and poetry, and to suggest that the reason for his going wrong is often that he has lost the sense of the present. By the sense of the present I mean two closely related things: the sense of the present moment in time and the sense of the world about us, the sense of what is present. It is the sense, steady and maintained, of living in a live, consequential environment. Eliot has always insisted that poetry must be made by the close interaction of intellect and emotion. This is true, but incomplete. Intellect, emotion, and the world about us all interact closely—in a good poem they are perpetually capturing one another and fusing into durable effects. Good poetry depends on the successful involvement of the poet in his environment—not simply on the poet’s perception of concrete objects but on his ability to make the motions of his own sensibility and the activities of his environment flow together productively.