Communication

Sirs,

If I may be so carping as to pick a fault in an otherwise good issue of the Kenyon Review (Spring, 1954), I should like to complain about the tone of Mr. Adams’ article on Donne and Eliot. The tone approaches rather too closely, for my taste, literary criticism from the God’s-eye point of view. His comparison of them as metaphysicals amounts in the end to the accusation that they viewed the world sub specie Donne and Eliot instead of sub specie aeternitatis. Their point of departure was a temperament, that is to say, a human point of departure. Fortunately for them as poets, however, their temperaments were out of tune with their times, and this gave them a dramatic pose to exploit, to play for all the effects it was worth. Lucky Donne and lucky Eliot, whose temperatments were sufficiently unadjustable to their times to give them a vocation! This attitude nearly corners us with those who exclaim: lucky Yeats, whose unhappy love gave him something to make poems about, or, isn’t it marvelous how God parcels out the sufferings and the talents in just such nice proportions as to fulfill His inscrutable will and our insatiable craving for good poetry!