| | 1 | Author: | Eliot, T. S. | Add | | | Title: | The Second-Order Mind  | | | | Published: | 1996 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | TO any one who is at all capable of experiencing the pleasures of justice,
it is gratifying to be able to make amends to a writer whom one has
vaguely depreciated for some years. The faults and foibles of Matthew
Arnold are no less evident to me now than twelve years ago, after my
first admiration for him; but I hope that now, on rereading some of his
prose with more care, I can better appreciate his position. And what
makes Arnold seem all the more remarkable is, that if he were our exact
contemporary, he would find all his labour to perform again. A moderate
number of persons have engaged in what is called "critical" writing, but
no conclusion is any more solidly established than it was in 1865. In the
first essay in the first Essays in Criticism we read that
"it has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our
literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it in fact
something premature; and that from this cause its productions are
doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which
accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more lasting
than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And this prematureness
comes from its having proceeded without having its proper data, without
sufficient material to work with. In other words, the English poetry of
the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative
force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter,
Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so
wanting in completeness and variety." | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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