4.

functioned more comprehensively, that is, it took cognizance of greater varieties of experience in the lives of its believers, than does the modern myth born of science. There was no danger that the abstract quantitative world known to science would, as Santayana puts it, "dry up the ancient fountains of poetry by its habitual presence in thought".

It is to the pretensions of this modern myth that the poets, some of them, have objected, the myth of rationality, which, in the arrogance of success, has embarrassed them in the exercise of their manhood and their art. The myth provides no place for their chosen vocation, or at best the unhappy one of drug venders for those jaded in pursuit of proper business. Some have not been grateful for the sop thrown them by scientists like J. B. S. Haldane, who says that poetry, if the poets only knew more science, would interpret to the average man "that beauty in his own life". For instance, Robert Graves once pointed out with some heat that it is hard to see exactly what -- poetically speaking -- all this would mean.

It is a question whether any individual poet who happened to experience the discontent I have been discussing could satisfy himself by a private discipline, especially if that discipline were of a merely literary or technical nature such as the one Eliot prescribes in the essay mentioned. In fact, since the date when Eliot wrote those few provocative paragraphs, he has announced himself as royalist in politics, classicist in literature, and Anglo-Catholic in religion, which means, at least that the problem was not, after all, a literary, or even a purely personal, one. And it is instructive that the doctrines here rebelled against are historically associated with the rise of science. Likewise, a small part of Ransom's criticism

12.

and *Our Two Worthies*, the latter of which, according to Williamson,
is the closest approach to Eliot, do I feel that the interest is
primarily in the wir as such. In the first is regretted the condition
of the

"...... sinner
Who must write with no dinner,

No gravy and no grub,
No pewter and no pub,

No belly and no howels,
Only consonants and vowels."

In the second are celebrated Jesus the Paraclete and Saint Paul the Exegete. One admires and enjoys these pieces for what they are -- unless the reader is incapable of enjoying wit by reason of some conventional set toward poetry -- but if they represented the best of Ransom's performance, his position would be considerably below my private estimate.

Elsewhere in the poet's three volumes the wit appears as an
instrument. The precise function of this instrument can perhaps be
best illustrated by a comparison with, let us say, metaphor. Metaphor,
we are told, implies a comparison which, on factual basis and
according to strict logic, is not defensible, but which justifies itself
in terms of the emotional enrichment of a poetic theme. It enlarges
the experience of the poem. Now wit is a critical and intellectual
quality; when it appears in a poem, that poem, if otherwise
successful as poetry, is enriched, but in another direction. Again,
like metaphor, it may be a device toward resolution of a theme.
Contrary to opinion among softer readers of poetry, usually those
whose taste has been formed on nineteenth-century models, wit and
emotional quality in poetry are not mutually exclusive, or necessarily