The Environmental Unconscious by Steven Swarbrick;

Author:Steven Swarbrick; [Swarbrick, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT014000 LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, LCO009000 LITERARY COLLECTIONS / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, LIT006000 LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

So Honour better lowness bears,

Than that unwonted Greatness wears.

Height with a certain grace does bend,

But low things clownishly ascend.

And yet what needs there here excuse,

Where ev’ry thing does answer use?

Where neatness nothing can condemn,

Nor pride invent what to contemn? (8.57–64)

How to square this stanza’s emphasis on “neatness” and “use” with the round peg of stanza 7, where nothing seems to “answer use,” but answers only to the excitement, the sub-representational nonmetrics, of rounding, of queering the line? Again, Eliot is a useful foil. For, despite Eliot’s criticisms of Marvell, the answer is already to be found in Eliot’s interpretation of the structure of metaphysical poetry. Before Raymond Williams, before Brian Massumi, Eliot pinpoints what he calls a “structure of . . . feeling” operating beneath the language of the poem:

It is to be observed that the language of these poets is, as a rule, simple and pure; in the verse of George Herbert, this simplicity is carried as far as it can go—a simplicity emulated without success by numerous modern poets. The structure of the sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling.67

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