Milton Is O.K.

In the hushed splendor of a Manhattan museum (the Frick) that was once a coal baron's Fifth Avenue palace, some of the most serious U.S. poets and critics gathered. They had come to hear, and honor, the acknowledged first poet of their day. T. S. Eliot, making one of his rare U.S. appearances, delivered a new lecture on his old enemy, John Milton.

Long self-professed an Anglo-Catholic, a royalist, and a classicist, Eliot has been an uncommonly revolutionary conservative, both as poet and critic. Now he made clear that, in some respects, he regards the revolution as over. He was even convinced that poets can now study Milton's poetry with profit. Said he:

"It was one of our tenets that . . . the subject-matter and the imagery of poetry should be ... related to the life of a modern man or woman; that we were to seek the non-poetic . . . and words and phrases which had not been used in poetry before." In this effort "the study of Milton could be no help; it was only a hindrance.

"We cannot, in literature any more than in the rest of life, live in a state of perpetual revolution. If every generation of poets made it their task to bring poetic diction up to date with the spoken language, poetry would fail in one of its most important obligations. For poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly; a development of language at too great a speed would be ... progressive deterioration; and that is our danger today. If the poetry of the rest of this century takes the line of development which seems to me . . the right course, it will discover new and more elaborate patterns of a diction now established. ... In this search it might have much to learn from [Milton] the greatest master of freedom within form in our language, outside the theater. ... It might also learn that the music of verse is strongest in poetry which has a definite meaning expressed in the properest words."

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