THE ROSTRUM

"Wordsworth and Coleridge were very different, not only the men themselves, but the circumstances of the composition of their principal critical works," said T. S. Eliot '10, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, yesterday evening, in the last of his lectures during this half-year. Eliot spoke on "The Theories of Coleridge and Wordsworth," in the fourth of a series entitled, "The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism."

"Coleridge was visited with the Muse and was henceforth haunted. Wordsworth was of the opposite poetic type. Whether the bulk of his literary achievements are so much greater than Coleridge's is uncertain. Whether his gift stayed with him to the last is likewise uncertain. He went on droning 'the still sad music of infirmity.'

"Nor in their lives were the two men similar. But they were the two most original poetic minds of their generation. Their influence on each other was very great but the influence of Wordsworth on Coleridge was probably the greater."

Speaking of the influence of Wordsworth's sister on both poets, Eliot declared, "No woman ever played so important a part in the lives of two poets at once as did Dorothy Wordsworth."

In speaking of the new theory of poetic diction, in which Wordsworth and Coleridge made common cause, Eliot said, "It is Wordsworth's social interests which explain his criticism of the old poetic diction. Wordsworth's poetry met with no worse reception than might have been expected." Eliot recalled the time when he and Ezra Pound were called "literary bolsheviks," and said that in truth they were affirming forgotten standards rather than setting up new ones.

"The criticism of Dryden and Johnson," Eliot said, "was appropriate in a period of stasis. That of Wordsworth and Coleridge was appropriate to a period of conscious change. In Arnold we find another effort at stabilization, somewhat abortive and premature."

The next Charles Eliot Norton lecture will be given by Professor Eliot on Friday, December 17 at 8 o'clock in the New Lecture Hall.