Pound, Yeats, Joyce, and now William Carlos Williams: it is because there has been no twentieth-century Rome or Venice that so much of our literary history has been contained in the published correspondence of the eminent writers. The colleagues, disciples and inquirers who would have flocked to a capital if there had been one, have instead used the post. The masters, on the other hand, have put into letters much that would otherwise have been delivered viva voce and so lost. If Johnson had only had reason to write out what Drummond so cryptically reported! “He said that Donne, for not keeping accent, deserved hanging”; and no doubt he said much more, all occluded forever by that idiot clamshell of a note. It is not too much to say that the circulation of an ample statement by Johnson on Donne’s prosody might, by provoking curiosity, have saved English poetry several runs of barren decades.
We think of discipleship and reaction with too Cartesian a simplicity; three intelligent sentences may determine the climate in which the principal subject of an age’s speculations gets thought about, or the incidence and variety of the interests that are allowed to gather around it. The nature of the interest Donne’s poems have attracted in our time, among poets as among scholars, has been largely created by a hundred words of Eliot’s.
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