Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- I From chaos to case
- II The bizarre territory
- III The curve of the mirror
- IV From ‘so complex an irony’ to ‘such a textual logic’
- V From ‘wit’ to ‘astonishment’
- VI ‘Fool’ and ‘pharmakon’
- VII ‘The monstrous clarity’
- VIII From ‘ensemble’ to ‘exception’
- IX Pagan perspectives
- X The Tao of criticism
- Notes
- Index
V - From ‘wit’ to ‘astonishment’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Preface
- I From chaos to case
- II The bizarre territory
- III The curve of the mirror
- IV From ‘so complex an irony’ to ‘such a textual logic’
- V From ‘wit’ to ‘astonishment’
- VI ‘Fool’ and ‘pharmakon’
- VII ‘The monstrous clarity’
- VIII From ‘ensemble’ to ‘exception’
- IX Pagan perspectives
- X The Tao of criticism
- Notes
- Index
Summary
An important passage in Eliot's essay on Marvell proceeds through the contrast of ‘wit’ and ‘magniloquence’ with a subsequent sketch of some possibilities of wit which help to delineate the nature of Marvell's own affinities. And it is part of a larger ‘placing’, as Leavis would say, in which a characteristic employment of wit finds its role in turn in the larger literary tradition. It also is presented with a certain grandeur of elaboration, a growing awareness of scale, a richness of reference, a fullness of one's sense of the possibilities of the uses of wit, to give the impression of wit as viewed through the manner of magniloquence itself. The aim is to elicit contrastively versions of the blend of these opposing qualities in the late seventeenth century, but the sheer force of comparison develops its own elan, and one plunges forward in time and beyond the limits of the original distinction:
The wit of the Caroline poets is not the wit of Shakespeare, and it is not the wit of Dryden, the great master of contempt, or of Pope, the great master of hatred, or of Swift, the great master of disgust. What is meant is some quality which is common to the songs in Comus and Cowley's Anacreontics and Marvell's Horatian Ode. It is more than a technical accomplishment, or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch; it is, what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace.[…]
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- Information
- The Myth of Theory , pp. 86 - 98Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994