discuss how leavis compares milton and pope
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Milton's dislodgment, in the past decade, after his two centuries of predominance, was effected with remarkably little fuss. The irresistible argument was, of course, Mr. Eliot's creative achievement; it gave his few critical asides potent, it. is true, ,by context. their finality, and made it unnecessary to elaborate a case. Mr. Middleton Murry also, it. should be remembered, came out against Milton at much the same time. His Problem of Style contains an acute page or two comparing Milton with Shakespeare, and there was a review of Bridges' Milton's Prosody in The Athenceum that. one would like to see reprinted along with a good deal more of Mr. Murry's weekly journalism of that time. But the case remained unelaborated, and now that Mr. Eliot has become academically respectable those who refer to it show commonly that they cannot understand it. And when a writer of Mr. Allen Tate's repute as critic, poet and intellectual1eader, telling us that Milton should be, made' to 'influence poetry once more,' shows that he too doesn't understand, then one may overcome, perhaps, one's shyness of saying the obvious .
Mr. Tate thinks that if we don't like Milton it is because of a prejudice against myth and fable and a preference for the fragmentary: 'When we read poetry, we bring to it the pseudo-scientific habit of mind; we are used to joining things up in vague disconnected processes in terms that are abstract and thin, and so our sensuous enjoyment is confined to the immediate field of sensation. We are bewildered, helpless, confronted with one of those immensely remote, highly sensuous and perfectly make-believe worlds that rise above our scattered notions of ' process.'