the poet and the necessity of criticism become greater . . . .
[ii CR I T I C I S �I A N D T i l E l E A N I N G O F P O ETR Y
. . . The critical mind operating iu poetry, the critical effort which
goes to the writing of it, may always be in advance of the critical
mind operating uprm poetry, whether it be one's own or some one
else's. I only affirm that there is a significant relation bet\ een the
best poetry and the best criticism of the same period. The age of
criticism is also the age of critical poetry. And when I speak of
modern poetry as being extremely critical, I mean that the contemporary poet, who is not merely a composer of graceful verses, 79
ESSAYS OF GENER A L I �A T I O N
1 9 3 0- 1 9 6 5
•
- i s forced to ask himself such questions as 'what is poetry for ?' ;
not merely 'what am I to say ?' but .rather 'how and to whom am
I to say it ?' We have to communicate - if it is communication, for
the word may beg the question - an experience which is not an
experience in the ordinary sense, for it may only exist, formed out
of many personal experiences ordered in some way which may be
very different from the way of valuation of practical life, in the
expression of it. /[poetry is a form of 'communication', yet that
which is to be communicated is the poem itself, and only incidentally the experience and the thought which have gone into it.
The poem's existence is somewhere between the writer and the
reader ; it has a reality which is not simply the reality of what the
writer is trying to 'express', or of his experience of writing it, or of
the experience of the reader or of the writer as reader. Consequently the problem of what a poem 'means' is a good deal more difficult than it at first appears. If a poem of mine entitled Ash
Wednesday ever goes into a second edition, I have thought of
prefixing to it the lines of Byron from Don Juan :
Some have accused me ofa strange design
Against the creed and morals of this land,
And trace it in this poem, every line.
I don't pretend that I quite understand
My own meaning when I would be very fine;
But the fact is that I have nothing planned
Except perhaps to be a moment merry . . .
There is some sound critical admonition in these lines. But a
poem is not just either what the poet 'planned' or what the reader
conceives, nor is its 'use' restricted wholly to what the author
intended or to what it actually does for readers. Though the
amount and the quality of the pleasure which any work of art has
given since it came into existence is not irrelevant, still we never
judge it by that; and we do not ask, after being greatly moved by
the sight of a piece of architecture or the audition of a piece of
music, 'what has been my benefit or profit from seeing this
temple or hearing this music ?' In one sense the question implied
by the phrase 'the use of poetry' is nonsense. But there is another
meaning to the question. Apart from the variety of ways in which
poets have used their art, with greater or less success, with designs
of instruction or persuasion, there is no doubt that a poet wishes
to give pleasure, to entertain or divert people ; and he should
normally be glad to be able to feel that the entertainment or
diversion is enjoyed by as large and various a number of people as
possible. When a poet deliberately restricts his public by his
So .
'THE USE O F POETRY AND THE USE O F CR I T I C I S M '
choice of style of writing or of subject-matter, this is a special
situation demanding explanation and extenuation, but I doubt
whether this ever happens. It is one thing to write in a style which
is already popular, and another to hope that one's writing may
eventually become popular. From one point of view, the poet
aspires to the condition of the music-hall comedian. Being
incapable of altering his wares to suit a prevailing taste, if there
be any, he naturally desires a state of society in which they may
become popular, and in which his own talents will be put to
the best use. He is accordingly vitally interested in the use of
poetry . . . .
Shelley both had views about poetry and made use of poetry for
expressing views. With Shelley we are struck from the beginning
by the number of things poetry is expected to do ; from a poet
who tells us, in a note on vegetarianism, that 'the orang-outang
perfectly resembles man both in the order and the number of his
teeth', we shall not know what not to expect. The notes to Quem
Mab express, it is true, only the views of an intelligent and
enthusiastic schoolboy, but a schoolboy who knows how to
write ; and throughout his work, which is of no small bulk for a
short life, he does not, I think, let us forget that he took his ideas
seriously. The ideas of Shelley seem to me always to be ideas of
adolescence - as there is every reason why they should be. And
an enthusiasm for Shelley seems to me also to be an affair of
adolescence : for most of us, Shelley has marked an intense period
before maturity, but for how many does Shelley remain the
companion of age ? I confess that I never open the volume of his
poems simply because I want to read poetry, but only with some
special reason for reference. I find his ideas repellent ; and the
difficulty of separating Shelley from his ideas and beliefs is still
greater than with Wordsworth. And the biographical interest
which Shelley has always excited makes it difficult to read the
poetry without remembering the man : and the man was humourless, pedantic, self-centred, and sometimes almost a blackguard.
Except for an occasional flash of shrewd sense, when he is speaking of someone else and not concerned with his own affairs or with fine writing, his letters are insufferably dull. He makes an
astonishing contrast with the attractive Keats. On the other hand,
I admit that Wordsworth does not present a very pleasing
personality either ; yet I not only enjoy his poetry as I cannot
enjoy Shelley's, but I enjoy it more than when I first read it. I can
only fumble (abating my prejudices as best I can) for reasons why
8 1
ESSAYS OF GENER�L I ZAT I ON · 1 9 3 0- 1 96 5
Shelley's abuse o f poetry does me more violence than Words-
worth's.
.
Shelley seems to have had to a high degree the unusual faculty
of passionate apprehension of abstract ideas. Whether he was not
sometimes confused about his own feelings, as we may be
tempted to believe when confounded by the philosophy of
Epipsychidion, is another matter. I do not mean that Shelley had a
metaphysical or philosophical mind ; his mind was in some ways
a very confused one : he was able to be at once and with the same
enthusiasm an eighteenth-century rationalist and a cloudy Platonist. But abstractions could excite in him strong emotion. His views remained pretty fixed, though his poetic gift matured. It is
open to us to guess whether his mind would have matured too ;
certainly, in his last, and to my mind great
est though unfinished
poem, The Triumph of Life, there is evidence not only of better
writing than in any previous long poem, but of greater wisdom :
Then what I thought was an old root that grew
To strange distortion out �(the hillside,
Was indeed one of those (sic) deluded crew
And that the grass, which methought hung so wide
And white, was but his thin discoloured hair
And that the holes he vainly sought to hide
Were or had been eyes . . .
There is a precision of image and an economy here that is new to
Shelley. But so far as we can judge, he never quite escaped from
the tutelage of Godwin, even when he saw through the humbug
as a man ; and the weight of Mrs. Shelley must have been pretty
heavy too. And, taking his work as it is, and without vain conjectures about the future, we may ask : is it possible to ignore the
'ideas' in Shelley's poems, so as to be able to enjoy the poetry ?
Mr. I . A. Richards deserves the credit of having done the
pioneer work in the problem of Belief in the enjoyment of poetry ;
and any methodical pursuit of the problem I must leave to him
and to those who are qualified after him. But Shelley raises the
question in another form than that in which it presented itself to
me in a note on the subject which I appended to an essay on
Dante. There, I was concerned with two hypothetical readers, one
of whom accepts the philosophy of the poet, and the other of
whom rejects it ; and so long as the poets in question were such
as Dante and Lucretius, this seemed to cover the matter. I am
not a Buddhist, but some of the early Buddhist scriptures affect
me as parts of the Old Testament do ; I can still enjoy Fitzgerald's Omar, though I do not hold that rather smart and shallow
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' THE USE O F POETRY AND THE USE OF CR I T I C ISM '
view of life. But some of Shelley's views I positively dislike, anJ
that hampers my enjoyment of the poems in which they occur ;
and others seem to me so puerile that I cannot enjoy the poems in
which they occur. And I do not find it possible to skip these
passages and satisfy myself with the poetry in which no proposition pushes itself forward to claim assent. What complicates the problem still further is that in poetry so fluent as Shelley's there
is a good deal which is just bad jingling. The following, for
instance :
On a battle-trumpet's blast
I fled hither, fast, fast, fast,
Mid the darkness upward cast.
From the dust of creeds outworn,
From the tyrant's banner torn,
Gathering round me, onward borne,
There was mingled many a cry -
Freedom! Hope! Death! Victor]'!
Walter Scott seldom fell as low as this, though Byron more often.
But in such lines, harsh and untunable, one is all the more affronted by the ideas, the ideas which Shelley bolted whole and never assimilated, visible in the catchwords of creeds outworn, tyrants
and priests, which Shelley employed with such reiteration. And
the bad parts of a poem can contaminate the whole, so that when
Shelley rises to the heights, at the end of the poem :
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wro11gs darker than death or 11ight;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent ;
To love, a11d bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates . . .
lines to the content of which belief is neither given nor denied,
we are unable to enjoy them fully. One does not expect a poem to
be equally sustained throughout ; and in some of the most successful long poems there is a relation of the more tense to the more relaxed passages, which is itself part of the pattern of beauty. But
good lines amongst bad can never give more than a regretful
pleasure. In reading Epipsychidion I am thoroughly gravelled by
lines like :
True love in this differs from gold ami claJ',
That to divide is not to take away . . .
I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
ESSAYS O F GENER.f. L I ZATI ON
1 9 3 0- 1 9 6 5
•
Out of the cromd, a mistress or a frimd
Awl ;Jil t he rest, though jitir mu(mise, commend
To colt! ohliviou . . .
so that when I come, a few lines later, upon a lovely image like :
A vision like incarnate April, warning
With smiles and tears, Frost the mwtmi�J'
Into his summer grave,
I am as much shocked at finding it in such indifferent company as
pleased by finding it at all. And we must admit that Shelley's
finest long poems, as well as some of his worst, are those in which
he took his ideas very seriously. 1 It was these ideas that blew the
'fading coal' to life ; no more than with Wordsworth, can we
ignore them without getting something no more Shelley's poetry
than a wax effigy would be Shelley.
Shelley said that he disliked didactic poetry ; but his own poetry
is chiefly didactic, though (in fairness) not exactly in the sense in
which he was using that word. Shelley's professed view of poetry
is not dissimilar to that of Wordsworth. The language in which he
clothes it in the 'Defence of Poetry' is very magniloquent, and
with the exception of the magnificent image which Joyce quotes
somewhere in Ulysses ('the mind in creation is as a fading coal,
which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens
to transitory brightness') it seems to me an inferior piece of
writing to Wordsworth's great preface. He says other fine things
too ; but the following is more significant of the way in which he
relates poetry to the social activity of the age :
'The most unfailing herald, companion and follower of the
awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion
or institution, is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation
of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The persons in whom this power resides may often, so far as regards many
portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with
that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst
they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the power
which is seated on the throne of their own soul.'
I know not whether Shelley had in mind, in his reservations
about 'the persons in whom this power resides', the defects of
Byron or those of Wordsworth ; he is hardly likely to have been
1 He did not, for instance, appear to take his ideas very seriously in
The Witch of Atlas, which, with all its charm, I think we may dismiss
as a trifle.
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'THE USE O F POETRY AND THE USE OF CR I T I C I SM '
contemplating his own. But this is a statement, and is either true
or false. If he is suggesting that great poetry always tends to
accompany a popular 'change in opinion or institution', that we
know to be false. Whether at such periods the power of 'communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature' accumulates is doubtful; one would
expect people to be too
busy in other ways. Shelley does not
appear, in this passage, to imply that poetry itself helps to operate
these changes, and accumulate this power, nor does he assert that
poetry is a usual by-product of change of these kinds ; but he docs
affirm some relation between the two ; and in conseq uencc, a
particular relation between his own poetry and the events of his
own time ; from which it would follow that the two throw light
upon each other. This is perhaps the first appearance of the
kinetic or revolutionary theory of poetry ; for Wordsworth did
not generalize to this point.
We may now return to the question how far it is possible to
enjoy Shelley's poetry without approving the use to which he put
it ; that is, without sharing his views and sympathies. Dante, of
course, was about as thoroughgoing a didacticist as one could
find ; and I have maintained elsewhere, and still maintain, that it
is not essential to share Dante's beliefs in order to enjoy his
poetry. 1 If in this instance I may appear to be extending the
tolerance of a bi�ssed mind, the example of Lucretius will do as
well : one may share the essential beliefs of Dante and yet enjoy
Lucretius to the full. Why then should this general indemnity not
extend to Wordsworth and to Shelley ? Here Mr. Richards comes
very patly to our he I p : 2
'Coleridge, when he remarked that a "willing suspension of disbelief" accompanied much poetry, was noting an important fact, but not quite in the happiest terms, for we are neither aware of a
disbelief nor voluntarily suspending it in these cases. It is better
to say that the question of belief or disbelief, in the intellectual
sense, never arises when we are reading well. If unfortunately it
does arise, either through the poet's fault or our own, we have for
the moment ceased to be reading and have become astronomers,
or theologians, or moralists, persons engaged in quite a different
type of activity.'
We may be permitted to infer, in so far as the distaste of a
1 Mr. A. E. Housman has affirmed (The Name a11d Nature of Poetr,J',
p. 34) that 'good religious poetry, whether in Keble or Dante or Job, is
likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminatingly relished
by the undevout'. There is a hard atom of truth in this, but if taken
literally it would end in nonsense.