Criticism from Plato to Eliot

Introduction

The criticism of poetry has always played an influential role in the development of poetry in Western civilization, from the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans up through the Renaissance, neoclassic, and Romantic periods and into the twenty-first century. By articulating the general aims and ideals of poetry and by interpreting and evaluating the works of particular poets, critics throughout the ages have helped shape the development of poetry. Poets, for their part, have often attempted to meet—or to react against—the stated aims and ideals of the prevailing critical theories. Some poets have also formulated and practiced the criticism of poetry, producing a closer and more vital relationship between criticism and poetry. For the student, the study of poetic theory and criticism can be not only an interesting and fruitful study in itself, but also a valuable aid in the attempt to understand the historical development of poetry.

The following review is organized chronologically, divided into six main sections: classical critics, Renaissance critics, neoclassic critics, Romantic critics, Victorian critics, and modern critics. The focus is primarily on English critics, though the ancient Greeks and Romans are included because they represent the classical tradition inherited and built on by the English. Significant American contributors to the mainstream of poetic theory and criticism are, with the exception of Edgar Allan Poe, restricted to the twentieth century and beyond. In this essay, T. S. Eliot is the only American critic treated in depth, though even his contributions are seen as a continuation of the English tradition.

Criticism of poetry can appear in many different forms but can be categorized one of two basic ways: Theoretical criticism, or poetic theory, is the articulation of general principles and tenets of poetry, usually regarding the nature, aims, and ideals of poetry, but also covering techniques and methods. Practical criticism, on the other hand, is the application of these principles and tenets to the tasks of interpreting and evaluating particular works of poetry. Both theoretical and practical criticism can be focused on any of four different aspects of poetry: the poem itself, the relationship of the poem to that which it imitates, the poet’s relationship to the poem, and the relationship of the poem to the audience. M. H. Abrams designated these four types of criticism as objective, mimetic (after the Greek wordmimesis, for imitation), expressive, and pragmatic. A recognition of the critic’s orientation as either theoretical or practical and as objective, mimetic, expressive, or pragmatic can help the student of criticism comprehend the contribution of the critic to the history of criticism.

Classical critics

Four works of poetic theory by ancient Greek and Roman theorists have had a profound influence on the course of Western literature in general and poetry in particular: Plato’s Politeia (fourth century b.c.e.; Republic, 1701), Aristotle’s De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705), Horace’s Ars poetica (c. 17 b.c.e.; The Art of Poetry), and Longinus’s Peri hypsous (first century c.e.; On the Sublime, 1652). In these four works are many critical theories that make up the classical tradition inherited by English letters. The two most important of these theories address the relationship of poetry to that which it imitates and the relationship of poetry to its audience. The central Greek concept of poetry is that of mimesis: Poetry, like all forms of art, imitates nature. By nature, the Greeks meant all of reality, including human life, and they conceived of nature as essentially well ordered and harmonious and as moving toward the ideal. Hence, poetry seeks to imitate the order and harmony of nature. Of equal importance to the mimetic concept of poetry is the Greek belief that poetry has a moral or formative effect on its audience. Poetry achieves this effect by making the reader more aware of reality and thereby more aware of his or her own nature and purpose. The Roman theorists, in turn, accepted these basic concepts of poetry. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans were very interested, however, in the expressive relationship between the poet and the poem (involving such questions as what takes place in the poet during the creative act of writing poetry), though they do make occasional comments on this aspect of poetry.

Plato

In book 9 of the Republic, Plato (c. 427-347 b.c.e.), the great Greek philosopher, discusses the role of poets and poetry in the ideal society. His ideas regarding poetry are valuable, not because they clarify poetic issues, but because they raise serious objections to poetry that later critics are forced to answer. Indeed, Plato states that poets and poetry should be banished from the ideal society for two reasons: Poetry represents an inferior degree of truth, and poetry encourages the audience to indulge its emotions rather than to control them. The Republic is written in the form of a dialogue, and in book 10, Socrates (speaking for Plato) convinces Glaucon of these two objections to poetry. He arrives at the first objection by arguing that poetry, like painting, is an imitation of an imperfect copy of reality and, therefore, is twice removed from ultimate truth. Reality, or ultimate truth, Plato believed, exists in universal ideas or eternal forms and not in the particular concrete objects of this world of matter. A table or a bed, for example, is a concrete but imperfect copy of the eternal form of the table or the bed. A painter who paints a picture of the particular table or bed is thus imitating not the reality (the eternal form), but an imperfect copy of the eternal form. The poet, in writing a poem about the table or the bed—or about any other imperfect concrete manifestation of reality—is also removed from reality, and therefore the poem represents an inferior degree of truth.

The second objection to poetry raised by Plato stems from his belief that human lives should be governed by reason rather than by emotions. Poetry, Plato believed, encourages the audience to let emotions rule over reason. As an example, Socrates cites the fact that those who listen to tragic passages of poetry indulge in the feelings created by the poem and are pleased by the poet who moves them the most. However, if similar tragic events took place in their own lives, they would strive to be stoical and would be ashamed to be so emotional.

Plato’s objections to poetry raise serious questions: Does poetry represent an inferior degree of truth? Does it have a harmful social or moral effect? More generally, and in a sense more important, his objections raise the question of whether poetry can be interpreted and evaluated on grounds other than the philosophical, moral, and social grounds he uses. In other words, can poetry be interpreted and evaluated on poetic grounds? Later critics, beginning with Aristotle, argue that it is possible to construct a general theory by which to interpret and evaluate poetry on poetic grounds.

Aristotle

The Poetics of Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.), as Walter Jackson Bate has remarked, stands out not only as the most important critical commentary of the classical period but also as the most influential work of literary criticism in the entire period of Western civilization. Thus it is essential for the student of poetic theory and criticism to have a grasp of Aristotle’s basic ideas concerning poetry, especially those that refute Plato’s objections and those that help establish a general theory by which poetry can be interpreted and evaluated on poetic grounds.

“Poetics” means a theory or science of poetry, and accordingly, Aristotle begins his discussion in a scientific manner:

I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each; to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into whatever else falls within the same inquiry. (This and following quotations of the Poetics are translations by S. H. Butcher.)

It is important to note that the word “poetry” (the Greek word is poiesis, which means “making”) is used by Aristotle in a generic sense, to refer to all forms of imaginative literature, including drama, and not in the specific sense in which it is used by modern critics to refer to a form of literature distinct from drama and fiction. Unfortunately, the Poetics is not complete (either Aristotle never finished it or part of it was lost). As it now stands, the work contains an extensive analysis of tragedy, an account of the sources and history of poetry, and scattered remarks on comedy, epic poetry, style, and language. It also contains an evaluative comparison of tragedy and epic poetry and a discussion of critical difficulties in poetry. Despite its incompleteness and its lack of any discussion of lyric poetry, the Poetics is an extremely important document of poetic theory.

First of all, the Poetics is important because it refutes Plato’s objections to poetry, though it is uncertain whether Aristotle considered the Poetics to be a direct reply to Plato. (As a student of Plato at Athens, he must have been aware of Plato’s objections, but the Poetics is thought to have been written after Plato’s death and therefore not intended as a direct reply.) The key to Aristotle’s refutation of Plato’s first objection—that poetry represents an inferior degree of truth—is in his interpretation of the Greek concept that poetry is an imitation of nature. It is known from Aristotle’s philosophical works that he believed that reality exists, not solely in universal ideas or eternal forms (as Plato believed), but rather in the process by which universal ideas work through and give form and meaning to concrete matter. For example, the reality of a table for Aristotle is not in the universal idea of a table but in the process by which the idea of a table gives form to the wood that goes into the particular table. Hence, in observing the process of nature, the poet observes reality, not an inferior copy of it. Furthermore, the poet’s act of imitation, for Aristotle, is not mere slavish copying, as it seems to be for Plato. (Plato implies that the poet is concerned with making realistic copies of the objects of the world of matter rather than with representing universal ideas.) Rather, Aristotle apparently saw the act of poetic imitation as a duplication of the process of nature or reality. That is, poetry is an imitation of the process of universal ideas or forms working through concrete matter. For example, a universal idea of human suffering gives shape to language, characters, and action in a tragic poem.

Poetry for Aristotle is both poiesis and mimesis, making and imitating. Hazard Adams, in The Interests of Criticism (1969), explains it in this way:

To Aristotle, then, there is no contradiction between poet, or maker, and imitator. The two words, in fact, define each other. The poet is a maker of plots, and these plots are imitations of actions. To imitate actions is not to mirror or copy things in nature but to make something in a way that nature makes something—that is, to have imitated nature.

As for Plato’s second objection to poetry—that it encourages emotional and irrational responses—Aristotle’s theory of catharsis provides a means of refutation. Catharsis (katharsis), a term used by the Greeks in both medicine and religion to mean a purgation or cleansing, is apparently used by Aristotle (there is some disagreement) to mean a process that the audience of a tragedy undergoes. Tragedy excites the emotions of pity and fear in the audience and then, through the structure of the play, purges, refines, and quiets these emotions, leaving the audience morally better for the experience. While Aristotle’s comments on catharsis are restricted to tragedy, they seem to be applicable to various kinds of literature. Poetry, Aristotle’s ideas suggest, does not simply encourage its audience to indulge their emotions, as Plato contended, but rather it engages their emotions so that they may be directed and refined, thus making the audience better human beings.

The Poetics, then, is a significant document in the history of poetic theory because it refutes the specific objections to poetry raised by Plato. It has another significance, however, just as important and closely related to the first: It demonstrates the possibility of establishing a general theory by which poetry can be analyzed and evaluated on poetic grounds rather than on the philosophical, moral, or social grounds used by Plato. Aristotle’s analysis of tragedy, his evaluative comparison of tragedy and epic poetry, and his discussion of critical difficulties in poetry all contribute to establishing such a general theory of poetry.

In his analysis of tragedy, which takes up the better part of the Poetics, Aristotle enumerates the parts of tragedy (plot, character, thought, diction, song, and spectacle), ranks them in importance, and analyzes each (though he devotes most of his discussion to plot, which he calls “the soul of a tragedy”). In addition to breaking down the parts of a tragedy, he explains how the parts must interrelate with one another and form a unified whole, “the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.” Although his structural analysis is largely restricted to tragedy (he touches on epic poetry), it has the far-reaching effect of demonstrating that every form of literature, including all types of poetry, is made up of parts that ideally should interrelate with one another and form a harmonious and unified whole that is aesthetically pleasing to the audience.

In comparing tragedy with epic poetry, Aristotle concludes that tragedy is the higher art because it is more vivid, more concentrated, and better unified than epic poetry, and that it “fulfills its specific function better as an art—for each art ought to produce, not any chance pleasure, but the pleasure proper to it.” Aristotle thus demonstrates, in making this judgment, that poetry can be judged by its poetic elements (such as vividness, concentration, and unity) and its aesthetic effects (the pleasure proper to it).

In one of the last sections of the Poetics, Aristotle discusses five sources of critical objections to artistic works, including poetry. Works of art are censured for containing things that are (1) impossible, (2) irrational, (3) morally hurtful, (4) contradictory, and (5) contrary to artistic correctness. Aristotle shows that each of the critical objections can be answered, either by refuting the objection or by justifying the presence of the source of the objection. In several cases, the refutation or justification is made on aesthetic grounds. For example, he says that the artist or poet may describe the impossible if the desired artistic effect is achieved. Here also, then, Aristotle shows that poetry can be analyzed and judged as poetry according to a general theory of poetry.

In summary, the Poetics of Aristotle is of primary importance in the history of criticism because it answers Plato’s charges against poetry and because it demonstrates to later critics how a general theory of poetry can be established.

Horace

The greatest Roman contribution to the history of poetic theory is a work by the poet Horace (65-8 b.c.e.), usually titled The Art of Poetry but known originally as Epistle to the Pisos because it was written as a verse letter to members of the Piso family. Perhaps because it was written in the form of a letter, Horace’s work lacks the systematic approach and profundity of Aristotle’s treatise and the vigorous thought of Plato’s dialogue. Despite these differences, as well as a lack of originality (Horace was restating—perhaps actually copying from an earlier treatise—already accepted poetic principles and tenets), The Art of Poetry is valuable for its influence on later ages, in particular the Renaissance and the neoclassic age. Poets and critics of those times found in Horace’s graceful verse letter many of the classical poetic aims and ideals, such as simplicity, order, urbanity, decorum, good sense, correctness, good taste, and respect for tradition. In addition, Horace’s urbane style and witty tone provided his admirers with a writing model.

Horace comments on a wide variety of literary concerns, ranging from the civilizing effect of poetry to the poet’s need for study and training as well as genius and natural ability, though he does not explore any of these in appreciable depth. Some of the concerns are specific to drama (for example, a play should have five acts), but others relate to poetry in general. The most famous statement in The Art of Poetry is that the “aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life.…He who combines the useful and the pleasing wins out by both instructing and delighting the reader” (translated by Bate). This idea that poetry is both pleasing and formative extends back to the Greeks and has retained a central position in poetic theory through the ages. Another important concept that pervades Horace’s letter is that of decorum, which is defined as the quality of fitness or propriety in a literary work. All elements in the work should be fitted to one another: character to genre, speech and action to character, style of language to genre, and so on. Horace’s statements on decorum, the separation of poetic genres, the use of past models for imitation, and the formative effect of poetry became cornerstones of neoclassic theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Longinus

The fourth classical work to have an important influence on English poetry and criticism is On the Sublime, a fragmentary treatise generally attributed to Greek philosopher and rhetorician Longinus (flourished first century c.e.). Although the work is mostly a treatise on the principles of rhetoric, it does contain passages of poetic theory.

The author lists five sources of the “sublime,” which Bate defines as an “elevation of style, or that which lifts literary style above the ordinary and commonplace to the highest excellence” (Criticism: The Major Texts, 1970). The effect of the sublime on the audience is the result of characteristics possessed by the poet: “the power of forming great conceptions” and “vehement and inspired passion” (translated by W. Rhys Roberts). The other three sources are poetic techniques, which the poet must practice and execute: figurative language, noble diction, and the dignified and elevated arrangement of words.

On the Sublime was published in the sixteenth century by an Italian critic, and its popularity among poets and critics of Europe and England reached a peak in the later half of the eighteenth century. Commentators attribute the popularity of On the Sublime to its combined appeal to the traditional classical interests and to the emerging romantic interests of the eighteenth century. That is, on the one hand, the author of the work stresses the classical values of studying and practicing the techniques of writing poetry, of imitating past models, and of creating balanced and unified works of poetry, while on the other hand, he stresses the Romantic values of inspiration, imagination, and emotion, both in the poet who creates the poetry and in the reader who is emotionally transported by sublime passages.

Renaissance critics

During the Middle Ages, scholars had little interest in the literary elements of poetry and valued it, if at all, for its religious and philosophical meanings. Even the great Italian poets of the late Middle Ages—Dante, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio—state in their critical works that the value of poetry is in its religious and moral teachings.

With the Renaissance, however, there came a renewed interest in the literary qualities of poetry. At first, the interest was restricted to studies of technical matters, such as meter, rhyme, and the classification of figures. These studies did not, however, solve what some scholars called the fundamental problem of Renaissance criticism: the justification of poetry on aesthetic or literary grounds. The solution to the problem was contained in classical literary theory, so that, with the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics (it had been lost to Western Europe during the Middle Ages) and with the study of Horace’s The Art of Poetry, Renaissance critics were able to formulate a theory that justified poetry on literary grounds and demonstrated its value for society. In Italy, this theory was developed by such critics as Antonio Minturno, Bernardino Daniello, and Francesco Robortelli. In England, it was most eloquently and persuasively articulated in the late sixteenth century by Sir Philip Sidney in the Defence of Poesie (1595), which Bate calls “the most rounded and comprehensive synthesis we have of the Renaissance conception of the aim and function of literature.”

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was neither a full-time poet nor a full-time critic; nevertheless, he is recognized as the first great English poet-critic. The Defence of Poesie, written in the early 1580’s and published posthumously, is Sidney’s sole piece of sustained literary criticism, but it so well provided the needed aesthetic defense of poetry that Sidney’s reputation as the foremost English critic of the Renaissance rests securely on it. The essay is an impressive reflection of Sidney’s classical education both in its structure and style and in its ideas. The structure, as Kenneth Myrick (Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman, 1935) pointed out, is that of a classical oration, and the graceful and persuasive style is adapted perfectly to the structure. The ideas, while shaped by Sidney’s mind, are derived from the great classical theorists: Aristotle, Plato, and Horace. In addition, the essay shows the influence of Italian literary criticism and contemporary Christian religious thought.

The Defence of Poesie (also published as An Apologie for Poetry) is a justification of poetry in the generic sense, that is, of all imaginative literature, and was occasioned by various puritanical attacks on poetry, such as Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse (1579), which was dedicated to Sidney. Not only does Sidney refute the puritanical charges against poetry, but he also argues that poetry is the most effective tool of all human learning in leading people to virtuous action. His essay is devoted to establishing proof for this thesis.

Sidney begins to line up his proof by presenting a historical view of poetry, in which he asserts that poetry is the most ancient and esteemed form of all learning. Poetry, he says, was “the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled [peoples] to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges.” The first books were books of poetry, and these led to other kinds of books, such as history, philosophy, and science. Hence, poetry is the great educator. Accordingly, poets have enjoyed a place of esteem in most civilizations throughout history. The names given to poets (such as the Roman name vates, meaning prophet or diviner) is further proof of the honor accorded poets and poetry.

Following his historical view, Sidney offers a definition of poetry and an analysis of the nature and function of poetry—all of which is designed to buttress his argument that poetry, more than any other kind of learning, leads humankind to virtuous actions. It is important to notice in this part of Sidney’s argument that he is making a direct connection between the aesthetic quality of poetry and its moral effect—a connection that has its origin in classical theory.

With obvious debts to Aristotle and Horace, Sidney defines poetry as “an art of imitation…that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture; with this end, to teach and delight.” In imitating, Sidney says, the poet is not restricted to nature. He may “mak[e] things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature,” such as demigods and other fantastic creatures. The result is that the poet creates a “golden” world, whereas nature’s world is of brass. Poetry, in other words, creates an ideal world and, thereby, “maketh us know what perfection is.” In giving us a “speaking picture” of perfection, poetry moves us to virtuous action. The various genres of poetry—epic, satire, elegy, pastoral, comedy, and so on—present various versions of the ideal.

Neither history nor philosophy, according to Sidney, is equal to poetry in its ability to move humankind to virtuous action. History is tied to the actual, “the particular truth of things” or “what is,” and philosophy, conversely, is concerned with the universal or the ideal, “the general reason of things” or “what should be.” Hence, history fails to show humankind a universal truth or ideal for which to aspire, and philosophy, while possessing the universal truth or ideal, presents it in abstract and general terms, rather than in concrete and particular terms, and thus fails to reach most of humankind. Poetry, on the other hand, “coupleth the general notion with the particular example,” that is to say, embodies the universal truth in a concrete image or situation and, in so doing, affects its readers emotionally as well as intellectually and moves them to virtuous action.

After establishing proof for his thesis that poetry is the most effective tool of human knowledge in leading humankind to virtuous action, Sidney turns to a refutation of the charges against poetry. He lists four specific charges: first, that there are “more fruitful knowledges” than poetry; second, that poetry is “the mother of lies”; third, that poetry is “the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires”; and fourth, that “Plato banished [poets] out of his Commonwealth.” Sidney overturns the first charge by stating that, since no knowledge “can both teach and move [mankind to virtue] so much as Poetry,” then none can be as fruitful as poetry. As for the second charge, that poetry lies, Sidney states that the poet does not lie because he does not affirm anything that is false to be true. By this, Sidney means that the poet does not attempt to deceive his audience into believing that what his poetry presents is actual or real. Rather, he offers his poem as an imaginary picture of the ideal, or “what should be.” Sidney refutes the third charge, the puritanical charge that poetry is harmful because it increases sinful desires, by asserting that the fault lies, not in poetry itself, but in the abuse of poetry. When poetry is abused, it is harmful; but, used rightly, it is beneficial. In refuting the fourth charge, that Plato banished the poets, Sidney argues that Plato was “banishing the abuse, not the thing”; that is, Plato was upset by the mistreatment of gods in poetry. In Iōn (fourth century b.c.e.; Ion, 1804), Sidney claims, Plato gave “high and rightly divine commendation to Poetry.”

The Defence of Poesie also expresses many of the neoclassic ideas and concerns that were to be treated more fully by critics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the separation and ranking of genres, the need for decorum in poetry, and the use of ancient classical models and critical authorities. It is, however, in the defense and justification of literature on aesthetic as well as moral grounds that Sidney’s essay deserves its high place in the history of criticism.

Neoclassic critics

In the two centuries following Sidney’s Defence of Poesie, neoclassic poetic theory flourished in England. During this period, and especially from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, England produced a number of able exponents of neoclassicism. Some of these critics, following the lead of French critics, insisted on a rather strict form of neoclassic theory and critical practice, turning the ancient classical principles into hard-and-fast rules. The two greatest critics of this period, however, rose above this rule mongering and inflexibility, so that their criticism has been of permanent value. They are John Dryden and Samuel Johnson.

John Dryden

John Dryden (1631-1700) is known as the founder of English criticism, an honorary title given to him by Samuel Johnson because Dryden was the first English critic to produce a large body of significant literary criticism. Almost all of it, however, is practical criticism, that is, criticism that examines particular literary works and particular problems in literary technique and construction. (Dryden often wrote about his own poems and plays.) Dryden rarely, if ever, treated in depth the larger theoretical issues of literature, such as the aims and ideals of literature, the nature of imitation, the creative process, and the moral and aesthetic effects of literature on the audience. He did write on these issues, but in passing rather than in depth. Furthermore, in no single piece of criticism did Dryden develop a general theory of literature (as Aristotle and Sidney did) as a standard by which to investigate particular works of literature.

Some literary historians are repelled by Dryden’s lack of an explicitly stated general theory of literature, especially because his scattered remarks on theoretical issues are sometimes inconsistent or even contradictory. For example, on the matter of the ends of poetry, he says several times that delight is the most important end. This statement from “A Defence of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy” (1668) is typical: “for delight is the chief, if not the only, end of poesy: instruction can be admitted but in second place, for poesy instructs as it delights.” In other pieces, however, he expresses a different opinion: “Let profit [instruction] have the pre-eminence of honour, in the end of poetry” (A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, 1693); and “The chief design of Poetry is to instruct” (“A Parallel of Poetry and Painting,” 1695). In still other pieces, Dryden merges the two ends: “To instruct delightfully is the general end of all poetry,” he states in “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy” (1679).

Although some commentators see Dryden’s lack of an explicitly stated general theory of literature to be a weakness that results in inconsistent statements and judgments, others see it as a strength that affords him flexibility and allows him to evaluate individual pieces of literature on their own merits rather than against a theoretical standard. These latter commentators point out that much questionable neoclassic criticism resulted from an inflexible adherence to general principles and rules.

Most of Dryden’s criticism, as well as being practical rather than theoretical, pertains to drama rather than to poetry and is, therefore, outside the purview of this essay. His best and most famous piece, for example, is Of Dramatic Poesie: An Essay (1668), a comparative analysis of ancient, modern, French, and English drama, examined in the light of neoclassical dramatic principles and rules by four different speakers. It might be argued that it is his criticism of drama that gives Dryden his high ranking among literary critics; nevertheless, he is also at times an astute reader and judge of poetry.

“Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern” (1700) is Dryden’s best-known commentary on poetry. Written in an informal, discursive style that Dryden perfected, the essay serves as an introduction to Dryden’s translations of fables by Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Dryden’s method is largely comparative: He compares Homer to Vergil, Ovid to Chaucer, and Chaucer to Boccaccio, revealing the characteristics of the poets and the beauties of their poems. In addition, Dryden comments on the history and the development of poetry, pointing out relationships among various poets, such as Dante, Petrarch, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, as well as those mentioned above. In doing all of this, Dryden gives a sense of the achievement of poetry in general and of Chaucer in particular. Chaucer, Dryden says, is “the father of English poetry.” He was “a perpetual fountain of good sense,” and he “follow’d Nature everywhere.” In examining The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), Dryden finds a rich variety of characters representing “the whole English nation.” It is to Chaucer’s magnificent cast of characters that Dryden applies the proverb: “Here is God’s plenty.”

Although it is impossible to summarize Dryden’s critical position because it frequently shifted and because it was not explicitly stated, it is possible to summarize his critical concerns and to list the characteristics he values as a critic of poetry. First, he was concerned more with the practice of poetry than with theory. He liked to examine particular poems and specific literary problems. Second, in examining particular poems, he felt that the critic’s business is not “to find fault,” but “to observe those excellencies which should delight a resonable reader” (“The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic License,” 1677). Third, he was interested in genres—satire, epic poetry, and so on. He considered, as did most neoclassic critics, heroic (epic) poetry to be the highest type of poetry (partially because of the mistaken neoclassic notion that Aristotle ranked epic over tragedy). In “The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic License,” an essay influenced by Longinus’s On the Sublime, Dryden calls heroic poetry “the greatest work of human nature.”

The characteristics that Dryden values as a critic of poetry are unity, simplicity, decorum, wit, grace, urbanity, good sense, and the like. As a poet, he often embodied these characteristics in his own poetry. Thus, in both his poetry and his criticism, Dryden stands out as the preeminent model of neoclassic poetic theory of the seventeenth century.

Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope

Between Dryden and Johnson, there were two English critics who deserve mention, Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Addison contributed to English neoclassic criticism through the essays he wrote for popular periodicals of his day, such as The Tatler (1709-1710) and The Spectator (1711-1712, 1714), which he published with Richard Steele. Addison wrote both theoretical pieces on such poetic matters as wit, taste, and imagination, and pieces of practical criticism on such poems as Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), and the medieval ballad “Chevy Chase.” As a body, the essays express the prevailing notions of English neoclassic criticism.

Alexander Pope, a poet of the first rank, is the author of An Essay on Criticism (1711), a verse essay written in heroic couplets and modeled on Horace’s The Art of Poetry and such contemporary pieces as L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry, 1683), by the French critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. Pope’s essay contains no new critical ideas, nor does it explore traditional ideas in any appreciable depth. It is, however, commendable for its expression of the prevailing neoclassic principles and tenets and for its liberal interpretation. Pope’s couplet on wit is a good example of his ability to express ideas succinctly: “True wit is Nature to advantage dress’d;/ What oft’ was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.” His discussion ranges from the characteristics and skills needed by the critic to various critical methods and principles. A reading of Pope’s essay is an excellent introduction to English neoclassic criticism.

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) has been called the “Great Cham” of eighteenth century English literary criticism. If to Sidney belongs the honor of writing the first great piece of English literary criticism and to Dryden that of being the first great practicing English critic, then to Johnson belongs the honor of being the first “complete” English literary critic. Johnson was expert in all forms of literary criticism: He formulated and explained literary theory, edited texts and practiced the principles of sound textual criticism (criticism that seeks to date texts, to settle questions of authorship, and to establish the author’s intended text, free from errors and unauthorized changes), explained the historical development of poetry, examined and evaluated particular literary works in relation to genre and in terms of literary aims and ideals, and wrote literary biography. Johnson’s criticism appears in a variety of sources, ranging from the monumental The Lives of the Poets (1779-1781) to the preface and notes to The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), from the narrative Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia: A Tale by S. Johnson (1759) to the essays in The Rambler (1750-1752) and The Idler (1758-1760), two periodicals he published. In addition to his critical work, he wrote poetry, a play (Irene: A Tragedy, pr. 1749), and a great many moral and social essays and meditative works; he also compiled a dictionary of the English language and edited a collection of Shakespeare’s works.

Johnson firmly believed in the classical idea that poetry is an imitation of nature, having as its ends instruction and delight. The nature that the poet imitates, however, should be “general nature.” In the preface and notes to The Plays of William Shakespeare, he states: “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.” By general nature, Johnson means what is universal and permanent, that is, what is true for all people in all ages. In Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, the philosopher Imlac explains:

The business of a poet…is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances; he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the different shades in the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such prominent and striking features, as recall the original to every mind.…[He] must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths, which will always be the same.

By imitating general nature, the poet instructs and delights the audience. Johnson believed that instruction, or what Bate calls “the mental and moral enlargement of man,” was the more important end of poetry, but he realized that poetry could best instruct by delighting. Hence, he repeatedly makes such statements as that “the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing” (preface and notes to The Plays of William Shakespeare).

As a practicing critic, Johnson examined and evaluated poetry primarily in the light of this principle that poetry is an imitation of general nature with the purpose of instructing and delighting. He also investigated poetry in terms of the prevailing neoclassic notions regarding the conventions and techniques of the various genres. He believed, however, that “there is always an appeal open from criticism to nature” (preface and notes to The Plays of William Shakespeare), so that he never approved of conventions and techniques for their own sakes. In fact, he frequently rejected the rigid neoclassic rules as being in violation of the laws of nature. The poet’s duty, he felt, was to imitate nature and life, not to follow critical rules. It was on this principle that Johnson rejected Milton’s “Lycidas,” a pastoral elegy. The pastoral elements, he felt, divorced the poem from nature, truth, and life. Finally, as a practicing critic, Johnson strove for impartiality, seeking to discover “the faults and defects” of a poem, as well as its “excellencies.” By giving a balanced and impartial account of a poet’s work, Johnson established credibility as a critic.

The Lives of the Poets is a set of fifty-two critical biographies of English poets, varying greatly in length and written as prefaces to the works of these poets collected and published by a group of London booksellers. The poets are all from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and range from Abraham Cowley to Thomas Gray, Johnson’s contemporary. Johnson’s general method is to sketch the poet’s life and character, analyze his works, and estimate his achievement, but he also discusses a variety of poetic issues, such as diction, wit, and the conventions of genre, and by covering the poets of more than a century, he effectively establishes the history of English poetry from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. A review of several of the more famous biographies will give an idea of Johnson’s methods and critical prowess.

In his biographical account of Pope, Johnson includes a description of Pope’s method of composition. It serves as a description of the quintessential neoclassic poet (and may be compared to that of the Romantic poet found in various pieces of Romantic criticism). Johnson says that Pope’s method of poetic composition “was to write his first thoughts in his first words, and gradually to amplify, decorate, rectify, and refine them.” Pope’s nearly exclusive use of the heroic couplet resulted in “readiness and dexterity,” and his “perpetual practice” led to a “systematical arrangement” of language in his mind. Johnson recounts the rumor that, before sending a poem to be published, Pope would keep it “under his inspection” for two years, and that he always “suffered the tumult of imagination to subside, and the novelties of invention to grow familiar.” Johnson’s description of Pope emphasizes the neoclassic poet’s belief in the importance of practice, labor, revision, and the use of reason over imagination.

Johnson devotes a great part of his biography of Milton to a long analysis of Paradise Lost, Milton’s epic. In neoclassic fashion, he examines the poem in light of the requirements of the epic genre: moral instruction, fable or plot, significance of subject matter, characters, use of the probable and marvelous, machinery, episodes, integrity of design, sentiments, and diction. His judgment is that, in terms of fulfilling the requirements of an epic, Paradise Lost ranks extremely high. There are faults in the poem, however, the chief one being “that it comprises neither human actions nor human manners. The man and woman [Adam and Eve] who act and suffer are in a state which no other man or woman can ever know.” The result is that the reader cannot identify with the characters or the actions, so that the poem lacks “human interest.” Nevertheless, Paradise Lost, in Johnson’s final judgment, “is not the greatest of heroick poems, only because it is not the first.”

In his biography of Cowley, Johnson gives an account of the seventeenth century Metaphysical poets, a term he is credited with coining. His account of them is to a great extent denigrating: They “will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated anything; they neither copied nature nor life.” They were, however, men of learning and wit, and this admission leads Johnson to a penetrating examination of the essence of wit. After rejecting Pope’s definition of wit (“What oft’ was thought, but ne’er so well express’d”) because it “reduces [wit] from strength of thought to happiness of language,” Johnson offers his own definition as that “which is at once natural and new” and “though not obvious…acknowledged to be just.” He finds, though, that the Metaphysical poets do not possess wit defined as such. Rather, their wit is “a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.…The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” It is a tribute to Johnson’s critical powers that this definition of Metaphysical wit continues to be applied, despite the fact that his general estimate of Metaphysical poetry is no longer accepted.

Johnson is the last—and arguably the greatest—ofthe neoclassic critics of poetry. In another sense, though, he is apart from them. By appealing to nature and reason and common sense—in other words, by returning to classical literary principles—he almost singlehandedly overturned the tendencies of extreme neoclassic critics to codify and regularize all aspects of literature. Johnson is, in effect, a great proponent of the classical view of poetry.

Romantic critics

Romantic criticism represents a sharp movement away from the concerns and values of neoclassic criticism. Whereas the neoclassic critic is concerned with the mimetic relationship of poetry to the nature or reality that it imitates and with the pragmatic relationship of poetry to its audience, the Romantic critic focuses primarily on the expressive relationship of the poet to poetry. The neoclassic critic sees poetry as an imitation of nature designed to instruct and delight; the Romantic critic sees poetry as an expression of the creative imagination. In examining poetry, the neoclassic critic turns to matters of genre, techniques, conventions, and effects of poetry; the Romantic turns back to the poet, the imagination, and the creative process. When the Romantic critic does turn to the mimetic relationship, he focuses on the organic and beneficent qualities of nature, and when he looks at the pragmatic relationship, he is especially interested in the connection between feelings and moral response.

William Wordsworth

In 1798, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) published, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a volume of poetry titled Lyrical Ballads. For many literary historians, this publication is the watershed between neoclassicism and Romanticism, and the preface that Wordsworth wrote for the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads is the manifesto of the English Romantic movement. In this preface, Wordsworth presents definitions and descriptions of the poet, the creative process, and poetry. He also discusses, among other things, the differences between poetry and prose and the effect of poetry on its readers.

Wordsworth defines the poet as “a man speaking to men,” suggesting by this phrase that the poet does not differ in kind from others. He does, however, differ in degree: He has “a more lively sensibility,… a greater knowledge of human nature,… a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner.” In short, the poet is, for Wordsworth, one who responds to life and nature with intense feelings and thoughts and is capable of expressing his or her feelings and thoughts poetically.

“[A]ll good poetry,” Wordsworth says, “is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” a definition that, at first glance, seems to be the very antithesis of the neoclassical view that poetry is the expression of restrained emotion and clear thought and the result of labor and revision. This definition of poetry is, however, sharply qualified by Wordsworth’s description of the creative process. The poet, he says, does not compose poetry spontaneously on the occasion of having an emotional experience. Rather, the emotional experience of the poet must first resolve itself into tranquillity, during which the poet reflects on his or her emotional experience:

the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins.

In other words, raw emotion is not enough for poetic composition. The emotion must be refined in a period of tranquillity by thoughts, which themselves are the representatives of past feelings. When the tranquillity modulates back into emotion, composition can begin.

Though Wordsworth does not make it explicit in this passage on the creative process, it can be inferred from the passage and from statements he makes in his poems that the faculty by which the poet creates poetry is the imagination. Like the other Romantics, Wordsworth exalts imagination over reason (itself exalted by the neoclassicists) and assigns to it a variety of functions, which Bate sums up in his introduction to Wordsworth in Criticism:

We have, then, in the imagination, an ability to draw upon all the resources of the mind: to centralize and unify sense impressions, to combine them with intuitions of form and value, and with realizations won from past experience.

In The Prelude: Or, The Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850), his long, autobiographical poem, Wordsworth says that the imagination “Is but another name for absolute power/ And clearest insight, amplitude of mind/ And Reason in her most exalted mood.”

One of Wordsworth’s principal aims in the preface to Lyrical Ballads is to explain the poetic and philosophical bases for the kind of poems he had written. The purpose, he says, “was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them…in a selection of language really used by men.” The incidents would be made interesting by “a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect” and “by tracing in them…the primary laws of our nature.” He goes on to say that he chose to depict “[h]umble and rustic life” in his poems because those who live in such circumstances are closer to nature and its formative and beneficial influences. Their feelings and passions reach a maturity from being “incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature,” and their language is purified because they “hourly communicate with the best objects [that is, those of nature] from which the best part of language is originally derived.” The effect of reading such poetry as Wordsworth has prescribed is that “the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degrees enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified.” This poetic and philosophical notion—that poetry should imitate the purified language and the beautiful passions and feelings of those who live simple lives in a close relationship to nature—is known as Romantic naturalism. Wordsworth’s idea that a poetry of Romantic naturalism will have a profound moral effect on its readers is a central tenet of Romantic poetics.

Wordsworth’s poetry of “[h]umble and rustic life” is in opposition to the eighteenth century poetry that depicted a polite, urban society. His espousal of a “language really used by men” is in opposition to the language of eighteenth century poets, known as “poetic diction.” Poetic diction is marked by personification, periphrasis, Latinisms, archaisms, invocations, and the like, and is based on the notion that, as Thomas Gray put it, “the language of the age is never the language of poetry.” Wordsworth sought, in his poetry and in his preface, to break down the prevailing distinction between the language of poetry and the language of everyday life because he believed that an artificial poetic language prevents the poet from capturing “the essential passions of the heart.” For Wordsworth, “the language of a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose.” This idea, in turn, leads him to the controversial notion that meter and rhyme are superadditions to the poem. They are added by the poet to increase the reader’s pleasure and to balance the emotional excitement produced by imagery and language with the calmness produced by the regularity of meter and rhyme. This notion that meter and rhyme are superadditions to a poem conflicts, however, with the more accepted concept that all elements of a poem are essential to forming a unified whole.

Wordsworth’s importance as a literary critic does not go much beyond the contribution of the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Nevertheless, the role that this document played in the Romantic movement and the importance that it has in the total body of Romantic criticism are great indeed.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is, by far, the greatest of the Romantic critics of poetry: He wrote more theory and practical criticism, ranged farther across critical terrain, and pondered critical problems more deeply than did the other Romantic critics. It is also true, however, that he is not always clear about his ideas, left some of them incomplete, and borrowed some concepts from critics and philosophers, especially the Germans, without proper attribution. The fact that his literary ideas frequently move into philosophical areas also makes it difficult for the student of literature to grasp fully his literary positions. His key literary concepts appear in a variety of publications, the major ones being Biographia Literaria (1817) and his lectures on William Shakespeare.

Like the other Romantic critics, Coleridge is interested less in the rules and conventions of poetry than in the nature of the poet, the imagination, and the creative process. He is also deeply interested in the question of what makes a poem a poem.

Poetry for Coleridge is the product of the creative imagination of the poet. He makes this clear when he states in chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria that the question “What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution to the other.” He then describes the poet, not by what he is, but by what he does:

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.

Coleridge has thus moved from poetry back to the poet and then to the imagination.

Coleridge spent a great deal of critical effort in attempts to define the imagination because he felt that a concept of the imagination was central to his poetic theory. Some of his key statements, besides the one quoted above, are that the imagination is the “reconciling and mediatory power” that joins reason to sense impressions and thereby “gives birth to a system of symbols” (“The Statesman’s Manual,” 1816); that it is “that sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that on which it meditates” (“Shakespeare as a Poet Generally”); and that it “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” (Biographia Literaria, chapter 14). He also distinguishes between the primary and secondary imagination in chapter 13 of Biographia Literaria. The primary imagination is “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” By this latter phrase, he apparently means that the imagination is godlike in its ability to create. The secondary imagination, he explains, differs in degree but not in kind from the primary imagination. Essentially, Coleridge seems to say that the imagination is creative, empathetic, perceptive, harmonizing, synthesizing, symbolizing, and reconciling.

One of Coleridge’s key literary concepts that has been fully embraced by modern critics is that of organic form. Although the theory is not original with Coleridge (Aristotle advocated it), he was the first important English critic to elaborate on it. In one of his Shakespeare lectures, Coleridge distinguishes between “organic” form and “mechanic” form:

The form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material; as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. (“Shakespeare’s Judgment Equal to His Genius”)

Nature, for Coleridge (as for Aristotle), is the model of organic form. Poetry imitates nature’s organic process of giving unifying form to all of its diverse elements. A poem, for Coleridge, is like a plant, a living organism, synthesizing all of its diverse elements—imagery, rhythm, language, and so on—into a harmonious and organic whole.

Coleridge also wrote a great amount of criticism on particular poets—Dante, Shakespeare, John Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, and many others. The greater part of it, however, is on Shakespeare and Wordsworth. Much of his criticism on Wordsworth is negative. He objects (in Biographia Literaria) to Wordsworth’s preface, in particular to what he sees as Wordsworth’s attempt to present his poetic theory as applicable to all poetry rather than to a particular kind. Despite his objections, Coleridge considers that his fellow Romantic poet ranks just behind Shakespeare and Milton in greatness.

Coleridge’s investigations of particular poets are almost always interesting, but his greatness as a critic lies in his contributions to the theories of the creative imagination and the organic nature of poetry.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

The poetic theories of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) are contained, for the most part, in his essay A Defence of Poetry (1840), which he wrote in response to Thomas Love Peacock’s satirical attack on poetry in an essay titled The Four Ages of Poetry (1820). Shelley’s essay shows the influence of Neoplatonism combined with Romantic notions of the organic character of nature, and it bears a resemblance to Sidney’s Defence of Poesie, especially in its defense of poetry on moral and aesthetic grounds. Although the greater part of the essay is given over to a descriptive history of poetry, it is typically Romantic in its discussion of the nature of the poet, the poetic process, the creative imagination, and the importance of sympathy and feeling in the development of the moral faculty.

Shelley’s claims for the poet are very grand: “A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one.” The poet unites the two vocations of legislator and prophet, not in the sense of making social laws and foretelling the future, but in the sense that the poet “beholds intensely the present as it is,…[and] beholds the future in the present.” Hence, “[A] poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.”

The faculty by which the poet discovers these Platonic laws that govern nature is not reason (which Plato championed) but imagination. Reason, for Shelley, is the “principle of analysis” that dissects, divides, enumerates, and distinguishes objects of nature, whereas imagination is the “principle of synthesis” that grasps the totality of nature in all of its organic character and perceives its value and quality. Poetry, for Shelley, is “the expression of the imagination”; it is not “produced by labour and study,” as it was for the neoclassicists. The poet cannot create poetry at will, “for the mind in creation is as a fading coal,” which is blown into “transitory brightness” by a power within the poet that comes and goes without warning. Even as the poet is composing, his inspiration is waning, and because inspiration is so fleeting, “the most glorious poetry…is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.” This Romantic notion—that the conception is perfect and the execution or composition is imperfect according to its distance from the conception—is the very opposite of the neoclassic notion that the poet approaches perfection through labor and revision.

The effect of poetry on the reader is, according to Shelley, morally formative, not because poetry is or should be didactic, but because it engages the reader’s emotions. Shelley echoes the other Romantic critics, especially William Hazlitt, when he states that “[t]he great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” The imagination—strengthened and enlarged by reading poetry—enables the reader to move away from his own selfish concerns and sympathetically identify with others, thus developing his moral faculty.

John Keats

John Keats (1795-1821) was not a professional critic nor did he set down his critical ideas about poetry in a systematic fashion, as did Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. He expressed his poetical ideas—which are profound and suggestive—sporadically in his personal letters to family and friends. In a letter concerning a personal matter, he would suddenly express his ideas about poetry, the poet, the creative imagination, and other related issues in which he was passionately interested.

Keats describes the nature of the poet to his friend Richard Woodhouse, in a letter of October 27, 1818. The poet, he says, “has no Identity”; rather, he is always “filling some other Body,” that is, identifying with someone or something else with which he is poetically engaged—a character, a tree, the sun, a bird, or autumn. The poet, for Keats, is like the chameleon: He changes his color to adjust to his environment. Keats distinguishes this sort of poet from “the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,” by which he seems to mean the poet who is intent on projecting his own feelings onto other things, instead of entering into the nature of other things.

The power by which the poet is capable of sympathetically identifying with other people and things is labeled by Keats “negative capability.” At its simplest, negative capability allows the poet to negate his own personality in order to identify with and understand another person or thing. The understanding, however, is not one of reason but of feeling. Keats says that negative capability is at work “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (December 21 or 27, 1817). Stated another way (in the same letter): “With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration.”

Beauty and truth are the chief aims of art and poetry, according to Keats. He says that the “excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth” (December 21 or 27, 1817). Another function of the imagination for Keats (besides that of negative capability) is that of apprehending beauty and translating it into truth. In a letter of November 22, 1817, he states that “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth.” Abstract truth—truth gained through “consequitive reasoning”—is not as valuable for Keats as truth embodied in the concrete forms of beauty and experienced with the senses and emotions. This belief that truth must be concretely experienced leads Keats to state that if poetry “is not so fine a thing as philosophy—[it is] For the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth” (March 19, 1819).

Several other Romantic critics deserve mention, though there is not space to describe their contributions in detail. In England, Hazlitt wrote widely on literary matters and promulgated many of the ideas that make up the Romantic theory of poetry. In Germany, A. W. von Schlegel and his brother Friedrich articulated the aims and accomplishments of German Romanticism. Poe is recognized as the leading American Romantic critic, though there is substantial disagreement about the real value of his critical ideas. His most famous critical work is “The Poetic Principle” (1848), which urges that beauty, and not truth, is the proper aim of poetry.

Victorian and modern critics

Criticism of poetry became increasingly diverse in the nineteenth century. In the last half of that century, it ranged from the classical, moral, and humanist interests of Matthew Arnold to the impressionistic, art for art’s sake theories of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde and the historical, sociological, and biographical methods of the French critics Hippolyte Taine and Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, critics widened the scope of literary criticism by applying methods and terminology from a variety of other disciplines to the history and interpretation of literature. This diversity makes it difficult to identify the “great” critics of poetry in the Victorian and modern periods, but certainly two in particular stand out: Arnold and Eliot.

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is the major literary critic of the last half of the nineteenth century. He was a poet, a professor of poetry at Oxford, and an inspector of schools. Furthermore, he perceived his role as critic as extending far beyond literary matters into social, educational, moral, and religious areas, so that he is, in effect, a critic of culture in a broad sense. For this reason, it is imperative to understand his ideas about culture to understand his ideas about poetry and criticism.

In “Sweetness and Light” (a chapter from Culture and Anarchy, 1869), Arnold defines culture as “a study of perfection, and of harmonious perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.” In other words, culture is not the possession of certain knowledge or information; rather, it is a condition or habit of being that can be applied to everyday life. Arnold equates the “pursuit of perfection,” which is the goal of culture, with the “pursuit of sweetness and light,” metaphors for beauty and truth.

The way to culture’s goal of perfection, to beauty and truth, is “to know the best which has been thought and said in the world.” (Arnold repeats this phrase with some variations in different essays.) When Thomas Huxley, a scientist, accused Arnold of limiting the sources of culture to literature (Huxley believed that scientific knowledge is as effective as literary knowledge in attaining culture), Arnold responded in “Literature and Science” (1882) by stating that all literature—including scientific, social, political, as well as imaginative—contributes to the pursuit of culture. Nevertheless, Arnold goes on to say, a literary education is superior to a scientific education. There is a need in life, Arnold says, for knowledge, and science satisfies this need by providing one with facts about humans and nature. There is also, however, a great need to relate knowledge to “our sense for conduct” and “our sense for beauty,” and this, Arnold contends, science cannot do. Literature, on the other hand, does have the power of relating new knowledge to people’s senses of conduct and beauty. Arnold means that literature, because it unites the universal with the particular and because it affects the emotions as well as the intellect, can show people how to apply new ideas morally in their conduct and aesthetically in the way they perceive the world.

Arnold’s most famous definition of literature is that it is “a criticism of life,” a definition that he repeatedly uses in his critical works and consistently applies to poetry under his inspection. Arnold means by this phrase that poetry should address the moral question of “how to live.” It should provide an ideal by which people can measure their own lives. In another famous phrase that Arnold uses in various essays, he says that great poetry is “the noble and profound application of ideas to life.” The purpose of poetry, he says in “The Study of Poetry” (1880), is “to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us,” a function that he likens to that of religion. Indeed, to an age in which religious faith had been badly shaken by the findings of science, Arnold solemnly offered poetry as a source of consolation and sustenance.

Criticism, as well as poetry, plays a central role in Arnold’s concept of culture. In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864), Arnold defines criticism as “a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas.” Arnold is speaking here of all types of criticism, not only literary criticism, and the ideas generated by disinterested criticism will be ideas relating to all fields of knowledge and will contribute to the attainment of culture. The task in every critical endeavor, according to Arnold, is “to see the object as in itself it really is,” and in evaluating new ideas the duty of the critic is “to be perpetually dissatisfied…while they fall short of a high and perfect ideal.”

Arnold’s method as a practicing critic of poetry is seen in a number of essays. The most famous—and most controversial—of these is “The Study of Poetry,” an introduction to a collection of English poetry. In the essay, Arnold rejects two traditional methods of evaluating poetry: the “historic estimate,” which judges a poem by its historical context, and the “personal estimate,” which relies on a critic’s personal taste and preferences to judge a poem. In place of these, Arnold proposes the “touchstone” method: The critic compares lines of the poem under consideration with “lines and expressions of the great masters”—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. Such lines, which the critic should keep stored in his mind, will serve as “an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in all other poetry which we may place beside them.”

The chief objection raised to Arnold’s “touchstone” method is that it appears to place more value on the individual parts (lines) than on the interrelationship of the parts and the total design and unity of the poem. This may not, in fact, have been Arnold’s intention. In other critical works, he emphasizes the importance of total design and unity. For example, in his preface to Poems (1853), he praises the quality of total design in poems, and he disparages “poems which seem to exist merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of producing any total-impression.” He cites Keats’s Isabella (1820) as a poem without total design. In Matthew Arnold: A Survey of His Poetry and Prose (1971), Douglas Bush suggests that Arnold may have meant that “a line or two [the touchstone] may recall the texture and total character of a long poem—which he assumes that his readers know,” so that in effect the critic using the touchstone method is not comparing individual lines but complete poems.

“The Study of Poetry” is also controversial in some of its judgments of English poets. In the latter half of the essay, Arnold uses the touchstone method to evaluate most of the major English poets from Chaucer to Robert Burns. In examining each poet, Arnold looks for “high seriousness,” a quality he does not define but which is obviously related to his notion that poetry should be “a criticism of life.” Shakespeare and Milton, in Arnold’s view, are classics of English poetry because they possess “high seriousness.” Chaucer, on the other hand, is not a classic of English poetry because he lacks “high seriousness.” This judgment conflicts with past judgments of Chaucer (such as Dryden’s), and it is all the more controversial in the light of the fact that Arnold judges Gray to be a classic poet with “high seriousness.” Also controversial is Arnold’s judgment that Dryden and Pope are not classics of English poetry. Instead, “they are classics of our prose” because they possess the qualities of great prose: “regularity, uniformity, precision, balance.”

The survey of English poetry in “The Study of Poetry” stops with Burns (who falls short of being judged a classic), but Arnold makes judgments of later English poets in other essays, most of which can be found in the two volumes of Essays in Criticism (1865 and 1888). He ranks Wordsworth directly behind Shakespeare and Milton in poetical greatness because Wordsworth “deals with more of life than [other poets] do; he deals with life, as a whole, more powerfully” (“Wordsworth”). Lord Byron, in Arnold’s opinion, ranks right behind Wordsworth. The strengths of Byron are his “splendid and puissant personality,…his astounding power and passion…and deep sense for what is beautiful in nature, and for what is beautiful in human action and suffering.” Byron lacks, however, the “great artist’s profound and patient skill in combining an action or in developing a character.” This and his other faults—such as “his vulgarity, his affectation”—keep him from achieving in his poetry “a profound criticism of life” (“Byron”).

Of Keats’s poetry, Arnold’s opinion is that it “is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous” and possesses “natural magic” equal to that of Shakespeare. He lacks, on the other hand, the “faculty of moral interpretation” and “high architectonics" (by which Arnold means the ability to create a total design) necessary for the great poet. Had Keats not died early, he might, in Arnold’s view, have developed into a great poet because he undoubtedly had the “elements of high character” (“Keats”). Arnold’s essay on Shelley is a review of a recent biography of the Romantic poet. Arnold rejects the biographer’s unqualified veneration of Shelley and “propose[s] to mark firmly what is ridiculous and odious in…Shelley…and then to show that our former beautiful and lovable Shelley nevertheless survives.” He concludes the essay by repeating his now-famous description of Shelley (first used in his essay on Byron): Shelley is “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain” (“Shelley”).

Arnold’s literary interests extended beyond English poetry. He also wrote about Celtic literature, the poetry of Homer, of Heinrich Heine and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the works of Count Leo Tolstoy, as well as about many other authors and literary topics. Through all of his critical writings, Arnold maintained the position of the classicist, asserting the broad moral value of humane arts and letters in a world in which proponents of science, on one hand, and proponents of the art for art’s sake movement, on the other, were threatening to eclipse classical literary ideals.

T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) deserves the title of great critic because of the range and depth of his criticism. A gifted poet and playwright who gave up his American citizenship to become a naturalized British subject, Eliot wrote on a diversity of literary topics. Because of this diversity, his critical work is very difficult to summarize. Rather than attempting to encompass all of his views regarding poetry and criticism, the following discussion presents a rough classification of his critical works and a detailed explanation of several of his key poetic concepts. If Eliot’s critical works on drama and dramatists and those dealing with topics other than literature, such as culture and religion, are excluded, most of the remaining works can be classified into three groups: works dealing with the nature of criticism, works dealing with the nature of poetry, and works dealing with individual poets.

The first group includes such works as “The Perfect Critic” and “Imperfect Critics” (both from The Sacred Wood, 1920), “The Function of Criticism” (1923), and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (1933). One of the purposes of the latter work is to explore “the relation of criticism to poetry” from the Elizabethan age to the modern period, and it includes essays on many of the great critics of poetry. Eliot’s ideas about the criticism of poetry are many and diverse, but on the whole they contributed greatly to modern formalistic orNew Criticism by insisting on the primacy of the poem itself. In the introduction to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Eliot states that criticism addresses two questions: “What is poetry?” and “Is this a good poem?” At a time when literary critics were often concerned with historical and biographical aspects, Eliot’s statement served to remind critics that poetry itself should be the primary concern of the critic.

The second group of critical works includes such essays as “The Social Function of Poetry,” “The Music of Poetry,” and “The Three Voices of Poetry” (all contained in the first section of On Poetry and Poets, 1957). As with the first group, Eliot’s range in this group is wide. Almost any aspect of poetry interests him—relatively small matters such as the use of blank verse to larger issues such as the difference between “classic” and “romantic.” Probably the two most influential essays in the group are “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “The Metaphysical Poets” (both in Selected Essays, 1932, 1950).

The English poets about whom Eliot writes in the third group of critical works include Andrew Marvell, Milton, Dryden, William Blake, Byron, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and William Butler Yeats. Especially noticeable in these works is Eliot’s extensive use of quotations from the poetry to illustrate his observations. This practice is in keeping with his idea that the critic should focus on the poetry. Also noticeable are Eliot’s attempts to reshape the reigning view of English poets (especially to downgrade Milton and to elevate the Metaphysical poets and Dryden). Eliot believed that one of the ends of criticism is “the correction of taste.”

Several of Eliot’s poetic concepts have become very important in modern poetics and therefore deserve special attention. These concepts concern the nature of the poet and the poetic process, the nature of poetry, and the idea of tradition. Eliot developed these ideas throughout several works, the most important of which are “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “The Metaphysical Poets.”

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” Eliot says that “[t]he poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.” The difference between a poet and an ordinary person, Eliot explains, is that the poet has the ability to form these chaotic elements into a unified whole:

When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. (“The Metaphysical Poets”)

To explain the actual creative process of composing poetry, Eliot uses a scientific analogy, which has the effect of emphasizing the objectivity and intensity of the process. He compares the creative act of composing poetry to the scientific act of forming sulphurous acid:

When the two gases previously mentioned [oxygen and sulphur dioxide] are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. (“Tradition and the Individual Talent”)

The two gases represent the emotions and feelings and other experiences that the poet has stored up. The filament of platinum represents his mind or creative faculty, and the sulphurous acid is the poem. The objectivity of the process is stressed in the fact that the poem (the sulphurous acid) shows “no trace” of the poet’s mind (the platinum) and that his mind is “unchanged” by the experience of writing the poem. Eliot further emphasizes this objectivity (called “aesthetic distance” by formalistic critics) in his statement, following the analogy that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.”

Eliot calls this process of composing poetry the “process of depersonalization” because it deemphasizes the poet’s personality and personal emotions. “Poetry,” he states in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” This does not mean, however, that poetry for Eliot is not intense. There is intensity involved, but “it is not the ’greatness,’ the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.” The result of such an intense artistic process is an impersonal aesthetic emotion, that is, an “emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.” Eliot expounds on this idea of an impersonal aesthetic emotion in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems”:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

The ideal poet for Eliot, then, is one who keeps his creative self separate from his personal self and who creates an impersonal artistic emotion in his poetry through the “objective correlative” formula. In order to be such a poet, it is necessary for him to “surrender…himself…to something which is more valuable,” that is, to tradition. Tradition, for Eliot, involves the “historical sense,” that is, “a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.” The historical sense gives the poet a feeling for the “simultaneous existence” and “simultaneous order” of all literature from Homer on, and it will make clear to him how his own work must fit into this literary tradition while at the same time expressing his “individual talent.”

With regard to the English literary tradition, Eliot worked to overturn the prevailing opinion that the line of great English poets extended from Shakespeare to Milton to Wordsworth and excluded the Metaphysical poets (Donne, Marvell, and others) and the neoclassic poets, especially Dryden. (Arnold was the critic most responsible for the prevailing opinion, especially by his designation of Dryden and Pope as “classics of prose” and not of poetry, and his praise of Wordsworth, but Johnson’s view that the Metaphysical poets were more “wits” than poets had stuck through the nineteenth century and contributed to the prevailing opinion.) Eliot argues that the Metaphysical poets “were the direct and normal development of the precedent age,” that is the Elizabethan age, and not “a digression from the main current” of English poetry. These poets, like their Elizabethan predecessors, “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.” They had the ability to unite thought and feeling, so that in their poetry “there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling.” After the Metaphysical poets, “a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered” (“The Metaphysical Poets”).

This “dissociation of sensibility”—the separation of thought and feeling in poetry—was “aggravated,” Eliot says, by Milton and Dryden. Milton perfected an impassioned language but dispensed with wit, whereas Dryden developed an intellectual wit lacking an emotional element. Both were fine poets, but their followers lacked their poetic qualities and only “thought and felt by fits, unbalanced.” Eliot touches on this thesis again in his essays on Milton, Dryden, and Marvell, but he does not develop it further in his essays on the Romantic poets. Nevertheless, his theory of poetic sensibility has become one of the leading theories regarding the historical development of English poetry.

Other modern critics of poetry perhaps deserve to be ranked as great critics, but it is fitting to end this essay with Eliot because he is the latest in a long line of great English critics who are also poets. It is not essential, of course, that a critic also be able to write poetry, but the fact that so many of the great English critics—from Sidney to Eliot—have also been poets has undoubtedly increased the perception, sensitivity, range, and flexibility of English criticism.

Bibliography

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Baines, Paul. The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope. New York: Routledge, 2000. This introduction offers basic information on the author’s life, contexts, and works, and outlines the major critical issues surrounding Pope’s works, from the time they were written to the end of the twentieth century.

Bate, Walter Jackson. Samuel Johnson. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. This Pulitzer Prize-winning biography has shrewd psychological assessments of Johnson’s early and major poems.

Christensen, Allan C. The Challenge of Keats: Bicentenary Essays, 1795-1995. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. These essays reexamine some of the criticisms and exaltations of Keats in order to deliver an appraisal of the historical and cultural contexts of Keats’s work and an in-depth discussion of the influences on Keats and his relationships with other poets.

Collini, Stefan. Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. A new edition of a classic study. An afterword, created for this edition, considers Arnold’s influence on later critics. Includes an updated bibliography.

Day, Gary. Literary Criticism: A New History. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. A reliable overview, enlivened with details about the lives and times of the critics and with the author’s often unconventional opinions. Bibliography and index.

Fulford, Tim. Landscape, Liberty, and Authority: Poetry, Criticism, and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. This innovative study demonstrates how landscape descriptions reflected the critical views and political opinions of various writers during a historical period marked by rapid change.

Gelber, Michael Werth. The Just and the Lively: The Literary Criticism of John Dryden. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1999. Gelber provides a complete study of Dryden’s criticism. Through a detailed reading of each of Dryden’s essays, he explains and illustrates the unity and the development of Dryden’s thought.

Habib, M. A. R. A History of Literary Criticism: From Plato to the Present. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. This award-winning book, praised for its comprehensiveness, lucidity, and accessibility, is divided into eight chronological sections. It offers explanations of literary theories, discussions of writers and their works, and close readings of important texts, and serves as an excellent introduction to the subject. Bibliography and index.

Harrison, Stephen, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Horace. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Essays by various scholars discuss such subjects as the themes of Horace’s works, his poetics, his wide range of genres, contemporary reactions to his poetry, and his later influence. Introduction by the editor. Dateline, list of works cited, and index.

Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. An extensive collection of critical works from classical times to the end of the twentieth century. Includes general introduction, headnotes, annotations, and bibliographies.

Martin, Peter. Samuel Johnson: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008. A well-researched, insightful study of the man many consider England’s greatest literary critic. Illustrated. Maps.

Murray, A. David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Seventeen essays by noted scholars on such subjects as Eliot’s life and thought, his works, and his literary, social, and political criticism. The final chapter is a review of Eliot studies, with a selected bibliography. Chronology.

Murray, Chris, ed. Encyclopedia of Literary Criticism. 2 vols. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999. Based on Salem Press’s four-volume Critical Survey of Literary Theory (1987), this indispensable reference expands on the original publication, adding 117 new entries. It covers more than 250 world critics through the ages in lengthy essays that survey their lives, introduce their literary theory, and list both primary and secondary works. Articles on concepts, chronological periods, and movements range from ancient times to the present and are worldwide in scope. Contains copious finding aids (alphabetized, chronological, and categorized lists) and a thorough subject index.

Stillinger, Jack. Romantic Complexity: Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. A collection of major essays by a distinguished scholar and specialist in the Romantic period. Among the subjects discussed are multiple texts, varied readings, editing and revising, collaboration, and the influence of one writer on another.

Wellek, René. A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950. 8 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. This massive work is still considered a standard history of literary criticism. Wellek conceives of literary study as comprising three areas: criticism, theory, and history. He covers the later eighteenth century; the Romantic age; the “age of transition”; the later nineteenth century; the first half of the twentieth century in England; the first half of the twentieth century in America; German, Russian, and Eastern European criticism in the first half of the twentieth century; and French, Spanish, and Italian criticism in the same period.