1 In chapter xxii of Principles of Literary Criticism Mr. Richards discusses these matters in his own way. As evidence that there arc other approaches as well, see a very interesting article Le SJ1mbolisme et l'ame
primitil:e by E. Cailliet and J. A. Bedc in the Rente de /itterature comparee for April-June 1 932. The authors, who have done field-work in Madagascar, apply the theories of Levy-Bruhl : the pre-logical mentality persists in civilized man, but becomes available only to or through the poet.
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ESSAYS OF GENERAL I ZATION · 1 9 3 0- 1 9 6 5
in theology arc equally significant. One voice was raised, in our
time, to express a view of a different kind ; that of a man who
wrote several remarkable poems himself, and who also had an
aptitude for theology. It is that of T. E. Hulme :
'There is a general tendency to think that verse means little else
than the expression of unsatisfied emotion. People say : "But how
can you have verse without sentiment ?" You see what it is ; the
prospect alarms them. A classical revival to them would mean the
prospect of an arid desert and the death of poetry as they understand it, and could only come to fill the gulf caused by that death.
Exactly why this dry classical spirit should have a positive and
legitimate necessity to express itself in poetry is utterly inconceivable to them . . . . The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to realize how extraordinarily difficult this is. . . . Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a
concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your
own purpose.'
This is, we must remark at once, not a general theory of poetry,
but an assertion of the claims of a particular kind of poetry for the
writer's own time. It may serve to remind us how various are the
kinds of poetry, and how variously poetry may appeal to different
minds and generations equally qualified to appreciate it.
The extreme of theorizing about the nature of poetry, the
essence of poetry if there is any, belongs to the study of aesthetics
and is no concern of the poet or of a critic with my limited
qualifications. Whether the self-consciousness involved in
aesthetics and in psychology does not risk violating the frontier of
consciousness, is a question which I need not raise here ; it is
perhaps only my private eccentricity to believe that such researches are perilous if not guided by sound theology. The poet is much more vitally concerned with the social 'uses' of poetry,
and with his own place in society ; and this problem is now perhaps more importunately pressed upon his conscious attention than at any previous time. The uses of poetry certainly vary as
society alters, as the public to be addressed changes. In this
context something should be said about the vexed question of
obscurity and unintelligibility. The difficulty of poetry (and
modern poetry is supposed to be difficult) may be due to one of
several reasons. First, there may be personal causes which make it
impossible for a poet to express himself in any but an obscure
way ; while this may be regrettable, we should be glad, I think,
that the man has been able to express himself at all. Or difficulty
may be due just to novelty : we know the ridicule accorded in turn
.to Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, Tennyson and Browning - but
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must remark that Browning was the first to be called difficult ;
hostile critics of the earlier poets found them difficult, but called
them silly. Or difficulty may be caused by the reader's having
been told, or having suggested to himself, that the poem is going
to prove difficult. The ordinary reader, when warned against the
obscurity of a poem, is apt to be thrown into a state of consternation very unfavourable to poetic receptivity. Instead of beginning, as he should, in a state of sensitivity, he obfuscates his senses by
the desire to be clever and to look very hard for something, he
doesn't know what - or else by the desire not to be taken in. There
is such a thing as stage fright, but what such readers have is pit or
gallery fright. The more seasoned reader, he who has reached, in
these matters, a state of greater purity, does not bother about
understanding ; not, at least, at first. I know that some of the
poetry to which I am most devoted is poetry which I did not
understand at first reading; some is poetry which I am not sure I
understand yet : for instance, Shakespeare's. And finally, there is
the difficulty caused by the author's having left out something
which the reader is used to finding ; so that the reader, bewildered,
gropes about for what is absent, and puzzles his head for a kind of
'meaning' which is not there, and is not meant to be there.
The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense,
may be (for here again I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and
not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted
and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him : much as the
imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for
the house-dog. This is a normal situation of which I approve. But
the minds of all poets do not work that way ; some of them, assuming that there are other minds like their own, become impatient of this 'meaning' which seems superfluous, and perceive possibilities
of intensity through its elimination. I am not asserting that this
situation is ideal ; only that we must write our poetry as we can,
and take it as we find it. It may be that for some periods of society
a more relaxed form of writing is right, and for others a more
concentrated. I believe that there must be many people who feel,
as I do, that the effect of some of the greater nineteenth-century
poets is diminished by their bulk. Who now, for the pure pleasure
of it, reads Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats even, certainly
Browning and Swinburne and most of the French poets of the
century - entire ? I by no means believe that the 'long poem' is a
thing of the past ; but at least there must be more in it for the
length than our grandparents seemed to demand ; and for us, anything that can be said as well in prose can be said better in prose.
And a great deal, in the way of meaning, belongs to prose rather
than to poetry. The doctrine of 'art for art's sake', a mistaken
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one, and more advertised than practised, contained this true
impulse behind it, that it is a recognition of the error of the poet's
trying to do other people's work. But poetry has as much to learn
from prose as from other poetry ; and I think that an interaction
between prose and verse, like the interaction between language
and language, is a condition of vitality in literature.
To return to the question of obscurity : when all exceptions
have been made, and after admitting the possible existence of
minor 'difficult' poets whose public must always be small, I believe
that the poet naturally prefers to write for as large and miscellaneous an audience as possible, and that it is the half-educated and ill-educa
ted, rather than the uneducated, who stand in his
way : I myself should like an audience which could neither read nor
write. 1 The most useful poetry, socially, would be one which
could cut across all the present stratifications of public taste -
stratifications which are perhaps a sign of social disintegration.
The ideal medium for poetry, to my mind, and the most direct
means of social 'usefulness' for poetry, is the theatre. In a play of
Shakespeare you get several levels of significance. For the simplest
auditors there is the plot, for the more thoughtful the character
and conflict of character, for the more literary the words and
phrasing, for the more musically sensitive the rhythm, and for
auditors of greater sensitiveness and understanding a meaning
which reveals itself gradually. And I do not believe that the
classification of audience is so clear-cut as this ; but rather that the
sensitiveness of every auditor is acted upon by all these elements
at once, though in different degrees of consciousness. At none of
these levels is the auditor bothered by the presence of that which
he does not understand, or by the presence of that in which he is
not interested. I may make my meaning a little clearer by a simple
instance. I once designed, and drafted a couple of scenes, of a
verse play. My intention was to have one character whose sensibility and intelligence should be on the plane of the most sensitive and intelligent members of the audience ; his speeches should be
addressed to them as much as to the other personages in the play
- or rather, should be addressed to the latter, who were to be
material, literal-minded and visionless, with the consciousness of
being overheard by the former. There was to be an understanding
between this protagonist and a small number of the audience,
while the rest of the audience would share the responses of the
other characters in the play. Perhaps this is all too deliberate, but
one must experiment as one can.
1 On the subject of education, there are some helpful remarks in
Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious.
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'THE USE O F POETRY AND THE U S E O F CR I T I C I SM '
Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had
some direct social utility. By this, as I hope I have already made
clear, I do not mean that he should meddle with the tasks of the
theologian, the preacher, the economist, the sociologist or anybody else ; that he should do anything but write poetry, poetry not defined in terms of something else. He would like to be something
of a popular entertainer, and be able to think his own thoughts
behind a tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey the
pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger
groups of people collectively ; and the theatre is the best place in
which to do it. There might, one fancies, be some fulfilment in
exciting this communal pleasure, to give an immediate compensation for the pains of turning blood into ink. As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a
mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the
permanent value of what he has written : he may have wasted his
time and messed up his life for nothing. All the better, then, if
he could have at least the satisfaction of having a part to play in
society as worthy as that of the music-hall comedian. Furthermore, the theatre, by the technical exactions which it makes and limitations which it imposes upon the author, by the obligation to
keep for a definite length of time the sustained interest of a large
and unprepared and not wholly perceptive group of people, by
its problems which have constantly to be solved, has enough to
keep the poet's conscious mind fully occupied, as the painter's by
the manipulation of his tools. I f, beyond keeping the interest of a
crowd of people for that length of time, the author can make a
play which is real poetry, so much the better.
I have not attempted any definition of poetry, because I can
think of none which does not assume that the reader already
knows what it is, or which does not falsify by leaving out much
more than it can include. Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage
beating a drum in a jungle, and it retains that essential of percussion and rhythm ; hyperbolically one might say that the poet is older than other human beings - but I do not want to be tempted
to ending on this sort of flourish. I have insisted rather on the
variety of poetry, variety so great that all the kinds seem to have
nothing in common except the rhythm of verse instead of the
rhythm of prose : and that does not tell you much about all
poetry. Poetry is of course not to be defined by its uses. If it
commemorates a public occasion, or celebrates a festival, or
decorates a religious rite, or amuses a crowd, so much the better.
It may effect revolutions in sensibility such as arc periodically
needed ; may help to break up the conventional modes of perception and valuation which are perpetually forming, and make 95
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people see the world afresh, o r some new part o f it. It may make
us from time to time a little m.ore aware of the deeper, unnamed
feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we
rarely penetrate ; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of
ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world. But to
say all this is only to say what you know already, if you have felt
poetry and thought about your feelings. And I fear that I have
already, throughout these lectures, trespassed beyond the bounds
which a little self-knowledge tells me are my proper frontier. If,
as James Thomson observed, 'lips only sing when they cannot
kiss', it may also be that poets only talk when they cannot sing.
I am content to leave my theorizing about poetry at this point.
The sad ghost of Coleridge beckons to me from the shadows.
REL I G I ON AND L I TE RATURE
What I have to say i s largely i n support of the following propositions : Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age
there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so
far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in
which there is no such common agreement, it is the more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological
standards. The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined
solely by literary standards ; though we must remember that
whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary
standards. 1
We have tacitly assumed, for some centuries past, that there is
no relation between literature and theology. This is not to deny
that literature - I mean, again, primarily works of imagination -
has been, is, and probably always will be judged by some moral
standards. But moral judgments of literary works are made only
according to the moral code accepted by each generation, whether
it lives according to that code
or not. In an age which accepts
some precise Christian theology, the common code may be fairly
orthodox : though even in such periods the common code may
exalt such concepts as 'honour,' 'glory' or 'revenge' to a position
quite intolerable to Christianity. The dramatic ethics of the
Elizabethan Age offers an interesting study. But when the common code is detached from its theological background, and is consequently more and more merely a matter of habit, it is
exposed both to prejudice and to change. At such times morals
are open to being altered by literature ; so that we find in practice
that what is 'objectionable' in literature is merely what the present
generation is not used to. It is a commonplace that what shocks
one generation is accepted quite calmly by the next. This adaptability to change of moral standards is sometimes greeted with 1 As an example of literary criticism given greater significance by
theological interests, I would call attention to Theodor I laecker : Virgil
(Sheed and Ward).
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satisfaction as a n evidence o f human perfectibility : whereas it is
only evidence of what unsubstantial foundations people's moral
judgments have.
I am not concerned here with religious literature but with the
application of our religion to the criticism of any literature. It may
be as well, however, to distinguish first what I consider to be the
three senses in which we can speak of 'religious literature'. The
first is that of which we say that it is 'religious literature' in the
same way that we speak of 'historical literature' or of 'scientific
literature'. I mean that we can treat the Authorized translation of
the Bible, or the works of Jeremy Taylor, as literature, in the
same way that we treat the historical writing of Clarendon or of
Gibbon - our two great English historians - as literature ; or
Bradley's Logic, or Buffon's Natural History. All of these writers
were men who, incidentally to their religious, or historical, or
philosophic purpose, had a gift of language which makes them
delightful to read to all those who can enjoy language well written
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 13