Oxford Lectures on Poetry

The freedom of modern art, and the universality of its field, are great things, and the value of the second is easily seen in the extraordinary variety of subject-matter in the longer poems of the nineteenth century. But in candid minds most recitals of our modern advantages are followed by a melancholy sense of our feebleness in using them. And so in some degree it is here. The unrivalled opportunities fail to produce unrivalled works. And we can see that the deepest cause of this is not a want of native genius or of acquired skill or even of conscientious labour, but the fact that the opportunities themselves bring danger and difficulty. The poet who knows everything and may write about anything has, after all, a hard task. Things must have been easier, it seems to us, for an artist whose choice, if his aim was high, was restricted to a cycle of ideas and stories, mythological, legendary, or historical, or all together, concerning beings divine, daemonic, angelic, or heroic. His matter, as it existed in the general imagination, was already highly poetical. If not created by imagination, it was shaped or coloured by it; a world not of bodiless thoughts and emotions, but of scenes, figures, actions, and events. For the most part he lived in unity with it; it appealed to his own religious and moral feelings and beliefs, sometimes to his patriotic feelings; and he wrote, painted, or carved, for people who shared with him both his material and his attitude towards it. It belonged usually to the past, but he did not view it over a great gulf of time with the eye of a scientific historian. If he wished to robe it in the vesture of the life around him, he was checked by no scruples as to truth; and the life around him can seldom, we think, have appeared to him repulsively prosaic. Broad statements like these require much qualification; but, when it is supplied, they may still describe periods in which perhaps most of the greatest architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry has come into being.

How different the position of the artist has now become we see at a glance, and I confine myself to some points which specially concern the difficulty of the long poem. If a poem is to be anything like great it must, in one sense, be concerned with the present. Whatever its ‘subject’ may be, it must express something living in the mind from which it comes and the minds to which it goes. Wherever its body is, its soul must be here and now. What subject, then, in the measureless field of choice, is the poet to select and fashion into a body? The outward life around him, as he and his critics so often lament, appears uniform, ugly, and rationally regulated, a world of trousers, machinery and policemen. Law – the rule, however imperfect, of the general reasonable will – is a vast achievement and priceless possession; but it is not favourable to striking events or individual actions on the grand scale. Beneath the surface, and breaking through it, there is doubtless an infinity of poetic matter; but this is inward, or it fails to appear in impressive forms; and therefore it may suit the lyric or idyll, the monologue or short story, the prose drama or novel, but hardly the long poem or high tragedy. Even war, for reasons not hard to find, is no longer the subject that it was.

But when the poet turns to a subject distant in place or time or both, new troubles await him. If he aims at complete truth to time and place the soul of the present will hardly come into his work. Yet he lives in an age of history and science, and these hamper as well as help him. The difficulty is not that he is bound to historical or scientific truth, for in principle, I venture to say, he is free. If he can satisfy imagination by violating them he is justified. It is no function of his to attain or propagate them; and a critic who objected, say, to the First Part of Faust on the ground that it puts a modern spirit into the legend, would rightly be laughed at. It is its triumph to do so and yet to succeed. But then success is exceedingly difficult. For the poet lives in a time when the violation of truth is prima facie felt to be a fault, something that does require justification by the result. Further, he has himself to start from a clear consciousness of difference between the present and the past, the spirit and the story, and has to produce on this basis a harmony of spirit and story. And again, living in an age of analytical thought, he is likely – all the more likely, if he has much greatness of mind – to be keenly interested in ideas; and so he is exposed to the temptation of using as the spirit of the old story some highly reflective idea – an idea not only historically alien to his material, but perhaps not very poetical, or again not very deep, because it belongs to him rather as philosopher than poet, while his genius is that of a poet.

The influence of some of these difficulties might readily be shown in the Second Part of Faust or in Prometheus Unbound, especially where we perceive in a figure or action some symbolical meaning, but find this meaning deficient in interest or poetic truth, or are vexed by the doubt how far it ought to be pursued.70 But the matter is more easily illustrated by the partial failure of the Idylls of the King. We have no right to condemn beforehand an attempt to modernise the Arthurian legends. Tennyson’s treatment of them, even his outrage on the story of Tristram, might conceivably have been justified by the result. And, indeed, in the Holy Grail and the Passing of Arthur his treatment, to my mind, was more than justified. But, in spite of countless beauties, the total result of the Idylls was disappointing, not merely from the defects of this or that poem, but because the old unity of spirit and story was broken up, and the new was neither equal to the old nor complete in itself. For the main semi-allegorical idea, having already the disadvantage of not being poetic in its origin, was, as a reflective idea, by no means profound, and it led to such inconsistency in the very centre of the story as the imagination refuses to accept. Tennyson’s Lancelot might have wronged the Arthur who is merely a blameless king and represents Conscience; but Tennyson’s Lancelot would much rather have killed himself than be systematically treacherous to the friend and lover-husband who appears in Guinevere.71

These difficulties belong in some measure to the whole modern time – the whole time that begins with the Renaissance; but they become so much clearer and so much more serious with the advance of knowledge and criticism, that in speaking of them I have been referring specially to the last century. There are other difficulties not so closely connected with that advance, and I will venture some very tentative remarks on one of these, which also has increased with time. It has to do with the kind of life commonly lived by our poets. Is there not some significance in the fact that the most famous of our narrative poets were all three, in their various ways and degrees, public men, or in contact with great affairs; and that poets in earlier times no less must usually have seen something at first hand of adventure, political struggles, or war; whereas poets now, for the most part, live wholly private lives, and, like the majority of their readers, are acquainted only by report with anything of the kind? If Chaucer had never been at Court, or seen service in the French war, or gone on embassies abroad; if Spenser had not known Sidney and Raleigh and been secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland; if Milton had spent his whole life at Horton; would it have made no difference to their poetry? Again, if we turn to the drama and ask why the numerous tragedies of the nineteenth century poets so rarely satisfy, what is the answer? There are many reasons, and among them the poet’s ignorance of the stage will doubtless count for much; but must we not also consider that he scarcely ever saw anything resembling the things he tried to portray? When we study the history of the time in which the Elizabethan dramas were composed, when we examine the portraits of the famous men, or read such a book as the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, we realise that the violent actions and passions which the dramatist depicted were like the things he saw. Whatever Shakespeare’s own disposition was, he lived among these men, jested with the fellow-actor who had borne arms abroad and killed his man in a duel at home, conversed with nobles whose heads perhaps were no great way from the block. But the poet who strolls about the lanes or plods the London streets with an umbrella for a sword, and who has probably never seen a violent deed in his life, or for a moment really longed to kill so much as a critic, how is he to paint the vengeance of Hamlet or the frenzy of Macbeth, and not merely to thrill you with the emotions of his actors but to make them do things that take your imagination by the throat?

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Assuming, now, that (even if this last idea is doubtful or unimportant) there is some truth in the suggestion that the difficulties of the long poem arise largely from the conditions described, and especially from the nature of the intellectual atmosphere which the modern poet breathes, let us return to Wordsworth’s age in particular. In that age these difficulties were aggravated in a quite exceptional way by special causes, causes responsible also in part for the unusual originality and intensity of the poetry. In it we find conditions removed to the extremest distance from those of the poet who wrote, in the midst of a generally accepted social order, for an audience with which he shared traditional ideas and beliefs and a more or less traditional imaginative material. It was, in a word, a revolutionary age, in the electric atmosphere of which the most potent intellectual influences were those of Rousseau and (for the English poets) of Godwin. Milton’s time was not in the same sense revolutionary, much less Shakespeare’s. The forces of the great movement of mind in Shakespeare’s day we may formulate as ‘ideas,’ but they were not the abstractly conceived ideas of Wordsworth’s day. Such theoretical ideas were potent in Milton’s time, but they were not ideas that made a total breach with the past, rejecting as worthless, or worse, the institutions, beliefs, and modes of life in which human nature had endeavoured to realise itself, and drawing airy pictures of a different human nature on a new earth. Nor was the poetic mind of those ages enraptured or dejected by the haunting many-featured contrast of real and ideal. But the poetic mind in Wordsworth’s age breathed this atmosphere of revolution, though it was not always sensitive to the influence. Nor is it a question of the acceptance or rejection of the ‘ideas of the Revolution.’ That influence is clearly traceable in all the greater writers except Scott and Jane Austen. It is equally obvious in Wordsworth, who hungered for realities, recovered from his theoretic malady, sought for good in life’s familiar face, yet remained a preacher; in Byron, who was too shrewd, sceptical, and selfish to contract that particular malady, but who suffered from the sickness from which Goethe freed himself by writing Werther,72 and who punctuates his story in Don Juan with bursts of laughter and tears; and in Shelley, whose ‘rapid spirit’ was quickened, and then clogged, by the abstractions of revolutionary theory.

But doubtless Shelley is, in a sense, the typical example of this influence and of its effects. From the world of his imagination the shapes of the old world had disappeared, and their place was taken by a stream of radiant vapours, incessantly forming, shifting, and dissolving in the ‘clear golden dawn,’ and hymning with the voices of seraphs, to the music of the stars and the ‘singing rain,’ the sublime ridiculous formulas of Godwin. In his heart were emotions that responded to the vision, – an aspiration or ecstasy, a dejection or despair, like those of spirits rapt into Paradise or mourning over its ruin. And he wrote, not, like Shakespeare or Pope, for Londoners sitting in a theatre or a coffee-house, intelligences vivid enough but definitely embodied in a definite society; he wrote, or rather he sang, to his own soul, to other spirit-sparks of the fire of Liberty scattered over the dark earth, to spirits in the air, to the boundless spirit of Nature or Freedom or Love, his one place of rest and the one source of his vision, ecstasy, and sorrow. He sang to this, and he sang of it, and of the emotions it inspired, and of its world-wide contest with such shapes of darkness as Faith and Custom. And he made immortal music; now in melodies as exquisite and varied as the songs of Schubert, and now in symphonies where the crudest of Philosophies of History melted into golden harmony. But the songs were more perfect than the symphonies; and they could hardly fail to be so. For a single thought and mood, expressive of one aspect of things, suffices, with its melody, for a lyric, but not for a long poem. That requires a substance which implicitly contains a whole ‘criticism’ or interpretation of life. And although there was something always working in Shelley’s mind, and issuing in those radiant vapours, that was far deeper and truer than his philosophic creed, its expression and even its development were constantly checked or distorted by the hard and narrow framework of that creed. And it was one which in effect condemned nine-tenths of the human nature that has formed the material of the world’s great poems.73

The second and third quarters of the century were not in the same degree as the first a revolutionary time, and we feel this change in the poetry. The fever-heat is gone, the rapture and the dejection moderate, the culture is wider, the thought more staid and considerate, the fascination of abstractions less potent, and the formative or plastic impulse, if not stronger, less impeded. Late in the period, with Morris, the born teller of tales re-appears. If, as we saw, the lyrical spirit continues to prevail, no one would deny to Browning the full and robust sympathy of the dramatist with all the variety of character and passion. Yet these changes and others are far from obliterating those features of the earlier generation on which we have dwelt. To describe the atmosphere of ‘criticism’ as that of a common faith or view of the world would be laughable. If not revolutionary, it was agitated, restless, and distressed by the conflict of theoretic ideas. To Arnold’s mind it was indeed a most unhappy time for poetry, though the poetic impulse remained as yet, and even later, powerful. The past was dead, but he could share neither the soaring hope nor the passionate melancholy of the opening century. He was

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,The other powerless to be born,With nowhere yet to rest his head.

And the two greatest poets, as well as he, still offer not only, as poets always must, an interpretation, but a definite theory of life, and, more insistently than ever before, of death. Confidence in the detail, at least, of such theories has diminished, and with the rapid advance of the critical sciences the poets may prophesy less than their predecessors; but they probe, and weigh, and deliberate more. And the strength of the ‘inward’ tendency, obvious in Tennyson and Arnold, may be clearly seen even in Browning, and not alone in such works as Christmas Eve and Easter Day or La Saisiaz.

Objective and dramatic as Browning is called and by comparison is, he is surely most at home, and succeeds most completely, in lyrics, and in monologues divested of action and merely suggestive of a story or suggested by one. He too must begin, in Pauline, with the picture of a youthful poet’s soul. Dramatic the drama of Paracelsus neither is nor tries to be: it consists of scenes in the history of souls. Of the narrative Sordello its author wrote: ‘The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study.’ Even if that is so, great narrative poems are not written thus. And what Browning says here applies more or less fully to most of his works. In the end, if we set aside the short lyrics, his best poems are all ‘studies’ of souls. ‘Well,’ it may be answered, ‘so are Shakespeare’s tragedies and tragi-comedies.’ But the difference is great. Shakespeare, doubtless, is little concerned with the accuracy of the historical background, – much less concerned than Browning. But his subject is not a soul, nor even souls: it is the actions of souls, or souls coming into action. It is more. It is that clash of souls which exhibits not them alone, but a whole of spiritual forces, appearing in them, but spreading beyond them into the visible society to which they essentially belong, and into invisible regions which enclose it. The thing shown, therefore, is huge, multiform, ponderous, yet quivering with an inward agitation which explodes into violent bodily expression and speaks to the eye of imagination. What specially interests Browning is not this. It is the soul moving in itself, often in its most secret windings and recesses; before action or after it, where there is action at all; and this soul not essentially as in its society (that is ‘background’ or ‘decoration’), but alone, or in relation to another soul, or to God. He exhibits it best, therefore, in monologue, musing, explaining, debating, pleading, overflowing into the expression of feeling or passion, but not acting. The ‘men and women’ that haunt the reader’s imagination are not so much men of action as lovers, artists, men of religion. And when they act (as for example in The Ring and the Book, or the dramas) what rivets attention, and is first recalled to memory by their names, is not the action, but its reflection in the soul of the doer or spectator. Such, at least, is my experience; and in the end a critic can only offer to others his considered experience. But with Homer and Shakespeare and Milton it is otherwise. Even with Dante it is otherwise. I see not souls alone, but souls in visible attitudes, in outward movement, often in action. I see Paolo and Francesca drifting on the wind: I see them sitting and reading: I see them kiss: I see Dante’s pity:

E caddi come corpo morto cade.4

I spoke of Tennyson and Browning in order to point out that, although in their day the intellectual atmosphere was no longer ‘revolutionary,’ it remained an atmosphere of highly reflective ideas representing no common ‘faith’ or way of envisaging the world, and that the inward tendency still asserts itself in their poetry. We cannot pursue the history further, but it does not appear that in the last forty years culture has advanced much, or at all, towards such a faith or way, or shows the working of new semi-conscious creative ideas beneath the surface of warring theories and opinions. Only the younger among us can hope to see what Arnold descried in the distance,

One mighty wave of thought and joyLifting mankind again.

And even when, for them or their descendants, that hope is realised, and with it the hope of a new great poetry, the atmosphere must assuredly still be one of ‘criticism,’ and Arnold’s insistence on the necessity of the best criticism will still be as urgently required. It must indeed be more and more needed as the power of half-educated journalism grows. How poetry then will overcome the obstacles which, therefore, must in some measure still beset it, is a question for it, a question answerable not by the reflections of critics, but by the creative deeds of poets themselves. Accordingly, while one may safely prophesy that their long poems will differ from those of any past age, I have no idea of predicting the nature of this difference, and will refer in conclusion only to certain views which seem to me delusive.

It must surely be vain for the poet to seek an escape from modern difficulties by any attempt to withdraw himself from the atmosphere of free and scientific culture, to maintain by force simplicity of view and concreteness of imagination, to live in a past century or a sanctuary of esoteric art, whether secular or religious. Whatever of value such an attempt may yield – and that it may yield much I do not deny – it will never yield poems at once long and great.

Such poems, we may allow ourselves to hope, will sometimes deal with much of the common and painful and ugly stuff of life, and be in that sense more ‘democratic’ or universal than any poetry of the past. But it is vain to imagine that this can be done by a refusal to ‘interpret’ and an endeavour to photograph. Even in the most thorough-going prose ‘realism’ there is selection; and, to go no further, selection itself is interpretation. And, as for poetry, the mirror which the least theoretical of great poets holds up to nature is his soul. And that, whether he likes it or not, is an activity which divides, and sifts, and recombines into a unity of its own, and by a method of its own, the crude material which experience thrusts upon it. This must be so; the only question is of the choice of matter and the method of treatment. Nor can the end to be achieved be anything but beauty, though the meaning of that word may be extended and deepened. And beauty in its essence is something that gives satisfaction, however much of pain, repulsion, or horror that satisfaction may contain and overcome.

‘But, even so,’ it may be said, ‘why should the poet trouble himself about figures, events, and actions? That inward tendency in which you see danger and difficulty is, on the contrary, simply and solely what on one side you admit it to be, the sign of our advance. What we really need is to make our long poems entirely interior. We only want to know how Dante felt; we do not wish to see his pity felling him to the ground; and much less do we wish to hear Othello say “and smote him thus,” or even to imagine the blow. We are not children or savages.’ We do not want, I agree, attempts to repeat the Elizabethan drama. But those who speak thus forget, perhaps, in how many kinds of poem this inward tendency can display its power without any injury or drawback. They fail to ask themselves, perhaps, whether a long poem so entirely ‘interior’ can possibly have the clearness, variety, and solidity of effect that the best long poems have possessed; whether it can produce the same impression of a massive, building, organising, ‘architectonic’ power of imagination; and whether all this and much else is of little value. They can hardly have realised, one must suspect, how much of life they wish to leave unrepresented. They fail to consider, too, that perhaps the business of art is not to ignore, but at once to satisfy and to purify, the primitive instincts from which it arises; and that, in the case of poetic art, the love of a story, and of exceptional figures, scenes, events, and actions, is one of those instincts, and one that in the immense majority of men shows no sign of decay. And finally, if they suppose that the desire to see or imagine action, in particular, is a symptom of mere sensationalism or a relic of semi-barbarism, I am sure they are woefully mistaken. There is more virtue than their philosophy dreams of in deeds, in ‘the motion of a muscle this way or that.’ Doubtless it is the soul that matters; but the soul that remains interior is not the whole soul. If I suppose that mere self-scrutiny can show me that, I deceive myself; and my deeds, good and evil, will undeceive me.

A last delusion remains. ‘There is,’ we may be told, ‘a simple, final, and comfortable answer to all these doubts and fears. The long poem is not merely difficult, it is impossible. It is dead, and should be publicly buried, and there is not the least occasion to mourn it. It has become impossible not because we cannot write it, but because we see that we ought not. And, in truth, it never was written. The thing called a long poem was really, as any long poem must be, a number of short ones, linked together by passages of prose. And these passages could be nothing except prose; for poetry is the language of a state of crisis, and a crisis is brief. The long poem is an offence to art.’ I believe I have stated this theory fairly. It was, unless I mistake, the invention of Poe, and it is about as true as I conceive his story of the composition of The Raven to be. It became a gospel with some representatives of the Symbolist movement in France; and in fact it would condemn not only the long poem, but the middle-sized one, and indeed all sizes but the smallest. To reject this theory is to imply no want of gratitude for the lyrics of some of its adherents; but the theory itself seems strangely thoughtless. Naturally, in any poem not quite short, there must be many variations and grades of poetic intensity; but to represent the differences of these numerous grades as a simple antithesis between pure poetry and mere prose is like saying that, because the eyes are the most expressive part of the face, the rest of the face expresses nothing. To hold, again, that this variation of intensity is a defect is like holding that a face would be more beautiful if it were all eyes, a picture better if the illumination were equally intense all over it, a symphony better if it consisted of one movement, and if that were all crisis. And to speak as if a small poem could do all that a long one does, and do it much more completely, is to speak as though a humming-bird could have the same kind of beauty as an eagle, the rainbow in a fountain produce the same effect as the rainbow in the sky, or a moorland stream thunder like Niagara. A long poem, as we have seen, requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one; and it would be easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the highest value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes. That the long poem is doomed is a possible, however groundless, belief; but it is futile to deny that, if it dies, something of inestimable worth will perish.74