Poets themselves might not be the
best ones at Critical Theory. How could they be, in Kant's terms,
'disinterested' enough to apprehend the beautiful and sublime in their own
works? Didacticism , the rigors of philosophy, can hardly be their strongest fort,
though whatever sound thoughts can be gleaned from the Prefaces and After-Words
to their published poems or the occasional lecture might be of historical
interest and reflective of certain general trends analogized
together as representing a school of poetic endeavor, namely, in the case of
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, Romanticism.
Wordsworth's (1770-1850) poems, by his
own light, 'follow the spontaneous outflow of powerful organic feelings natural
to men, modified by thought; that thought being itself representations of past
feeling. 'Organic" in the sense of arising out of sensual rather than
conceptual experience . Wordsworth exemplifies these feelings as paternal,
maternal, fraternal, the feelings
perplexity, fear and others of a more obscure character that he -
"will not abuse the indulgence of my reader by dwelling on the subject; it is proper that I should mention one other circumstance which distinguished these poems from the popular poetry of the day; it is this, that the feelings therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling." Organic in the sense of arising in the soul of the poet.
It is a 'natural' feeling which-
"for a multitude of causes,
unknown in former times, now acting with a combined force to blunt the
discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion
are reduced to a state of almost savage torpor. The more effective of these
causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the
increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their
occupations produces cravings for extraordinary incident, which the rapid
communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners
the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country conform themselves.
The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of
Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and
stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.
I am almost ashamed to have spoken of the feeble effort which I have endeavored
to counteract it, reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil. I should
be oppressed with no dishonorable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of
certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind which will in the future,
systematically oppose these evils by men of greater powers than I, and with far
more success."
But in all modesty, Wordsworth admits
that for the poet the outflow of natural feeling depends more on his capacity
for removing what would otherwise be painful in passion than putting up
directly those emanations of reality and truth which his fancy or imagination
can only suggest, but words cannot express.
Coleridge (1772-1834) seconds
Wordsworth's thought about organic feeling, or maybe it was his to begin with:
" The organic form is innate;
it shapes and develops itself from within: nature humanized as a genial
understanding, self-consciously directing a power and an implicit wisdom deeper
than consciousness." Coleridge, however, allows a co-existing or secondary
imagination responsive to the
conscious will which reshapes the perceptual world into an idealized and
unified picture , creating a less real but more fantastical kind of art. Thus
he accounted for the difference between Wordworths art and his own.
Keats( 1795-1821) says of Coleridge
that he 'would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the inner
sanctum of mystery from being
incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. Shakespeare, in his view,
was a poet of great achievement because he possessed a "Negative
Capacity" that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
Keats did not write much theory. We
just have a few brilliant flashes from his correspondence. He describes his
'mode of operation' as Imagination, which he compares to Adam's dream in Paradise
Lost- he awoke and found it to be true. Truth is 'authentic reality' rather
than 'verifiable fact'.
Following Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792-1822) in "A Defense of Poetry" one might illuminate the foregoing distinction by saying reason
acts within the realm of verifiable fact whereas imagination makes authentic
reality. Reason enumerates and brings relationship to what's given to our
apprehension whereas imagination synthesizes what's given to the point where it
can be felt as the real. Reason organizes and translates, imagination creates.
This is the sense in which Shelley's famous statement that "Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the World" is perhaps best understood.
Much of what Shelley writes along
critical lines have the aspect of ancient hieroglyphics, before the discovery
of any Rosetta stone. Some clues can be gained by examining the essay by Thomas
Love Peacock ( 'The Four Ages of Poetry') to which "A Defense of
Poetry" is said to be a response. Raymond Williams analysis of Shelley's
essay ( from "Culture and Society 1780-1950") provides at least some
partial interpretative assistance with the suggestion that Shelley's work falls
into the category of a general growth in the idea of the artist as a special
kind of person.
I found the remark editor of The Critical Tradition particularly useful: "For Shelley, the world is veiled from human participation by dead thought and language, and it is the poets alone who are to penetrate and 'lift the veil from the hidden beauty of the world'. A thought familiar to anyone acquainted with Sufi mysticism and it would not be surprising if some evidence were discovered that Shelley was in some direct way influenced by it. Alternatively, Shelley may have been working with the notion found in 1 Corinthians 13:12 :"For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know part; but then shall I know even as also I shall be known." Or just the general idea that the majesty of creation and the human capacity to apprehend its unity fail to line up, even the message Holy Scripture being but a partial inscription of divine will and wisdom calibrated to the limited understanding of humans of which, in the Romantic tradition, the poet is a kind of mediator, by means of love and grace.
There might be a kind of
proto-Semiotics in Shelley's 'Defense" as well but I do not have the
inclination or time to pursue that angle at this time.
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