Thomas Love Peacock’s satiric essay “The Four Ages of Poetry” is far less well-known than the essay it inspired in response, Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry.” While the popular disparity is adequately explained by the second author’s far greater eminence, it is also true that Peacock’s ideas have little currency today while the exalted notions of the poet’s role set forth by Shelley remain widely accepted. The first appeal of the text to a contemporary reader is likely Peacock’s acerbic wit; he refers, for instance, to the Lake poets as an “egregious confraternity of rhymesters” and to Wordsworth in particular as “a morbid dreamer.” [1]
The essay like the conversations in Peacock’s entertaining romans à clef, can scarcely be taken at face value [2]. Indeed, one of the principles set forth in the essay is that poetry, which is to say, imaginative writing in general, is designed only to entertain and not to embody truth. Nonetheless, the radical objections Peacock makes are not peculiar to him or to his age, but rather are similar to points made by earlier critics. To cite only two examples, Plato condemned poetry in the Republic as an inadequate imitation of reality and as an exciter of unruly and uncontrollable passions that weakens rationality, and Bacon considered poetry to be merely “a dream of learning,” a sort of “feigned history” without a role in the advancement of knowledge. A response (reasoned, perhaps, as well as passionate) is therefore appropriate to the essay, though the critic of Peacock the critic will find himself seriously answering claims which to the writer may have been primarily facilitators of a most enviable wit.
Peacock maintains that poetry has value as entertainment only, lacking any capacity for expressing truth. Its prestige in the past was, he argues, due to the primitive state of more effective forms of investigation by the likes of “mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, historians, politicians, and political economists.” From a point of view shaped by eighteenth century rationalism, he likewise condemns the aesthetic emphasis on emotions and pleasure.
Unsympathetic as the contemporary reader may be to these conclusions, certain of Peacock’s points are compelling. The fact is that Peacock’s concluding claim that poetry’s downward slip is bound to continue, its weaknesses making Parnassus appear “far beneath” the eminence occupied by scientific, factual, and technological thinkers, might seem to have been substantially confirmed. No one could deny that poetry has been far further marginalized in the nearly two hundred years since the essay appeared in the Literary Miscellany. [3]
In addition, despite the limited information available in Peacock’s day about ancient (and modern oral) poetry, his survey of the history of poetry is in part consistent with more recent researches. The trajectory with which he predicts poetry’s diminished future arises from his accurate observation of its central role in earlier ages, though here his raillery begins to interfere with his facts. He notes that poets had been in archaic times “not only historians but theologians, moralists, and legislators” engaged in “delivering their oracles ex cathedra, and being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity.” His satiric vein intrudes to the detriment of his argument when he claims that the result of the poets’ “reputation of inspiration” is their “faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.” Though “the sole depositories of all the knowledge of their age,” their “knowledge is rather a crude congeries of traditional phantasies than a collection of useful truths.”
His selective view is apparent in his characterization of “iron age” poetry as wholly sycophantic, serving primarily “to disseminate the fame of [a chieftains’] achievements and the extent of his possessions.” He sounds very nearly like a vulgar Marxist before the time of Marx when he states categorically, “This is the origin of poetry, which, like all other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the commodity, and flourishes in proportion to the extent of the market.” According to Peacock this was a period of undisguised selfishness and raw power in which poets serve to gratify the egos of the strong, their business being “to disseminate the fame of [the local nobleman’s] achievements and the extent of his possessions.”
Here he mistakes the part for the whole more than promulgating outright error. Surely the professional role of the early poet -shaman-priest-legislator cannot be justifiably reduced to that of a pure mountebank, the epithet Peacock uses for poets. If the intellectual leadership of the species had been an utter humbug, the scientific progress Peacock admired could never have occurred. He writes in the same vein that primitive religion, apart from serving the vanity of rulers, was nothing but “ignorance and fear.” a more balanced view of the facts would recognize that oral poetry engages many themes other than praise of the ruling house, and that early religion embodies considerable subtle symbolic figuration of the order of the world having little to do with ruling class propaganda.
It is certainly true that one function of literature is to confirm received ideas, to reassure readers of what they have always thought was true. A portion of this reinforcement of socially accepted views is undoubtedly to confirm the nobility and excellence of the powers that be, and thus to encourage peace and social order. However, only a portion of art is conservative in this sense. Poetry may also cause its consumers to conceive new ideas, to question assumptions, and to perceive contradictions, ambiguities, and mysteries. Some works tend more toward the one end of this spectrum; some toward another, but in neglecting the critical potential of poetry, Peacock is guilty of distortion. (For him, this may be no error, but merely the set-up of a clever line. He notes that the bards of old times were always pleased to celebrate the strength of their lord, “being first duly inspired by that of his liquor.”)
In any event he considers poetry an inappropriate tool for investigating reality. Poets such as Wordsworth who “had retreated from the world for the express purpose of seeing nature as she was” instead can see only what “she was not,” “a sort of fairy- land which they peopled with mysticisms and chimaeras.” In his enlightened modern times, Peacock confidently declares, “with the progress of reason and civilization, facts become more interesting than fiction,” making poetry obsolete.
Apart from complaining that poetry cannot lead to truth, Peacock objects as well to its association with pleasure and emotion. To him the beauty of poetry’s melody is for the naïve and simple, “pleasant to the ears of uncultured men, who are easily caught by sound.” He dismisses the harmony of metrical patterns as nothing but “language on the rack of Procrustes.” The reader realizes that in Peacock’s semi-utilitarian view, all pleasure is necessarily trivial and child-like.
Similarly, to judge by this essay emotion for Peacock amounts to little more than “puling sentimentality.” He ridicules “sentiment, which is canting egotism in the mask of refined feeling; passion, which is the commotion of a weak and selfish mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; and sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head.” Far from praising the cultivated sensibility of the poet’s audience, he considers them vulgar, “that much larger portion of the reading public, whose minds are not awakened to the desire of valuable knowledge, and who are indifferent to any thing beyond being charmed, moved, excited, affected, and exalted.” They are nothing but “a multitude of listless idlers, yawning for amusement, and gaping for novelty.”
Overstated (and amusing) as this may be, it is misleading as well in this context. All organisms seek to pursue pleasure and avoid pain; the principle is fundamental to our species no less than to other animals. Further the world, even in modern times, is hardly as clear and simple as Peacock’s argument would imply. However clever our rationalizations may be, we are governed by emotion and by irrational motives, and we are beset by ambiguities, contradictions, and insoluble mysteries, especially when contemplating the chief concerns of our lives: love, death, and the divine. These are specifically the areas in which factual, “scientific” discourse fails, and poetic discourse excels. What Peacock repeatedly calls “chimaeras” is in fact the daily stuff of our consciousness.
Toward the end of his piece, almost like a punch line, Peacock says that, as so many excellent poems are already in existence, no more need be written. But this provocative claim is undercut by the fact that its author has seen fit to compose a highly literary essay using all the devices of rhetoric to present it. In very much the same manner as a lyric or a short story, Peacock is inviting his readers to imagine, “What if one were to say this . . .?” If the result is Bacon would call “feigned history” few would wish to substitute unimaginative prose, however transparent. The significant objects of contemplation are never emptied out by analysis; there is always a further word to be added. There is no end of poems and there is no end of essays.
1. The entire passage following is worthy of quotation.
“”While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age. Mr. Scott digs up the poachers and cattle-stealers of the ancient border. Lord Byron cruizes for thieves and pirates on the shores of the Morea and among the Greek Islands. Mr. Southey wades through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, strings them into an epic. Mr. Wordsworth picks up village legends from old women and sextons; and Mr. Coleridge, to the valuable information acquired from similar sources, superadds the dreams of crazy theologians and the mysticisms of German metaphysics, and favours the world with visions in verse, in which the quadruple elements of sexton, old woman, Jeremy Taylor, and Emanuel Kant, are harmonized into a delicious poetical compound. Mr. Moore presents us with a Persian, and Mr. Campbell with a Pennsylvanian tale, both formed on the same principle as Mr. Southey's epics, by extracting from a perfunctory and desultory perusal of a collection of voyages and travels, all that useful investigation would not seek for and that common sense would reject.”
2. Shelley wrote to Peacock on March 21, 1821, calling his own essay “an antidote” to Peacock’s, but minimizing their differences, saying “ You will see that I have taken a more general view of what poetry is than you have, and will perhaps agree with several of my positions, without considering your own touched.” It has been suggested, for instance by P. M. Yarker in the introduction to the Everyman edition of Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, that Peacock conceived the “Four Ages” intentionally playing straight man to Shelley’s vatic poet.
3. In this twenty-first century, it seems that any politician’s appeal for support for schools must insist that education is centered in what is today called the STEM curriculum. Not poetry alone, but the very ideal of a liberal education has withered.
Peacock maintains that poetry has value as entertainment only, lacking any capacity for expressing truth. Its prestige in the past was, he argues, due to the primitive state of more effective forms of investigation by the likes of “mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, historians, politicians, and political economists.” From a point of view shaped by eighteenth century rationalism, he likewise condemns the aesthetic emphasis on emotions and pleasure.
Unsympathetic as the contemporary reader may be to these conclusions, certain of Peacock’s points are compelling. The fact is that Peacock’s concluding claim that poetry’s downward slip is bound to continue, its weaknesses making Parnassus appear “far beneath” the eminence occupied by scientific, factual, and technological thinkers, might seem to have been substantially confirmed. No one could deny that poetry has been far further marginalized in the nearly two hundred years since the essay appeared in the Literary Miscellany. [3]
In addition, despite the limited information available in Peacock’s day about ancient (and modern oral) poetry, his survey of the history of poetry is in part consistent with more recent researches. The trajectory with which he predicts poetry’s diminished future arises from his accurate observation of its central role in earlier ages, though here his raillery begins to interfere with his facts. He notes that poets had been in archaic times “not only historians but theologians, moralists, and legislators” engaged in “delivering their oracles ex cathedra, and being indeed often themselves (as Orpheus and Amphion) regarded as portions and emanations of divinity.” His satiric vein intrudes to the detriment of his argument when he claims that the result of the poets’ “reputation of inspiration” is their “faculty of leading multitudes by the nose.” Though “the sole depositories of all the knowledge of their age,” their “knowledge is rather a crude congeries of traditional phantasies than a collection of useful truths.”
His selective view is apparent in his characterization of “iron age” poetry as wholly sycophantic, serving primarily “to disseminate the fame of [a chieftains’] achievements and the extent of his possessions.” He sounds very nearly like a vulgar Marxist before the time of Marx when he states categorically, “This is the origin of poetry, which, like all other trades, takes its rise in the demand for the commodity, and flourishes in proportion to the extent of the market.” According to Peacock this was a period of undisguised selfishness and raw power in which poets serve to gratify the egos of the strong, their business being “to disseminate the fame of [the local nobleman’s] achievements and the extent of his possessions.”
Here he mistakes the part for the whole more than promulgating outright error. Surely the professional role of the early poet -shaman-priest-legislator cannot be justifiably reduced to that of a pure mountebank, the epithet Peacock uses for poets. If the intellectual leadership of the species had been an utter humbug, the scientific progress Peacock admired could never have occurred. He writes in the same vein that primitive religion, apart from serving the vanity of rulers, was nothing but “ignorance and fear.” a more balanced view of the facts would recognize that oral poetry engages many themes other than praise of the ruling house, and that early religion embodies considerable subtle symbolic figuration of the order of the world having little to do with ruling class propaganda.
It is certainly true that one function of literature is to confirm received ideas, to reassure readers of what they have always thought was true. A portion of this reinforcement of socially accepted views is undoubtedly to confirm the nobility and excellence of the powers that be, and thus to encourage peace and social order. However, only a portion of art is conservative in this sense. Poetry may also cause its consumers to conceive new ideas, to question assumptions, and to perceive contradictions, ambiguities, and mysteries. Some works tend more toward the one end of this spectrum; some toward another, but in neglecting the critical potential of poetry, Peacock is guilty of distortion. (For him, this may be no error, but merely the set-up of a clever line. He notes that the bards of old times were always pleased to celebrate the strength of their lord, “being first duly inspired by that of his liquor.”)
In any event he considers poetry an inappropriate tool for investigating reality. Poets such as Wordsworth who “had retreated from the world for the express purpose of seeing nature as she was” instead can see only what “she was not,” “a sort of fairy- land which they peopled with mysticisms and chimaeras.” In his enlightened modern times, Peacock confidently declares, “with the progress of reason and civilization, facts become more interesting than fiction,” making poetry obsolete.
Apart from complaining that poetry cannot lead to truth, Peacock objects as well to its association with pleasure and emotion. To him the beauty of poetry’s melody is for the naïve and simple, “pleasant to the ears of uncultured men, who are easily caught by sound.” He dismisses the harmony of metrical patterns as nothing but “language on the rack of Procrustes.” The reader realizes that in Peacock’s semi-utilitarian view, all pleasure is necessarily trivial and child-like.
Similarly, to judge by this essay emotion for Peacock amounts to little more than “puling sentimentality.” He ridicules “sentiment, which is canting egotism in the mask of refined feeling; passion, which is the commotion of a weak and selfish mind; pathos, which is the whining of an unmanly spirit; and sublimity, which is the inflation of an empty head.” Far from praising the cultivated sensibility of the poet’s audience, he considers them vulgar, “that much larger portion of the reading public, whose minds are not awakened to the desire of valuable knowledge, and who are indifferent to any thing beyond being charmed, moved, excited, affected, and exalted.” They are nothing but “a multitude of listless idlers, yawning for amusement, and gaping for novelty.”
Overstated (and amusing) as this may be, it is misleading as well in this context. All organisms seek to pursue pleasure and avoid pain; the principle is fundamental to our species no less than to other animals. Further the world, even in modern times, is hardly as clear and simple as Peacock’s argument would imply. However clever our rationalizations may be, we are governed by emotion and by irrational motives, and we are beset by ambiguities, contradictions, and insoluble mysteries, especially when contemplating the chief concerns of our lives: love, death, and the divine. These are specifically the areas in which factual, “scientific” discourse fails, and poetic discourse excels. What Peacock repeatedly calls “chimaeras” is in fact the daily stuff of our consciousness.
Toward the end of his piece, almost like a punch line, Peacock says that, as so many excellent poems are already in existence, no more need be written. But this provocative claim is undercut by the fact that its author has seen fit to compose a highly literary essay using all the devices of rhetoric to present it. In very much the same manner as a lyric or a short story, Peacock is inviting his readers to imagine, “What if one were to say this . . .?” If the result is Bacon would call “feigned history” few would wish to substitute unimaginative prose, however transparent. The significant objects of contemplation are never emptied out by analysis; there is always a further word to be added. There is no end of poems and there is no end of essays.
1. The entire passage following is worthy of quotation.
“”While the historian and the philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown babies of the age. Mr. Scott digs up the poachers and cattle-stealers of the ancient border. Lord Byron cruizes for thieves and pirates on the shores of the Morea and among the Greek Islands. Mr. Southey wades through ponderous volumes of travels and old chronicles, from which he carefully selects all that is false, useless, and absurd, as being essentially poetical; and when he has a commonplace book full of monstrosities, strings them into an epic. Mr. Wordsworth picks up village legends from old women and sextons; and Mr. Coleridge, to the valuable information acquired from similar sources, superadds the dreams of crazy theologians and the mysticisms of German metaphysics, and favours the world with visions in verse, in which the quadruple elements of sexton, old woman, Jeremy Taylor, and Emanuel Kant, are harmonized into a delicious poetical compound. Mr. Moore presents us with a Persian, and Mr. Campbell with a Pennsylvanian tale, both formed on the same principle as Mr. Southey's epics, by extracting from a perfunctory and desultory perusal of a collection of voyages and travels, all that useful investigation would not seek for and that common sense would reject.”
2. Shelley wrote to Peacock on March 21, 1821, calling his own essay “an antidote” to Peacock’s, but minimizing their differences, saying “ You will see that I have taken a more general view of what poetry is than you have, and will perhaps agree with several of my positions, without considering your own touched.” It has been suggested, for instance by P. M. Yarker in the introduction to the Everyman edition of Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey, that Peacock conceived the “Four Ages” intentionally playing straight man to Shelley’s vatic poet.
3. In this twenty-first century, it seems that any politician’s appeal for support for schools must insist that education is centered in what is today called the STEM curriculum. Not poetry alone, but the very ideal of a liberal education has withered.
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