Hazlitt on the Nature of Poetry

Quotations without references are from the first chapter of Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets, “Introductory: On Poetry in General.”


     Hazlitt is for me one of the most reliable of practical critics. His comments are virtually always revealing, strongly felt, and very often sufficiently in accord with my own taste to seem incisive. He is far from assertive about theory, suggesting that his reactions are impressionistic, that he seeks merely “to feel what is good.” He explicitly discounts theoretical aesthetics which would have been of limited use in any event to his productive career as a periodical journalist, reviewer, and popular lecturer, though in his day the general public was at least literate enough to attend a series of talks on poetry. “You decide from feeling and not from reason; that is, from the impression of a number of things in the mind . . . though you may not able to analyze or account for it in the several particulars.” [1]
     Impressionistic criticism, apart from some forms of reader response theory, is little valued today, but it was positively encouraged by Romantic ideology valuing the individual and the irrational. It also received a certain authority by association with Longinus’ “On the Sublime” in contrast to the prescriptive principles of Aristotle, especially in Boileau’s version which appealed to neo-classicists. [2] Hazlitt was in fact labeled “the Longinus of the Cockneys” by a scornful critic [3], though the writer wished probably more to ridicule his lack of academic education than to point out actual similarities with Longinus. The very concept of the sublime is itself subjective, dependent on a sort of readerly enthusiasm altogether resistant to system.
     Impressionistic criticism is natural as well to an author who defined the familiar style. “To write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as anyone would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.” [3] Though he defended the use of rhetorical flourished in poetry, attacking “frigid and pedantic critics, for reducing the language of poetry to the standard of common sense and reason,” his ideal in writing prose for the general reader was an appearance of colloquial spontaneity.
     Still, Hazlitt’s statement that one’s general assumptions “may” not be evident provides a prudent conditional, admitting the possibility that the critic’s impressions may willy-nilly fall into patterns that suggest a theoretical foundation, as indeed I believe they do for all thoughtful readers. Hazlitt in fact had a taste for philosophy. He was familiar with the principal thinkers of his day and was early influenced by Coleridge who did not shrink from philosophizing.
     The first of his Lectures on the English Poets concerns “Poetry in General,” and there Hazlitt states some general principles that he considers to have guided his judgments. Hazlitt’s resistance to any intellectual or analytical approach to poetry is evident in his opening sentence which defines a poem as “the natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.” He emphasizes with the words “natural” and “involuntary” the nearly autonomic operation of art in its record and communication of states of consciousness and locates the aesthetic event in the consumer’s mind, or, as his era would have said, in the imagination.
     The mind, as psychologists have demonstrated through the last hundred and more years, is far from ruled by reason. Hazlitt was well aware that every subjectivity is unique: “the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear [or other strong emotion]. 'Our eyes are made the fools' of our other faculties. This is the universal law of imagination.” Passion is part of human vision.
     Hazlitt quite accurately notes that poetry gives recognition to the fundamental role of emotion when he says, “poetry then is an imitation of nature, but the imagination and the passions are a part of man's nature.” For him “poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling.” This is no distortion or displacement of truth, but rather its approximation since “If poetry is a dream, the business of life is much the same.” It is the non-dreamlike characterization that would be false, and the poet is the truest reporter of consciousness. “All live in a world of their own making; and the poet does no more than describe what all the others think and act.”
     Demonstrating his own “high-wrought enthusiasm,” Hazlitt pushes this notion, though, much too far. One can accept his assertion that “The child is a poet in fact, when he first plays at hide-and-seek, or repeats the story of Jack the Giant-killer; the shepherd-boy is a poet, when he first crowns his mistress with a garland of flowers.” These are, after all, little dramas involving the illumination and animation of reality with play. But Hazlitt includes as well under his capacious rubric of poetry “the miser, when he hugs his gold” and “the tyrant, who fancies himself a god.” Poetry would then be found whenever one finds meaning or emotion in the details of the environment. The two actors -- poet and reader -- are no longer necessary in this view. Apparently, anyone who experiences emotion is a solitary and perhaps a mute poet through the very fact of subjectivity.
     For Hazlitt the desire for pleasure and the sensations of strong emotion are the wellsprings of poetry. “Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions.” “It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have.” “It relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind.” Yet these characterizations discount the appeal of ingenuity, subtlety, and the appearance of truth, all of which are as likely to distinguish a poem as melodic beauty or the expression of powerful feelings. Pleasure and pain and rationality and emotion are not the only dualities people seek to bridge with art.
     Hazlitt’s essential definition of the poem emphasizes the Romantic values of naturalness, subjectivism, fancy, and passion, and the words “natural” and “involuntary” suggest an almost automatic writing. It is as though the poem emerges spontaneously like a sudden geyser, art generated by sympathetic magic rather than craft. The feeling that had simply appeared in the author is then elicited automatically from the reader by the little machine of words. “The natural impression of any object or event, by its vividness exciting an involuntary movement of imagination and passion, and producing, by sympathy, a certain modulation of the voice, or sounds, expressing it.”
     Hazlitt is elsewhere more succinct: “It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have.” Similarly, “Poetry in its matter and form is natural imagery or feeling, combined with passion and fancy.” The only concession to the role of craft is the word “perfect.” Though he does admit that “There is a near connexion between music and deep-rooted passion,” the association of form and content sounds accidental. The sounds simply accompany the ideas. “As there are certain sounds that excite certain movements, and the song and dance go together, so there are, no doubt, certain thoughts that lead to certain tones of voice, or modulations of sound, and change 'the words of Mercury into the songs of Apollo'.”
     Literature and art in general do foreground emotion, pleasure, and the irrational in a way that more closely reflects the actual operations of human consciousness than do such discourses as science and mathematics, yet few would agree that every subjective experience of any power is poetry. Hazlitt’s view of the sublime, which he shared with many of his age, encourages such a broad definition of poetry.
     Though for Longinus the sublime is associated only with eloquent and powerful language, likely to express grand and lofty thoughts, in the eighteenth-century Edmund Burke declared terror the “ruling principle of the sublime." He noted the unique power of fear to induce “astonishment,” “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other." For Wordsworth existential contemplation induces an “aspect more sublime; that blessed mood” [5] in which one apprehends the mysterium tremendum of the cosmos and yet feels intimately connected.
     For Hazlitt the reward need not be so profound. For him passion of any sort is a dynamo that “shows us the rich depths of the human soul: the whole of our existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits.” It would be difficult to distinguish Aeschylus from Elmore Leonard in Hazlitt’s formulation: “The pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry . . .has its source and groundwork in the common love of strong excitement.” By imagining “that which we desire and that which we dread” we are made to “drink deeper of the cup of human life.”

Further, as poetry, unlike the data of everyday experience, is ordered, it facilitates a wish fulfilment through symbolic manipulation. Poetry “raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things as reason and history do.” Poetry is able “to take the language of the imagination from off the ground, and enable it to spread its wings where it may indulge its own impulses ‘Sailing with supreme dominion/Through the azure deep of air –‘”
     Consistent with the skepticism implied by an impressionism that feels more powerfully than it knows, Hazlitt questions the representational potential of words in terms that resemble those of semioticians and post-structuralists. According to Hazlitt “Poetry represents forms chiefly as they suggest other forms; feelings, as they suggest forms or other feelings.” What Hazlitt maintains for the aesthetic text, for poetry, Saussure had claimed for all signification, that signs are relational and can refer only to other signs.
     Like Saussure, [6] Hazlitt also stresses the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. For him “the ordinary construction of language” is a thing “altogether arbitrary and conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or correspondence to the individual ideas, or to the tone of feeling with which they are conveyed to others.”
     Though he carried forward the latest intellectual trends of his day, Hazlitt’s conclusion is elegiac and backward-looking, almost as if he foresaw the decline of poetry as a popular art. To him science will inevitably assimilate the role of art as knowledge increases. “The progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency, to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry. The province of the imagination is principally visionary the unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things to their natural boundaries and strips them of their fanciful pretensions.” At the end of the essay, Hazlitt illustrates his concepts by examining four of the “principal works” of poetry. Most contemporary readers will accept his judgement that Homer, the Bible, and Dante belong in that category, but his fourth choice is Ossian. His attention to the nostalgia for a one-time poetic vigor imagined among the primitive is familiar also in Blake, Keats, and, indeed, in the general vogue for Macpherson’s Ossian long after his historicity had been questioned.
     While Hazlitt’s views have affinities with such twentieth century trends as deconstruction and reader response theory, his rhetoric is firmly founded in the values of Romanticism. These have led him to speak as though all experiences of emotion, all sensations of pleasure and pain are within the ambit of art, though these broad gestures weaken neither his other theoretical statements nor his practical criticism. Both the strengths and weaknesses of his essay are apparent in the following single sentence which might serve as an epitome of his approach. “Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part of our nature, as well as of the sensitive -- of the desire to know, the will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these different, parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect.” To Hazlitt poetry was the highest expression of the complete human consciousness, an exalted vision, but one worth recalling in this belated age.



1. See “On Genius and Common Sense.” Later in the nineteenth century Pater provided further support for a similar approach. In the Introduction to The Renaissance, he says “The first step toward seeing one’s subject as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.”

2. Though Longinus had been translated into English earlier, William Smith's version, published in 1739 proved particularly widely read and influential. Boileau had published a French translation in 1674.

3. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review vol. 16 “Cockney Contributions for the First of April” July 1824.

4. Burke, On the Sublime (1757), ed. J. T. Bolton. 58. To Burke the beautiful and the sublime are complementary. His emphasis on terror provided the theoretical base for the Gothic novel.

5. "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," 37-8.

6. See Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics.