What Poetry Is Not

 

Poetry is not instructive.

     Poetry does not teach people wisdom; it offers no pointers toward enlightenment, no aid to being more moral or guidance on how to vote.  Artists have no privileged access to truth.  The apparent insights the reader may gain from a story or poem are generated by recognition of another take on reality, another vision, not necessarily sager but different from one’s own and thus broadening.  A poet need not be wise; his professional skill is limited to the manipulation of words and symbols made of words.  The historic claim that art teaches truths arose from its central role since archaic times in conveying received ideas like those implied by myth, ritual, and religion, and affirming people’s beliefs about politics and behavior in general.  In its inverted modern version, art’s critical role comes to the fore, exposing contradictions and opening the way for change.  Art’s reputation for teaching its audience one way or another has been heightened by a moralistic suspicion of the pursuit of pleasure in the contemplation of beauty for its own sake.

 

Poetry is not sincere.

     Poetry is always in the voice of a persona, always an artifice.  The pose of speaking directly from the heart is rhetorical as are other fictions.  Every lyric is not the author’s cri de coeur but rather a hypothetical statement of what some speaker might one day have said.  This does not contradict the fact that, coincidentally, the statement on the page may correspond closely to the conscious sentiment of its writer, but this is accidental and unrelated to the value of what is said.  In fact, creativity is more foregrounded in the depiction of attitudes that are not the author’s own, just as one is obliged as a reader to exercise greater imagination in identifying with fictional characters with views unlike one’s own.  Sincerity, while doubtless valuable in personal relationships, has no place in art.

 

Poetry is not therapeutic.

     The aim of a poem qua poem is not to work through personal experiences, neither to overcome grief nor, for that matter, to celebrate a joyful event.  The author’s state of mind, whether it be disturbed or serene has no relation to the success of the work of art.  Likewise, the reader’s feeling better or worse after reading has no aesthetic value.  When someone says a poem is inspired by a bout with disease or by a newly adopted child, the reader must be wary, though such an origin has, in fact, neither positive nor negative implications for the value of the work.  Any therapeutic (or other utilitarian) use for either a producer or consumer of art is entirely incidental.  Art is the playful manipulation of symbols; it is not designed to solve the problems of either creators or consumers. 

 

Poetry is not (in general) obscure.

     The qualification in this statement arises from the fact that, whereas in other discourses lucidity is the highest value, poetry is often more complex.  Some verse has always depended on subcultural knowledge, whether academic and courtly or based in folkways, rural or urban.  The pleasure of some literary work, too, derives, like that of riddles and puzzles, from the need for energetic decoding.  Still, most poetry is intelligible for any attentive reader.  With poetry’s exile from the center of the majority of  people’s artistic experience after the turn of the twentieth century, certain poets, such as Hart Crane and Gertrude Stein, indeed reacted by reveling in the density of their texts, but in earlier times no one complained that poetry was difficult to understand.  Nonetheless, since a significant amount of human experience is mysterious, contradictory, ambiguous, or irrational, these characteristics are replicated in many poems.  If a sentiment is reducible to a simple paraphrase, after all, there is no excuse for casting it in artistic form.  In art “meaning” is overappreciated in any event; in only a minority of cases does “meaning” provide the primary value of a work.

 

Poetry is not a specialized taste. 

     Every culture on earth, including those which have no written language, has poetry, often in genres similar of those of technologically advanced societies.  Homer, Sophocles, and Shakespeare were consumed by everyone.  Popular genres such as folksong and broadsheet verses among the uneducated and parlor poetry for the middle classes flourished until very recently.  All young children relish nursery rhymes and virtually all adults are moved by popular songs.    Poetry appears today still in advertising jingles and the word-play of graffiti, sound bites, jokes, and bumper stickers.  Dexterity in the manipulation of symbolic materials is the distinguishing characteristic of the human species.  It is only natural that we should all enjoy practicing this skill.

Basil Bunting’s Ambiguous Ars Poetica

 

     Poets are not dependable critics of their own work, but I take Basil Bunting at his word when he insists that the primary appeal of his poetry is sound, what his friend Pound called melopoeia.  To Bunting “a poem is a series of sounds in the air, just as music.” [1]  Commentary on his poetry might best be limited to a florilegium of choice excerpts with, perhaps, some analysis of their musical patterns, but I here adopt the more perilous route of explicating Bunting’s Ode 15, an ars poetica, more abstract in language and more dependent on meaning than much of his work.  Bunting often shrank from thematic implications altogether and, when he did theorize (as in his relation to Objectivism), he was likely to be a skeptic, criticizing propositions more often than embracing them, but this poem sets forth an unusually clear and rather extravagant notion of poetry’s potential.  Yet immediately after celebrating his art, he deflates his own ideas, then continues into a dancing dialectical series of turns.

    The poem is susceptible to paraphrase, a characteristic that comes and goes in Bunting.  Though the syntax slows to a sonorous and auspicious pace, at moments suspending meaning over rocky syllables, the first sentence makes grand claims for the aesthetic.  According to the ode, nothing directly observed in itself (“substance”) or preserved in memory (what “time/ stills or restrains”) can match for beauty (“design” and “supple measure”) the artistic product compounded of perception (“the tread/ sensuous things/ keep in our consciousness”) and reflection (“thought’s intricate polyphonic/ score”).  Art, then, trumps life.

     Should there be any doubt, Bunting specifically names his subject: “man’s craft,” but what makes the literary gesture the more bold and dramatic is his ready concession that poetry is always “the word spoken in shapeless night,” that is to say, spoken from the depths of human ignorance, without any comforting access to special truth.   What is inscrutable and unknowable becomes the very center of the revelation (as it is for the apophatic mystic).  The poet works not by accumulation but by removal, according to the formula dichten = condensare, with “paring away/ waste” in order to produce “the forms/ cut out of mystery!”  Mystery is not eliminated; the poem is made entirely of mystery, but hewn to a becoming shape.  The exclamation point, rare in Bunting, betrays his enthusiasm. 

   The poem thus produced surpasses other cognitive processes, but its excellence rests not so much in what it is as in the care with which it is constructed.  Its “taut” (well-crafted) sound ventures into a realm beyond what is perceptible (that is, into the “unseen”).  Only in this way is art capable of representing nature in the most profound mimesis: the clouds, the woods, the grain come into view.  The last term suggests the cyclic turn of life summarized in the seasons, indicating completeness but, at the same time, summoning thoughts of mortality.  Thus, as art is itself a part of nature, the artist and the work may age alike.  Since the author’s powers are limited by time, the appeal of a verse may also fade, as a blade of grass will dry, wither, and blow away unknown.  

     This prediction of the production and then the decay of art and insight is instantly enacted on the page.   After asserting what seemed for a moment the preeminent power of poetry, the poem reverses and ends with a concession of sorry defeat.  The “breeze,” which had resembled “a polyphonic score,” is at this point unfelt and unheard.  The final sound is the “thud of the ictus,” referring at once to the final syllables of Bunting’s rolling iambs and anapests and, in medical terminology, to a sudden attack or seizure, especially stroke, the body’s thud to the floor.  Bunting has eloquently cut the ground from under himself.  He lies at the end at our feet.

     The dialectic continues in an “Appendix” that followed in the Poetry Magazine publication providing a further image encapsulating the poem’s movement but emphasizing the inevitable collapse with Modernist irony.  The molten iron, not only glowing but superabundant, overflowing can turn to a cold lump, drained of drama, “turmoil,” and “peril.”  Emphasizing the loss of visionary excitement, the crashing return to the mundane in this coda heightens the bathos, with the final use of the devastating vulgarity “blob” a last indignity.  For the Collected Poems, Bunting decided to omit these last lines (though he doubtless regretted losing the archaic “spilth,” around which the passage revolved), leaving a more delicate but equally ambiguous conclusion.

     Thus he embraces poetry’s potential to embody the world and generate beauty while accepting its ultimate failure which parallels the inevitable weakening of its makers.  While a carefully constructed pattern of words may well represent subjective experience, this labor will in the end inevitably reveal nothing but “mystery.”  One is left not with truth, but with the consciousness of aesthetic grace: “supple,” “deft,” “sharp,” “taut,” everything seen “in its due array.”  The pleasure of the beauty implied by those adjectives remains undeniable if insubstantial, and the reader of Bunting’s verse, as melodious as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins (though Bunting lacked the Jesuit’s metaphysical foundation), will make do with the experience of the words’ music, very nearly literally one writer’s “whistling in the dark.”  While this commentary may be amusing, even useful for some, I do not doubt that, were Bunting to have read it, he would have declared “What the hell, it’s all rubbish.  Put it on a string and hang it up in the bathroom!” [2]  

  

 

1.  Jonathan Williams, “An Interview with Basil Bunting,” Conjunctions No. 5, 1983.

 

2.  Ibid.

Argument by Images in Keats’s “Sleep and Poetry”

 

Numbers in parentheses refer to lines of “Sleep and Poetry”; those in brackets to endnotes. 

 

     John Keats is not known as a theoretician, but his early “Sleep and Poetry” provides a programmatic manifesto in defense of his Romantic practice.  Characteristically, he makes a case through images rather than syllogisms.  This is wholly in keeping with Keats’ principle of Negative Capability, perhaps his most significant contribution to literary theory.  The reader who pays regard to the poem’s images from the start will develop the system of correspondences critical to the climactic passage.

     Though the title seems to balance sleep and poetry, the poem in fact is about the latter.  The opening paean to sleep is a feint, introducing the notion of a free imagination and setting up even greater praise for poetry.  After an epigraph from the pseudo-Chaucerian The Floure and the Leafe which in fact describes sleeplessness as distressing and inexplicable, Keats proceeds to identify sleep with a series of images that establish a foundation for his theme.

     First he celebrates the beauties of nature in a conventional catalogue which, for all its predictability (birds, bees, blooms, bowers) includes palpable and specific detail: a “pretty hummer” that “buzzes cheerily,” “a musk-rose, blowing/ In a green island, far from all men’s knowing.”  The primary meaning is at first a simple affirmation of sensuality, but even this significance is complicated by the rose being unknown, presumably because a mentally conceived flower is superior even to the beautiful ones in a real garden.  Similarly, the value of the “nest of nightingales” is heightened by its extreme secrecy analogous to an individual subjectivity. 

     Birdsong also suggests poetry, which leads to the culminating terms of the first rhetorical period’s cluster of images, “Cordelia’s countenance,” and “a high romance,” anticipating the poem’s conclusion by recalling poetic texts rather than natural objects and both implying love, the one paternal and the second romantic.  The poet’s goal, though, lies beyond.  All of pretty these images fall short of sleep’s power to please and shorter yet of the sublimity of the highest poetry.

     Having moved from attractive aspects of nature to images evoking art and human affection, in the second half of the verse paragraph Keats lists images meant to convey the nature of sleep itself.  Having just mentioned literary accounts of passion, Keats now associates sleep with the charms of actual lovers maternal and romantic.  Sleep closes our eyes and sings lullabies as though a loving mother.  Sleep is the “silent entangler of a beauty’s tresses,” a phrase suggesting the lady in bed.  It is a “happy listener” to the upwelling sense of felicity that greets each “new sunrise,” for, at any rate, “all the cheerful eyes.”  This praise is, again, designed to more greatly magnify the glory of poetry once Keats’ entire progression of thought emerges.

     In the next verse paragraph (ll. 19-40) the series of associations from prettiness to love to bliss forms a crescendo that exalts poetry to the level of a numinous experience.  It surpasses the experience of beauty in nature and, indeed, is ineffable, “beyond thought.” (19)  Keats mentions birds, considered intermediaries between the human and the divine, before admitting the inadequacy of language.  “What is it?  And to what shall I compare it?”  For Keats poetry provides access to a “glory” which is a direct experience of reality and thus contains hints at least of Ultimate Reality.  It is “awful, sweet, and holy,” appearing in many guises, sometimes, “fearful,” sometimes “gentle,” yet always “wondrous” and most accurately traceable only in images.  As art is generally oblique in its implications, the truth seems coy, often revealing only “shapes,” “aerial limning,” “faint-heard hymning,” yet such evidence is sufficient “sometimes” to elicit a jubilant reaction from the soul: “rejoice! rejoice!”  This experience of an illuminated sublime is familiar to many besides himself. (41-46)  He cunningly creates a community of the initiated, of all those who “can feel his being glow,” by saying that he will not “insult” his readers by attempting to sketch what they already know from their own lived experience. 

     The sensual delights of the imagination are detailed in the next section (47-84) as the poet contemplates the ascent of his own Parnassus.  “Not yet a glorious denizen” of that realm, he offers the sacrifice of praise as well as, in fantasy, his own death “like a fresh sacrifice” ‘to the great Apollo.”  His approach is marked by the heady intoxication of “o’erwhelming sweets.”  This is for Keats the locus amoenus, the “bowery nook,” the “elysium,” identified with the entire body of poetry, what I like to call “the ocean of words,” for Keats “an eternal book” where everything is “lovely” and nymphs play in the woods.  There he might entertain “imaginings” of all sorts, “vistas of solemn beauty” inspiring him to “write on my tablets all that was permitted,/ All that was for our human senses fitted.”  Mysteriously, only through such fabulating flights of the mind can the individual ”seize” (or understand) “all the events of this wide world.”  Keats then overturns his earlier modesty topoi and anticipates gaining “wings” and a concomitant immortality through his own verse.

     The rush of this grand ambition is then brought up short with the admonition “Stop and consider!  Life is but a day,” followed by a series of images of life’s evanescence: “a fragile dew-drop,” “a poor Indian’s sleep,” turning to the more hopeful “the rose’s hope while yet unblown,” concluding with the quite wonderful “a laughing school-boy. Without grief or care,/ Riding the springy branches of an elm.”    With this more sanguine view, Keats returns in lines 96-121 to his poetic ambitions, asking, with a poignance inevitable for those who know the poet’s biography, for ten years to produce his oeuvre.  The thought I enough to return him to the idyllic quasi-Classical scenes that for him suggest the beauties of art in general, often with erotic even orgiastic imagery.  The poet says he will “choose each pleasure that my fancy sees,” “catch the white-handed nymphs,” “woo sweet kisses,” “play with their fingers, “touch their shoulders.”  He imagines in fact a troupe of nymphs all ministering to his comfort, teaching the doves to fan him with its wings, dancing, enticing,

 

till in the bosom of a leafy world

We rest in silence, like the two gems upcurl’d

In the recesses of a pearly shell.

                                               (119-121)

 

This final image with its snug lapidary beauty is a neat formulation of purely aesthetic satisfaction. 

     Yet the poet feels he must, with an act of will, summon up his gravitas and “bid these joys farewell” in pursuit of “a nobler life” that embraces not beauty alone but also the “agonies” and “strife of human hearts.”  This resolution is followed immediately by a vision of an Apollonian heroic charioteer, the embodiment of the poet as redeemer, bringing in his train “shapes of delight, of mystery, and fear,” an entire spectrum of emotion, laughing, weeping, but always beautiful like “a lovely wreath of girls.”  The onward impetus on this lord of poetry is “awfully intent,” implying the dread and delight of his comprehensive view.

      The vision then vanishes, as visions do, the chariot “fled into the light of heaven,” bringing Keats crashing down into “a sense of real things” that “like a muddy stream” he feels may “bring my soul to nothingness.”  He is sustained by the sublime memory of poetry’s potential and muses over the decline of the art in his own age, recalling a Golden Age in which the British muses had no care “than to sing out and comb their wavy hair.”  In another of Keats’ breath-taking images he describes how earlier poets, a “fervid choir that lifted up a noise of harmony” until their song, a “mighty self of convoluting sound” which gains such immensity that it becomes “huge as a planet” and rotates “eternally around a dizzy void.” (173-177) 

     This grand afflatus comes and goes, however, in the life of the world as well as of the individual.  A summary of the images in the latter portion of the poem will indicate this oscillation between the previously defined poles.  The ordinary aesthetic pleasures are evoked still by the images of pastoralism, most succinctly by the “sweet music” of the “swan’s ebon bill.” (223, 226)  Yet the joy of these immediate delights is curtailed by suffering, mortality, and the great unknown.  For Keats art provides the most effective strategy for coping with an unknowable and often inimical world.    Faced with “the shiftings of the mighty winds that blow/ Hither and thither” (286-7) “the mighty winds,” he finds a route “out the dark mysteries of human souls.” (289)  Through the sort of via negativa not unlike the ancient Skeptics’ and Stoics’ concept of ἐποχή and which Keats called Negative Capability, the poet is capable of not only accepting inability to understand the cosmos, but building insight from that lack.

 

yet there ever rolls                

A vast idea before me, and I glean           

Therefrom my liberty; thence too I’ve seen         

The end and aim of Poesy.

                                                                                          (290-3)

 

Here poetry is named as the only route to a clear enlightened vision.  Yet that “liberty” brings no end to suffering and striving, though the truth be

 

                                             manifest                     

As a large cross, some old cathedral’s crest,        

Lifted to the white clouds.

                                                            (295-297)

 

There remains a kind of existential “ocean dim” “spreads awfully before me” (306-307), presumably made up of ignorance and suffering, irreducible but tolerable through art.   A proper Pegasus, not the neo-Classical “rocking horse” (186) with “might half slumb’ring on its own right arm” (237) has the power “to sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man” (247) in spite of “trees uptorn,” (242) etc., bringing “delightful hopes” and “heart-easing” words. (268)

     Keats recognizes the hazards of the visionary’s role, indeed he embraces the Romantic myth of the artist’s likely early death, which proved so poignantly true in his case. 

Ah! rather let me like a madman run       

Over some precipice; let the hot sun       

Melt my Dedalian wings . . .

(301-303)

     This self-dramatizing image embodies an existential crisis with the poet as hero facing a cosmos sufficiently disturbing to drive the persona back to refuge in the sensual beauty which defines the pleasures of the mind, while the poet knows he must accept also the harshness of the world and the limits of his own knowledge.  The mention of myrtle, Aphrodite’s flower (248), represents a resolution in art between the joys and distresses of the world.  The plant, primarily associated with love (and under Christianity with the Virgin), also signified the victor in athletic and poetic competitions (a usage also echoed in the New Testament) [2]

     Keats’ vision of life, abundant and delightful yet inevitably tragic, is rendered livable by imagination, by art.  In the concluding passage, Keats takes his inspiration and comfort from the symbolic elaborations of the art objects he sees about him in Hunt’s cottage.  He restates his earlier description of poetry functioning with insouciant mastery, “’tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm” (237),     

   

            And with these airs come forms of elegance
            Stooping their shoulders o'er a horse's prance,
            Careless, and grand — fingers soft and round
            Parting luxuriant curls; — and the swift bound
            Of Bacchus from his chariot, when his eye
            Made Ariadne's cheek look blushingly.

(331-336)

 

     The reader is left, then, in the end with what to Keats was most significant: a handful of images: the immediately appealing musk-rose and the nymphs, but also the alarming images of the uprooted trees, the Indian about to go over the waterfall, and the precipice.  The contradiction is then resolved by art, signified in the pearly shell, the cross “huge as a planet,” and the charioteer.

     Keats’ conclusion is a charming and intimate recapitulation with details of the poet’s visit to Leigh Hunt’s cottage on the Vale of Health (in which Shelley and Byron were also guests).  His demonstration of the power of images is here raised to another order by his use of the objets d’art he saw about him [3], selected by Hunt and viewed by Keats as symbolic representation of their values.  Since Keats here plays the role of consumer of art as well as creator, this passage serves as an example of art’s uplifting influence.  

     The images of antiquity represent beauty embodied in art includes nymphs as well as “fauns and satyrs taking aim at swelling apples with a frisky leap.”  Here the poet includes a vision of nature itself, seen as though freshly through the eyes of the artists of the past.  The sexual association of this reverence for nature is clear in language like “the wild thrilling liquidity of dewy piping.”  While the mythological prints on the wall celebrate nature, love, art, and, in particular the art of antiquity, and, by implication, offer a sort of pagan divine service as well, the gap of centuries separating the poet from the Classical era suggests his lack, his longing, his hunger.  The picture of Petrarch and Laura reinforces the same scheme as does the bust of Sappho, each with associations both erotic and artistic.

 

                                             half smiling down

At nothing; just as though the earnest frown

Of over thinking had that moment gone

From off her brow, and left her all alone.

 

Sappho’s peace of mind is imagined to have arrived at the moment that ratiocination, “over thinking” ceased.  Surely Keats sought a similar resolution for himself and his readers.

     While the construction of the value of beauty is the primary theme, Keats’ political ideals support his aesthetic ones.   More than a nationalist icon, the bust of Alfred the Great probably suggested to Keats the king’s support for learning and culture as well as the notion that he advanced constitutional rule.  Kościuszko, to whom Coleridge and Hunt himself had also written sonnets, was a hero in freedom’s cause for the Romantics [4]. 

     With the sight of these meaningful images, Keats is uplifted and declares, “And up I rose refresh'd, and glad, and gay.” (401)  The positive operation of these works of art on the consciousness of the poet anticipates a similar effect of the poem on the reader.  In effect, the author represents himself as having “reprogrammed” his mind through contemplation of both art and nature, and the alteration of consciousness occurs through the developing montage of images alone. 

     Regularly through the poem, the lower levels of inspiration are marked by the Classical images of pastoralism and the higher by divine figures, only to vanish at the summit of aesthetic experience as language becomes unable to bear the theme.  Keats maintains the vigor of his skepticism, proceeding without illusion, with the conviction that the symbolic manipulations of art provide the most potent solace in a fallen world both beautiful and terrifying.  For him the most profound truth is accessible by looking closely, meditating, one might say, on certain images which have their own order and the capacity to program the consciousness, his own and his readers’.  Whereas sleep is a mere temporary escape, like the unmixed sylvan fantasies of pastoralism, Keats seeks to provide an authentic and lasting heart’s-ease in poetry “to sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man” (247).

 

  

1.   I am reminded of the elusiveness of enlightenment suggested by the Zen Ox-herding pictures. 

 2. See, for instance, Philippians 3 and I Corinthians 9:24.

3.  These works are listed by Sir Sidney Colvin in his John Keats (ch. 3) as Poussin’s “Empire of Flora,” his “Venus and Adonis,” and several, perhaps, of his “Bacchanals;” Stothard’s “Bathers,” “‘Vintage,'” and Petrarch as a youth first meeting Laura; and Raphael’s “Poetry,” from the Stanza della Segnatura.

4.  Among the many other poets of the age who wrote in praise of Kościuszko were Henry Francis Cary (“Ode to General Kosciuszko”), Byron (“The Age of Bronze”), Southey (“To A. S. Cottle from Robert Southey”), and Thomas Campbell (“Pleasures Of Hope”).

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.