Subjectivity in Edward Young

 

 

     Among the trends in English poetry identified as “pre-Romantic” are the rural and nature poets (notably Dyer and Thomson), the archaic or folk-oriented (Burns, Chatterton, Macpherson), the out-and-out visionary (Smart, Blake), and the “graveyard school” (associated with Gray, Cowper, and Young).  While hardly mutually exclusive, each of these points toward a significant Romantic vector, all suggesting deviation from the neo-Classical theory associated with Dryden, Pope, and Johnson.  Among the most influential of the writers pointing new directions for English poetry was Edward Young.

     Young’s The Complaint, and the Consolation; or, Night-Thoughts, the first portion of which was published in 1742, was immensely popular in the U. K. and hardly less on the Continent, particularly in Germany.  When Young later published a collected works [1], the author was identified not by name, but as “the Author of the Night-Thoughts.”  A new edition in 1797 included illustrations by William Blake [2]. 

     The popularity of his poem made Young particularly authoritative [3] and his essay “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759) allows the reader to juxtapose Young’s theoretical ideas with his poetic practice.  This analysis both in theory and practice clarifies Young’s contribution to the old dispute about whether poets are born or created by training. [4]  

     The primary theme of Young’s essay is the value of originality, revealed by the title and reinforced throughout.  Assuming then a partisan position in the dispute which in France had been called the querelle des anciens et des modernes and in England the Battle of the Books [5], Young insists on his preference for original compositions as opposed to those shaped by the imitation of classics.  He even suggests that moderns may outdo the classics, though he modestly stops short of claiming that they have already, noting that “the modern powers are equal to those before them” yet “modern performance in general is deplorably short.”  He begins his argument with the sensible observation that “human souls, through all periods, are equal.”  [6]  Within each “soul” must be an innate god-given capacity for genius which alone is capable of shaping great art. 

     Young’s notion of genius is considerably mystified, as his use of terms such as vigor igneus and caelestis origo signifies.  Genius, he says, partakes of the divine and “raises his structure by means invisible.”  His notion is not far distant from older ideas of a muse or god of poetry.  Genius, he declares is a surprise even to its possessor who must “contract full intimacy with the stranger within [himself].”  Genius in his view not only makes a great writer; it makes also a virtuous man.  Yet unfortunately Genius explains poetry no more than the “Great Man” theory explains history.  Even Boileau in the very first stanza of his prescriptive manual had declared that a would-be poet born without “Genius” would work in vain.   Genius seems to amount to little more than an afterthought inferred from the poem’s perceived excellence.

     Apart from failing itself to be an original concept, Genius always begs the question since it is already assumed in the author of a work deserving of praise.  The genius may access the profundities of the mind of man: “its bounds are unknown, as those of the creation.”  This bright promise, however, is hedged with hazard.  The innovative poet may find no audience, since “all eminence, and distinction, lies out of the beaten road.”  “the more remote your path from the highway, the more reputable.”  Genius, Young claims, is most likely to be condemned when he has soared highest and gone out of sight of the common reader.  Thus the greater the poet the lesser his reputation.

     One looks, then, to the first installment of Night-Thoughts in search of an example of the novelty the author recommended so highly.  The blank verse form is familiar enough.  Probably the most common meter in English poetry since the sixteenth century, unrhymed iambic pentameter had been the choice of Milton in Paradise Lost, Dryden’s All for Love, and Thomson’s The Seasons.  The personifications that meet the reader in the first lines – Nature, Sleep, Fortune – are thoroughly in the neo-Classical manner as are artificial epithets like “downy pinion” for wing.  His theology is likewise quite orthodox, resisting, though at times with difficulty, the latititudinarianism and deism of his age. 

     What, then, if neither form nor content is innovative, made the author feel he was taking a new literary turn?   In a brief Preface, Young provides the answer: “As the occasion of this Poem was real, not fictitious, so the method pursued in it, was rather imposed, by what spontaneously arose in the Author's mind, on that occasion, than meditated, or designed.”  Here Young takes a stand against Boileau’s clear emphasis on conscious craft. 

 

Gently make haste, of Labour not afraid;

A hundred times consider what you've said:

Polish, repolish, every Colour lay,

And sometimes add; but oft'ner take away.

'Tis not enough, when swarming Faults are writ,

That here and there are scattered Sparks of Wit;

Each Object must be fix'd in the due place,

And diff'ring parts have Corresponding Grace:

'Till, by a curious Art dispos'd, we find

One perfect whole, of all the pieces join'd.

Keep your subject close, in all you say;

Nor for a sounding Sentence ever stray. [7]

 

Whereas Boileau privileges first of all discerning taste, proportion, and unity, a sort of elegant tidiness, allowing some appeal to the intellectual pleasures implied by “Wit,” Young claims that his poem is itself a thing of nature, “real, not fictitious,” and, as a result, is subject not to “meditation” or “design,” but must be governed wholly “by what spontaneously arose in the Author’s mind.” 

   By saying the poem is “real,” of course, what Young means is that he has attempted to convey in words his own subjectivity, accurately reflecting his own experience, just as Wordsworth had outlined using similar language in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.  The fogginess of the concept of Genius in the “Conjectures” appears then in a new light.  If access to the sublime is subjectively determined, a natural occurrence, arriving “spontaneously,” obedience to literary rules becomes irrelevant, and analysis is fruitless.  Subjectivity is for him self-justifying. 

     The privilege Young accords subjectivity in theory is suggested in the use of the word “conjectures” in the title which couches his conclusion appropriately in the essai’s language of supposition.  Young’s self-denigrating opening describes the essay as “miscellaneous in its nature, somewhat licentious in its conduct; and, perhaps, not overimportant in its end.”  “Though I despair of breaking through the frozen obstructions of age, and care’s incumbent cloud . . .yet will I hazard some conjectures.”  Though he foregrounds the modesty topos, Young reserves some chance of gravitas, hoping that his observations may “strike the careless wanderer after amusement only, with useful awe.”  A twenty-first century modern may be struck by the assumption that a reader seeking idle entertainment would read a treatise on poetics in the first place, but Young here seizes a bit of high moral ground that places him within the traditional European view of the ends of art as to delight and to instruct. 

     Although Young recognizes that poets may be mistaken, misleading, or simply incompetent, he prescribes no way to discern true Genius and thus separate the sublime from the worthless.  He maintains that one must “leap” to reach new ground but, “by that leap, if genius is wanting, we break our necks.”  While truly original works will “engross” the reader, they may also “prejudice” and “intimidate.”  Young suggests that there may be a purely aesthetic criterion in that the reader will enjoy the work of the gifted with greater pleasure.  Art is, he says, “a delicious garden of intellectual fruits and flowers” affording many beneficial effects: a “respite from care;” it “rescues us from sloth and sensuality,” defending against “the langours of old age.” 

     The Christianity that defined Young’s profession obliges him to add a traditional extra-literary touchstone: moral improvement.  “Wit, indeed, however brilliant,” he says, “should not be permitted to gaze self-enamored on its useless charms” but should “like the first Brutus, it should sacrifice its most darling offspring to the sacred interests of virtue, and real service of mankind.“  This is surely equivalent to the “useful awe” he had also cited to justify poetry.  Yet the appeal of Young’s verse is surely in his vulnerability rather than his faith.  His anxiety not his piety wins our attention because it is more likely to   resemble our own state of mind. 

     Perhaps his faith in subjectivity is the most contemporary element in Young’s thought.  The very idea of the subjective realm had evolved from bare Cartesian dualism to both a bugaboo and an ideal by the eighteenth century.  After Young’s time, however, a good share of lyric poetry has, to one extent or another, shared this self-dramatizing subjectivity in subsequent years.  Since Shelley fell upon the thorns of life, a wide variety of poets from effusive Romantics through decadent aesthetes to Beats, Confessionals, and beyond a passionate expressiveness is considered by many the poet’s Helicon.  The undertone in these later days is evident in grassroots poetry readings where self-expression holds sway.  Even apart from literature, the process is advanced in this age by the proliferation of self-help and mystic notions that encourage the cultivation of individual subjectivities.   

 

 

1.1   1.  The Works of the Author of the Night-Thoughts (1762).

 

2.      2.  Blake painted 537 watercolor designs for the project of which 150 were chosen and engraved.  When sales of the expensive volume proved disappointing, publication halted including only 43 of Blake’s engravings.  The association with Blake has gained Young many of his modern readers.

 

3.      3.  Though Thomas Parnell’s “A Night-Piece on Death” had appeared in 1721, Young’s poem was followed by Robert Blair’s “The Grave” (1743), Thomas Warton’s “The Pleasures of Melancholy” (1747), and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), and a good many other poems with a “graveyard” tone.  Young himself remained sufficiently well-known several generations later that in the prefatory essay to an 1853 edition of Night-Thoughts the Rev. George Gilfillan comments “It would be extremely ill-bred in us to suppose that our readers are not acquainted with the facts of Young’s life; they are among the things that ‘everyone knows.’”

 

4.      4.  For a careful history of the idea, see William Ringler, “Poeta Nascitur Non Fit: Some Notes on the History of an Aphorism,” Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1941).  A miscellany of figures has figured in the discussions of the issue with writers like Philip Sidney, Coleridge, Robert Graves, and Mary Oliver maintaining that poets are born to their role and, on the other side, Horace, Jonson, and Pope.

 

5.      5.  Following Swift’s usage in the prolegomenon to his A Tale of a Tub.

 

6.      6.  he logic would continue with the realization that people of all countries are equally gifted, a sensible corollary that some resist even today.

 

7.      7.  The Art of Poetry, Canto 1, 171-182 Soames and Dryden’s version.

In Praise of Bias

     People often speak as though a writer’s bias is an undesirable thing, indicating a beclouded vision. Yet surely the only unbiased person would be one who has never had a thought or made an observation. In fact “bias” is what enables significance and instills meaning into what would otherwise be mere information. Far from warning readers to beware, an openly confessed bias promises well-thought-out conclusions and the active engagement of the author.
     In fact bias is universal. Perhaps the writer who pretends to objectivity might be honestly unaware of bias, leading the reader to wonder how much else he or she might be in the dark about. A great proportion of our intellectual blind spots arise because certain assumptions strike us as so self-evident or natural that they seem raw data rather than conclusions. It is just such ideas, often the idées reçues of an entire culture, that an original author will seek to interrogate or at any rate to reinforce in an original manner. As Max Friedländer noted in commenting on the case of forger Han Van Meegeren , “Forgeries must be served hot,” since the tell-tale stylistic nuances, the assumptions characteristic of each age are invisible to viewers at first, but inevitably emerge as obvious with the passage of time. The very same principle applies to reasoning and logic.
     Worse but less insidious is the intentional concealing of bias. The consciously deceitful propagandist need not concern us. Everyone will find such a fraud offensive (with the exception of sophistic rhetoricians to whom falsity may present an opportunity for a more dazzling epideixis). In such cases the writer, aware of the deception, can only be thought to consider a legitimate case unconvincing. Such arguments are far from insignificant – they are the very stuff of advertising and political discourse -- but such biases are less likely to hoodwink the alert reader or listener if they cannot deceive their own creator.
     This principle emerged clearly during the late 1960s when many concluded that it was impossible to be apolitical. Passivity in the face of injustice came to be regarded as tantamount to endorsement of the status quo (particularly when combined with other clues such as the pursuit of income), while such transgressive practices as dope-smoking and gay sex naturally, though not inevitably, situated people in the opposition , and poverty implied integrity. These are, of course, biases and less than absolutely predictive, yet they possess both meaning and analytical value. Like other prejudices, stereotypes, and clichés, they were found to be quite often true.
     Some, but not all biases, are also value judgments. I recognize my bias against Western movies and musicals as individual and subjective; I would not argue the inherent superiority of who-dun-its, but I would not voluntarily spend an evening watching John Wayne drawl as he rides through the sagebrush. Likewise, my fondness for ancient Skeptics, medieval troubadours, and early modern avant-gardists is not prescriptive, nor is my coolness toward Chinese traditional music or the Grand Ole Opry. I recognize my unfortunate sluggishness to appreciate the work of artists and writers younger than myself. Most blues music is for me good, while all polkas with the exception of those written by Chopin are not.
     Yet I do not deny that I hold biases about biases. Father Arrupe’s “preferential option for the poor” is a good bias to me as is affirmative action while sexism, racism, and homophobia are bad ones. These preferences may be traced to morality, but the association is not necessary. If I encounter an individual with a prejudice in favor of bland food, I will prejudge that person’s other values as dubious, while I will be predisposed in favor of the attitudes of a cook with an ample spice cabinet. I would be more likely to agree with the judgment of a leftist opera buff than a reactionary Nascar fan. The fact is that biases are so potent in human social relations that I never encounter a Nascar fan in my social circles. Such an event would be as unlikely as dinner with Republicans. (A radical car racer might be an interesting character; a conservative lover of La Traviata sounds boring.)
     Intelligence is no safeguard against bias. Indeed the research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky has indicated that intelligent people are not only fallible like everyone else, but that they are in fact slightly more likely to make erroneous decisions based on bias.
     The word itself derives through French, Provencal, and Latin from the Greek epikarsios meaning “athwart, crosswise, at an angle,” and that is the basis for its applications in tailoring and the sport of crown green bowls. The quality of obliqueness it shares with metaphor and other rhetorical figures is what opens biased judgments to significance based on connotation, association, and implication. Such ambush on a question from an angle other than warp or woof often releases insight. Biases are instrumental in weaving a texture of meaning that may be decoded (not always accurately) like a poem, a profile, or a tone of voice.
     My biases include a preference for black over blue, red wine over white, pinot noir over cabernet, for lamb over beef, pork over chicken, for spinach over chard, cauliflower over broccoli, cherries over grapes, pears over apples, hazelnuts over Brazil nuts, and, I must confess, peanuts over all tree nuts. Bring me a heap of beans rather than of meat. I like Victorian houses rather than modern ones, cities over suburbs, San Francisco over Los Angeles, Iowa over New Jersey, but the Northeast over the South. I have a bias in favor of traveling anywhere outside of my own country such that I have never seen the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone Park. Talk is more pleasant than television, the fall preferable to the spring, and the mountains to the seashore. I would never ever dye my hair. I always wore a tie while teaching. Though biased against church-going Christians, fundamentalists, and hierarchies, I feel sympathetic toward Meister Eckhart, Quakers, and the Catholic Worker movement. I like Plato rather than Aristotle, the Greeks in general more than the Romans, the Nibelungenlied better than Roland, troubadours before trouvères, Wyatt before Surrey, Lear before Hamlet, Keats better than Shelley, Pound more than Eliot. The early poems of Gary Snyder and Robert Bly are far superior, I think, to their later work.
     The value of biases need not arise from their truth. Naming a few among my myriad biases sketches my nature with greater precision and accuracy than the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. To eliminate my biases would be to erase the host of specifics that define me far more than my physical features. The fact is that bias cannot be avoided. There is no escaping the perspective through the holes in the front of the skull. Even a physicist contemplating subatomic particles must view the spectacle of existence using all-too-human eyes and a brain full of assumption derived from teachers and words and the chances of grants and fashions in science, but, far from lamentable, these limitations give a point to science as they do to art and to life.

Axiology and Subjectivity

     Should any reader turn to this page expecting a philosophical discussion, I wish to declare at the outset that I am not competent to paraphrase leading ideas in axiology, far less to comment on them or to criticize. Indeed, that inability is in a way my point, for I wish to suggest that value of all sorts is, like other aspects of reality, always and inevitably subjective, though that fact does not mean that value judgments are arbitrary or without significance.
     In pragmatic decision-making, some, however, may seen hardly disputable: if one wishes to turn a screw, a screwdriver is good, because it does the job efficiently; a city map is good if one wishes to find the train station; food is good since it is required for life. Yet even these include an implied subjectivity. One cannot assume that turning the screw is desirable, or finding the train, or even continuing to live. Each of these consequences is a concrete result. When no such observable cause and effect is involved as in theoretical ethics and even more so in aesthetics, a demonstration of value becomes exceedingly obscure.
     If a critic prefers the novels of Samuel Richardson to those of Henry Fielding (as Leavis does), he may provide ample reasoning and bolster his arguments with supporting evidence from the books in question, yet he cannot, like a scientist, present a compelling “objective” case. Literature and criticism have histories, to be sure, yet it is difficult to conceive of those histories as recording incremental progress over the centuries. The same might be said for all aesthetic judgments. To one individual opera provides the most moving and powerful experience of beauty while another may react only with snores in the manner of George McManus’s comic strip character Jiggs.
     Indeed the situation is no different with all acknowledged matters of taste. Not only art, but food, clothing, style in general is highly subjective. Is Greek retsina wine tasty? Are tattoos becoming? Is a huge SUV beautiful? There is no reasonable way to convince either opponents or proponents to change their attitudes.
     While some would be willing to concede that aesthetic judgments are not subject to proof, many would consider moral and ethical decisions a different matter. Most commonly, due to religious teachings which specifically resist rational investigation, requiring instead faith, people of various traditions claim an absolute, “revealed” certainty in their ethical precepts. Here is a clear case of the power of subjectivity. For internal intuitive reasons that cannot be conveyed to an unbeliever, the faithful accept dogmatic teachings.
     The fact is that, contrary to the claims of some religionists, an entirely adequate system of morality can be elaborated from a simple principle of self-interest. By a secular application of the Golden Rule the entire legal code can be constituted. But my own preference to shrink from theft in order not to worry about my neighbor’s thieving from me, while compelling in practical terms to govern my behavior, is not in fact universal. A considerable share of people do, in fact, steal. Plenty of medieval knights went campaigning for booty. Big businessmen steal from us all while thinking they are exemplary and “successful.” Further, these last examples point out the fact that individuals, ages, and cultures may have significant differences in their definition of theft. Even such an apparently self-evident and natural conclusion as the evil of slavery was never recognized by Moses, Plato, Aristotle, or Christ.
     Furthermore, ethics is clearly a matter between human beings, a social issue, not one related to Ultimate Reality in any way. The cosmos is indifferent to my conduct and any view that looks beyond the human sphere will see that morality does not exist in the Milky Way, only magnificent grandeur. The regulation of human behavior, though a critical element in making life livable, is wholly functional; it exists to accomplish a purpose and not for its own sake.
     Yet, if I might be considered in some ways to display “good behavior,” my motive is not to protect myself. In fact my actions are most generally shaped by a desire to look good if only in my own eyes. Base behavior is ugly; to act in a degraded fashion diminishes oneself. Generous-hearted and compassionate behavior, on the other hand, is beautiful; to act nobly is to become more comely. With eyes open to the phantasmagoria of this world, I selfishly seek to spend my time in the best possible way, keeping myself healthy, learning constantly, bathing in art, trying to deal sympathetically and magnanimously with the people I encounter. And for no other reason than that it feels right to me, it seems the more beautiful choice. I feel as though I react spontaneously and naturally to each choice. While I am quite aware that I have been taught a code of moral response to various situations, I nonetheless experience each decision as a fresh mover expressing my nature. Awareness of my earlier training does not eliminate or invalidate it, though I experience my moral, aesthetic, and culinary decisions as expressing myself, not replicating a formula.
     This should be hardly surprising. It is impossible to escape the subjectivity of our experience of reality. The images on my retina are transformed by strange and elaborate codes translating the activities of all those sub-atomic particles hovering in my office and looking so settled and inert as desks and books and rugs. It means nothing to ask what is real when one’s human consciousness cannot escape setting the parameters of the investigation.
     So we muddle on, making constant value judgments, almost always without conscious consideration, making fallible predictions, feeling our way through the darkness of our general ignorance. If one acquits oneself well, the reward must be in the performance, a graceful turn, a beneficent influence, a settled sense of self at day’s end. Just as some people define themselves through their postings of products on Pinterest, others may turn to Homer, but who is to say which is “best”? We can object if a stranger treads on our toes, but we cannot prescribe a code of morality as though it had absolute value.
     In this way ethical, gastronomic, and aesthetic decisions have much in common. Should a constellation formed of caritas and Beaujolais and Charlie Parker, one evening at a dinner party, cross that of mind-your-own-business and IPAs and Verdi, the two might cross-fertilize like the joyful reshuffling of genes or the vast drifting of galaxies and produce wholly new configurations.