The Definition of a Poem
Men take the words they find in use among their neighbours, and that
they may not seem ignorant what they stand for use them confidently
without much troubling their heads about a certain fixed
meaning. . . . it being all one to draw these men out of their
mistakes, who have no settled notions, as to dispossess a Vagrant
of his habitation, who has no settled abode. This I guess to be
so; and every one may observe in himself or others whether it
be so or not.
Locke.
It may be useful to collect here some of the results of the foregoing
sections and consider them from the point of view of the practising
critic. The most salient perhaps is the desirability of distinguishing
clearly between the communicative and the value aspects of a
work of art. We may praise or condemn a work on either ground
or upon both, but if it fails entirely as a vehicle of communication
we are, to say the least, not well placed for denying its value.
But, it may be said, it will then have no value for _us_
and its value or disvalue for us is all that we as critics pretend
or should pretend to judge. To make such a reply, however, is
to abdicate as a critic. At the least a critic is concerned with
the value of things for himself and for people like him. Otherwise
his criticism is mere autobiography. And any critic worth attention
makes a further claim, a claim to sanity. His judgment is only
of general interest in so far as it is representative and reflects
what happens in a mind of a certain kind, developed in a certain
fashion. The services of bad critics are sometimes not less than
those of good critics, but that is only because we can divine
from their responses what other people’s responses are likely
to be.
We must distinguish between standard or normal criticism and
erratic or eccentric criticism. As critics Lamb or Coleridge
are very far from normal; none the less they are of extraordinary
fertility in suggestion. Their responses are often erratic even
when of most revelatory character. In such cases we do not take
them as standards to which we endeavour to approximate, we do
not attempt to see eye to eye with them. Instead we use them
as means by which to make quite different approaches ourselves
to the works which they have characteristically but eccentrically
interpreted.
The distinction between a personal or idiosyncratic judgment
and a normative is sometimes overlooked. A critic should often
be in a position to say, “I don’t like this but I know it is
good”, or “I like this and condemn it”, or “This is the effect
which it produces upon me, and this quite different effect is
the one it should produce.” For obvious reasons he rarely makes
any such statements. But many people would regard praise of a
work which is actually disliked by the praiser as immoral. This
is a confusion of ideas. Any honest reader knows fairly well
the points at which his sensibility is distorted, at which he
fails as a normal critic and in what ways. It is his duty to
take these into consideration in passing judgment upon the value
of a work. His rank as a critic depends at least as much upon
his ability to discount these personal peculiarities as upon
any hypothetical impeccability of his actual responses.
So far we have been considering those cases in which the vehicle
is sufficiently adequate and the critic sufficiently representative
and careful for the response to be a good index of the value
of the poem. But these cases are comparatively rare. The superstition
which any language not intolerably prolix and uncouth encourages
that there is something actual, _the poem_, which all readers
have access to and upon which they pass judgment, misleads us.
We naturally talk about poems (and pictures, etc.) in a way which
makes it impossible for anybody to discover what it is we are
talking about. Most critical discussion, in other words, is primarily
emotive with only a very loose and fourfold equivocal reference.
We may be talking about the artist’s experience, such of it as
is relevant OF about The experience of a qualified reader who
made no mistakes, or about an ideal and perfect reader’s possible
experience, or about our own actual experience. All four in most
cases will be qualitatively different. Communication is perhaps
never perfect, so the first and the last will differ. The second
and third differ also, from the others and from one another,
the third being what we ought unrestrictedly to experience, or
the best experience we could possibly undergo, whereas the second
is merely what we ought to experience as things are, or the best
experience that we can expect.
Which of these possible definitions of a poem shall we adopt?
The question is one of convenience merely; but it is by no means
easy to decide. The most usual practice is to mean by _the
poem_ either the first or the last; or, by forgetting what
communication is, to mean both confusedly together. The last
involves the personal judgment to which exception was taken on
the previous page, and has the further disadvantage that there
would be for every sonnet as many poems as readers. A and B,
discussing _Westminster Bridge_ as they thought, would unwittingly
be discussing two different things. For some purposes, for the
disentanglement of some misunderstandings, it is convenient
to define a poem temporarily in this manner.
To define the poem as the artist’s experience is a better solution.
But it will not do as it stands since nobody but the artist has
that experience. We must be more ingenious. We cannot take any
single experience as the poem; we must have a class of more or
less similar experiences instead. Let us mean by _Westminster
Bridge_ not the actual experience which led Wordsworth on
a certain morning about a century ago to write what he did, but
the class composed of all actual experiences, occasioned by the
words, which do not differ within certain limits from that experience.
Then anyone who has had one of the experiences comprised in the
class can be said to have read the poem. The permissible ranges
of variation in the class need (of course) very careful scrutiny.
To work them out fully and draw up a neat formal definition of
a poem would be an amusing and useful occupation for any literary
logician with a knowledge of psychology. The experiences must
evidently include the reading of the words with fairly close
correspondence in rhythm and tune. Pitch difference would not
matter, provided that pitch relations were preserved. Imagery
might be allowed to vary indefinitely in its sensory aspect but
would be narrowly restricted otherwise. If the reader will run
over the diagram of a poetic experience given in Chapter XVI
and consider in what respects his and his friends’ experiences
must agree if they are to be able to refer to them indifferently
as though they were one and the same without confusion or misunderstanding,
he will see what kind of thing a detailed definition of a poem
would be.
This, although it may seem odd and complicated, is by far the
most convenient, in fact it is the only workable way of defining
a poem; namely, as a class of experiences which do not differ
in any character more than a certain amount, varying for each
character, from a standard experience. We may take as this standard
experience the relevant experience of the poet when contemplating
the completed composition[75].
Anyone whose experience approximates in this degree to the standard
experience will be able to judge the poem and his remarks about
it will be about some experience which is included in the class.
Thus we have what we want, a sense, namely, in which a critic
can be said to have not read the poem or to have misread it.
In this sense unrecognised failures are extremely common.
The justification for this outbreak of pedantry, as it may appear,
is that it brings into prominence one of the reasons for the
backwardness of critical theory. If the definition of a poem
is a matter of so much difficulty and complexity, the discussion
of the principles by which poetry should be judged may be expected
to be confused. Critics have as yet hardly begun to ask themselves
what they are doing or under what conditions they work. It is
true that a recognition of the critic’s predicament need not
be explicit in order to be effective, but few with much experience
of literary debate will underestimate the extent to which it
is disregarded or the consequences which ensue from this neglect.
The discussions in the foregoing chapters are intended as no
more than examples of the problems which an explicit recognition
of the situation will admit and of the ways in which they will
be solved.
[75] Difficulties even here arise, e.g. the poet may be dissatisfied
without reason. Coleridge thought _Kubla Khan_ merely ‘a
psychological curiosity’ without poetic merits, and may have
been justified in some degree. If he was not, it is his dream
experience which we should presumably have to take as our standard.