Matthew Arnold once advised people who wanted to know what was good poetry
not to trouble themselves with definitions of poetry, but to learn by
heart passages, or even single lines, from the works of the great poets,
and to apply these as touchstones. Certainly a book like Mr. Cowl's
_Theory of Poetry in England_, which aims at giving us a representative
selection of the theoretical things which were said in England about
poetry between the time of Elizabeth and the time of Victoria, makes one
wonder at the barrenness of men's thoughts about so fruitful a world as
that of the poets. Mr. Cowl's book is not intended to be read as an
anthology of fine things. Its value is not that of a book of golden
thoughts. It is an ordered selection of documents chosen, not for their
beauty, but simply for their use as milestones in the progress of English
poetic theory. It is a work, not of literature, but of literary history;
and students of literary history are under a deep debt of gratitude to the
author for bringing together and arranging the documents of the subject in
so convenient and lucid a form. The arrangement is under subjects, and
chronological. There are forty-one pages on the theory of poetic creation,
beginning with George Gascoigne and ending with Matthew Arnold. These are
followed by a few pages of representative passages about poetry as an
imitative art, the first of the authors quoted being Roger Ascham and the
last F.W.H. Myers. The hook is divided into twelve sections of this kind,
some of which have a tendency to overlap. Thus, in addition to the section
on poetry as an imitative art, we have a section on imitation of nature,
another on external nature, and another on imitation. Imitation, in the
last of these, it is true, means for the most part imitation of the
ancients, as in the sentence in which Thomas Rymer urged the
seventeenth-century dramatists to imitate Attic tragedy even to the point
of introducing the chorus.
Mr. Cowl's book is interesting, however, less on account of the sections
and subsections into which it is divided than because of the manner in
which it enables us to follow the flight of English poetry from the
romanticism of the Elizabethans to the neo-classicism of the eighteenth
century, and from this on to the romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge,
and from this to a newer neo-classicism whose prophet was Matthew Arnold.
There is not much of poetry captured in these cold-blooded criticisms, but
still the shadow of the poetry of his time occasionally falls on the
critic's formulae and aphorisms. How excellently Sir Philip Sidney
expresses the truth that the poet does not imitate the world, but creates
a world, in his observation that Nature's world "is brazen, the poets only
deliver a golden!" This, however, is a fine saying rather than an
interpretation. It has no importance as a contribution to the theory of
poetry to compare with a passage like that so often quoted from
Wordsworth's preface to _Lyrical Ballads_:
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in
tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of
reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion,
kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is
gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
As a theory of poetic creation this may not apply universally. But what a
flood of light it throws on the creative genius of Wordsworth himself! How
rich in psychological insight it is, for instance, compared with Dryden's
comparable reference to the part played by the memory in poetry:
The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in the
poet ... is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer,
which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field
of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after.
As a matter of fact, few of these generalizations carry one far. Ben
Jonson revealed more of the secret of poetry when he said simply: "It
utters somewhat above a mortal mouth." So did Edgar Allan Poe, when he
said: "It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild
effort to reach the beauty above." Coleridge, again, initiates us into the
secrets of the poetic imagination when he speaks of it as something
which--
combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness,
tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human
feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its
principle and fountain, which is alone truly one.
On the other hand, the most dreadful thing that was ever written about
poetry was also written by Coleridge, and is repeated in Mr. Cowl's book:
How excellently the German _Einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime
and loftiest faculty, the power of coadunation, the faculty that
forms the many into one--_Ineins-bildung_! Eisenoplasy, or
esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, either
catoptric or metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and,
again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will.
The meaning is simple enough: it is much the same as that of the preceding
paragraph. But was there ever a passage written suggesting more forcibly
how much easier it is to explain poetry by writing it than by writing
about it?
Mr. Cowl's book makes it clear that fiercely as the critics may dispute
about poetry, they are practically all agreed on at least one point--that
it is an imitation. The schools have differed less over the question
whether it is an imitation than over the question how, in a discussion on
the nature of poetry, the word "imitation" must be qualified. Obviously,
the poet must imitate something--either what he sees in nature, or what he
sees in memory, or what he sees in other poets, or what he sees in his
soul, or it may me, all together. There arise schools every now and
then--classicists, Parnassians, realists, and so forth--who believe in
imitation, but will not allow it to be a free imitation of things seen in
the imaginative world. In the result their work is no true imitation of
life. Pope's poetry is not as true an imitation of life as Shakespeare's.
Nor is Zola's, for all its fidelity, as close an imitation of life as
Victor Hugo's. Poetry, or prose either, without romance, without
liberation, can never rise above the second order. The poet must be
faithful not only to his subject, but to his soul. Poe defined art as the
"reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of
the soul," and this, though like most definitions of art, incomplete, is
true in so far as it reminds us that art at its greatest is the statement
of a personal and ideal vision. That is why the reverence of rules in the
arts is so dangerous. It puts the standards of poetry not in the hands of
the poet, but in the hands of the grammarians. It is a Procrustes' bed
which mutilates the poet's vision. Luckily, England has always been a
rather lawless country, and we find even Pope insisting that "to judge ...
of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rules is like trying a man by the laws of
one country who acted under those of another." Dennis might cry: "Poetry
is either an art or whimsy and fanaticism.... The great design of the arts
is to restore the decays that happened to human nature by the fall, by
restoring order." But, on the whole, the English poets and critics have
realized the truth that it is not an order imposed from without, but an
order imposed from within at which the poet must aim. He aims at bringing
order into chaos, but that does not mean that he aims at bringing
Aristotle into chaos. He is, in a sense, "beyond good and evil," so far as
the orthodoxies of form are concerned. Coleridge put the matter in a
nutshell when he remarked that the mistake of the formal critics who
condemned Shakespeare as "a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful
monsters," lay "in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic
form." And he states the whole duty of poets as regards form in another
sentence in the same lecture:
As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is
even this that constitutes its genius--the power of acting
creatively under laws of its own origination.
Mr. Cowl enables us to follow, as in no other book we know, the endless
quarrel between romance and the rules, between the spirit and the letter,
among the English authorities on poetry. It is a quarrel which will
obviously never be finally settled in any country. The mechanical theory
is a necessary reaction against romance that has decayed into windiness,
extravagance, and incoherence. It brings the poets back to literature
again. The romantic theory, on the other hand, is necessary as a reminder
that the poet must offer to the world, not a formula, but a vision. It
brings the poets back to nature again. No one but a Dennis will hesitate
an instant in deciding which of the theories is the more importantly and
eternally true one.