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THE ATTITUDE QF THE NEW CRITICS
TOWARDS SHELLEY

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THE ATTITUDE OF THE NEW CRITICS

TOWARDS SHELLEY

BY

NANCY JANE BURKE

w

A THESIS

Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies of Michigan
State College of Agriculture and Applied Science
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF AR TS

Department of English

1952

THESIS

 

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Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

PREFACE

The aim of this thesis is simple; it is to illustrate the
attitude of the so-called New Critics towards Shelley. It is to
show that among the ultramoderns Shelley is not admired be-
cause Shelley pays no attention to the aspects and functions of
poetry favored by the New Critics. The thesis points out what
these aspects and functions are. And it aims to show that, by
the standards held by the New Critics, Shelley is a bad poet.

The method of this thesis is also simple; it is to give
a few general statements in the introduction concerning the
critical and the poetical standards of the New Critics and why
Shelley falls short of their standards. Then, the method is to
devote a special chapter to each of the thirteen New Critics
that I have chosen to write about in the thesis. I will show
why each of these men object to Shelley. I will quote specific
passages about Shelley from their own works. Sometimes I
will quote from personal letters that the New Critics have re-
cently written to me concerning their present attitude towards

Shelley. The conclusion summarizes the over-all opinion of

the New Critics towards Shelley.

iv
My sincere thanks go out to Dr. Carson C. Hamilton,
who patiently directed this work, to Doctors Anders Orbeck
and Claude M. Newlin, who helped with it, to all the New Crit-
ics that contributed personal letters to it, to my husband, who
typed it, and to Mother Laura Keeler of San Francisco College
for Women, who inspired it and prayed for it.
Nancy Jane Burke

Lansing, Michigan
December, 1951

TABLE OF

CHAPTER
I. Introduction . . .

II. T. E. Hulme . . .

III. T. S. Eliot . . .

IV. F. R. Leavis .

V. Rene Wellek .

VI. Leavis Again . . .
VII. Martin Turnell . .
VIII. 1. A. Richards . .

IX. William Empson . .

X. Cleanth Brooks .
XI. John Crowe Ransom
XII. Allen Tate . . . .
XIII. Elder Olsen . . .
XIV. Robert Stallman .
XV. R. P. Blackmur . .
XVI. Conclusion .

NOTES . . . . . . .

BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . .

CONTENTS
Page

. . . . . . 1
. . . . . 5
. . . . . . 9
. . . . . . 18
. . . . . . . 28
. . . . . . . 35
. . . . . . 38
. . . . 43
. . . . . . 50
. . . . . . . 60
. . . . . . 71
. . . . . 76
. . . . . . 88
. . . . . . . 90

........100

.......108

........111

.........129

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

Through T. E. Hulme's writing prior to 1914,1 T. S.

Eliot's Sacred Wood of 1920, and I. A. Richards' critical ap—

 

proach, our age has established a radical revision of the whole
history of English poetry. Its criticism has, in our age, ac-
complished a critical revaluation, as Cleanth Brooks contends,
of the order of the Romantic revolt.Z T. S. Eliot's criticism
is the first full revaluation of poetry since Arnold's ”Essays
in Criticism" of 1865.3 His revolt against the conception of
poetry and criticism as defined by the Romantics continues

in the criticism of F. R. Leavis (whose approach also owes
much to I. A. Richards), in that of Allen Tate (who is indebted
to Hulme), in that of John Crowe Ransom (whose critical ideas
are close to those of Allen Tate), and in that of Cleanth Brooks
(who is indebted not only to T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards but
to Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and others). Their criti-
cism resurrects the metaphysicals and thoroughly repudiates

the romantics. Donne becomes their favorite poet; Shelley,

2
because he represents most fully the vices of romanticism, be-
comes the most adversely criticized poet of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Also, in the general attack on Shelley by the New Critics,
there has been almost a solid front of agreement.

These ultramoderns cannot admire Shelley. They are
interested in aspects and functions of poetry to which Shelley
pays no attention. What are these aspects and functions? The
key phrase that answers that question is modern sensibility.

When modern sensibility demands that poetry shall deal
with the actual world, the phrase means something very differ-
ent from what it meant one hundred and fifty years ago. To
men now it means the world as it presents itself to average
perception in a culture that has been thoroughly imbued with
the positivistic temper. Modern sensibility meets the problem
of belief by using a positivistic view of the world to adumbrate
nonpositivistic values. It is skeptical of all large syntheses
based on faith, indeed of all large syntheses whatsoever. It
shuns commitments; if it makes them, it wants to know thor-
oughly what it is letting itself in for. It is suspicious of pro-
nounced rhythms in verse. It wants its poetry developed, not

by explicit statement, and not by a flood of images each relevant

at only one point, but by the developed image, a large image
firmly held, displaying point after point of relevancy. It dis-
likes metaphors within metaphors. Above all, it wants no sim-
plification or purification of experience in the interests of al-
1eged beauty or of an alleged higher truth. It insists that since
the experience of the actual world is always a complex of the
pleasant and the disgusting, of the beautiful and the ugly, of
the attractive and the repulsive, poetry must hold the discor-
dant elements together, not allow them to separate. Poetry
must operate through Irony, Paradox, and Understatement.
Modern criticism maintains that by these standards
Shelley is a bad poet. He is sentimental; that is, he calls
for a greater display of emotion than the modern reader feels
to be warranted by the occasion. He employs pronounced, in-
toxicating, hypnotic rhythms that seem to be trying to sweep
the reader into hasty emotional commitments. He seldom uses
a firmly-held developed image but pours out a flood of images
which one must grasp momentarily in one aspect and then re-
lease. He is fond of figures within figures. He imposes his
will on the object of experience: He does not explore reality;

he flies away from it. He seldom takes a gross, palpable,

4
near-at-hand object from the world of ordinary perception and
holds it for contemplation: His eye goes up to the sky, he
starts with objects that are just on the verge of becoming in—
visible or inaudible or intangible and he strains away even from
these. He exhibits dissociation of sensibility: though he is even
too much aware of the disgusting, the ugly, the painful, and the
horrible, he puts all the beauty into one poem and all the ugli-
ness into another, or he sorts them out in different portions
of the same poem. He luxuriates in emotion. He embarrasses
the reader by representing himself as weak, frail, bowed, bleed-
ing, fainting and dying.

Such is the general critical attitude of the New Critics
towards Shelley. Now let us turn to the critic T. E. Hulme
first because Hulme is the unacknowledged Father of the New

Critics.

CHAPTER II
T. E. HULME

I want to maintain that after a hundred years of
romanticism, we are in for a classical revival, and the
particular weapon of this new classical spirit, when it
works in verse, will be fancy. And in this I imply the
superiority of fancy--not superior generally or absolutely
for that would be obvious nonsense, but superior in the
sense that we use the word good in empirical ethics--good
for something, superior for something.

Those were the words of T. E. Hulme around 1914; and
his prediction that there would be a "swing to the classical
tradition in literature" proved true.

Hulme regarded romanticism as “an awful disease from
which France had just recovered."2 Romanticism made the
revolution. He thought that if one hates the revolution, he must
hate romanticism. Then Hulme defined the romantic, or ro-

mantic is m:

People of all classes, people who stood to lose by
it were in a positive ferment about the idea of liberty.
There must have been some idea which enabled them [the
romantics] that something positive could come out of so
essentially negative a thing. There was, and here I get
my definition of romanticism. They had been taught by
Rousseau that man was by nature good, that it was only
bad laws and customs that had suppressed him. Remove
all of these and the infinite possibilities of man would have
a chance. This is what made them think that something
positive could come out of disorder, this is what created
religious enthusiasm. Here is the root of all romanticism:
that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possi-
bilities; and if you can rearrange society by the destruction
of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a
chance and you will get Progress.

Put shortly, according to T. E. Hulme, the romantic and
the classical are two views then. And they are opposite views.
One view is that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circum-
stance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited but disci-

plined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To

the one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a
bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir
full of possibilities, he called romantic; the one which regards
him as a very finite and fixed creature, Hulme called the clas-
sical.

Shelley, Hulme wrote, is a romantic, because he thinks
man infinite, must always be talking about the infinite; and as
there is always the bitter contrast between what you think you
ought to be able to do and what man actually can, it always
tends, in its later stages to be gloomy.

Hulme gave this as his reason for the return to clas-
sicism: Art, like organic life, after a definite period of life,
grows old and decays and dies. The writers and readers are
wearied by the old poetical forms; and now they look for a dif-
ferent poetical form to play with--namely dry hard classical
verse from ‘which the infinite is excluded. They, the readers
and writers, look for fancy instead of imagination, wit instead
of idle imagery, sense instead of emotion.

He admitted the greatness in some of the works of the
romantics but in general he said: "I object even to the best of

the romantics. I object still more to the receptive attitude. I

8
object to the sloppiness which doesn't consider that a poem is
7

a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something."

Shelley fits in here.

CHAP TER III

T. S. ELIOT

T. S. Eliot, along with T. E. Hulme, writes against much
of the romantic poetry, and Eliot writes much of the adverse
criticism directed against Shelley in particular.

Some of the things that Eliot objects to in Shelley are
the childish and feeble beliefs that were held by Shelley and
that Shelley put into his poetry. According to Eliot, Shelley's
view of life is not coherent, mature, and well-founded on the
facts of experience. To give an exaggerated example of this,
Shelley was inclined to put a belief like "All that glitters i_s
gold" into his poems. This childish, unsound conception of
life, says Eliot, is apparent in most of Shelley's poetry. Be-
sides that, says Eliot, Shelley's beliefs are irrelevant to the
poem as a whole.

Yet, Eliot enjoys a poem that expresses a doctrine or
belief (I) if that doctrine or belief is sensible, and (2) if that

doctrine or belief is an intrinsic part of the poem and not just

10
an added thought that the poet (Shelley in this case) wanted to
put into the poem to propagate a belief or doctrine.

Eliot says that a work of art is autotelic. It possesses
a life of its own which is distinct from the biography of the
poet and also from any beliefs he expresses. A poem is sup—
posed to be an impersonal thing. The reader is not supposed
merely to extract the ideas of a poem, but he is supposed to
read and enjoy the poem as a whole--not just for its theology,
morals, or philosophy. The reader is not supposed to be think-
ing of whether or not he believes what a poet is saying in a
poem. If the question of belief arises, says Eliot, then, ”We
have ceased to be readers and have become astronomers, the—
ologians or moralists [or, as Cleanth Brooks adds, economists],
persons engaged in quite a different type of activity."1 When
we read Shelley, though, says Eliot, his ideas are so insipid
that the reader is distracted from the poem as a whole; there-
fore, the reader's enjoyment is hampered, and the poet's work
is not a piece of art.

Dante and Lucretius, continues Eliot, used their poetic
gifts to propagate a doctrine, but their beliefs were sensible;

he does not admit that he accepts the doctrines of the ancient

11
poets, but he grants that he enjoys their poems. He enjoys
their poems or works of art because they are autotelic; that
is, all of the parts of their poems are necessary parts of the
whole poem. This is not the case when he reads Shelley.

The following quotations from Eliot's various critical
works illustrate his attitude towards Shelley:

I suggest that the position is somewhat as follows.
When the doctrine, theory, belief or "view of life" pre-
sented in a poem is one which the mind of the reader can
accept as coherent, mature, and founded on facts of experi-
ence, it interposes no obstacle to the reader's enjoyment,
whether it be one that he can accept, or deny, approve or
deprecate. When it is one which the reader rejects as
childish or feeble, it may for the reader set up an almost
complete check.

The ideas of Shelley seem to me to be ideas of
adolescence . . . as there is every reason why they should
be. And an enthusiasm for Shelley seems to me also to
be an affair of adolescence: for most of us, Shelley has
marked an intense period before maturity, but for how many

does Shelley remain the companion of age?

12

I find his ideas repellent; and the difficulty of sep—
arating Shelley from his ideas and beliefs is still greater
than with Wordsworth.3

Shelley borrowed ideas, which is perfectly legiti-
mate . . . but he borrowed shabby ones, and when he got
them he muddled them up with his own intuitions.

It is not that Shelley is deliberately making use of
his poetic gifts to proPagate a doctrine; for Dante and Lu-
cretius did the same thing. Our distaste for Shelley's po-
etry is not attributable to irrelevant prejudices or to a
simple blind spot, but is due to a peculiarity in the poetry
and not in the reader.

But some of Shelley's views I positively dislike,
and that hampers my enjoyment of the poems in which
they occur.6

Dante and Lucretius propagate doctrines, but their
doctrines do not stand in the way of critical sensibility.
They do not place an illegitimate dependence on the possible
scientific truth of their doctrine. To the beliefs of Dante

or Lucretius the critic is able to give, if not his philo-

sophical belief, at least his poetic assent.

13

The critic's concern is not with the beliefs as held but

 

with the beliefs as felt. Shelley's beliefs are not felt as an

integral part of the whole poem, consequently they get in the
way. They are so repellent to T. S. Eliot that he finds Shel-
ley's poetry to be "almost unreadable.”

Shelley's rejection by all the New Critics is not only
on the grounds of his illegitimate assertions of "scientific
truths," his untenable beliefs (beliefs which are foolish and

. . 8 . . .
therefore make his poetry foolish), his escapist sentimental-
ism and "romantic irony," his didactic or Platonic heresy;
Shelley is rejected, and similarly Milton, because he is a bad
influence, and could only be an influence for the worse, upon

9

any poet whatever.

Eliot objects again to Shelley because Shelley has only

, 10

a vague grasp of the world of common perceptions. Shel-
ley's poetry presents no object; there is nothing grasped at
its core. "Shelley at his best and worst offers the emotion
. . . . 11 . .
in itself, unattached 1n the v01d.” Ehot has said the same
thing about Swinburne: "When you take to pieces any verse

of Swinburne, you find always that the object was not there

. . . only the word.” Eliot adds:

14

In Swinburne the meaning and the sound are one
thing; in Shelley content and music are separate. The dic-
tum that "The bad poet dwells partly in a world of objects
and partly in a world of words, and he never can get them

to fit," can be applied to Shelley.12

Eliot rejects Shelley again in his essay on Crashaw,

where he destroys the analogy between Crashaw and Shelley.
Shelley, he says, "keeps his images on one side and his mean-
ings on the other." The critic struggles to grasp something

real in The Triumph 9_f Life. However, in a letter to me Car-

 

los Baker states that T. S. Eliot's opinion is quite positive to-

wards The Triumph gf Life. Baker writes:

 

The attitude of the "New Critics" on Shelley is
chiefly derogatory and chiefly directed against a few of
the lyrics. You might want to know thought, that T. S.
Eliot, when I talked to him briefly on the matter about
1947 (and whose essay on Shelley and Keats has been very
influential in modern criticism directed against these two)

14
said he thought The Triumph of; Life a very great poem.

 

The mechanism of sensibility Eliot discovers in the

seventeenth century metaphysicals could devour all kinds of

15
experience, intellectual as well as emotional. Emotion is the
single quality Eliot isolates in Shelley's poetry. He thinks
that Shelley thought and felt by starts. Except for one or two

passages in The Triumph 511; Life, wherein Eliot finds "traces

 

of a struggle toward unification of sensibility," Eliot regards

Shelley's The Triumph of Life, his last and unfinished poem,

 

as his greatest. There is evidence, says Eliot, not only of
better writing than in any previouslong poem, but of greater
wisdom. There is precision of image and an economy here
that is new to Shelley.16

Nevertheless, Eliot's theory of poetry is the basis of
F. R. Leavis' attack: "feeling in Shelley's poetry is divorced
from thought."l7 Eliot's theory of poetry, like Santayana's
theory of poetry, differs from the Romantic-Symbolist Theory
of Art: Art as the expression of feeling.

The New Critics think that it is largely owing to the
Shelleyan conception of poetry that such poets as Dryden are
depreciated or neglected; it is due to a prejudice that Dryden's

material, the feeling out of which he built, is not poetic. (The

prejudice was also Arnold's.) Eliot takes Dryden's side in

16
this controversy. He asks what is unpoetic in the following
passage by Dryden:

All, all of a piece throughout!
Thy Chase had a beast in View;
Thy Wars brought nothing about;
'Tis well Old Age is out,
And time to begin a New.
He asks what is superior on intrinsically poetic merit about
the following lines from Shelley:
The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faith's empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream
Eliot continues:
It is easy to see why the second should appeal more readily
to the nineteenth, and what is left of the nineteenth under
the name of the twentieth century. It is not so easy to
see propriety in an image which divests a snake of "winter

weeds"; and this is a sort of blemish which would have

17
been noticed more quickly by a contemporary of Dryden
than by a contemporary of Shelley.18

A poet's emotion, according to Eliot, must have objecti-
fication in a "correlative."19 The correlative of Shelley's emo-
tion is not objective. Shelley's emotion, the New Critics agree,
exists in a void; he presents no object to which his emotion at-
taches; consequently his poems do not possess a structural
unity. For a poem possesses full structural unity only when
the poet achieves "objective correlatives" of his emotion. This
is Eliot's criterion of structure.

In spite of the numerous quotations gathered together
here from critical articles by T. S. Eliot, Eliot states in a
letter to me that he is afraid that there is nothing of his in
print which gives a fair presentation of his views about Shel-

ley.20

CHAPTER IV

F. R. LEAVIS

T. S. Eliot's revolt against the flaws in Shelley's poetry
continues in the criticism of F. R. Leavis.

Shelley comes off rather badly with Leavis too. Shelley
was an inferior poet, according to Leavis, because he did not
qualify his dogma with observation, his political poetry divorces
principles from particulars, his poetry fails through oversim-
plification. It is Platonic poetry; its Platonic world of ideas
fails to coincide with the original world of perception. Phys-
ical properties in Shelley's discourses are translatable at every
point into ideas; ideas in turn are general and abstract. Things
in Shelley's discourse have no substance.

Leavis thinks that Shelley's poetry makes no sense. He
thinks that there is nothing grasped in Shelley's poetry; that is,
Shelley's poetry is abstract and there is never any object of-
fered for contemplation.

Leavis has written an attack against Shelley in his _R_e_-

valuation. I shall summarize the case he makes against Shelley

19
in that critical essay. (1) Shelley represents preeminently the
divorce between thought and feeling, intelligence and sensibility,
that is characteristic of the nineteenth century. (2) Shelley has
only a vague grasp of the world of common perceptions.

This second point has been sufficiently established by
the New Critics. Leavis notes that the objects Shelley presents
in his poetry are not realized as objects in their own natures
and their own right. Therefore, Shelley's poetry is just plain
emotional.3 This final charge echoes Eliot.

Leavis does not think as highly of The Triumph _o_f_ Life

 

as Eliot does. Leavis says:
But in spite of the earnest struggle to grasp some-
thing real, the sincere revulsion from personal dreams and

fantasies, the poem itself [The Triumph o_f Life] is a drift-

 

ing phantasmagoria--bewildering and bewildered. Vision
opens into vision, dream unfolds within dream, and the
visionary perspectives, like those of the imagery in the

passage of Mont Blanc, shift elusively and are lost; and

 

the failure to place the various phases or levels of vision-
ary drift with reference to any grasped reality is the more

significant because of palpable effort. Nevertheless, The

20
Triumph pi Hf: is among the few things one can still read
and go back to in Shelley when he has become, generally,
"almost unreadable."5 [In the last sentence Leavis is
quoting Eliot.]

Leavis does not think much of the intelligence of the
reader that enjoys Shelley; Shelley's imagery, he asserts, de-
rives directly from sensory experience. The antipathy of his
sensibility to any play of critical mind, writes Leavis, results

in cheap surrenders to inspiration. The critic gives That Time

 

i_s Dead Forever, Child as an example of this. Shelley, says

 

Leavis, has a capacity for momentary self deception and in-
sincerities; he luxuriates in sentimentality, in emotion for emo-
tion's sake, in a pathos of self-regarding, and in directing at-
tention to his idealized self. Leavis gives Lines Written Amo_ng_

the Euganean Hills as an example of this. (The self-pity Leavis

 

detects in Shelley, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate define as
"romantic irony.") Shelley, continues Leavis, like Swinburne,
depends for his effects upon a suspension in the reader of the
critical intelligence. "His imagery feels right, the associations
work appropriately . . . one accepts the immediate feeling and

6
does not slow down to think." In the poetic surge of the Ode

21

To The West Wind, for example, writes Leavis, we let our-

 

selves be swept along without scrutinizing the elusive imagery,
the high-pitched emotions, the confusion between the metaphor-
ical and the actual, and the real and imagined, the inner and
the outer.7 Thinking in Shelley's creative act was at a mini-
mum. His critical intelligence was switched off. The Cloud
and _T_q a Skylark are products of switching poetry on. The
latter Leavis calls,
a mere tumbled out spate (spontaneous overflow) of poeti-
calities, the place of each one of which Shelley could have
filled with another without the least difficulty and without
making any essential difference. They are held together
by the pervasive "lyrical emotion," and that this should
be capable of holding them together is comment enough on
the nature of its strength.

His emotional intensity though it may make Shelley in-
toxicating at fifteen, makes him almost unreadable, except in
very small quantities of his best, to the mature.9 (Again Lea-
vis has repeated Eliot.) Leavis continues:

Even when he is in his own way unmistakably a

distinguished poet, as in Prometheus Unbound, it is

22
impossible to go on reading him at any length with plea-
9
sure . . .
Leavis and Eliot agree in many places over the flaws
in Shelley's poetry. Their positive criticism towards Shelley
. 10 . . .
amounts to very little. I believe that they would primarily
1
agree on the point that Shelley did not think before he sang. 1
Leavis also believes that Shelley counts for a great deal
in what is perhaps still the prevailing idea of "the poetical"--

the ideas that had their latest notable statement, as Leavis re-

marks, in Professor Housman's address, The Name and Nature

 

12
_o_f Poetry. If we honor Shelley we depreciate Dryden.
I have dealt with Leavis' attitude in general towards
Shelley. Now I will give a specific statement of Leavis' deal—

ing with one of Shelley's most popular poems, The Ode to the

 

West Wind. Leavis is especially acute in his criticism about

 

this poem. The following quotation will also illustrate the Lea-
vis critical method:
It will be well to start in fact by examining the
working of Shelley's poetry--his characteristic modes of

expression--as exemplified in one of his best poems.

23
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's
commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves
are shed,
Shook from the tangled bough of Heaven

and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are
spread
On the blue surface of thine aéry surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the
dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height
The locks of the approaching storm.
The sweeping movement of the verse, with the accompany-
ing plangency, is so potent that, as many can testify, it is

possible to have been for years familiar with the Ode-~to

 

know it by heart--without asking the obvious questions. In
what respects are "loose clouds" like "decaying leaves"?

The correspondence is certainly not in shape, colour or

24
way of moving. It is only the vague general sense of
windy tumult that associates the clouds and the leaves;
and, accordingly, the appropriateness of the metaphor
"stream" in the first line is not that it suggests a sur-
face on which, like leaves, the clouds might be "shed,"
but that it contributes to the general "streaming" effect
in which the inappropriateness of "shed"'passes unnoticed.
What again, are those "tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean"?
They stand for nothing that Shelley could have pointed to
in the scene before him; the "boughts," it is plain, have
grown out of the "leaves" in the previous line, and we are
not to ask what the tree is. Nor are we to scrutinize
closely the stream metaphor as developed: that "blue
surface" must be the concave of the sky, an oddly smooth
surface for a "surge"--if we consider for a moment. But
in this poetic "surge," while we let ourselves be swept
along, there is no considering, the image doesn't challenge
any inconvenient degree of realization, and the oddness is
lost. Then again, in what ways does the approach of a
storm ("loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves," "like

ghosts from an enchanter fleeing") suggest streaming hair?

25
The appropriateness of Maenad, clearly, lies in the perva-
sive suggestion of frenzied onset, and we are not to ask
whether her bright hair is to be seen as streaming out in
front of her (as, there is no need to assure ourselves, it
might be doing if she were running before a still swifter
gale: in the kind of reading that got so far as proposing
to itself this particular reassurance no general satisfaction
could be exacted from Shelley's imagery).
This is the kind of criticism we get from F. R. Leavis.
He shows us the Shelleyan "weak grasp upon the actual," the
"idealism" and "Platonism." Leavis thinks Santayana rates
Shelley's poetry too highly. Shelley's poetry is peculiarly emo-
tional. The point may be best made, perhaps, by continuing
the previous observation, "that one may have been long familiar

with the Ode _t_o_ the West Wind without ever having asked the

 

 

obvious questions"; questions that propose themselves at the
first critical inspection. This poetry induces--depends for its
success on inducing-—a kind of attention that does not bring
the critical intelligence into play: the imagery feels right, but

14
only a nonthinking reader can accept imagery such as that!

 

26
Leavis expressed his attitude towards Shelley in terms

of a representative analysis in Revaluation in 1936, and there

 

15
is nothing he wants to change or to add to that opinion today.

Shelley, according to Leavis, lacked another gift which
a good poet must possess. He lacked the ability to blend the
comic and the tragic within the same poem. (Dryden, says
Leavis, possessed the talent that was absent in Shelley.)16 Then,
the critic concluded that, because of this lack, Shelley's sensi-
bility was immature.

Leavis calls W. B. Yeats "naively romantic" because
Yeats admired parts of Shelley. Leavis also stated that some
of Yeats' poetry has "a fresh unliterary spontaneity comparable
to that of Shelley's."1.7

Students should study poets like Donne and others of the
seventeenth century, Leavis recommends. He is weary of the
time-honored way of telling a student to write an essay on
"Shelley the Poet of the Revolutionary Creed." This, he says,
is an enormous waste of time and spirit. The student should
be taught to make critical analyses of poems, such as, Keatsian

18
verse compared to Shelleyan verse. (Keats, remember, to the

New Critics, is a "paradox" of the nineteenth century.)

27
Leavis has one positive thing to say for Shelley. He

says: It is at any rate universally agreed that (to shift tact-
fully to positive terms) Shelley's genius was essentially lyri-

19

cal

 

CHAPTER V

RENE WELLEK

Rene Wellek can be called one of the New Critics; he

has not written so much of the anti-Shelleyan analytical criti-

 

cism; but he does go along with Leavis and Eliot in their atti- .. .
tude towards Shelley.

About fifteen years ago Wellek wrote a letter to Leavis.
One of his reasons for writing the letter was to tell Leavis he

thought him a little too harsh towards Shelley in his Revaluation.

 

It is important to remind the present reader of this,
that Wellek's words of fifteen years ago to Leavis do not rep-
resent his present opinion. Wellek continues to hold to this
opinion, but by no means does he believe today all that is in-
cluded in the letter.

It is salient to my thesis to include what Wellek said in
that letter so that the reader may understand clearly why Lea-
vis answered and what Leavis answered. Leavis' answer to the
letter I am about to discuss will appear in the following chap-

ter.

29
Wellek, in his letter, argued that Leavis ignored the
poetic thought or philosophy of Shelley and the other romantics.
He also stressed some doubts on some of Leavis' individual
points. Wellek writes:

Your analysis on the second stanza of the Ode to

 

the West Wind presses, I think, some of the metaphors too

 

 

hard. The comparison of loose clouds with the earth's de-
caying leaves does not seem to me merely vague and gen-
eral. A defense could suggest that the parallel can be made
plausible by imagining Shelley dying in his boat and seeing
the loose clouds the counterpart of the leaves swimming in
the stream or even seeing clouds mirrored in the water
together with the leaves. These are the "tangled boughs
of Heaven and Ocean," which I don't think could have been
suggested merely by the leaves, but rather allude to the
old mystical conception of two trees of Heaven and Earth
inte rwinding .
He continued that Leavis' stress on abundance of inspi-
ration on the part of Shelley seemed to be exaggerated. Wellek
said neither he nor anyone else can deny that a certain share

of the "unconscious" and "sudden inspiration" must be more

3O
prominent in a writer of songs such as Shelley. But, Wellek
agrees, Shelley overstressed the inspiration in the obvious re-
action the eighteenth-century ideas on composing poetry and in
answering Peacock's essay, which is written from a completely
rational point of View.

In reply to Leavis' statement that the opening paragraph

 

of Mont Blanc is confusing, Wellek objects: "I cannot see the L,

 

slightest confusion in the opening paragraph of Mont Blanc. It

 

states an epistemological proposition quite clearly."
Wellek agrees with Leavis for the most part in a later
section of the letter:
Characteristically: that is, Shelley's characteristic
pathos is self regarding, directed upon an idealized self in
the way suggested . . . This is patently so in some of his

best poetry; for instance, in Ode to the West Wind. Even

 

there perhaps, one may find something too like an element
of luxury in the poignancy (at any rate one's limiting crit-

icism of the Ode would move towards such a judgement);

 

and that in general there must be dangers and weakness
attending such a habit will hardly be denied. The poem

just examined (When the Lamp _1_s_ Shattered) shows how

 

 

“ain‘t..|...!i~.3l.l3. 1», .l (a- I.- ‘

‘

 

31
gross may be in Shelley, the corruptions that are incident.
He can make self-pity a luxury at such a level that the
conventional pathos of album poeticizing, not excluding the
banalities about (it is plainly so in the third stanza) the
sad lot of woman, can come in to gratify the appetite.

The abeyance of thought exhibited by the first three
stanzas now takes on a more sinister aspect. The switch-
ing off of intelligence that is necessary if the sentiments
of the third stanza are to be accepted has now to be in-
voked in the explanation of a graver matter--Shelley's
ability to accept the grosser, the truly corrupt, gratifica-
tions that have just been indicated. The antipathy of his
sensibility to any play of the critical mind, the uncongenial-
ity of intelligence to inspiration, these clearly go in Shel—
ley, not merely with a capacity for momentary self decep-
tions and insincerities, but with a radical lack of self-
knowledge. He could say of Wordsworth, implying the op-
posite of himself that

. . . . he never could

Fancy another situation

 

32
From which to dart his contemplation
Than that wherein he stood.
But, for all his altruistic fervers and his fancied capacity
for projecting his sympathies, Shelley is habitually-—it is
no new observation--his own hero: Alastor, Laon, The

Sensitive Plant.

 

(It loves, even like Love, its deep heart
is full,
It desires what it has not, the Beautiful)
And Prometheus. It is characteristic that he should say
to the West Wind
A heavy weight of hours has chained and
bowed
One too like thee: tameless, swift and
proud,
and conclude:
Be thou, Spirit fierce
My Spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Wellek would not like to defend When the Lamp .1_s__ S3131-

tered either. It seems to him a very poor poem in any case.

 

 

33
However, he thought Leavis makes the poem out worse than it
is. He makes a few corrections of Leavis' faulty understanding
of the poem.

The main point of Wellek's letter to Leavis was to prove
that Shelley's philosophy was unified and perfectly coherent.
Shelley, says Wellek, was an idealist in the truest sense of
the word: Shelley's conception of the world as a phenomenal
flux behind which the unreachable absolute ("the white radiance
of eternity") is only dimly perceived pervades also his imagery
and such symbols as the veils and streams, boats, caverns, the
gnostic eagles and serpents. Wellek continues:

Another characteristic of this idealism is one per-
vading characteristic of his style, which psychologists call
synaesthesia; i.e., the seeing of sounds and the hearing of
colors, which is not a mere idiosyncracy but is based on
a psychological type and appears in the poetry of many
ages, especially in the Baroque and Romantic ages.

Wellek maintained also that Coleridge's romantic view
of the world is found in Shelley's poetry. He concluded his

letter to Leavis with these words:

. o‘m_~:1:.-Jlu
_Il‘

 

34
Your book, or rather the very limited part I have
been discussing, raises anew the question of the poet's

belief and how far sympathy with this belief and cornpre-

 

 

hension of it are necessary for an appreciation of the

5
poetry.
In a letter to me, Wellek wrote:

I still hold the same opinions [as in his letter to

 

Leavis]: i.e., I would try to defend the coherence of Shel-
ley's thought and would reject what I would consider mis-
interpretations of-his text.7

In that letter to me Wellek rates Shelley thusly:

. . . As to ranking Shelley as a poet I would today
take a middle position: I would put Shelley below Blake,
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, but above Byron and
Scott. .I admire several small lyrics very highly as well

as some Odes such as Ode to the West Wind which is well

 

 

designed and perfectly coherent but I would have to make
only a small selection from his longer poems and consider

The Cenci a mere pastiche of Shakespeare. All this would

 

have to be argued at length . . .7

Such an attitude towards Shelley establishes Rene Wellek

as a New Critic.

CHAPTER VI

LEAVIS AGAIN

Leavis objects to Wellek's criticisms of the ”Shelley"

section of Revaluation. He objects on these grounds: Wellek

 

is a philosopher, and Leavis is a literary critic. According ,...

 

to Leavis, Wellek sees things in the light of philosophy while
Leavis sees things in the light of the aesthetic. Furthermore,
Leavis contends that there is a weakness in seeing such poets
as Blake, Wordsworth and Shelley as products of ”The Roman-
tic View of the World." These three poets, claims Leavis,
are so different from each other that they can hardly be es-
tablished as products of a similar philosophy.

When Wellek comes to Shelley he hardly makes any
serious show of sustaining his case against me, writes Leavis,
and the weakness of his own approach is clearly exposed. He
is so interested in philosophy that he pays no real attention to
my analysis of poetry. Then Leavis continues:

Take, for instance, his suggested interpretations of

points in the Ode to the West Wind: it is not merely that

 

36

they are it seems to me, quite unacceptable; even if they
were otherwise, they would make no analysis of the way
in which Shelley's poetry works. And why should Dr.
Wellek suppose that he is defending Shelley in arguing that
”the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean" may allude to
the "old mystical conception of the two trees of Heaven

and Earth interwinding”? Not that I attack the Ode to

 

the West Wind; I merely illustrate from it the character-

 

istic working of Shelley's poetry.1
In the Reply to Wellek, Leavis still maintains the open-

ing paragraph of Mont Blanc evokes with great vividness a state

 

of excited bewilderment and wonder.

Leavis writes Wellek's attention is elsewhere than on
Shelley's poetry and his analysis. Leavis is concerned with
poetry--not philosophy "coherent" or otherwise. He states:

If in reply to my charge that Shelley's poetry is repetitive,
vaporous, monotonously self-regarding, and often emotionally
cheap, and so, in no very long run, boring, Dr. Wellek tells
me Shelley was an idealist, I can only wonder whether some
unfavorable presumption has not been set up about ideal-

, 2
15m.

 

37
Therefore, all that Leavis wrote about Shelley in his

Revaluation still stands solidly as his attitude towards Shelley.

 

 

CHAPTER VII

MARTIN TURNELL

The work of Martin Turnell-“the leading associate of
Leavis' Scrutiny school, is likewise both technical and histor-

ical criticism--he and Leavis represent the two most impor-

 

tant critics in England today.1 Since Turnell is reputed to be
so closely associated with Leavis and Leavis' school, I shall
now discuss his attitude towards Shelley.

Turnell admires “impersonality” in poetry. But, he
says, only the best can achieve this: Rimbaud, for example,
gives us the emotion 33112 the situation from which it springs;
that is to say, there is an organic, and objective relation be-
tween the poem and the events which produced it. The emo-
tion is generated by the contemplation of the problem and it
therefore possesses that impersonality which only belongs to
the greatest poetry. But, continues Turnell, Shelley's poetry
gives us the emotion unattached to the object or events which

produced it. His poetry does not possess the impersonality

that Rimbaud's achieves.

39
Martin Turnell wrote an enlightening and interesting let-
ter to me. I believe that he establishes his position clearly as
to his attitude towards Shelley in this letter, which is quoted
entire:

Thank you for your letter of July 17th. I am afraid
that I cannot be of great help to you over Shelley, as my
field is French literature. The only time I have mentioned
him recently was in a lecture on Crashaw given to a body
called the Newman Association in January 1950. Here are
the relevant bits which have not been published, though the
rest of the lecture has. It was in a series called ”The
Spiritual Order in English Poetry" which explains the op-
ening attack!

"Twenty years ago the French critic, Charles Du
Bos, published the first part of a long study called Er

spirituel dans l'ordre littéraire. He explained that he had

 

used the word 'spiritual' in preference to 'spirituality' be-
cause ‘spirituality' is a state whereas the 'spiritual‘ is
'an element which cannot be grasped in itself, but which
can only be identified, apprehended in its manifestations.‘

He then went on to distinguish between the 'sublime' and

40
the 'spiritual.' The sublime, he said, was a 'climate'
which the writer had to maintain by a constant effort of
style. The spiritual was a 'breath,' and all the writer
had to do was to remain open on all sides to give it pas-
sage. Milton was sublime; Shelley spiritual: Corneille a
combination of the two.

"It is an ingenious and engaging theory--a theory
which could only have been formulated by a deeply religious
man and which is well calculated to impress other devout
minds who are more interested in a poet's message than
in the quality of his poetry. We must therefore ask our-
selves two questions. We must ask ourselves whether
these careful distinctions between the 'sublime' and the
'spiritual' really add anything to our appreciation of poetry
3.5. poetry. And we must ask ourselves whether there really
is anything in poetry which corresponds to Du Bos's 'spiri-
tual' or whether it is not after all a pious illusion.

"I confess that I have never greatly enjoyed Mil-
ton's poetry. The statement that he is 'sublime,' that he
always remains in the same 'climate'--a fact of which I

am sometimes only too keenly aware--does nothing to

“llfllbjltgti ur‘luilvfw u .1.) IIJI.
_ ,. . ..I n...u.H.,‘

41
increase my enjoyment or to overcome my dislike of the
heavy, Latinised vocabulary and of the monotonous rhythms.
If Shelley is an example of the 'spiritual,' I can only say
that I find his spirit intolerably garrulous and vague, and
could wish his away . . .

"I turn now to the second question. Poetry is a
human activity and is a record of human experience. The
poet's experience is naturally moulded by his beliefs, but
this is a very different thing from changing him into a
visionary who transmits to the reader a mysterious wind

blowing from another world. And when I am told that the

 

wind which blows through Shelley's 9:13 1:_o_ the West Wind
is a manifestation of the 'spiritual,' I suspect that the
critic is imposing a personal interpretation on the poet's
experience and investing it with a religious quality which
it does not in fact possess. In other words, he is writing
a fresh poem which is decidedly different from the one
Shelley wrote."

I hope this will be of some help to you and you can

c e rtainly quote me .

42
Needless to say, I do not like Shelley and have
seldom opened him since my days of study were over. I
particularly dislike his vague religiosity which seems to
have been largely responsible for his being greatly over-

rated, and I hate his verbiage.

CHAPTER VIII

I. A. RICHARDS

The eminence of I. A. Richards has been achieved mainly

by his critical approach. The achievement of Practical Criti-

 

c_i_§_r_n_ (1930) is such that it can hardly be canceled out by any
subsequent defections. It was the beginning of objective criti-
cism, the first organized attempt to stop theorizing about what
people get when they read a poem and find out. Its ultimate
aim is no less lofty a one than the general improvement of
literary appreciation.

I. A. Richards judges Shelley by his own standards. The
following is a summary of Richards' critical standards. He
believes that the one and only goal of all critical endeavors,
of all interpretation, appreciation, exhortation, praise or abuse,
is improvement in communication. This may seem an exag-
geration, says Richards; but it is true. The whole apparatus
of critical rules and principles is a means to the attainment
of finer, more precise, more discriminating communication.

There is, it is true, a valuation side to criticism. When we

44
have solved, completely, the communication problem, when we
have got, perfectly, the experience, the mental condition rele-
vant to the poem, we have still to judge it, still to decide upon
its worth. But the latter question nearly always settles itself.
Our prime endeavor must be to get the relevant mental condi-
tion and see what happens.

Immature readers, says I. A. Richards, accept Shelley
merely because Shelley is a tradition in the anthologies. Stu-
dents think because Shelley is famous he is good--the same is
thought about Milton. But this is not true. There cannot be
much doubt that when we know we are reading Milton or Shel-
ley, a great deal of our approval and admiration is being ac-
corded not to the poetry but to an idol.1

1. A. Richards' idea about the Problem of Belief is close
to T. S. Eliot's. For instance, Richards states that Shelley in

Prometheus Unbound has built his poem about definite beliefs

 

concerning the world. Ordinarily a reader can read and can
enjoy a poem without accepting the poet's beliefs. There is
some doubt whether one can enjoy Shelley as much as Dante

on this basis.

45

Richards stresses another opinion in his Practical Criti-

 

cism: that is, Shelley often forgot his readers. Shelley had a

 

sense or feeling about something but he did not communicate it
to the readers. Therefore, says Richards, Shelley had atrocious
manners.3 For instance, "Hail to thee, blithe Spirit, Bird thou
never wert," has little emotional effect upon the reader.

When Richards discusses the metaphor he writes that
the Elizabethans were far more widely skilled in the use of
the metaphor--both in utterance and in interpretation--than we
are, a fact which made Shakespeare possible. The eighteenth
century narrowed its skill down, defensively, to certain modes
only. The early nineteenth century, writers like Shelley, re-
volted against this and specialized in other modes. The later
nineteenth century and Richards' generation, he says, have been
recovering from these two specializations. That, Richards sug-
gests, is a way of reformulating the Classic-Romantic antithesis
which it would be interesting to try out.

Richards writes: Throughout the history of Rhetoric
(we find it in Shelley), the metaphor has been treated as a
sort of happy extra trick with words, an opportunity to exploit

the accidents with their versatility, something in place occasionally

46
but requiring unusual skill or caution. In brief, a grace or
ornament or added power of language, not in its constitutive
form. Sometimes, it is true, a writer will venture on specula-
tions that go deeper.

In Principles _o_f Literary Criticism (1928) Richards

 

 

comes to grips with Shelley's sensibility. Richards writes

that Shelley misunderstood the function of poetry. Shelley
thought it useful to convey his beliefs, his morality. The great-
est critics over the ages grant that poetry like all other arts

is written to delight and instruct. For instance, Richards
quotes a review that he says explains his opinion about Shel-
ley's sensibility excellently for him:

"It had been better had Shelley's £13221 remained
forever banned. It represents three hours of unrelieved,
agonising misery . . . What excuse is there for depicting
horrors such as these? There must be some, for a house
packed with literary celebrities fiercely applauded. If the
function of the theater is to amuse, then in the presenta-

tion of the Cenci it has missed its aim. If it is to in-

 

struct, what moral can be pointed for the better conduct

47
of our lives by a tragedy such as this? If Art be the
answer, the Art may well be sacrificed."

Again Richards states that Shelley misunderstood the function
of poetry:
We cannot read Shelley adequately while believing

all his views are moonshine. Read Prometheus Unbound

 

while holding that "the perfectibility of man is an unde-
sirable ideal" and that "hangmen are excellent things."
Shelley writes so well sometimes that one can hardly
know it is Shelley, explains Richards. .This occurs when Shel-
ley is musical. Richards continues this point:

In the second chorus of Hellas in the middle of the
second stanza the rhythm, tune and handling, though not the
meter, becomes uncharacteristic of Shelley. A fullness of
tone, a queer, gentle cadence, and a leisurely ease of move-
ment belong to the fifth and following lines:

A mortal shape to him

Was like the vapour dim

Which the orient planet animates with light;

Hell, Sin and Slavery came,

Like bloodhounds mild and tame,

48
Nor preyed, until their lord had taken
flight . . .
And this tone and movement are in clear contrast with the
fever, the impetuosity, the shrillness and rapidity of the
second stanza, or of the closing lines of the second:
The moon of Mahomet
Arose and it shall set:
While blazoned as on heaven's immortal
noon,
The Cross leads generations on.
Richards is derogatory about several of Shelley's great-

est and most popular poems: The Skylark, he says, is in bad

 

10
eminence in the textbooks; the same is true of the Ode to

 

The Nightingale;11 and, when we are through reading Adonais,

 

writes Richards, we are left with a strong emotional attitude
to accept Shelley's beliefs of immortality or survival.
Shelley's whole theory that "a poem is the very image
of life expressed in its eternal truth," is inferior because
Shelley fills us up with too much belief and too little poetry--
or as Richards puts it--too much sack and too little bread.

Poetry to Shelley, according to the New Critic, becomes the

49
necessary channel for the reconstitution of order. Richards
writes:

Eras that have produced no poetry that is remem-
bered have been as disorderly as ours. There are better
reasons, in the work of modern poets, to hope that a cre-
ative movement is beginning and that poetry, freed from a

mistaken conception of its limitations and read more dis-

 

cerningly than heretofore, will remake our minds and with
them our world. Such an extravagant estimate of power
was Shelley's. It has been the opinion of others with whom
we need not be ashamed to agree.

But Shelley was lacking in all the fundamentals of mod-
ern sensibility, and Richards condemns him for it. He also
condemns all of the academics who give Shelley unwarranted
attention in the classrooms. Such is the attitude held towards

Shelley by one of the most important of the New Critics.

CHAPTER IX

WILLIAM EMPSON

William Empson has been called the student of I. A.
Richards by John Crowe Ransom, a critic of critics. Richards,

according to Ransom, is a psychological critic, and Empson has

1
. —AI.____

followed, almost exactly, the critical approach of Richards.

In Seven Types of Ambiflity, Empson treats of the am-

 

 

biguity in Shelley. An ambiguity, according to Empson, in
ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a
rule witty or deceitful.l But Empson uses the word in an ex-
tended sense in his book.

An ambiguity of the fifth type occurs when the author
(Shelley in this instance), says Empson, is discovering his idea
in the act of writing, or not holding it all in his mind at once,
so that, for instance, there is a simile which applies to nothing
exactly, but lies half-way between two things when the author
is moving from one to another. This is at least ambiguous
in the sense that the reader is puzzled by it; but the defini-

tion does not assert that there would be alternative reactions

51
to the passage when completely grasped, or that the effect nec-
essarily marks a complex but integral state of mind in the
author.

This form of ambiguity was fairly common in the nine-
teenth century, states Empson; and there is an example in the
Shelley Skylark, about which Eliot started a discussion. Emp-

son agrees with Eliot when he summarizes quite neatly Eliot's L

 

ideas towards Shelley's ambiguity. Empson illustrates:
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill

delight,

Keen as are the arrows

Of that silver sphere,

Whose intense lamp narrows

In the write dawn clear,

Until we hardly see, we feel that it is

there.

52
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven
is overflowed.

Eliot wrote he did not know what the sphere was;

 

one would take it to be a star, as a matter of grammar.
But the simile goes tumbling on to the next verse; the bad

rhyme clear--there--air may serve as evidence of this.

 

This sphere is then the {922; both 31322 and Eta are
made fainter by the morning. There are two syntaxes

for the verse: "Your delight is as keen as are the ar-
rows of the sphere," and "though the arrows of the sphere
are so keen (as to carry a long way) yet even when we are
so far off as to be out of shot we still feel the presence
of beauty." The last line may mean: "we feel that your
delight is there for a long time, until, in fact, we can
hardly see you," or "whose lamp narrows till we can
scarcely be said to see it, till we can more truly be said

to feel that it is there." All these are well enough suited

53

to the first simile, in which the lark out of sight but still

 

audible as a series of silvery notes is compared to a star,
which is spherical and whose light is silvery, out of sight
in the daytime but still faintly sounding the music of the
3
spheres . . . etc. . . .
Although Empson agrees with much of Eliot's criticism,
nowadays Empson thinks "There is no need to be so puzzled
4
about Shelley."
Empson believes Shelley perhaps does not strike one as

keeping so sharp a distinction between the world he considered

real and the world from which he wrote poetry.5 The Skylark

 

is a series of images-~irrelated images says Empson; however,
he sees the poem as something more. Empson writes:
The poem was probably written under the influence

of Keats' Nightingale Ode, and for it to seem straight for-

 

ward one must hold the main tenets of the Romantics. The

 

Skylark is a precise symbol of Shelley's View of the poet;
it rises higher and higher, straight upwards, alone, always
singing, always in effort, till becoming exhausted somewhere
out of sight of the normal world it tumbles back in silence,

and resumes a humble, isolated, and invisible existence

 

 

 

 

 

 

54
somewhere in the middle of a field. But on to this view
of the bird as the symbol of spiritual life, which thinks of
it struggling and dying, is grafted another view which thinks
of it as outside human limitations; as free from pain and
the satiety which follows mortal ecstasy, and indeed, like

a nightingale, as immortal. From this point of view the

 

rising of the Skylark is an apotheosis of nature and unques-
tioned animal satisfaction (as at once more and less than
human, and so in either case free from our inadequacy),
which is shown either rising to Heaven, because nature is
superior to the complex and disorderly human processes
which apprehend it (the natural is divine), 93 _n_e_a_r_ i_t, that

is, rising to the stars or the moon, and so to one of the

 

crystalline spheres (the natural is perfect). Its song,
therefore, becomes something absolute, fundamental, out-
side time, and underlying all terrestrial harmony. (Surely
it was unappreciative of Mr. Eliot to call that extremely
, 6
packed lme "shabby.")
Another point Eliot has raised against Shelley is sus-

ceptible to the same sort of explanation, writes Empson. Here

 

 

 

55

Empson quotes Shelley's Hellas, and he echoes Eliot in the
lines following the poetry.

The world's great age begins anew,

The golden years return,

The earth doth like a snake renew

Her winter weeds outworn:

Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires

gleam,

Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

When Eliot said snakes do not renew their cast skins,
and do not cast them at the end of winter; and weeds are sup-
posed to mean garments of widows, or winter vegetation that
would rot in the spring, Empson agrees with him. He states
he agrees with what Eliot was saying at the time, and certainly
these meanings are not so much united as hurried on top of
each other, but it is, after all a pun, almost a conceit at the
same time the thought seems excessively confused; this muddle
of ideas clogging an apparently simple lyrical flow may be ex-
plained but not justified.7

Shelley, according to Empson, was excited when he wrote

poems like the Skylark; he was trying to translate his elated joy

'7

aw. 1
ha

 

 

 

56

in lyrical terms. He tried to hold and use the various ideas
that were in his mind. One might regard as an extreme case
of the transitional simile that "self woven" simile employed
by Shelley. When not being able to think of a comparison fast
enough he compares the thing to a vaguer or more abstract
notion of itself, or points out that it is its own nature, or that
it sustains by supporting itself. Again, Shelley seldom per-
ceived profitable relations between the two things, he was too
helplessly excited by one thing at a time, and that one thing
was often a mere notion not conceived in action or in an en-
vironment.

Empson believes that Shelley was a politically tragic

 

character. And he still is. It is not that he was just a

poetically tragic character. Says Empson:

 

It is clear that the view of the poet as outcast and
unacknowledged legislator, equally strong in Byron and
Shelley, puts him exactly in the position of the mythical
tragic hero. There is a subtler and less assertive ver-

sion of the myth in the favorite theme of Shelley and Keats,

that the poet obtains a vision of external extra-human beauty

 

"Y‘fi
|_

 

 

 

57

for an instant, by magic, at great cost,and then faints back

to the normal life of the world.9

An interesting letter from William Empson notes this

same View, 1 e., the controversy over Shelley is due to Shel-

ley‘s politics--not just his poetry. I quote part of Empson's

letter:

I think Eliot was wrong though convincing at
the time in saying that Shelley's opinions are nasty; I do
not see anything to object against them, and his hopes of

rapid improvement in the world were no sillier than hopes

felt at his time by solider characters. His ideas are not

difficult and muddled; they are the standard Enlightenment
ideas fizzed up very elegantly, and to call them necessarily
wrong seems to me a malignant view of world politics. That

they were absurdly remote when he thought they weren't

must now be agreed by all parties. What I do feel (agree-

ing with Eliot though disagreeing with his implied politics)
is that Shelley simply sounds very ugly; he uses the short
"i" which dogs the English language to the point of gabble.
It isn't my habit to danm a poet on such an unintelligent

ground, but I have been struck by it in my casual reading

 

 

 

58
recently; Saintsbury or some such fiftyyearago critic was
discussing the WONDERFUL BEAUTY OF SOUND in the
line

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar

from the imbecile poem which begins 9 WORLD 2 LIFE

 

2 TIME, and it struck me there must have been an impor-
tant change of sensibility of some kind; how could anybody
ever have thought that the slobbery bit of oral acrobatics
FRESH SPRING (of course teaching the language abroad
forces home on you the ugliness of what they have to learn)
could be thought beautiful sound? He squeaks and squeals;
and that went deep into his character too; but I don't think
there was anything else the matter with him. He has become
a queer field for off-scene politics; I remember in Tokyo in
1932 or so, with fierce police persecution of "liberal" stu-
dents, recommending someone to a job teaching English
literature, and my Japanese opposite number, and intelli-
gent practical mind, said "He may be a bit too advanced
for us here, you know; we have to look out for that." I

gather he doesn't like Shelley. If he had liked Shelley he

would have been a reliable type and might even have liked

 

 

59

Pearl Harbour . . . I promise you it (the anecdote) does
fit in somehow, it is what they call the "background" about
poor Shelley, and maybe he deserved it and maybe he didn't.

You get the same note a bit earlier in Shaw's John Bull's

Other Island when the British businessman says he com—

 

pletely sympathizes with idealists because he used to read

Shelley when he was a boy. This recurrent kind of inci-

dent is the real trouble about Shelley.

Yours sincerely
William Empson (5)

Not that a good deal of Shelley isn't very beautiful

indeed; if I was allowed to go ski-ing I would start reciting

Shelley about the snow automatically. I feel these remarks

now I look them over have a small-minded crosspatch qual-
ity but I was trying to say shortly what I think the real

quarrel is about. Politics are very complicated.

 

 

CHAPTER X

CLEAN TH BROOKS

Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate and
John Crowe Ransom are four of the New Critics that belong
to a group called the Southern Critics. They all object to
Shelley for rather similar reasons. Cleanth Brooks will be
dealt with in this chapter, with slight attention to Warren, while
Tate and Ransom and other Southern Critics will be taken up
in the two succeeding chapters.

One of the reasons for Cleanth Brooks' rejection of
Shelley is his untenable beliefs (beliefs which are foolish and
therefore make his poetry foolish), and those same beliefs
which give rise to his escapist sentimentalism and "romantic
irony," and his didactic or Platonic heresy. Shelley was a rev-
olutionary propagandist more than a poet, according to Brooks.
Some of the Marxist poets (though not all) have revived the old
allegorical didactic, or utilitarian, conception of the function of
poetry, whereby the truth of the poet's doctrine has everything

to do with the value of his poetry. Poetry which functions at

 

 

61
this level must be true or false, and any poet who refuses to
speak in these terms is forced into the isolation of the Ivory
Tower. But the dilemma of propaganda art on the one hand
and the Ivory Tower on the other, as Brooks points out, is a
false one. The dilemma which the Marxist critic and the poet
offer is rejected by Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and I.
A. Richards' account of the relationship of poetry to science.

Horace Gregory defends Shelley's propaganda art. He

says that Shelley's failures are not traceable to his use of

 

 

propaganda. But, answers Brooks, the characteristic fault of

 

Shelley's poetry is that it excludes on principle all but the
primary impulses-~that it cannot bear an ironical contempla-
tion. (Brooks' criterion is always Donne.) The same fault as

Shelley makes is seen today in the Anthology of Proletarian

 

Literature. The fault of such verse is its sentimentality and,

 

however revolutionary their economics, the aesthetic theory of
Marxist poets and critics is not revolutionary at all.

Brooks continues: But measured even by the principles
of a Marxist poet, Shelley comes off rather badly; he did not

qualify his dogmas with observation.

 

 

62.
In his Preface to Modern Poetry and the Tradition,
Brooks goes so far as to assert that one cannot participate
fully in the poetry of John Crowe Ransom, for example, and
continue to enjoy Shelley on the old basis. In an essay in
this volume, "Yeats: the Poet as Myth-Maker,“ Brooks com-
pares the poetry'of Yeats and Shelley. He writes:

If Yeats may appear to the reader to have fallen

wqm Eli-E": I'm”

into a mechanical determinism quite as rigid as the scien-
tific determinism which he tried to escape, and one which
is fantastic to boot, one should notice that Yeats allows a
considerable amount of free will. For each man of every
phase, there is 3 False Mask as well as a True Mask--a
course of action which is fatal for him to pursue as well
as a course he should pursue. Shelley, for example (like
Yeats, a man of phase 17 and "partisan propagandist, and
gregarious"), too often sought his False Mask and wrote
"phamphlets, and dreamed of converting the world."
Brooks says that his view of Shelley is not too far
from the view held by W. B. Yeats, not a New Critic, and a
poet frequently thought of as a romantic.4 Brooks is referring

especially to the attitude towards Shelley expressed in Yeats'

63

Autobiography. However, in an essay, Yeats says (and Brooks

 

agrees) that Shelley must have expected to receive thoughts and
images from beyond his own mind, just in so far as that mind
transcended its preoccupation with particular time and place,

for he believed inspiration a kind 9_f_ death; and he could hardly

 

 

have helped'perceiving that an image that has transcended par-
ticular time and place becomes a symbol, passes beyond death
as it were, and becomes a living soul. But, adds Brooks, one
notices Yeats' symbols form more than an exposition of the eso-
teric (like Shelley's): Yeats' symbols dramatize the emotional
relationships (not like Shelley's).5

In the New Critics' revised interpretation of English
literature the romantic movement obviously is to be classed
as an antiscientific revulsion, explains Brooks. It retreated
from the rationalistic, the ordered and the classified. But it
did not have the capacity to undo the damage done by Hobbes.
In a sense it understood that the issue was science, but its
reaction was confused. Hence we have on one hand Words-
worth's drivel about the botanist who would peek and botanize
on his mother's grave, and on the other, Shelley's attempt to

found a poetry of wonder and more of humanitarianism in the

 

. a!

 

64

latest findings of science.6 The movement was much centered
in the personal and the lyrical. It was a subjective thing--it
lacked wit and the dramatic.
Cleanth Brooks thinks Keats is a far better poet than
Shelley. Brooks argues:
One of the most striking evidences of the inaccuracy

of the traditional account of English poetry is seen in the

 

case with which Shelley and Keats are paired. I do not
mean to say that critics have not always been aware of
differences of poetic caliber. The traditional historian
hardly sees Shelley as a very unsatisfactory poet greatly
inferior to Keats, a more considered view must surely hold
him SQ.

Shelley is not merely guilty of poor craftsmanship
--slovenly riming, loosely decorative and sometimes too
gaudy metaphor. Consideration of the two poets on the
basis of tone and attitude will reveal more important dif-
ferences. Keats is rarely sentimental, Shelley frequently
so. Keats is too much the artist to risk Shelley's some-
times embarrassing declarations--"I die, I faint, I fail,"

or "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" Keats even

 

65
in his apprentice stage attempts to give his a restraining
form; he maintains his objectivity as in _T_q Autumn; he
attempts a qualifying self-irony as in the Ode to a Nigh -
, 7
ingale.

Shelley, measured by Brooks' favored poetry (the sym—
bolist-metaphysical poetry of Donne), is a bad poet. Brooks

charges that Shelley is sentimental, that he lacks proportion,

 

confuses the abstract generalization with the symbol, confuses l
propaganda with imaginative insight.
Brooks, along with the other New Critics, cannot excuse
Shelley for his multitude of poetic sins. Keats, says Brooks,
loves beauty for its own sake; whereas, Shelley loves and dic-
tates the moral and adorns it with beauty. Brooks cannot bear
the saccharine, lush imagery followed by the abstract--"Our
sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."

In the Well Wroug_ht_: Urn by Brooks, once again we have

 

the critic dealing with the problem of belief and the problem of
cognition in the works of Shelley. Brooks restates Eliot's tes-
timony concerning the difficulty with Shelley's beliefs: in read-
ing Shelley's poetry, certain statements, writes Brooks, explicit

or implied, because they are not properly assimilated to a total

 

66

context, wrench themselves free from the context, and demand
to be judged on ethical or religious grounds. The fault may,
of course, lie either with the poet or the reader: the poet
may fail by not dramatizing the statement; the reader may fail
by ignoring the context and considering the statement out of
the context.8

Brooks mentions a second misapprehension in the Ell
Wrought 252: Because the poet uses the language of a par-
ticular time (and with the language, the idealogy and the valu—
ations of a particular time), we may easily come to feel that
only in so far as we agree with the idealogy and valuations of
the time can we accept the poem. But this again is to mis-
conceive the functions of the various elements in a poem. It
is true, says Brooks, that we must know and understand the
ideas or beliefs in a poem; but, when we are forced by the
poet to accept the beliefs (as we are with Shelley), for our
own; then, we cannot only object to those ideas but we also
must object to the poet. In short, if we see that any item in
a poem is to be judged only in terms of its relation to the
total effect of the poem, we shall readily grant the importance

for criticism of the work of the linguist and the literary

 

67

historian, but we shall deny the heresy which reduces literature

to cultural history and this begets a critical relativism.
Brooks dislikes many of Shelley's poems; for instance,

he says, since a poem is to be judged by its coherence, sen-

sitivity, depth, richness, and tough-mindedness, one would con-

denm Shelley's Indian Serenade as sentimental in the proposi-

 

1
tions about love which it implies.

In a college textbook entitled Understanding Poetry by

 

Brooks and Warren, the introduction contains the following
statement:

There is real danger that the suggestion to the stu-
dent to look for beautiful objects in the poem will tend to
make him confuse the mention of beautiful or agreeable
objects in poetry with poetic excellence..

Some of the same confusions reappear in another

book. "These lyrics (Ode E the West Wind and 1'2 9;

 

Skylark) are characterized by a freshness and spontaneity,
beautiful figures of speech in abundance, melody, and an

unusually skillful adaptation of the form and movement of
the verse to the word and the idea. Their melodiousness

is sometimes compared with that of Shubert's music."

1“,

 

68
But in what, for example, does a beautiful compari-
son consist? The implication is that the beautiful compari-
son is one which makes use of beautiful objects. Again,
when a student has been given no concrete exposition of
the "adaptation of form and movement . . . to the word
and the idea" of a poem; and has received no inkling of
what the "idea" of a particular poem is, what is such a
statement expected to mean to him?11
Brooks and Warren there criticize the ambiguous explication
preceding Shelley's poems in some of the past and present
textbooks. They say that that sort of praise means nothing to
the student.

In the same textbook Brooks and Warren have more to
say about Shelley's poetry, about M, for instance, especially
the first two stanzas, which are used to illustrate the choice of
a wrong type of rhythm for a chosen subject. The coauthors
quote part of the poem:

Death is here, and death is there,
Death is busy everywhere,

All around, within, beneath

Above is death--and we are death.

 

69
Here, in _QSE't—hg then, the authors state, we have a case
in which the specific feeling stimulated by the jigging rhythm
tends to, contradict the response suggested by the ideas, images,
etc., of the poem. The poem is an unsuccessful poem because
12 '-

the parts do not work together--they are not properly related.

In this textbook Brooks and Warren also call Indian Sere-

 

nade a failure. Brooks' attitude today about that lyric is the

 

 

same as when he collaborated on Understanding Poetry.l3 After

 

giving considerable explication of the Indian Serenade in the

 

textbook, Brooks writes: The poet tells us outright that his
love is so intense that he is dying of it. But, continues Brooks,
some people die very easily--they are always dying over this
. . , 14

or that--always thmkmg they are dying. Shelley, to Brooks,
is "amusing," "disgusting," and juvenile when he makes such
statements as "I die!" We learn nothing about the poet except-
ing he lacks self-control, says Brooks. Any normal person that

reads the Indian Serenade does not get the emotion expressed

 

in the poem. Shelley merely tries to give an exotic and
remote atmosphere to the scene by assembling the conven-
tional exhibits of a "prettified" love affair, and by removing it

to a far-off romantic scene. Brooks illustrates his point further:

70
The student should notice that the question at issue
here is not whether Shelley felt "sincere" when he wrote
the poem, or whether Shelley ever had such an experience.
Even if Shelley had had such an experience justdescribed
in real life, that fact would have no relevance for the prob-
lem before us here. For what we have to determine is
this question: are the statements made by the lover in
this poem convincing to the reader? They are unconvinc-
ing and the poem, for the mature reader, is a sentimental
one. Sentimentality we may define as the display of more
emotion than the situation warrants. The poet has not in
this case properly prepared for the outburst of emotion.

This opinion about the Indian Serenade is consistent with

 

Brooks' other opinions about Shelley's poetry. Brooks believes

the Indian Serenade to be, however, a complete failure.1

 

7 .

CHAPTER XI

JOHN CROWE RANSOM

John Crowe Ransom (whose critical ideas are close to
those of Allen Tate) holds opinions about Shelley similar to
those of the other New Critics.

Of all modern literary critics Ransom sets the strict-
est bounds on literary criticism; criticism is limited to aes-
thetic and philosophical, not psychological, moral, or social
considerations. His standards are aesthetic and metaphysical.
Like Allen Tate, he sets out in systematic philosophical specu-
lations a conception of the essence of art. Like Leavis, he
looks for a body of trained literati having the authority of a
system of critical doctrine. Ransom is searching for the on-
tological critic. He points out:

The work of art in respect to its logical structure
is a formulation closely analogous to a scientific discourse
. . . But in respect to its texture, which is an incessant

and ubiquitous affair, it encourages its objects to resume

3')- IL...‘ 3 row. a"

m

 

72
their actual character as solids, and escape from the flat
state within the plane.

The crux of Ransom's position centers in the opposition
of science and poetry. Scientific poetry, poetry of the will,
didactic, moral, and Platonic poetry, is inferior poetry. Ran-
som rejects Shelley not only on the grounds of his illegitimate
assertion of “scientific truths" but also for his untenable be-
liefs (beliefs which are foolish and therefore make his poetry
foolish).2 For instance, Dante's beliefs are bold speculations
at which the accusing finger has pointed steadily for a long
time now, but substantively are better grounded, and methodo-
logically far more consistent, than Shelley's beliefs. That
consideration would enter into Ransom's preference of Dante
over Shelley. Shelley, Ransom says, serves actually as a text
for the really authoritative study of ideas.

Ransom calls Shelley's poetry Platonic poetry: Its
Platonic world of ideas fails to coincide with the original world
of perception. Physical properties in Shelley's discourses are
translatable at every point into ideas; ideas in turn are orna-
mented with physical properties. Things in Shelley have no

4
substance. Shelley writes the worst kind of Platonic poetry.

 

73
He is always feeling sorry for himself. Ransom summarizes
and repeats Tate's ideas:

Platonic Poetry is allegory, a discourse in things,
but on the understanding that they are translatable at every
point into ideas._ (The usual ideas are those which consti-
tute the popular causes, patriotic, religious, moral or so-

cial.) Or Platonic Poetry is the elaboration of ideas as

 

such, but in proceeding introduces for ornament some phys—
ical properties after the style of Physical Poetry; which is
rhetoric. It is positive when the poet believes in the effi-
cacy of the ideas. It is negative when he despairs of their
efficacy, because they have conspicuously failed to take
care ofvhim, and utters his personal wail
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

This is "Romantic Irony," which comes at occasional pe-
riods to interrupt the march of scientific optimism. But
it still falls under the category of Platonism; it generally
proposes some other ideas to take the place of those which
are in vogue.

Shelley is a sentimentalist. He seeks his own image

in nature, or the misguided moralist who seeks moral

74
enlightenment in nature; that is what nature is not capable of
giving him.

Then Ransom continues, Shelley's writing is an imita-
tion of Physical poetry, and not really a poetry. Platonists
practice their bogus poetry in order to show that an image will
prove an idea, but the literature which succeeds this delicate
mission does not contain real images but illustrations.

Shelley is compared to the metaphysicals by Ransom:

Clearly the seventeenth century had the courage of
its metaphors, and imposed them imperially on the nearest
things, and just as clearly the nineteenth century lacked
this courage, and was half-heartedly metaphorical, or con-
tent with similes. The difference between the literary qual—
ities of the two periods is the difference between the meta-
phor and the simile (it must not be admitted that this like
other generalizations will not hold without its exceptions).
One period was pithy and original in its poetic utterance,
the other was prolix and predictable. It would not quite
commit itself to the metaphor even if it came upon one.
Shelley is about as vigorous as usual when he says in

Adonai s:

_ ’ . "Walk-L11“

 

75

thou young Dawn
Turn all thy dew to splendour . . .
But the splendor is not the correlative of dew, it has the
flat tone of a Platonic idea, while physically it scarcely
means more than dew with sunshine upon it. The seven- 'F
teenth century would have said: "Turn thy dew, which is

water, into fire, and accomplish the transmutation of the

 

elements."7 b v
In spite of the fact that Ransom rejects Shelley's es-
capist sentimentalism and romantic irony, his didactic or Pla-
tonic heresy, Ransom still grants that Shelley is a great lyric
poet. As a matter of fact Ransom believes Shelley to be the
greatest musician in the English language. He writes:
If it will help at all I am ready to say that I think
of Shelley as the best musician of all the English poets,
and one with a wonderful flow of poetic language, and I
mean presently to study him. He is not popular with this

generation but I'd like to look into that for myself when

I can.

CHAPTER XII
ALLEN TATE

Allen Tate not only objects to Shelley; but he also ob-
jects to much of the positive criticism written on Shelley by
some of the scholars.

A. N, Whitehead, one of Shelley's most generous de-
fenders, evaluates Shelley's poetry on the basis of its idealistic,
Platonic philosophy of nature. Shelley's aesthetic intuitions
have the same validity as the abstract materialistic concepts
of orthodox scientific doctrine.l Whitehead's conception of
poetry is precisely the conception Allen Tate opposes. Their
critical position centers in the opposition of science and poetry.

Tate calls Shelley's poetry (a poetry of humanitarian-
ism founded on the latest findings of science) a poetry of the
will.2 A poetry of the will competes with science, falsifying
their real relationship. The poetry of the will is Platonic; it
is written in the interest of scientific, moral, or social ideas
apart from which it has neither existence nor significance. The

whole of the experience is ignored for one special aspect of

 

 

77
experience that is put to practical use. It is a one-sided po-
etry, because its primary direction is toward an oversimplifi-
cation of life. Shelley's "didactic" poetry is a direct descen-
dant of Spencer's allegorical mentality, the latest expression
of which is to be found in modern revolutionary propaganda
works. The will of the moral, or scientific, or social allegor-

ist is fundamentally of the same origin and purpose as the will

 

of the scientist. Poetry of the allegorical will, Tate contends,
is inferior both as science and as poetry.

Whitehead's conception of poetry attributes to poetry
functions of practical volition. He is under the illusion, ac-
cording to Tate and the New Critics, that Shelley's ideas are
what the scientist calls "truth." But such a poetics gives the
case away to the scientist; for, given the assumption that the
will of poetry and the will of science are the same will, it is
impossible not to believe in the superiority of the scientific
method: For the physical imagination of science is perfect,
Tate points out, whereas the physical imagination of poetry is
necessarily compacted of futile and incredible fictions, and
these fictions we rightly reject as inferior instruments of the

will. When the will tries to do the work of the imagination,

78
it fails, and only succeeds in doing badly the work of science.
The poet's will, because his instrument is not adequate to his
real purpose, becomes frustrated. The result is rhetoric, or
"the pseudo-explanation of unimagined material." (The real
explanation is that of explanatory science.) Shelley revolts
from Science, from Truth, from a cruel and Naturalistic world
that is indifferent to his desires. He defies the world of sci-
ence to break him if it can. This moral situation, transferred
to the plane of the lyric, becomes "romantic irony": The
poet's self-pity upon the rack of science. "I fall upon the
thorns of life! I bleed!" Shelley's will is broken, frustrated
by inhospitable Truth, continues Tate.4 The weakness of such
poetry is its sentimentality; its emotions are undisciplined by
the structure of events or ideas of which they are a part. Its
perceptions are, according to Tate, predigested and "truths"
are attached to them--truths that are instructions to the reader
to "respond" in a certain way to the poetical object, which is
the "stimulus." And in the great body of nineteenth century
lyrical poetry--whose worst ancestor was verse of the type of
Shelley's "I arise from dreams of thee"--the poet's personal

5
emotions became the "poetic stimulus." Contrary to Whitehead,

 

79
who believes that Shelley had a surer grasp of reality than the
scientists themselves, Tate argues that there is but a vague
grasp of the "real" world in Shelley and most nineteenth cen-
tury romantic verse. Their difference is their point of view,
Tate's being aesthetic. Tate explains:

There is a surer grasp of the totality of the expe-

 

rience in Wyat's _T_o_ His Lute than in Shelley's Adonais.

 

 

This is the center of the problem of poetry. We must
understand that the lines

Life like a dome of many-colored glass

Stains the white radiance of eternity
are not poetry: They express the frustrated will trying to
compete with science. The will asserts a rhetorical propo-
sition about the whole of life, but the imagination has not
seized upon the materials of a poem and made them into
a whole. Shelley's simile is imposed upon the material
from above; it does not grow out of the material. It ex-
ists only as explanation external to the subject . . . as

explanation it necessarily looks towards possible action,

 

and it is there that we know that the statement is mean-

ingless . . . If the simile of the same dome were an

80
integral part of a genuine poem, the question of its spe-
cific merit as truth or falsehood would not arise.

This is an exciting passage of modern literary criti-
cism. It takes us to the center of the problem of the revalu—
ation of Shelley's poetry, for at the center is the issue of
Shelley's poetic beliefs.

Tate believes with Eliot and Richards that a work of art

 

is autotelic. It possesses a life of its own. Therefore, Tate é.
believes a poem should be judged E a m, not for its doc-
trines. If it is judged for morals or theology then this judg-
ment is Platonic judgment of "Platonic poetry."

Shelley's poetry is not to be valued (as Whitehead val-
ues it, for its doctrines of nature) for the truth or falsehood of
its ideas. Tate and the New Critics think that the trouble with
Shelley's poetry is that his assertions are not a quality of the
whole poem--they are wilfully asserted for the purpose of
heightening a subject the poet has not implicitly imagined.7

Tate also thinks that Shelley is a bad model for a con-
temporary poet. Except for Hart Crane and Robinson Jeffers,
Shelley's disillusioned, romantic irony has almost vanished

from modernist poetry. It is the other, the positive type of

81
Platonism which partakes of the optimism of science, the es-
cape of a Tennyson or a Stephen Spender into the Golden Age
of the future which survives today in the political and social
propaganda of revolutionary poets8 (the didactic, allegorical,
propaganda poets).

Tate treats specific works and specific passages written
by Shelley. Three examples of his method as well as his Shel-
leyan criticism are in the essays "Tension in Poetry," "Under-
standing Modern Poetry," and "A Reading of Keats."

In "Tension in Poetry" Tate says he believes the reader
and the poet should share the same emotions over a poem: But
if one does not share those feelings, as Tate happens not to
share them in the images of desiccated nature, the lines and
even the entire poem are impenetrably obscure. Tate continues:

I am attacking here the fallacy of communication in
poetry. (I am not attacking social justice.) It is no less
a fallacy in the writing of poetry than of critical theory.
The critical doctrine fares ill the further back you apply
it; I suppose one may say--if one wants a landmark--that
it began to prosper after 1798; for on the whole nineteenth

century English verse is a poetry of communication. The

 

 

82
poets were trying to use verse to convey ideas and feeling
that they secretly thought could be better conveyed by sci-
ence (consult Shelley's Defense), or by what we today call,
in a significantly bad poetic phrase, the Social Sciences.
Yet possibly because the poets believe the scientists to be
tough and the poets joined the scientists in thinking the
poets tender, the poets stuck to verse. It may scarcely
be said that we change this tradition of poetic futility by
giving it a new name, Social Poetry. May a poet hope to
deal more adequately with sociology than with physics? If
he seizes upon either at the level of scientific procedure,
has he not abdicated his position as poet?

In "Understanding Modern Poetry," Tate thinks the
reader should not have merely the "emotional experience"; but
he should also have the "intellectual experience." That is, the
reader should not just be "moved" by a poem but he should be
using his intellect. If by an "intellectual" experience we mean
that we are using our minds on the relations of words to the
images, all the relations together--and if, moreover, we suc-
ceed in reducing all 'these things to the complete determination

of logic, so that there is nothing left over, then this intellectual

83

experience is a tautology similar to that of the emotional ex—
perience: we are intellectually using our intellects, whereas
before we were emotionally being moved. For instance, writes
Tate, note the confused and vague and emotional imagery in

Shelley's When the Lamp i_s Shattered; I quote the last stanza:

 

Its (Love's) passions will rack thee,

As the storms rack the ravens on high:

Bright reason will mock thee',

Like the sun from a wintry sky.

From the nest every rafter

Will rot, and thine eagle home

Leave thee naked to laughter,

When leaves fall and cold winds come.
The general "argument" is that the passing of spiritual
communion from lovers leaves them sad and, in the last
stanza, the prey of lust and self-mockery, and even of
the world ("naked to laughter"). The first line sets the
tone and the "response" that the reader is to maintain to
the end: we are told in advance what the following lines
will mean: an abstraction that will relieve us of the trouble

of examining the particular instances. Indeed, when these

‘: «a!

 

 

 

84
appear the development of their imagery is confused and
vague. The ravens in the second line are eagles in the
sixth; but after all, they are only generically birds, greater
particularity in them would have compromised their poeti-
cism as objects, or interfered with the response we are r
instructed to make them. I pass over "Bright reason," 3
the self-mockery, for the mockery of the world. Are we

to suppose that other birds come by and mock the raven i1

 

(eagle), or are we to shift the field of imagery and see
"thee" as woman? Now in the finest poetry we cannot
have it both ways. We have a multiple meaning through
ambiguity, but we cannot have an incoherent structure of
images. Shelley, in confusion, or carelessness, or haste
could not sustain the nest-bird metaphor and say all that
he wished to say; so, in order to say it, he changed the
figure and ruined the poem. The more we track down the
implications of the imagery of Donne, Marvel, Raleigh,
Milton, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, Ransom, Stevens, the richer
the meaning of the poem. Shelley's poem is confused. Are
we to conclude that therefore it offers an emotional experi-

ence?

85

Finally, in "A Reading of Keats," where Tate praises
Keats as the only romantic poet to achieve greatness, the critic
is again derogative of Shelley, who, he says, conceals more
traps to catch scholars.11 In this essay Tate cannot sympa-
thize with a more or less modern trend: For the past fifteen
years, he says, the direction of Anglo-American poetry has been
rather towards Shelley than Keats, and towards Godwin--towards
perfectibility and social consciousness rather than towards a
dramatic-symbolic style. Tate hopes he shall not sound like
Margaret Fuller if he says that he is not indifferent to the ut-
most capacity of men for social and individual perfection for
he simply does not think that poetry should be limited to ex-
horting these goods.12 But Tate continues to say that if Keats
had kept on with his successions of plastic scenes such as in
Hyperion, then Keats would have remained a "youthful experi-
menter of genius" not so impressive as Shelley.

When Tate analyzes a stanza of Keats' _O_£i_e_ £3 3 NiglL-
i_ngals he says: This stanza is bad; the best that one ought to
say of it perhaps is that there are worse things in Shelley. It
is bad in the same way as the passages in Adonais which ex-

3
hibit troops of mourners are bad.1

 

86
Keats and Shelley were alike in more than one respect,
Tate explains:

In Keats' mind there was, as I have said (why it
should have had, even in so young a man, an exclusive
dominance I do not know)--there was, to put it in the sim-
plest language, a strong compulsion towards the realization
of physical love, but he could not reconcile it with his
idealization of the beloved. So we get what has been sup-
posed to be a characteristically romantic attitude--that is
to 11.6. at the greatest intensity of love is to achieve that
intensity without diminution. If this is the romantic atti-
tude--and there is no reason to believe that Wordsworth's
domestic pieties and evasions, or Shelley's rhetorically
Godwinism and watered-down Platonism, ever achieved 33

experience a higher realization of the central human prob-

 

lem as Keats did--if this is romanticism, then romanti-
cism (or romantic poetry) represents a decline in insight
and in imaginative and moral power.
In spite of the somewhat sweeping statements quoted
from Tate, Tate asserts his criticism is not so much on Shelley

as on specific passages in Shelley. In a letter to me, he says:

 

 

87
I have never tried to formulate a rounded estimate of
Shelley: My works contain criticisms of specific passages.

Short 93 long and careful reading I cannot give a general

 

 

opinion. I simply have no opinions of Shelley's poetry as

a whole.15 Ir

 

CHAPTER XIII
ELDER OLSEN

Elder Olsen is not a New Critic in the strictest sense. l

As a matter of fact he has never written anything on Shelley.

 

However, he shares the opinions of the New Critics towards

Shelley, and for that reason he is mentioned here. Olsen be-

 

longs to a special group of critics that is gathered in and
around Chicago. This group has its own theories and it judges
a poem on the basis of those theories. Shelley does not come
off well with them at all. In a letter to me, Olsen remarks:
Shelley is undoubtedly a great poet, if by "great
poet" one means a poet who achieved extraordinary excel-
lence within given literary forms, rather than poems,--
and this is the case with most modern depreciators of
Shelley, e.g., Eliot, Leavis, et al.-—one's judgement is .
likely to be unfavorable. Shelley wrote poems of emotion;
moreover, his statement of emotion is direct, and the emo-
tion itself is at high pitch; and the transition from image

to image, thought to thought, line to line; stanza to stanza

 

 

 

 

89
is an emotional rather than intellectual transition; the mod-
erns tend to object to all these things. I have not read
any attacks upon Shelley (in the present day) which seem

to me to proceed from sound and comprehensive criticism.

 

 

CHAPTER XIV
ROBERT STALLMAN

No one can appreciate or enjoy Shelley on the old basis

' CO ‘

. . Nor can any critic any longer evaluate Shelley without

having fully participated in the problems of modern criticism

Ev
.
P
V

I

. In modern criticism Shelley fares far worse than Milton.1 3
Those opinions were written to me by Robert Stallman, another
who can be called a New Critic although his main works tend
to give him the title, "The Critic of the New Critics." He
agrees with the New Critics-~especially in their attitude towards
Shelley.

Stallman agrees with Leavis. Shelley is a bad poet,
overrated too. He agrees especially with Leavis' essay on

2
Shelley in Revaluation. Stallman's attitude and his method of

 

criticism are much like those of the Southern Critics. (He
judges a poem as a poem, not for its doctrines.) He echoes,
Tate, Ransom and Brooks.

In his Critiques, while Stallman is discussing forms of

the theme popularly called "the dissociation of sensibility," he

91

calls one variation of that theme, the loss of world order, a

 

 

world order which can be assimilated to the poetic vision.
Stallman writes:
. . . Without moral and intellectual standards the poet has
no means for measuring and testing his personal experience.
Our age lacks what Shelley called the "fixed point of ref-

erence" for the poet's sensibility. The assumption a fal-

 

lacy common to contemporary poets--that order or adequate
form can be created simply by the poet's act of self ex-
pression by his imitation of the world disorder in what.
Winters has labeled as Expressive or Imitative Form--fails
the poet as a solution for the problem of poetic structure.
For Winters, Tate, F. R. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, or
R. P. Blackmur--a poem for these critics must have a
rational structure, a core of meaning, a scheme of objec-
tive reference which orders and gives meaning to the poet's
emotions. "Shelley, at his best and worst, offers emotion
in itself, unattached in the void."
The intellect is not working when one reads Shelley and
enjoys him: Stallman goes along with Eliot and Tate's objections

to Shelley that, so many times, Shelley forgot about the poem

4:,

‘
,x
1..

92
itself and worked some of his doctrines or beliefs into his
poems. It is not the beliefs the critics affirm or deny. It is
their absolute irrelevance to the poem, says Stallman. That
makes the New Critics automatically reject the whole poem.
Stallman writes:

The-poet-poem-reader relationship is again illustrated
by the Problem of Belief: the question whether it is nec-
essary for the reader to share the poet's beliefs in order
to enjoy fully his poetry. The problem of the poem as re-
lated to the poet's or the reader's beliefs is resolved by
Eliot thus: "When the doctrine, theory, belief, or view of
life, presented in a poem is one which the mind of the
reader.can accept as coherent, mature and founded on the
facts of experience, it interposes no obstacle to the read-
er's enjoyment . . ." With this interpretation, which Eliot

makes in The Use at: Poetry (1933), all later critics con-

 

 

cur. The question of specific merit of poetic statement as
ordered into an intrinsic whole. It is on this ground that
Tate rejects Shelley's poetry, not because Shelley's ideas
are immature but because his statements are not an inte-

gral part of a genuine poem. As Eliot notes: "Both in

l-’t

 

93
creation and enjoyment much always enters which is, from
the point of view of 'art', irrelevant. One irrelevance is
the truth or falsity of the belief expressed in a poem (as)

poem.

 

In a detailed critique of C. S. Lewis' Shelley, Dryden I

and Mr. Eliot, Stallman objects to Lewis' defense of Shelley,

 

contesting Lewis' argument point by point, his conception of

 

poetic structure, his principle of decorum and greatness of

 

subject, and his criterion of intention. Lewis' buttoned-up ver-
sion of Shelley and unfrocking of Dryden is an academic tin-
type, argues Stallman.5

C. S. Lewis defends Shelley, not on the old basis, but
on Eliot's own grounds. Lewis writes:

I am a classicist, of the same order as T. S. Eliot,
and I maintain that Shelley is to be regarded, on grounds
Mr. Eliot himself will allow, as a more masterly, a more
sufficient, and indeed a more classical poet than Dryden.

Implied in Lewis' argument are three principles; Stall-
man brings them together to form Lewis' so-called "classical"
canon: .

(1) the principle of structure;

94
(2) the principle of decorum;
(3) the principle of greatness of subject.
This last principle, according to Stallman, immediately raises
the suspicion that Lewis' canon is partly Victorian, derivative
of Arnold, not truly "classical" at all. Lewis' demand that
poets choose a grandiose subject and execute it in the most
striking manner puts him, not on Eliot's ground, but on Arnold's.
Lewis is neither consistent with Eliot's position nor consistent
with his own "classical" one, argues Stallman.
Stallman continues to answer Lewis, point by point. When
Lewis objects to Dryden's mixing of the comic and the tragic,
this amounts to a demand for the Poetry of Exclusion, Stall-
man answers and continues:
Shelley's poetry is a poetry of sharp exclusion. His sensi—
bility is crude, his structure simple, his tone monotonous;
his poetry offers us uniformity, but uniformity without
heterogeneity of material. It is precisely Shelley's over-
simplification that critics like Messrs. Eliot, Tate, Ransom
and Brooks reject. But Mr. Lewis has not read the crit-
ics. He is not aware that the critics have been insisting

for two decades on the Poetry of Inclusion:--the poetry of

 

$.‘2 III-w

......

 

“and

AL; _

95
synthesis of conflicts, of inclusion of opposites, of recon-
ciliation of disparate experience, of fusion of levity with
seriousness (in Wit), of complex structures of variety as
well as uniformity. Shelley cannot stand up against Mr.
Eliot's criterion of Donne and the Metaphysicals. Dryden
and Pope come off much better.

Stallman agrees with Leavis that the suggestion of the ludicrous
within his serious poetic effect is a qualifying element that is
absent in Shelley.

When Lewis praises Shelley's poetic structure, his odes,
elegies and lyrics because they are traditional and because they

display a harmony between the poet's real and professed inten-

 

tion, Stallman brushes this praise off as academic. Lewis, ac-
cording to Stallman, is praising Shelley for handing down tra-
ditional forms to which he adheres without any radical innova-
tion. Tradition at this level, Stallman and Eliot agree, should
be positively discouraged.

When Lewis explained his praise of Shelley's intention
he said he meant that Shelley did what he intended to do in a
poem, and he wrote the poem he intended to write. Dryden,

he said, did not have this capacity.

 

96

Stallman objects to that entire idea of intention pointed
out by Lewis; for, writes Stallman, if Shelley succeeds in doing
what he intended to do, his achievement is not to be praised--
but condemned. The poem which most achieves its purpose,
plan or intention, says Stallman, is invariably the bad poem.
The poet's failure is in direct proportion to the success with
which his original intention is achieved. For obviously if the
total intention or the total meaning of the poem is entirely
predictable in the original intention of the logical content, this
original logical content is then the total meaning of the poem,
which is to say that the poem's total meaning is nothing more
than its prose or paraphrasable core. A poem at this rate,
continues Stallman, is not a poetic discourse but a prose dis-
course and therefore not a poem. What engages our critical
scrutiny is the work of art itself, its total intention, not its
original intention--which is always a different thing.

Stallman agrees with the New Critics that Shelley, in
respect to his material, has ideas that are untenable and emo-
tions that are not objectified. Shelley's failure to find an ade-
quate "set of objects," situation, "chain of events," or "ob-

jective correlatives," of his emotion, and the consequent

Joli. l .

 

97
confusion of purely personal feelings with those of his hero is
precisely what leaves Shelley's Prometheus Unbound "so vague

11
and vaporous."

 

Again, in criticizing C. S. Lewis, Stallman writes:
Mr. Lewis is not aware of the absurd consequences
of his own theory, but these have already been pointed out.
It is nonsense to praise Shelley for conquering material
that was entirely conquerable before composition began.
The victory that involves no struggle is no victory at all.
I suggest the very theory Mr. Lewis rejects: The great
poet comes to terms with experiences which offer great
difficulties, not slight ones; and the value of his creation
is in direct ratio to the difficulties involved. If a poem,
insofar as it is good, represents the comprehension on an
aesthetic plane of a given experience, then the poem will
be most valuable, which, granted it achieves formal per-
fection, represents the most difficult victory.
Stallman completes his case against Lewis and says
Lewis is fifty years behind the times. He calls Lewis unclas-
sical and inconsistent in his case for Shelley. The critic is

supposed to give his poetic assent to a poem not his philosophical

 

L G Wu»?!

98
b_€_1_ig£. Stallman notes Lewis is not aware of the distinct
terms.

Stallman aims to show that Lewis' argument, that Shel-
ley is a superior poet and is to be preferred to Dryden, is
wrong. His argument is wrong, according to the New Critic,
because it is based on erroneous grounds. Lewis does not
understand the way Eliot or the New Critics judge a poem.
Therefore, Stallman writes, how can he attempt to judge a
poem or a poet on the same grounds as Eliot judges it.

Stallman concludes his case against Lewis and against
Shelley by saying that Lewis' conception of poetic structure,
his principle of decorum and greatness of subject, and his cri-
terion of the poet's intention are utterly alien to modern crit-
ical ideas and poles apart from Eliot's own critical canon.
This is a disparity which Lewis shares with all the rest of
his kind, remarks Stallman.1

I presented Robert Stallman's attitude towards Shelley
in the form of a "Reply to C. S. Lewis." Since I am not
aware of any published reply to Lewis, I thought these remarks

I received from Stallman might prove interesting to the reader.

99

Perhaps Stallman was answering Lewis' defense of Shelley in

the way all of the New Critics would answer Lewis.

CHAPTER XV

R. P. BLACKMUR

If we look at the dominant development in criticism
in English during the last thirty years--all that Mr. Ran-
som means by the New Criticism--with its fineness of
analysis, its expertness of elucidation, and its ramifying
specialization of detail--we must see how natural, and at
the bottom how facile, a thing it has been. It has been
the critics' ways of being swept along, buoyed more by
rush than the body of things. It is a criticism, that is,
which has dealt almost exclusively either with the execu—
tive technique of poetry (and only with a part of that) or
with the general verbal techniques of language. Most of
its practitioners have been men gifted in penetrating the
private symbolisms and elucidating the language of all of
that part of modern poetry, we have come to call the school
of Donne.

These are words from the pen of R. P. Blackmur, re-

spected not only by the New Critics but also by those critics

3.4:... *3

101
and scholars outside the realm of New Criticism. It is his
method and his style that prompts all the praise. He is ob-
jective. He rarely makes abstract statements without backing
them up by citing some example by some author; and, after
he does that, he usually compares authors, the consequence
being that the reader is generally satisfied with his criticism
not only because he got the point but because he enjoyed the
way the critic expressed (the point.

For Blackmur, as for Eliot, scholarship is the basis
for all other forms of criticism. Its business is to furnish
the factual material for further investigation. The great crit-
ics are themselves either good scholars or know how to take
great advantage of scholarship. Donne remains alive in us,
the New Critics contend, to the extent that his statements of
fact form a part of our scholarship. But Shelley has not a
leg to stand on according to Blackmur's and the other New
Critics' criterion of criticism.

Compared to Donne's sensible rhythms Shelley employs
pronounced, intoxicating, hypnotic rhythms that seem to be try-
ing to sweep the reader into hasty emotional commitments.

Shelley seldom uses a firmly held developed image (as does

35.3

 

102
Donne), but he pours out a flood of images which one must
grasp momentarily in one aspect and then release. Donne was
a thinker; Shelley was a "mere dreamer." These are but two
apparent criticisms arising out of the minds of Blackmur and
the New Critics concerning Shelley.

The special distinction of R. P. Blackmur's criticism,
it has been said, lies in its elucidation of verbal and stylistic
properties as clues to the quality of thought and imagination.
The reader has only to look at the criticism which shows in-

tensive study of poems in The Double Agent (1935), and The

 

 

Egense 2f Greatness (1940), and many succeeding essays.
After the thoroughness of his stylistic investigations,
his rigorous study of words, patterns, and structures of the
literary object, Blackmur cannot admit Shelley to be a good
poet although he may admit him to be a fair poet in some as-
pects, especially the lyrical aspect. Blackmur wrote in a let-
ter to me:
I have never written more than a passing remark
or so on Shelley, and furthermore have no very positive
opinions about either him or his work. Like everybody I

know the lyrics pretty well and know that they are a real

103
part of any canon of lyric poetry. Beyond that I really
don't go. Of course I might add that Brooks and Warren

don't kill the Indian Love Lyric; you can put it back to-

 

gether liver than ever on their own principles. I pretty
well agree with Santayana's essay in 1111515 91 Doctrine

2
In some notes on the language of E. E. Cummings, Black-
mur tried to show how the poet, by relying on his private feel-
ings and using words as if their meanings were spontaneous
with use, succeeded mainly in turning his words into empty
shells. This is a faulty characteristic Blackmur believes Cum-
mings shares with Shelley. He says:

Any poetry which does not consider itself as much
of an art and having the same responsibilities to the con-
sumer as the arts of silversmithing or cobbling shoes--
any such poetry is likely to do little more than rehearse
a waking dream . . . Hence, both picture and word, and
then a little stretching of the fancy the substance of the .
dream itself, seem expressible just as they occur--as
things created, as the very flux of life. Mr. Cummings'

poems are often nothing more than the report of such

104
dreams. He believes he knows what he knows, and no doubt
he does. But he also believes, apparently, that the words
which he encourages most vividly to mind are those most
precisely fitted to put his poems on paper. He transfers
the indubitable magic of his private musings from the cell
of his mind, where it is honest incantation, to the realm
of poetry. Here he forgets that poetry, so far as it takes
permanent form, is written and meant to be read, and it
cannot be a mere private musing. Merely because his
private fancy furnishes his liveliest images, is the worst
reason for assuming that this private fancy will be approxi-
mately experienced by the reader or even indicated on the

_ 3
printed page.

This fault is not limited to Cummings according to Blackmur.

Shelley is also guilty of it. Most of Shelley's works, accord—

ing to Blackmur, are "tenuous and vague, private exercises or

public playthings of a soul in verse."

Blackmur likens Shelley to Cummings in another sense,

also:

When Mr. Cummings resorts of language for the

thrill that words may be made to give, when he allows his

 

105
thrill to appear as an equivalent for concrete meaning, he
is often more successful, than when he is engaged more
ambitiously. This is true of poets like Swinburne and Poe,
Shelley and the early Marlowe: where the first pair de-
pended almost as much upon thrill as Mr. Cummings in
those poems where they made use of it all, and where the
second pair used their thrills more appropriately as orna-
ment: where all four were most successful in their less
ambitious works.

Blackmur complained that the reader must, at times,
supply the skepticism and the irony, the imagination and the
drama while reading the poetry of Shelley. Furthermore, the
reader has another stumbling block while reading Shelley: the
reader has to flesh out the Platonic Ideas before he gets to
the substance of Shelley's poetry.5

Shelley was a product of romanticism; and in Shelley,
Blackmur criticizes, we see a great sensibility the victim of
early stages of religious and philosophical decay in the nine-
teenth century.6 But his sensibility was ruined. Thomas Hardy

and Shelley are compared by the critic:

lav-C.

106

The astonishing thing is--as with Shelley--that he
(Hardy) was able to bring so much poetry with him into a
pile of work that shows, like a brush heap, all the disad-
vantages of the nineteenth-century mind as it affected po-
etry, and yet shows almost none of the difficulties--whether
overcome, come short of, or characteristic--belonging to
the production or appreciation of poetry itself.

Now.Blackmur compares Shelley to another poet, D. H.
Lawrence:

As a poet, Lawrence belongs to the great race of
English writers whose work totters precisely where it
towers, collapses exactly in its strength: work written
out of a tortured Protestant sensibility and upon the foun—
dation of an incomplete, uncomposed mind: a mind without
defences against the material with which it builds and there-
fore at every point of stress horribly succumbing to it . . .
Shelley exemplified (in his particular ways) the deracinated,
unsupported imagination, the mind for which, since it lacked
rational structure sufficient to its burdens, experience was
too much. Their magnitude was inviolate, and we must

take account of it not only for its own sake but also to

107
escape its fate; it is the magnitude of ruins--and the ruins
for the most part of an intended life rather than an achieved

8
art.
In this final quotation from Blackmur, we see that he,

too, like the New Critics, holds a consistently unfavorable opin-

ion of Shelley.

CHAPTER XVI

CONCLUSION

Shelley is thoroughly repudiated by the contemporary
poet and critic. The case against him, according to the New
Critics, is decisive: Illegitimate assertion of "scientific truths,"
untenable beliefs, escapist sentimentality and "romantic irony,"
didactic, Platonic poetry of the will, emotional intensity divorced
from any critical intelligence, confusions between the metaphor-
ical and the actual, the imagined and the real, elusive imagery
and the decorative metaphor; in fine, poor craftsmanship and a
false conception of the function of art. And, the New Critics
assert, it is largely owing to this Shelleyan conception of po-
etry--from Shelley derives the prevailing idea of the "poetical,"
the idea that had its latest notable expression in A. E. Hous-

man's The Name and Nature _o_f_ Poetry (1933)--that Pope and

 

Dryden and Donne have been depreciated and neglected. Shel-
ley also could not combine the ludicrous and the serious poetic

effect; therefore his poetry is practically a complete failure.

109

The New Critics teach that no modern practitioner should
take Shelley as his model, for Shelley is a bad influence, and,
like Milton, could only be an influence for the worse, upon any
poet whatever. They object to the attention that Shelley is re-
ceiving in the colleges, and they frown upon the way in which
the instructors are teaching Shelley. Finally, they universally
agree that, in Shelley, a single isolated quality, emotion, is
made into poetry.

According to some scholars, this attitude is not to be
brushed away and treated as a passing phase. An instance is
the point of a paper by Professor Frederic Pottle of Yale pre-
sented at the 1950 MLA meeting:

It must be sufficiently apparent that I consider Shel-
ley a great poet. I do not, however, share the confident
belief of many of my colleagues that the anti-Shelleyanism
of the New Critics is a mere fad or fashion that will pass
away. I lecture to a large group of undergraduates each
year on Shelley, and I read a good many of the critical
papers they write on Shelley's poetry. It is clear to me
that within fifty years practically everybody will be saying

about Shelley what the New Critics are saying now. The

110
disesteem of Shelley is going to become general and it

may continue for a century or more.

NOTES

PREFACE

Vide "The New Criticism," The American Scholar

 

 

Forum, XX (Spring, 1951), pp. 219-229. This is a publication
of an informal discussion between William Barrett, Kenneth
Burke, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Gorham Davis, Allen Tate and
Hiram Haydn in which these important modern critics discuss
the terms the "New Criticism" and the "New Critics." They
agree that the term the "New Criticism" is really empty of
meaning insofar as it might be thought to convey some descrip-
tion of a specifically new technique in literary criticism. They
agree that the term the "New Critics" is also empty of real
meaning.

Mr. Cowley said: "Where Mr. Ransom and Mr. Tate,
for example, are miles apart in many of their judgments, young
Mr. X., who has listened to both of them and read both of them,
seems to be a conglomeration or coagulation of Ransom and
Tate. Young Mr. X. represents the school (New Critics), not

Ransom, Tate or Blackmur."

112
Mr. Barrett said: "It was Mr. Cowley's particular point
about the offspring of the New Criticism,--that [they, the off-

spring] have been the ones who have really made it a move-

 

ment. The single point that I have been trying to bring up this

 

evening is that there is no such thing as the New Criticism,
yet there is a. new criticism. And your point is that actually
only as it appears in the various younger offspring of various
people who have been called, and I think falsely, New Critics--
people like Mr. Tate.

"I feel that he is not a new critic at all. There is
nothing new about him in the sense we're discussing. His crit-
icism has been known for a long time.

"It seems to me that the movement is really there in
terms of the younger people whom I meet, who are mostly
graduate students. Most of these people do not appear in print
at all, but in their conversation I find that their whole approach
to literature is very limited. While I can't say, 'Well, this is
the work of the New Criticism,‘ I do think that in this sense
the New Criticism is a very real literary tendency of our

period."

Arr..-

113
I have summarized the attitude that practically all of
the New Critics hold concerning their being called the "New
Critics" practicing the "New Criticism." In many of the let-
ters that the New Critics wrote me, they objected to the terms.
Nevertheless the terms are used popularly, and not only by
graduate students, even amongst the New Critics themselves.
That is why I call them the New Critics throughout this thesis;
and I suspect that whether or not these men like the terms
"New Critics" and "New Criticism," the terms are here to

stay.

CHAPTER I

l T. E. Hulme, Speculations: ed. Herbert Read (New

 

York: 1924).

2 Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition

 

(Chapel Hill: 1939), introd.

3 F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement 2f _'I_'. §_. Eliot

 

 

(New York: Oxford UP, 1947), introd.
CHAPTER II

1 Hulme, Speculations, p. 113.

 

 

 

 

 

114
2
Ibid., p. 115.
3 .
Ibid., p. 116.

4
Ibid., p. 116.

 

5 Ibid., p. 117.

6 Ibid., p. 119.

7 Ibid., p. 126.
CHAPTER III

Eliot's main essays dealing with the Problem of Be-

lief: "Dante," Selected Essays (London: 1932); "A Note on

 

Poetry and Belief," The Enemy (London: Jan., 1927); "Shelley

 

and Keats," The Use 2f Poetry (London: 1933).

2
T. S..Eliot, The Use 9_f_ Poetry, p. 87.

 

 

 

 

.1219." p. 80.
4 Ibid., p. 90.
Ibid., p. 87.
Lb_i_d_., p. 82.

Eliot, "Dante," Selected Essays, p. 218.

 

John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism, p. 208.

Eliot, Essays and Studies, XXI (1936), p. 33.

 

10 F. R. Leavis, Revaluation, p. 8.

 

115

1 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 258. In Marvell there is

 

"explicit reference of emotion to object." In Marvell there is
hard precision; in Morris, a mistiness of feeling and vagueness
of its object.

2 Eliot, Sacred Wood, p. 148.

 

13 Eliot, "Poems on Richard Crashaw," The Dial, LXXXIV

(March, 1928), pp. 246-250.

 

'14 Carlos Baker, private communication, 8/2/51.
15 ,

Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 248.
16

The Use 2f Poetry, p. 81.

 

 

l7 Leavis, Revaluation, p. 211.

 

8 .
1 "John Dryden," Selected Essays, p. 274.

 

19 "Hamlet and His Problems," Selected Essays, P-

 

100. Eliot's ideas on the "objective correlative" are given
here.

Eliot, private communication, 7/26/51.
CHAPTER. IV

1 Vide John Crowe Ransom, "A Note on Ontology,"

 

The World's Body, 122 ff.

 

 

116

The Platonic poet is thus a scientist, interested in the
general and abstract. The Metaphysical poet is not a scientist.
He knows he is not competing with science but is dealing with

another order of description.

Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, p. 46..

Brooks points out that "the distinction between Tate's
Platonic poetry and his poetry of the Imagination, or the dis-
tinction between Ransom's Platonic poetry and Metaphysical
poetry, parallels the distinction of Richards' poetry of Exclu-
sion and his poetry of Synthesis." There is a similar distinc-
tion in Eliot's theory of poetry, though the resemblances are
not forced. In short, most all the New Critics think Shelley's
ideas are (1) erroneous, (2) not presented concretely.

2 . .
F. R. Leav1s, Revaluation, p. 8.
3 .

Ibid., p. 214.
4 .
Eliot, Sacred Wood, p. 138.
Leavis, Revaluation, p. 231.
6 .
Ibid., p. 207, f.
7 .
Ibld., p. 215.
8 .
Ibld., p. 231.

9 Ibid., p. 211.

 

__-A

”L-

.
-—- .1]... a..-

117

10 Ibid., p. 231.

11 Ibid., p. 211.

12 Ibid., p. 208.

13 Ibid., pp. 204-206.

14 Ibid., p. 207, f.

15 F. R. Leavis, private communication, 8/1/51.

 

 

 

16

Leavis, Revaluation, p. 113.
17 , . .

Leav1s, New Bearings _i_rl English Poetry, p. 37.
18

Leavis, Education and the Universities, p. 84.

 

19 Leavis, Revaluation, p. 206.

 

CHAPTER V

1 Rene Wellek, "Literary Criticism and Philosophy,"

The Importance 2f Scrutiny, p. 26.

 

2 Ibid., p. 27.

3 Leavis, Revaluation, pp. 208-209.

 

4 Wellek, The Importance if. Scrutiny, pp. 28-29.

 

5 Ibid., p. 29.

Rene Wellek, private communication, 8/3/51.

 

{L

118

CHAPTER VI

1
Leavis, "Literary Criticism and Philosophy: A Reply,"

The Importance 9_f_ Scrutiny, p. 38.

 

2 Ibid., pp. 40-41.
CHAPTER VII 5

Robert Stallman, Critiques and Essays _i_r_1_ Criticism,

 

 

 

 

m

p. 505. 7"
Note: Scrutiny critics are like the Southern critics;
i.e., they are concerned with resident values’ of a work of art
--the purely formal aesthetic ones. They attend to the proper-
ties of poetry as a fine art.
Martin Turnell, "The Poet of Revolution," Scrutiny,
VII (Sept., 1938), p. 229 ff.

Martin Turnell, private communication, 7/29/51.

CHAPTER VIII

1 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism, pp. 315-316.

 

2
Ibid., p. 271.

3 Ibid., p. 208.

119

4 _
C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning _o_f Mean-

 

i_n_g, p. 238.

5
Richards, The Philosophy <_)_f_ Rhetoric, p. 94.

 

Ibid., p. 90.

Richards, Principles _o_f Literary Criticism, p. 68.

 

 

Ibid., p. 79.

Ibid., pp. 215-216.

10 Ibid., p. 220.

 

1
1 Ibid., p. 250.

12 Ibid., p. 279.

 

 

3
1 Ibid., p. 274.

14
Richards, Coleridge _o_n Imagination, p. 229.

 

 

CHAP TER IX

 

 

1
William Empson, Seven Types 2f Ambiguity, p. l.
2 .
Ibid., p. 155.
3 .
Ibid., p. 157.
4 . .
Ibid., introd.
5 Ibid., p. 20.
6

Ibid., p. 159.

Ibid., p. 160.

L...

 

' t . n.—

120
8 Ibid., p. 161.

William Empson, Some Versions _o_f Pastoral, p. 207.

 

1
0 William Empson, private communication, 8/1/51.

CHAPTER X

1
Cleanth Brooks, "Metaphysical Poetry and Propaganda

Art," Modern Poetry and the Tradition, p. 47 f.

 

2 Ibid., pp. 50-51.
3 .
Brooks, "Yeats: The Poet as Myth-Maker," Modern

Poetiy and the Tradition, p. 187.

 

Cleanth Brooks, private communication, 8/22/51.

5
Brooks, Modern Poetry, pp. 197-198.

 

6
Ibid., pp. 216-217.
7 Brooks, "Notes for a Revised History of English Po-

etry," Modern Poetry, p. 237.

 

8
Cleanth Brooks, "The Problem of Belief and the Prob-

lem of Cognitio," The Well Wrought Urn, p. 227.

 

9 Ibid., p. 227.

10 Ibid., p. 229.

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understand-

 

ing Poetry, introd.

 

 

121

2 Ibid., pp. 219—220.

13
Cleanth Brooks, private communication, 8/22/51.

4
1 Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry, p. 321.

 

15 Ibid., p. 322.

Cleanth Brooks, private communication, 8/22/51.
In a letter to me Cleanth Brooks states more of his
present opinions. The letter is included here, in its entirety

to avoid the misunderstanding of excerpts:

 

"I am sorry that I can take no more time than to write
a brief note in answer to your good letter of the 12th which
has been forwarded to me here.

"To write an adequate answer to your questions would
require, however, among other things, a great deal of rereading
of Shelley. For my judgment of Shelley's poetry is based upon
the poetry--not upon changing fashions and trends and not upon
notions about the man.

"I have written almost nothing about Shelley for years.
I have found little reason to alter what I have written about
the several poems which at one time or another I have dis-

cussed. In revising ;Ag Approach 12 Literature, we are cutting

 

out our analysis of The Cloud, not because I have an appreciably

 

122
better opinion of that poem now than I had in 1936, but because
we feel that the analysis is too condensed to deal adequately
with some of the problems that are there dealt with--particu-
larly problems of imagery. [For this reason stated by Brooks,

I thought it best to omit the 1936 opinion of The Cloud in this

 

thesis.]
"I am afraid that my opinion of a number of the famous

lyrics like The Indian Serenade, _T_o 3 Skylark, and Ode 1:2 the

 

West Wind is substantially what it has been. I think the first

 

is a failure, _T_o_ a; Skylark, a much overrated poem, and the last
a brilliant poem with some bad flaws in it. But I am not sure
that this kind of statement is of much help to you or--given so
summarily--altogether fair to me.

"What I think is important is this: that the so-called
and badly named New Critics are not a group of people who

somehow have _i_1_:_ £1 for Shelley. They have certainly challenged

 

 

the conventional estimate of some of the admired showpieces.
(Even if some of these are good poems, the conventional ac-
counts of these poems are inadequate: they do not make the
sort of case for them that needs to be made.) But I am not

conscious of a prejudice against Shelley's poetry, and am quite

- < -W7_‘_‘:1

 

123
prepared to believe that when it can be shown that I have mis-
read this or that poem or that I have failed to note other poems,
I shall be willing to say so.

"I think that this is not an idle promise. I am conscious
that my opinion of a number of poems by Keats and Wordsworth
has in recent years risen a great deal. Compare, for example,

the analysis of the Ode t_o 3 Nightingale in the revised Under-

 

standing Poetry with that in the first edition. This, I believe,
is also true of the other New Critics. Look, for example, at

Allen Tate's recent articles on Keats in the American Scholar

 

--about two years ago. The view that the New Critics are on
principle anti-Romantic simply doesn't square with the facts.
"You have probably noticed Richard Fogle's recent book
on the imagery of the Romantic poets. I think that it is sig-
nificant that he has tried to make the case for Shelley in terms
of the New Criticism. He has not convinced me on Shelley, but
it is conceivable that he--or someone else--could. And I hope
that I should be willing to say 'yes, I see where I failed to
understand that poem, or I failed to read properly this one.

You are right. These are poems, and very fine poems.'

124
"One concluding observation: my view of Shelley is not
too far from that of W. B. Yeats, not a New Critic, and a poet
frequently thought of as 'Romantic.' Nor is it too far removed
from the opinion held by some of his contemporaries Words-
worth, Coleridge, and Keats. At least, this is my opinion.
The deification of Shelley was a later, a Victorian, phenome-

non." . I
l » :
Ii

Sincerely,

 

Cleanth Brooks (5)
"P.S. I don't mind your quoting from this letter, if you will
promise to print the whole letter in the thesis--perhaps as an
appendix. Excerpts might be misleading as to the tone of the

letter."

CHAPTER XI

1 John Crowe Ransom, "T. S. Eliot," The New Criti-

cism, p. 174,
2 .
Ibld., p. 208.
3 .
Ibid., p. 302.
4 X111: John Crowe Ransom, "Poetry: A Note on On-

tology," The World's Body, p. 122.

125
5 O
Ibld., p. 122.
6 .
Ibid., pp. 127-128.
7 .
Ibld., pp. 137-138.

John Crowe Ransom, private communication, 7/18/51.

TI

CHAPTER XII

.5! wife; _

1 A. N. Whitehead, "The Romantic Reaction," Science

 

and the Modern World, pp. 103-107.

 

2 Allen Tate, "Three Types of Poetry," Reactionary
Essays.

3 1313., p. 87.

"For what is rhetoric," wrote W. B. Yeats nearly
thirty years ago, "but the will trying to do the work of the
imagination ? "

4 239;, p. 97.

Tate, "Understanding Modern Poetry," Reason in

 

Madness: Critical Essayg, p. 143.

6 Tate, "Three Types of Poetry," Reactionary Essay,
pp. 84-86.

7 Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, p.

50.

E.
:-

126
Mr. Brooks quotes Tate.
8
Tate, "Three Types of Poetry," p. 103.

9

Tate, "Tension in Poetry," On the Limits of Poetry,

 

10 . F
Tate, "Understanding Modern Poetry," 92 the Limits

 

2f Poetry, p. 126.

 

11
Tate, "A Reading of Keats," 92 the Limits 9_f_ Poetry, 5;

 

 

, p. 166.

2 Ibid., pp. 167-168.

13 Ibid., p. 174.

14
Ibid., p. 183.

15
Allen Tate, private communication, 8/2/51.

CHAPTER. XIII
Elder Olsen, private communication, 8/25/51.
CHAPTER XIV

1
Robert Stallman, Dryden _in_ Modern Poetgy and Criti-

 

cism, p. 42.
Robert Stallman, private communication, 7/20/ 51.

Stallman, Critiques and Essays i_n Criticism, p. 498.

 

 

127
4 .
Ibid., pp. 502-503.

Stallman, Dryden _'_11_1_ Modern Poetry and Criticism,

 

 

 

introd.
6 . .. .
C. S. Lew1s, Rehabilitations, p. 5.
Stallman, Dryden i_n_ Modern Poetry and Criticism,
p. 65.

8 Ibid., pp. 65-66.

9 Stallman here quotes Eliot, "Tradition and the Indi-

vidual Talent," Sacred Wood, pp. 48-49.

10 Stallman, Dryden _12 Modern Poetry and Criticism,

 

 

'p. 71.

1

1 Ibid., p. 73.
2

1 Ibid., p. 75.

3
1 Ibid., p. 77.

CHAPTER XV

l R._P. Blackmur, "A Burden for Critic," Lectures _in_

Criticism, pp. 199-200.

 

2 R. P. Blackmur, private communication, 8/21/51.

3
Blackmur, "Notes on E. E. Cummings' Language,"

The Double Agent, pp. 10-12.

 

 

128

4
Ibid., p. 22.

5 Blackmur, "The Critic's Job of Work," The Double

Agent, pp. 274-275.

6
Blackmur, "Thomas Hardy," The Expfnse _o_f Great-

 

 

ness, p. 37. F

7 Ibid., p. 38.

8
R. P. Blackmur, "D. H. Lawrence and Expressive

9 1‘2 .KJL,’

Form," The Double Agent, p. 103.
9

 

 

John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism, introd.

 

CHAPTER XVI

Frederick A. Pottle, private communication, 8/31/51,
"The Case of Shelley"; unpublished paper; Vide abstract,

PMLA, LXVI (Feb., 1951), p. 137.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bentley, Eric., ed. The Importance _o_f_ Scrutiny. New York:

George Stewart, 1948 .

’ I‘m arr—"H

Blackmur, R. P. The Double Agent. New York: Arrow, 1935.

------- The Expense 9_f_ Greatness. New York: Arrow, 1940.

 

 

------- Lectures _i_r_1_ Criticism. New York: Pantheon Books,

 

 

1949.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Languggg if. Poetry. Princeton UP: 1946.

------- Modern Poetry and the Tradition. Chapel Hill: Univ.
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------- With Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry. New
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------- The Well Wrought Urn. New York: Reynal and Hitch-
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Cowley, Malcolm, ital. "The New Criticism," The American
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Eliot, T. S. After Stragg: Gods; A Primer 21; Modern Heresy.

 

New York: Harcourt, 1933.

------- Essays Ancient and Modern. New York: Harcourt, 1932.

130
------- "A Note on the Verse of John Milton," Essays and

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....... "The Poems of Richard Crashaw," Dial, LXXXIV (March,

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------- The Sacred Wood. New York: Knopf, 1930. I.

------- Selected Essays: 1917-1932. London: Faber 8: Faber,

 

 

1932.

'q-I' r-1 .1. -

 

------- The Use 2f Poetflr and the Use o_f Criticism. Cam-

 

 

bridge: Harvard UP, 1933.
Empson, William. Seven Types 9_f_ Ambiguifl; 3rd ed. Norfolk,
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------- Some Versions 2f Pastoral. London: Chatto 81 Windus,

 

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Hulme, T. E. Speculations; ed. Herbert Read. New York:

 

Paul Keegan, 1924.

Leavis, F. R., ed. Determinations: Critical Essays. London:

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------- Education and The University. New York: Stewart,

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..'.
y .
na,._____.m.._ Amm- «gin—4'. ._

131

------- Mass Civilization and Minority Culture. London: Mi-

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------- New Bearings; i_n_ English Poetry. London: Chatto 81

 

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------- Revaluation: Tradition and Development. London: 5:
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Lewis, C. S. Rehabilitations. New York: Oxford UP, 1939.

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Ransom, John Crowe. God Without Thunder. London: Gerald

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------- The New Criticism. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Direc-

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....... The World's Body. New York: Scribner's, 1938.

 

Richards, I. A. Coleridge an Imagination. New York: Har-
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------- Interpretation i_n_ Teaching. New York, Harcourt, 1938.

 

------- and Ogden, C. K. The Meaning 9_f_ Meaning. New York:

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132

....... Mencius on the Mind. New York: Paul Keegan, 1932.

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Stallman, Robert W. Critiques and Essays i_n_ Criticism. New

 

 

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Tate, Allen. On the Limits 93 Poetry. New York: Swallow

 

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Turnell, Martin. "The Poet of the Revolution," Scrutiny, VII
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.
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