and affairs as placidly as an old Chinese poet did, when he heard of the birth of his son? Families, when a child is born, I, through intelligence Having wrecked my whole life, Then he will crown a tranquil life Beauty had little to do with the inspiration there. More will have to be said about this troublesome question of poetic beauty. At present, this must suffice. When a poet chooses his subject-or I had better say, when a subject chooses a poet-there is no necessity for beauty to have any say in the business: but there is absolute necessity for every subject which poetry successfully communicates to us, to have thereby become invested with beauty. That need not have been the poet's intention; it merely and unavoidably happens that, when anything is successfully said in poetry, beauty arrives. I will briefly mention two other common suggestions as to the essential nature of poetic matter. Emotion is sometimes said to be the characteristic thing which poetry gives us. It is true that poetry has special means of conveying emotion; but it has special means 1 From Arthur Waley's A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems. Recent English verse can show little to compare with the delicately assured technique of these versions; and the fascination of their matter is irresistible, of conveying many other things as well. To be sure there must be emotion in poetry; for there is emotion everywhere in life. You cannot say anything without bringing in some sort of emotion; and if this is conspicuous in poetry, it is only because poetry is a remarkably complete and many-sided way of saying things. On the other hand, emotion simply as such does not exist. It can be expressed as such, by groaning or screaming. We feel this to be inconclusive, precisely because we know that something more than mere emotion must be happening; and we hasten to require the reason of the groans or screams. What is characteristic of poetry is the fact that it does not leave us asking for Emotion is there as a necessary part of a satisfactory whole, no more characteristic than any other element in it. reasons. We are swung to the opposite extreme when we are! told that poetry has lessons for us. This need not hold us long. Poetry may, among a thousand other things, do some occasional teaching: but if it does, it is not by virtue of its instruction that it is poetry, and the instruction would probably fare better elsewhere. The fallacy-an easy-going misunderstanding of poetry's idealism—is venerable and perhaps immortal, and has kept very distinguished company. The most interesting thing about it is that it should have taken in the two most profoundly artistic peoples in history, the Greeks and the Chinese: and yet the literatures of both could always have supplied refutation as perfect as "Phillada flouts me" is in ours: Oh what a pain is love, Fair maid, be not so coy, How shall I bear it? Do not disdain me; Matthew Arnold's doctrine, that poetry is a criticism of life, apparently puts the didactic fallacy in a more tactful form, but really sharpens its radical misconception of the poetic activity. What is this activity? So far I have evaded that question, and propose to go on doing so as long as I can. But not because the poetic is difficult to recognise. Tyger, tyger, burning bright In the forests of the night, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? If we are looking for poetry, who would think of questioning that? And what does it effect? Is not criticism at any rate the very last word one would use to describe it? Language like that simply and purely creates: it makes our minds become a moment of imaginative splendour. What do we care about criticising life while we are living in that style? It is true, nevertheless, that on reflection we may feel some implied criticism of life, when we contrast with the obscure and blundering hurly-burly of every day the clear significant order of things in poetry. Even so, unless a poem were composed in order to draw our special attention to this contrast (which would be very unlikely), we could not call it inspired by the criticism of life. Of course, if you abstract single lines, and wrest them from their purpose in the poem where they occur that is, if you misrepresent their meaning-you can argue very speciously for the criticism of life in poetry. What a voluminous and various critic has been made out in Shakespeare! For example: Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, He can give the rule for all human aspirations in a single phrase: Ripeness is all; or he can be with equal felicity and finality the ironical realist: For 'tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petar. Indeed, so various is his criticism that it is capable of quite irreconcilable extremes, for at one moment There's a divinity that shapes our ends, and at another As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: The truth is, of course, that to divorce these lines from their context and make morality of them is merely to destroy the art which invented them. That art, the equal of which has never been known, is the art of irresistibly impressing on our minds a sense of character, of particular kinds of human existence: and not only that, but also, as in the quotations I have just given you, an exact sense of the way these particular characters react at a given moment to a given set of circumstances. It is, in fact, like "Tyger, tyger," a use of language which is simply and purely creative: it makes our minds become the imagination of the poet. If we are confirmed, by rejecting this heresy, in the common-sense and traditional view that the poet is a maker, and not a critic or philosopher, we should by now be confirmed also against all those heresies which propose to limit the poet's creativeness to some particular kind of subject. There is no such thing as a poetical subject: or if you like, all subjects can be poetical; but the poetical thing about them will always be, not what they are, but the way they come to us. We must leave it to the poets to choose their own themes. It does not follow that we are bound to approve of their choice. It is obviously legitimate to detest a poet's inspiration even when we admire his art; indeed, the vehemence of our detestation may be a tribute to the |