Theories of poetry afford us a curious minor example of European mental processes. For nearly twenty-five hundred years now, since the Greeks invented Poetics, our cultural forebears have been arranging and rearranging the three terms Plato used to describe the origin, nature, and function of Poetry, always placing them, just as Plato did, in relation to some larger proposition about humanity or perhaps divinity. For Plato, of course, what he said about the poet, the poem, and the audience all had to serve his own larger notion, which was that man should be rational. Since Poetry in its origin, nature, and function had little to do with reason, there could be no place for it in Plato’s utterly rational visionary Republic. Poetry must be banned. After Plato, nearly everybody used his three terms for Poetry but nearly always they used them to escape his conclusion.

Aristotle began it. To quarrel with Plato, he had to agree with Plato’s three main observations, just as everyone has more or less had to do since then. But Plato and Aristotle agreed about a great deal more than those three things. They could make two very large assumptions, taking these for all but granted, two assumptions that were tremendously important to the theory of Poetry and which nobody after them could ever again claim with the natural assurance these two philosophers enjoyed. First, it seemed to them as surely as the sun shines that Poetry was of the most central importance in human society.

We know perfectly well that this was true, for a while, in those ancient city-states. But things are so different for us that we can scarcely imagine how it was. Of course it was really over for Plato and for Aristotle too. The palmy days lay well behind them both. Pericles died before Plato was born, and he grew up in the long disastrous war. Sophocles and Euripides died as he came of age. And we are told that by Aristotle’s time, in the 4th century, Poetry did not actually have anymore the place that he and Plato talked as if it had. It is as though Aristotle projected himself backward into the Golden Age too with the knowledge of how it all came out, as Plato did by saying everything through the mask of Socrates, who had been there. Still, the forms existed and the living memory; and we know how often we come to understand things only as we are losing them. But today, can even our most dedicated poets themselves really imagine an entire society convinced, as Werner Jaeger said the Greeks were, that Poetry is “the epitome of all knowledge and culture”?

Homer was more to the Greeks than the Bible has ever been to Jews or Christians. He was their history, their religion, their ethics, their mythology, their identity as a people, their duty and their pleasure. Far stranger to us than the lives of the bees, that life of 5th-century Athens which had as its very center the performances of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. We have nothing like that. If we could roll up in one big blow-out, which literally everyone would attend, our old Fourth of July, our New Year’s Eve, our Easter and Passover, our World’s Series, our Woodstocks, our opera and our movies, and such other diverse and dispersed occasions of assembled celebration as we still have, then we might see a faint simulacrum of the festivals of Dionysus. We have, of course, television, our universal and solitary vice.

The second assumption shared by Plato and Aristotle also gave them a good reason for investigating Poetry. It seemed obvious to them that everything should be judged according to its beneficial or harmful effect on men and their society—and again in a way that we can understand in principle but can scarcely grasp in our imaginations, this assumption included a further and deeper one: that man is really unthinkable, undefinable, apart from his society. This, like the assumptions about Poetry, would have been sharpened for them by a sense of loss.

“And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of Poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose on her behalf,” so Plato had Socrates say to Glaucon. “Let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit; for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers—I mean, if there is a use in Poetry as well as a delight?”

So they tried to account for Poetry in their peculiar categories of logic. As Plato and Aristotle thought about those few generations of splendor, they believed it necessary to examine it all as closely as they could. What is Poetry that it should be so bound up with the greatness of the polis? Today anyone writing about Poetics has to come at it on the opposite tack. What is Poetry? But how can we even ask questions seriously about something that is so utterly un-minded in the mightiness of our Empire? Poets and Poetry have little more place with us than Plato would have given them in his Republic. We might even wonder if this could be so for reasons anything like his.

_____________

Plato made three observations about Poetry. The poet works from inspiration, some resource that is not in the faculty of reason. The poem itself is an object that imitates other things. And third, the audience is affected emotionally by the poem. These seem very simple things to say, perhaps because we are all so used to them or perhaps because they must be true. Anyway, they have been elaborated and analyzed and interpreted all those twenty-five hundred years and we have not yet got around them. They are a terrible embarrassment to the idea of Poetry.

Plato thought that nothing a man did while he was out of his mind could be much good. Some of us now might in our desperation say just the opposite, rather as the Romantics did. Aristotle said only that Poetry indeed came from something other than reason. It came from a given condition, from instinct, basic human instinct. This source of inspiration was certainly not rational but it was not on that account bad either, and in operation it had certain incidental benefits for the poet, and received reinforcement from certain other feelings the poet had. Men just naturally have an instinct for imitation and for harmony. Today, of course, with our elaborate information and speculation about what besides reason occupies our minds, we have our own versions of the poet’s inspiration.

Second, where Plato said that the poem itself is an imitation of something else, Plato certainly meant that an imitation is not as good as the real thing. He had complicated confirmations of this, in accordance with his various theories of knowledge and value. The noblest thing is pure Idea; there is even an Idea, for instance, of Bed, and any “real” bed in our world is but an imitation of that Idea. Pitiful, then, a bed in a poem, the mere copy of a copy. (How could he use Bed as his example, when this would surely have called to anyone’s mind that veritable Ygdrasil, the great earth-rooted marriage bedstead of Odysseus and Penelope?) And an imitation of a man’s actions is surely a much poorer thing than action itself. Who would choose to be an encomiast rather than the earner of encomia?

Aristotle could only agree that Poetry, like all art, is imitation. Since this is so, since imitation is the central fact of Poetry, it must be that the kinds of Poetry are defined by the objects they imitate, by the medium in which they imitate, and by the manner of imitation. Aristotle used chiefly Tragedy in his demonstration, and thus we learned most of what we can say about that noble mode. Of the six necessary parts of any tragedy, all of them imitations, plot is the most important, for this imitates the actions of men and then through this the “characteristic movement of fate” itself. Then we have character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song. And we are into criticism now. For, knowing these things, Aristotle can tell us the main things required for a good plot, reversal and recognition, and the various ways these can be organized; he tells us something about each of these six parts of tragedy, the MORIA, “constitutent elements,” even a long section on diction and one on meter; and we are analyzing and judging Oedipus Rex, and Antigone, and the Oresteia, and we are even prescribing.

This critical analysis of course serves the main purpose of establishing a counter-statement to Plato. It argues for the inclusion of the minor term, Poetry, in the essential middle term that will connect Poetry with the major term, and the major term connects immediately with the proposition which both Aristotle and Plato can agree upon as that one subsuming all others: the good of man and State. The middle term is something like Noble Action, and doubtless what comes out is as inconclusive as what usually emerges when large and messy statements of value are run through the cogs of this small old Greek machine.

Noble action serves the purpose of man’s life.

Tragedy is a kind of noble action.

∴ Tragedy serves the purpose of man’s life.

Poetics has to be all this wide and airy in its general intention, and also at least as narrow as Aristotle is in trying to wedge that minor term into the grander view. Its arguments can never achieve that ideal tautology by which we are informed in “the mood of Barbara” that Socrates is a mortal. But the antique form does show us where the force of the argument has to be exerted, and seeing this, Aristotle put his heaviest work just there. Tragedy (and thus at least partly, through kinship, all Poetry) is a kind of noble action. Strictly of course he can really claim only that it is “like” a kind of noble action: and there we are again with imitation. Working out what imitation is took Aristotle beyond pure theory and into actual criticism. Since then we have gone back and forth with it. The idea of imitation dwindled for a long time into various precepts of what poets ought to imitate, chiefly the advice being that they should stick to copying certain approved poems. Others scorned the whole idea in favor of pure inspiration. In our century, imitation, mimesis, has reappeared in the dialogues of Poetics with something of the baffling potency of Aristotle’s meaning.

Catharsis is the third term. Again, Aristotle agreed with Plato about the audience, just as he had about the poet and the poem. The audience is affected emotionally. Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of letting them dry up as they might, and would let pleasure and pain be the rulers in our State, not law and the reason of mankind. Aristotle chose a different metaphor for the process and got different results. Tragedy certainly encourages the passions, he said, arousing pity and fear, but then, and this is the whole thing, “effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” Pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves. That is about all we have on it, except that of course he thought this catharsis, this purification, very valuable. He said nothing at all about what kind of actual physical or mental processes might be involved. He went into considerable detail, though, about how a tragedy could best be formed to have this effect on the audience. His word KATHARSIS, like our translation of it, is a figure borrowed from the visceral for the mental, with what assumptions or implications we don’t know, except that as we would guess, in the medicine of Hippocrates catharsis was good, it purified the body.

Again, like Inspiration and Imitation, Catharsis is today, if not in precisely this term then as this concept, quite back in circulation in Poetics.

_____________

II

As he set out in Poetics, I. A. Richards, a young man, surveyed the twenty-five hundred years of efforts by critics, moralists, educators, and aestheticians to account for the arts, and found almost nothing of value. “Aristotle was at least as clearly and fully aware of the relevant facts and as adequate in his explanations as any later inquirers” (Principles of Literary Criticism, 1925). Longinus, Horace, Boileau . . . Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold . . . all the others, many of them among the first intellects of their ages, on this subject afforded at best some brilliant guesses and pregnant hints in a waste of odd conjectures, admonitions, confusions and whimsies, dogmas and crotchets.

At first Richards believed the answer lay in a comprehensive promotion of catharsis. With Plato’s and Aristotle’s noble assumption of concern for mankind he concurred; only if the arts, if Poetry, served the good of man were they justified. There was a generous urgency in Richards’s view, too, more even in his first quarter of the 20th century than the two philosophers seemed to feel in ancient Athens following their great war. He doubted, in 1925, whether the world could survive another fifty years.

The arts, Poetry in particular, would serve the good of man by a kind of Catharsis, the new details of this to be supplied by then recent psychology and neurology; and these details, properly understood, might make art more widely and deeply effective. Poetry, he believed, has a special capacity for stirring up the reader’s nervous system, from the eyes right through to the tiniest and tenderest neurons, vibrating exquisitely with our most unconscious appetites, urges, and sensations; and then Poetry has also the capacity to restore equilibrium to all this fine system. Without this exercise of the neurons, we cannot estimate true values or deal with changing conditions in the world.

This part of Richards’s thought soon ceased to interest him all that much, and he realized that he like the others had added little to Aristotle on Catharsis. The supposed realignment of imputed neurological entities seemed to provide a ground for his large human concerns, but actually, as John Crowe Ransom said of this early stage of Richards’s thought, it amounted to “an odd reduction of human consciousness. For when we have an elaborate mental experience it is the thoughts, images, emotions, and the like which constitute the ‘hard facts,’ if any, not the neural state; the latter, so far as observation goes, are only their inferences, and have to be improvised.” Anyway, Richards was already turning from what I call this concern with Catharsis to a concern with Imitation—the object, medium, and manner of the poem’s Imitation. He had found that even advanced students, candidates for honors in English in his university, students who had received the most expensive education available, could not tell what a poem was about. They could not construe: they could not perform the most elementary task of telling what the meaning or intention of a poem might be. Their attempts to go further and report on the values of the poem or even on their own feelings about it were a shambles; and, of course, with his concern for humanity, it seemed to Richards that this could only mean that these students, soon to be among the leaders of England, had for their whole understanding of the world nothing but a mental and emotional shambles.

Out of his efforts to correct these basic defects came his studies in the language of Poetry. He tried to make explicit and available for inspection various kinds of meaning in poems (Sense, Feeling, Tone, Intention), and how figurative language works—from this eventually came his famous terms tenor and vehicle for the two parts of metaphor, the subject and the figure. He classified Poetic Forms, and defined the various errors of Irrelevant Associations and Stock Responses, Sentimentality and Inhibition, discussed Doctrine in Poetry. “Rhetoric, I shall urge, should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies.” Out of the many difficulties in explicitly construing came the sense that great poems often include what seemed to be contradictions, deep ironies, and these as it turned out were of the greatest value, they promote balance and reach a kind of truth otherwise unavailable, because they suppress nothing. From these ironies, these opposites, we come to whole multiplicities of meanings, to Ambiguities. And then we have his student William Empson’s great Seven Types of Ambiguity, and then, the full-blown New Criticism itself.

_____________

The subject of the New Criticism was Imitation. Seldom was Inspiration much considered, that is, the poet’s mind or life or thought as prior to the poem; nor was there really much concern for Catharsis, for whatever the poem might do to the audience. The poem itself, its language as medium of Imitation and its various manners of Imitation were the things to study. Ransom, in The New Criticism (1941), which gave the movement its name, found Richards, Empson, Eliot, and Yvor Winters lacking in proper focus. Their insights were remarkable but based on wrong notions of what talk about poetry should be: poetry is not essentially psychology or history or morals. It is a peculiar mode of discourse mixing abstract reason with many unaccountable particulars of experience, including a rather inexplicable but central concern with the sounds themselves of the language. Coleridge had said something like this, Coleridge, that Ocean where each kind Doth streight its own resemblance find: “the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image. . . .” For Ransom this mixture into unity represented—Imitated—nothing less than the nature of the world itself. Insofar as his book may be supposed to have had an effect, it promoted by praise and demonstration the analytic practices of the critics, and it made efforts to connect these local terms with larger ones all but impossible. Just so, Ransom’s own theory would seem to leave the minor term, Poetry, yearning for a connection with a major term of ultimate grandeur quite without benefit of a negotiable middle. And perhaps this was just as well. Theory is not everything. But The New Criticism is a book that might well be read more now, for its lovely and patient rationality, its delicate and yet sturdily sensible readings of poems as well as of critics. I could wish this book might be chosen over the many compendia of fallacies that so bemuse our graduate students of English today. (Is it the worse sin to be thus vague in reference or to be, in passing, invidious without any decent specificity of complaint? One, then, one compendium of fallacies: Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye.)

So, on the whole, the New Critics in all their variety were not really ambitious to form an entire Poetics, and if anything except chronological coincidence and propinquity in three or four literary quarterlies could define them, it would be the banning of Inspiration and Catharsis from their consideration. As one of the most distinguished of them, Cleanth Brooks, has said of the movement, “The New Criticism has tended to explore the structure of the work rather than the mind and personality of the artist or the reactions of his various readers.” This purification of literary criticism, the intense reading and intense analysis of structure certainly left the critics open to the charge, as Brooks says, of “having cut literature off from life.” But who could tell what criticism really might be able to accomplish in such a momentous detachment as this? Life in our time seems to have been famously busy in cutting off one thing after another from itself: family from society, we believe, and man from family, thought from feeling, and both thought and feeling from work. . . . At least the New Criticism changed for its time not only the way of talking about poetry but it changed poetry itself (which always changes anyway). Its unachieved Poetics did not even take a clear direction and there was never any sort of agreement on a philosophical justification for Poetry. Toward the end of it, the movement produced its most brilliant critic, and Randall Jarrell had no time at all for poetic theory. Nor so far as we know does the chief poet of the movement and of all his age. Both of them were certainly much instructed in the fine operations of critical analysis but also certainly neither of them, Jarrell or Robert Lowell, were in their work “cut off from life.” (Ransom said of Empson and Richards, “a brilliant pupil is presumptive evidence of the brilliant teacher.” Then what to say of Ransom, teacher to both Jarrell and Lowell?)

Still there may be some charge brought that the New Criticism did at least inadvertently in all its quite proper concern somehow lend itself to the general weakening of Poetry as a cultural force in our time. In exposing much that was untenable in, say, 19th-century claims for Poetry, it denied these doubtful mufflings of public dignity to its own poets. The critics taught us too much about actual Poetry to allow us any longer our old Stock Responses of diffuse piety for the Bards. Statistically, no doubt Poetry has never been so much studied in the universities as now it is. But I suspect that the discipline stands somewhat in the place of classical studies a hundred years ago: never so well understood, never so well equipped with the materials of authentic texts and with fine tools to work them, and the trap is ready to be sprung under it as the center of curriculum.

_____________

III

A new method of analysis with great powers of discrimination in detail and great promises of generalizations to come now puts itself forward for literary studies. But before discussing Linguistics, I must mention a recent attempt at a more traditional kind of Poetics. Bearing distinguished praises from René Dubos, Allen Tate, Henri Peyre, Ned Rorem, Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Rexroth, and Hiram Haydn, Stanley Burnshaw’s recent The Seamless Web¹ proposes to give us “an inclusive understanding of the phenomena we call poetry,” an understanding which will supplant “all extant views.” But, in fact, as far as Poetics goes, he is pretty well limited to reshuffling the few cards first dealt by Plato, just as everyone else has been.

Burnshaw claims to have found new values for these cards. From the vocabulary of recent speculation about human evolution and biology, he has borrowed some ways of rephrasing the traditional doctrines of Inspiration, Imitation, and Catharsis. But his main purpose is to enclose all these terms in an odd enthusiastic vision of what Freud called the Oceanic feeling. Burnshaw himself has some difficulty in naming this sentiment. How you say in English, “‘At-oneness,’ for all its plainness of statement, carries a portentous ring. ‘Seamlessness’ is a wholly negative abstraction. Still more difficult to envisage is the ‘mixedness’ of man’s condition.” This is his seamless web. To get us all woven back into it is to be the function of poetry. Boiled down and rearranged, then, in the ancient mode of discourse, Burnshaw states, first, that joining together the conscious mind and the unconscious would cause us to reexperience and reaffirm man’s unity with nature. Second, Poetry causes us to join together the conscious mind and the unconscious. Ergo, Poetry causes us to reaffirm man’s unity with nature.

The major term, what I have called a version of the Oceanic feeling, is stated rather as though it were really held by all of us in unquestioned assumption. To reexperience the kind of unity we felt in the womb: this is the supreme goal of human life. Attesting to this is chiefly a posthumous volume by Trigant Burrow, Preconscious Foundations of Human Experience (1964), as redacted by William E. Galt. Burnshaw reports that the authority of the book is perhaps excitingly uncertain. Burrow seems to have had a checkered career, for unexplained reasons. We are told he was dismissed from his university post and “excommunicated” from the American Psychoanalytic Association, but we are not told why. Burnshaw reports he could never get any social scientist to discuss a work by Burrow called The Social Basis of Consciousness. He also tells us the “experts” on human needs, drives, and instincts totally ignore “man’s drive to regain, to recover, his primary organic unity with the rest of creation, his ‘seamlessness.’” He mentions in another connection Civilization and Its Discontents but not the fact that Freud begins that book with an analysis of just that “drive.” Of course Freud did not share Burnshaw’s conviction that the womb is the ideal environment for an adult and that a man’s loftiest achievement would be to recover that Eden. I do not think Burnshaw can quite command universal assent for this proposal. Many human endeavors we all admire have not had such a destination.

The middle term, his central cog, assumes that the conscious mind and the unconscious had better be reconciled. Here Burnshaw depends not on psychoanalysis for support but on certain speculations about the evolution of the human brain. Some of these are drawn from the above Burrow, others from a book called Man’s Presumptuous Brain by A. T. W. Simeons. Simeons said of his own work, although Burnshaw does not tell us so, “This is a very controversial and highly speculative book intended at most to give some slight bias to modern thought on the psychosomatic mechanism.” The speculations concern a supposed conflict between our old animal brain stem, presumed arbitrator of our instincts, and our newer cortex, presumed authority of our artificial human world. Of course some similar notions of man’s nature have always been with us, if not in these phrenological exactitudes. We have seen Plato and Aristotle discussing them. Few today would doubt that there does seem to be some conflict in us, whether we call it that of emotion and reason, or whatever, and we might prefer to have it lessened. We do not require the evolutionary speculation in order to assent, at least tentatively, to this middle term.

But this gets us to the minor term, to Poetry. Poetry is going to reconcile our poor divided minds, and thus unite us with at-oneness, seamlessness, mixedness.

So here we have to get back to what Poetry is, Imitation; and how the poet produces it, Inspiration; and how the audience takes it, Catharsis. In Burnshaw’s view, poetry occurs in the human mind, but the mind imitates the body, the body’s pulsations of viscera and so on; thus the poet necessarily imitates his own body. As a part or function of the body, the mind finds its greatest happiness in producing regularly pulsing brain waves. These waves are disturbed by external stimuli, whereupon the mind busies itself to recover its original rhythmic bliss. This supposition is based on a statement by J. Z. Young, a biologist, who offers it, in Burnshaw’s quotation, as “a speculative suggestion.” With his characteristic generosity about credentials, Burnshaw takes it thereafter as a nailed-down fact. Perhaps this is sufficiently insecure, but the next step takes place—such a vehicle to such a tenor—in the regions of pure air. “Like anyone else, a creative artist inhales the surrounding world and exhales it. Whatever is taken in is given back in altered condition or transformed into matter, action, feeling, thought. And in the case of creative persons, an additional exhalation: in the form of words or sounds or shapes capable of acting upon others with the force of an object alive in their surrounding worlds.”

Well, surely this is only Richards’s Principles weakly rewritten, neurons and all, and Ransom’s objections apply here as well. So much for Inspiration, so much for Imitation and for Catharsis. So much for Poetics.

Otherwise, this web is a wide one producing a great haul of quotations and citations, scarcely a page without five or six of them: Bradley, Valéry, Dubos, Plato, Blake, Lacan, Vallejo, Frost. . . . There are comments on many subjects related to Poetics, comments to which a writer is entitled, surely, when he has done his bit with the elements: sentences are discussed, rime, meter, metaphor, translation, and questions like do other animals think, do they make artworks; and how come we enjoy in art things that would be unpleasant in life? Answer: “The Unlust of art bears the intimation of our ultimate creature victoriousness.” Thank you. Well, the subject of Poetics has inspired plenty of others to odd conjectures and admonitions, confusions and whimsies. Doubtless it will continue to do so, as at this very moment.

_____________

IV

The new discipline advancing on Poetry is linguistics—advancing now more publicly, that is, since for many years, like the New Criticism before it had its name, linguistics was doing its work on literature in ways and places obscure to most readers. For many literary people it is a fearsome engine. The tiny particles and invisible structures of language to which it attends, the outrageous names and symbols by which it represents these, and the abstract mathematic rigor of its arrangements and rearrangements, all these seem as far from Poetry as the Binomial theorem. A discourse in linguistics makes even the most abstruse analyses of literary critics look like friendly chit-chat. These works are scattered, rapidly increasing, and their impact on literary studies has not been fully assessed.² (The journal Linguistics has forthcoming a survey of the newest linguistic studies of literature. If that little arrow → meaning “rewritten as” were not the linguists’ favorite icon, then the word “forthcoming” would be. So busy they are.)

The most distinguished of linguists and veteran scholar of many literatures, Roman Jakobson, has recently published with a colleague, Lawrence G. Jones, a monograph that shows very certain achievements in this field, and shows, too, how uncertain may be the directions the movement can take. This is Shakespeare’s Verbal Art in Th’expence of Spirit.³

We would expect a lot about structure in this examination of verbal art. Sonnets are of course by definition a highly organized literary form. Whichever of the various schemes for the fourteen lines the poet may select—the octave and sestet of the Petrarchan sonnet or the three quatrains and couplet of the English, each with a number of possibilities for various rime schemes—it has always been supposed, if not quite with the force of an Act of Uniformity against the poets, that the procedures of units of thought in the sonnet would conform more or less to the procedures of the units of form (or notably not conform, as when Milton ran over his sentences and thoughts from octave into sestet). Like the units of thought, the sounds conformed in the order of the rimes, and in other ways.

But just how various and complex the mutual relations could be between these fourteen lines and the categories the form divides, and then between the sounds identified within these categories, and between their phrasings, and their grammar—and their thought!—this could scarcely have been guessed before. I cannot here attempt more than a sketch of the wealth of indisputable data uncovered in Shakespeare’s Verbal Art. The monograph is packed and detailed and not to be summarized without drastic loss.

But first, and after this intolerable deal of Poetics, one actual poem may be a relief, even superscribed as it is here with the marks set down for some of the structural features discerned by our linguistic analysts.

_____________

Sonnet 129

1.  

   1. Th’expence of Spirit | in a waste of shame
   2. Is lust in action, | and till action, lust
   3. Is perjurd, murdrous, | blouddy full of blame,
   4. savage extreame, rude, | cruel, not to trust,
2. 1. Injoyd no sooner | but dispised straight,
   2. Past reason hunted, | and no sooner had
   3. Past reason hated | as a swollowd bayt,
   4. On purpose layd | to make’the taker mad.
3. 1. Mad(e) in pursut | and in possession so,
   2. Had, having, and in quest, j to have extreame,
   3. A blisse in proofe | and provd | a very wo,
   4. Before a joy proposd | behind a dreame,
4. 1. All this the world | well knowes | yet none knowes well,
   2. To shun the heaven | that leads | men to this hell.

In such an English or Shakespearean form of the sonnet, we are accustomed to noticing the three quatrains each with its four lines linked by their rimes, shame, lust, blame, trust; straight, had, bayt, mad, and so on. Then we notice too the final couplet, well, hell, and we expect that the final couplet will summarize the foregoing lines, oppose them, or otherwise reflect in meaning something of the kind of finality that the chime of sound in the couplet’s rimes seems to give us after the alternating series of rimes in the quatrain.

Many of us have this old prejudice in art, no doubt a wise one, urging us that form and content are somehow inseparable. So when someone tells us he will show us more about form, we expect usually, I believe, that his demonstration will end in some increased estimate of the inseparable content. We may, in fact, think it rather an empty demonstration if it doesn’t so end: mere design, like wallpaper.

_____________

I will try something like that test on Shakespeare’s Verbal Art. But it is not a complete test by any means, nor perhaps quite relevant. I think deeper things are going on here than appear explicitly in this monograph, certainly deeper than in my tests. What we are looking for in language lies over the horizon and we can only find out what it is if we get there. Language is one of our last mysteries, and we know almost nothing of the relation of its forms to what it says. My kind of test, then, is only to show that it may be, in this case before us, that the authors themselves have seemed to ask for a test too crude for their real intentions.

A linguist is trained to observe particles of language we only use, and use without knowing how. And he is trained also to observe the way these particles recur and how according to the deep laws of our language they may or may not combine with one another, and then how the combinations of sounds may make words and phrases and sentences. The basic sounds of our language are not very many and they are selected from the really quite few sounds the human vocal apparatus can make. We have only a few vowels to work with and a few more consonants. Languages seem to have a way of pairing these off against one another so that sounds which are nearly alike are yet distinguishable to us. Sometimes the distinction is purely mental, as when most of us actually make or hear no real difference between beetle and beadle but distinguish them by the context. In the same way, linguists are given to worrying about pairs like lighthouse and light house and just what the rules are that we unconsciously encode and decode here; or with considerable complexity they worry out the grammatical rules that allow us to distinguish between sentences so apparently alike in syntax, on the surface, as, I persuaded John to leave, and, I expected John to leave.

Given a poem with fourteen lines, then, Jakobson sees first of all a form with more complications than ordinarily we see in the sonnet. There are many elements of this structure that may be paired and contrasted. The monograph examines these at all “levels” of language to observe how they correspond: the sounds of vowel and consonant; the classes of words (noun or not-noun, for instance, and then all the others); the types of phrases, the sentences, the figurative language, and other special sorts of device; and, finally, the meaning. Then we must see how all this adds up.

As it comes out, the correspondences are (up to a point) astonishing, whether we compare the qualities of odd lines with even lines, of odd strophes with even strophes, of outer strophes I and IV with inner strophes II and III, of the first two strophes with the last two. We find that sounds, grammar, meaning, all these really are arranged in sets of contrast. Even, the first seven lines may be opposed to the last seven: then the poem has a center. And the center marks a shift in rhythmic patterns, as the vertical lines introduced into the text above show. All the lines up to the center break in the middle of the third foot, after that they break before or after the middle foot, usually both places. The apparently anomalous punctuation of III 2, Had, having, and in quest, to have extreame, marks with a comma (after a familiar Elizabethan custom) a metrical break which the phrasing itself would not indicate. And I have mentioned only a few of the correspondences the monograph finds.

For a brief skeletonized example, we can take the consideration of how the pair of odd strophes, I and III, are opposed to the even strophes. We find a clear contrast all through. (I will omit the charting of sound clusters. Alerted to their presence, any reader can observe the many repetitions of vowels and of consonant clusters—there are more of them, and they are more patterned into groups by line, than we could expect even from the necessary repetitions in our limited repertory of English sounds. The final couplet particularly is dense with these clusters.)

But to return to the contrast of odd and even strophes. And I must skip even more here, the classification of parts of speech, of abstract and concrete words, of animate and inanimate, all of this impressively detailed. I will get on to one of the larger grammatical structures, and then to how the monograph relates this to the “Interpretations” of the sonnet. There is a grammatical form peculiar to the two even strophes which directly reflects, the authors believe, the way the plot of the poem works. They do not say it quite as I do in my doubtlessly naive way, but if I understand them, they mean that these grammatical constructions not only occur at twin vital structural points in the poem, and state the main theme of it, and introduce the two characters of the plot, but in their similar progression grammatically they imitate the progressive actions of the plot.

The “progressive structures” of these two key segments, so much like each other, differ radically from the grammar of the rest of the lines. In effect they produce a whole string of connected things showing cause and effect, where the other lines tend to pile up their objects and their phrases in mere conjunction.

II A) hated B) as a swollowed bayt, C) on purpose layd D) to make E) the taker F) mad.

IV A) none knowes well, B) to shun C) the heaven D) that leads E) men F) to this hell.

The grammatical structure here is supposed to be a kind of demonstration of the underlying cause and effect in the plot of the poem. The hero, the taker, is introduced in the last line of II. The last line of IV “brings the exposure of the malevolent culprit, the heaven that leads men to this hell, and thus discloses by what perjurer the joy was propos’d and lure laid.”

_____________

I believe we may now go on directly to the “Interpretation,” always remembering how the actual detail that makes up the substance of the monograph is scarcely indicated here. This will have to be rather a long quotation.

The sonnet has two topics—the lust and the luster—and omits the designation of the former in the final strophe and the designation of the latter in the initial strophe. The abstract appellation of the first topic attracts a string of further abstract nouns. The first strophe characterizes lust in itself; the second launches a set of passive participles with a hint to the yet unnamed dramatis personae and finishes by referring to the taker of the bayt; the third strophe uses active participles to depict the taker’s behavior and brings forward images of lust as objects of his striving. The adjective extreame applied to lust in the first strophe is transferred to the luster in the third. Mere anaphoric pronouns refer in the terminal couplet to the previous representation of lust, and the notion of the luster grows into a generalized idea of men and their damnation. The final line seems to allude to the ultimate persona, the celestial condemner of mankind.

Finally, the authors claim, “An objective scrutiny of Shakespeare’s language and verbal art, with particular reference to this poem, reveals a cogent and mandatory unity of its thematic and compositional framework.” Their demonstration of the compositional framework seems to me beyond challenge and of real importance. This “subliminal verbal patterning,” as Jakobson has called it, operating in large part outside the awareness of either writer or reader, is undoubtedly a feature of poetry, perhaps a distinguishing feature. Samuel R. Levin has explored it as such in Linguistic Structures in Poetry (1962), discovering relations “imposing on the discourse some structure additional to that which derives from the language as it is normally used.” Now, we have all been familiar with this in traditional English verse. Meter is a structure of sound derived from the language as normally used: it is derived from the stress patterns of spoken English which are then given a structure in addition to, and in relation to, that normally used. In the same way is rime derived and structured, and then the lesser devices of alliteration, assonance, and the others. But what is the relation of these structures, the framework of sound and then, as with Jakobson’s analysis, of syntactic units also, to the thematic framework? Is there a “cogent and mandatory unity” of these? By what mandate?

Here in this poem there seems reason for doubt. With the monograph’s ultimate interpretation I would not quarrel, we would be foolish to allow ourselves to stop short of any but the maximum intention we can imagine for Shakespeare. Surely we must not suppose he could fail to realize that heaven must present among other things the “ultimate persona” Himself, just as we know, at another extreme, he meant hell to present, among other things, the physical vagina itself.

I cannot quite make out why the “malevolent culprit” who has supplied lust to the luster is thereby a perjurer also. Lust is perjured and does this make its provider so too; or are lust and the culprit somehow one? But this does not really trouble me.

The doubt arises rather from the confidence of the monograph that the climactic progression of verbal art goes along with a like climactic progression of thematic presentation. When the authors chide other critics for saying the poem has “no logical organization at all” (John Crowe Ransom), or that there is a “fading out” of the initial bitter disgust (Richard Levin), or when they claim a carefully maintained distinction between lust and luster, or victim and condemner, then we can wonder. In the abrupt and powerful opening, so unlike most of the sugared lines of the other sonnets (its emphatic piling up of sound-clusters, stresses, so well analyzed here, its words of violence, its physical depiction of the sex act), then, yes, it seems to be clear enough what lust is. It is the sexual urge, and it is considered in the act, before the act, and afterward: murderous, savage, cruel, while seeking the act; destructive of the man physically and spiritually in the act; and then afterward causing the man to despise and hate sex.

The image of the swollowd bayt is also powerful but really it is not quite logical, for if the man is made mad by taking it then how was he mad before, or “made” so, as the Quarto has it in III 1, Made in pursut and in possession so; and at this point the elliptical syntax leads, perhaps properly enough if we consider the case dramatically or psychologically but not logically, if we remember that lust has just been a bait to be swallowed, to an inextricability of lust and luster. Perhaps I have only a quibble here, and we all respect Shakespeare’s rich effects of multiple mixed images. But is not the harsh initial energy running down toward the end in favor of sweetened lines and conventional diction? A blisse in proofe is a less striking phrase for the sex act than Th’expence of Spirit in a waste of shame; nor does a very wo, or a dreame, even if we call the dream a phantom, seem to be of an intensity that must be dispisd, past reason hated, or make a man go mad.

As John Crowe Ransom once remarked, a poem is a unique sort of chain that unlike others is as strong as its strongest link, but that is not to say we should suppose all the links, even such fantastically intricate links as these, must necessarily be equal to those powerful ones that can hold in themselves the whole poem’s value.

And if I may make one more reference to Ransom, he used to talk about the necessary “indeterminacies” that the poem’s structures of sound caused in their queer union with the poem’s meaning, just as the necessities of some more or less necessary kind of sense caused indeterminacies in the ideal sound pattern. These indeterminacies, he thought, constituted Poetry’s unique value as discourse. In both directions they brought in more than could otherwise have been there. Perhaps we should remember this and not suppose too soon that the new techniques, revealing unforeseen intricacies of correspondence in structure, will necessarily point to other correspondences as well. Although in many ways they do so point in this splendid reading of Th’expense of Spirit.

_____________

V

Now a final few words, my own inevitable claim I make like all those who have ever dared play with the counters of Inspiration, Imitation, and Catharsis, that in my words alone are these truly understood. My words are few because although I know that a sense of conviction comes to the reader only with many repetitions in hundreds of pages, this would be only a shifting of the accumulated weights of twenty-five hundred years. Insofar as I can budget these at all, I move them only slightly and mostly only point at them, a thing quickly enough done.

As to the largest purposes and functions of art, where we must all agree somehow in our way with Plato and Aristotle that art serves the very purpose of humanity, I have sketched my notions of this before,⁴ and what I have to say now is a little more modest, it has only to do with the minor and middle terms of the grand proposition.

These particles and structures of language, so clearly observed now by the linguists as they hear us work them in our everyday talk, manipulating as we must the very limited number of sounds in the limited combinations that have been selected for us by our language, all within the paths of syntax that are yet to be charted, but charted surely they will be—so the linguists promise and so we must suppose—these particles of sound and these paths are reiterated, reified, in Poetry, in the art of language. They are thus reiterated and reified beyond any practical use in communication, though they may incidentally serve it too and doubtless always do at Poetry’s very best. This reiteration is an Imitation of language itself. It is neither the importance of the object recorded in our verbal arts nor even the most superb ordering of the medium that we celebrate or respond to in Poetry. It comes to this, that we are reminded, all subliminally to be sure, and yet with increasing and constant lowering of that threshold these days, how the order of language exists for us: how we can—and must—record our Imitations of ourselves. I mean something quite baldly specific by that Imitation of ourselves, our essential humanity, as I tried to say in “The End of Culture.” But it is enough to say now that what poets are really talking about is language itself.

They are talking about the little particles of language and about the structures of language, and about how strangely words can come to stand for things without being those things. Any one of the collocations we call a “brilliant phrase” tells us this, as we are struck by what is said and how it is said—that it can be said! But Poetry forces us always to think this way. This is its Imitation.

Celebrating the achievement of his peer Roman Jakobson, I. A. Richards recalled⁵ his fears and high hopes of nearly fifty years ago, and again with his great spirit took such hope as he could, in this time of even more frightfully destructive powers, from what Jakobson has done to help us “to read better.” To read better! Is that where we are to put our hopes in this world? And to read Poetry, at that. But perhaps just the fact that this is not at all our general direction is some reason to trust in it.

_____________

¹ Braziller, 336 pp., $7.50.

² A useful compendium is Linguistics and Literary Style, ed. Donald C. Freeman, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 384 pp., $5.95.

³ Mouton (The Hague), available here from Humanities Press, $3.25.

⁴ “The End of Culture,” COMMENTARY, December 1969.

⁵ London Times Literary Supplement, May 28, 1970.