A LETTER (1937)
Dear Dr. Leavis:
I have read your new book, Revaluation,
with much admiration and profit. It seems the first consistent attempt to
rewrite the history of English poetry from the twentieth-century point of view.
Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Georgians recede
into the background, and Donne, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, and Keats in part,
Hopkins, the later Yeats, T. S. Eliot, etc., move into the foreground. Your
book teems with acute critical observations and brilliant interpretations of
texts. I think there will be little quarrel with your chapters on the
seventeenth century, on Pope, on the eighteenth century, and on Keats. If I may
venture, however, some fundamental criticisms (and there would be no reason to
write unless I had something to say), I could wish that you had stated your
assumptions more explicitly and defended them systematically. I do not doubt
the value of these assumptions and, as a matter of fact, I share them with you
for the most part, but I would have misgivings in pronouncing them without
elaborating a specific defence or a theory in their defence. Allow me to sketch
your ideal of poetry, your "norm" with which you measure every poet:
your poetry must be in serious relation to actuality, it must have a firm grasp
of the actual, of the object, it must be in relation to life, it must not be
cut off from direct vulgar living, it should not be personal in the sense of
indulging in personal dreams and fantasies, there should be no emotion for its own
sake in it, no afflatus, no mere generous emotionality, no luxury in pain or
joy, but also no sensuous poverty, but a sharp, concrete realization, a
sensuous particularity. The language of your poetry must not be cut off from
speech, should not flatter the singing voice, should not be merely mellifluous,
should not give, e.g., a mere general sense of motion, etc. You will recognize,
of course, in this description tags from your book chosen from all chapters,
and the only question I would ask you is to defend this position more
abstractly and to become conscious that large ethical, philosophical, and, of
course, ultimately, also aesthetic choices are involved.
My further criticism would be directed to one
of the consequences of your assumption. Your insistence on a firm grasp on the
actual predisposes you in the direction of a realist philosophy and makes you
unappreciative of a whole phase of human thought: idealism as it comes down
from Plato [see Shelley's Defence of Poetry]. This makes you
underrate the coherence and even the comprehensibility of the romantic view of
the world. I would like to demonstrate this by an analysis of a few examples
from your chapters on the Romanticists.
You compare, e.g., the structure of Blake’s
Introduction to the Songs of Experience with Eliot’s Ash Wednesday,
and consider Blake’s poem as so ambiguous as to have no "right sense"
at all (p. 141). Actually, I think, the poem has only one possible meaning,
which can be ascertained by a study of the whole of Blake’s symbolical
philosophy. Here is my paraphrase: the poet is addressing Mankind, Fallen Man,
who in Blake is frequently enough symbolized by the Earth. "Man!" he
says, "listen to the voice of the poet who has the gift of prophecy
because he has listened to the voice of God. In spite of his fall Man might yet
control the universe (‘the starry pole’)." Now the bard is quoted as
saying: "Arise from your slumber. Morning is near. But in the meantime you
can wait armed with Reason, limited by Time and Space." Or to comment on
every difficulty in detail: not the Holy Word of the Bard is calling the lapsed
soul, as you say (p. 141). The Bard claims only to have heard the voice of God
who once (in the garden of Eden) called the lapsed soul who then was weeping in
the evening dew. Delete "and" (in line 7), which was inserted only
because of the rhythm, and the sense is quite clear. The word "dew,"
by the way, has a special significance in Blake, and if you compare the very
similar scene in Vala ("Ninth Night," 1. 371, etc.) you find there
phrases like "the dew of death," which are obviously relevant.
"The dewey grass" in line 12 of our poem is also symbolic.
"Dew," or any water, in Blake represents matter, the grass, for
obvious reasons, flesh. The next "that" cannot possibly refer to God,
but to the soul or to Man, who after his rebirth might control the "starry
pole." There is no need to evoke "Lucifer." Earth, identical with
Man and soul, should arise out of matter ("dewey grass" is the same
as "slumberous mass"). The twinkling stars in Blake mean always the
light of Reason, and the watery shore the limit of matter or of Time and Space.
The identification of Earth and Man in this poem is explicitly recognized by
Blake in the illustration to this very poem, which represents a masculine
figure lying upon the "watery shore" and, with the "starry
floor" as a background, painfully lifting his head. There may be
discussion how hard this or that symbol of Blake should be pressed, but the
structure seems to me in no way to resemble Ash Wednesday, and the
syntax is quite clear. One of the difficulties is the punctuation in your
version: in the first edition there is no semi-colon after "sees," no
comma after "Soul," a colon after "dew," commas after
"heard" and "Word," etc.
The chapter on Wordsworth, excellent as it is
in fine critical discrimination, shows the same lack of interest in romantic
philosophy. I cannot see why the argument of Canto II of The Prelude
could not be paraphrased, and I cannot possibly consider Mr. Empson’s analysis
of a passage from Tintern Abbey as satisfactory (Seven Types of
Ambiguity, 1930, p. 191ff.). There is no difficulty with this passage
except possibly in the words "something far more deeply interfused."
The question "than what?" put by Mr. Empson can be answered only by
"than you would think, than it is usually (i.e., in theism)
understood." A "presence," a "sense sublime," a
"motion and a spirit," are all different terms for the something
"impelling all thinking things, all objects of all thought." This
last phrase does not, as Mr. Empson suggests, imply "determinism" or
even "predestination," but means simply that this something, this
spirit, sets in motion both human minds and all objects of these minds. The
sense of the passage becomes quite clear if we see it in the light of the whole
of Wordsworth’s philosophy; e.g., if we read of "the one interior life
that lives in all things . . . in which all beings live with God, themselves are
God, existing in the mighty whole" (from a Note-book of only slightly
later date, Sélincourt’s edition of The Prelude, p. 512). I grant that
we today may not be impressed by these speculations, but they are the very
life-blood of a great European tradition descended from Plato, and they are
still considered valid and valuable by many prominent thinkers. I recall, e.g.,
A. N. Whitehead’s interesting comments on Wordsworth’s philosophy of nature (Science
and the Modern World, 1926, p. 103), where the eminent mathematician,
logician, speculative philosopher commends Wordsworth precisely because
"he grasps the whole nature in the tonality of the instance."
Whitehead quotes "Ye Presences of Nature in the sky" (from The
Prelude, I, line 464) as expressing most clearly a feeling for nature,
"exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal
presences of others." Bradley’s comparison with Hegel does not seem to me
absurd, and I have myself shown (in my book on Kant in England, 1931, p.
159 ff.) that traces of Kantian thought can be found in Wordsworth (indirectly
through Coleridge). The debt to Hartley to which you refer and which you
consider rightly as external (p. 158) was really much slighter and more
transient than it would appear from a book like Beatty’s. So, contrary to your
own conclusion (p. 164), I would maintain the coherence, unity, and subtlety of
Wordsworth’s thought. I would be chary about using the term ultimate validity,
but Wordsworth’s thoughts on nature, etc., seem to me equally satisfying (and
actually of the very same general tendency) as the thought of Schelling or
Hegel on these questions. This stress on the "defensibility" (is
there such a word in the English language?) of Wordsworth’s philosophy of
nature implies that Wordsworth’s thought is not reducible to the Arnoldian
conception or to Mr. Empson’s astonishing assertion that he has no "other
inspiration than the mountains as a totem or a father-substitute" (bc.
cit., p. 26).
The same criticism applies, I think, also to
your paper on Shelley. I have, first, some doubts on individual points. Your
analysis of 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
earth’s decaying leaves does not seem to me merely vague and general (p. 205).
A defence could suggest that the parallel can be made plausible by imagining
Shelley lying in his boat and seeing in 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 leaves,
but rather allude to the old mystical conception of the two trees of Heaven and
Earth intertwining.
Your objections against Shelley’s stress on
inspiration seem to me exaggerated. One cannot deny the share of the
unconscious in the creative process, and sudden "inspiration" must be
of necessity more prominent in a writer of songs compared to a dramatist, a
novelist, or a composer of symphonies, where the share of conscious work must
be larger. Shelley, I think, overstressed the "inspiration" in
obvious reaction to eighteenth-century ideas on composing poetry and in answer
to Peacock’s essay, which is written from a completely rationalist point of
view. Shelley himself revised his work continually, and one can find at least
two or three earlier stages of the Ode in his Note-books (ed.
Buxton Forman, 1911, Vol. I, 164); e.g., line five was originally "On the
blue deep of the aerial stream," then "blue deep" was changed to
"blue depth" and then to "blue surface." "Stream"
was replaced by "billows" before the "surge" to which you
object was adopted.
I cannot see the
slightest confusion in the opening paragraph of
My own, my human mind,
which passively
Now renders and
receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting
interchange
With the clear
universe of things around [1. 87].
Here we have again, in spite of the stress on
the passivity of the mind, a clear conception of the give-and-take, of an
interchange, between the creative and the purely receptive principles of mind,
a complete commentary on the passage explained above. The passage you quote (p.
213) in contrast from Wordsworth’s Prelude (VI, 631ff.) has
philosophically nothing to do with the introduction of Shelley’s
I would not like to defend When the lamp is
shattered, which seems to me a poor poem in any case. But still I think you
make the poem out to be worse than it is. You do not seem to have interpreted
rightly the meaning of the question beginning "O Love" in stanza 3.
The poet merely asks Love why she chooses the frailest thing, i.e., the human
heart, as her cradle, home, and bier. Love is born, resides, and dies in the
heart. This does not seem to be anything unconventional, but still it saves the
poem from your charge of containing "banalities about the sad lot of
woman" (p. 221), as woman, in my interpretation, is never mentioned at
all. "The weak one" which is "singled to endure what is once
possessed" is not necessarily of feminine sex at all, but simply the heart
for which complete forgetfulness of former happiness would be less painful than
the burden of memory. Stanza 4 addresses Love again, and "its
passions" refer to the passion of the heart.
These notes are made only to support my main
point: Shelley’s philosophy, I think, is astonishingly unified and perfectly
coherent. After an early stage of eighteenth-century materialism he turned to
idealism in a subjective version. It is outside the scope of these notes to
determine what exactly were the different influences which moulded his
thoughts. Berkeley or Berkeley through Drummond, Plato, the neo-Platonists, the
Gnostics, Spinoza, Shaftesbury, or the animistic philosophy of nature developed
by E. Darwin and H. Davy from
All these remarks could have only one purpose:
to show that the romantic view of the world, though it found in England only
one prominent philosopher, Coleridge, underlies and pervades the poetry of
Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley, elucidates many apparent difficulties, and is,
at least, a debatable view of the world. 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 comprehension of
it are necessary for an appreciation of the poetry. A question which has been
debated a good deal, as you know, and which I would not like to solve too
hastily on the basis of your book.
Yours sincerely,
René Wellek
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© René Wellek
25.10.2008
http://courses.essex.ac.uk/lt/lt204/wellek.htm
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Katrin Blatt
kablatt@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press