SOURCE: Friedman, Norman. “Hallam on Tennyson: An Early Aesthetic Doctrine and Modernism.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 8, no. 2 (fall 1975): 37-62.

[In the following essay, Friedman examines “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson.” He claims the essay demonstrates Hallam as an original and almost prescient critic, noting connections between Hallam's essay and modernism.]

Tennyson praised Hallam, whose death set In Memoriam in motion, as a man of unusual intellectual promise cut off in his prime. If Hallam's essay, “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry” (1831),¹ published two years before his untimely death, is any indication, then Tennyson was right, for it seems to me a brilliant piece of work. Following Newman's “Poetry with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics” (1829) by two years, and preceding Mill's “Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties” (1833, rev. 1859) by the same number of years, Hallam's essay has a more clear-cut notion of the uniqueness of poetry as an art and of what that uniqueness entails in actual poems than either of these. With a slight change of style and in the references to poets, it could be imagined to have been written only yesterday under the same title, so modern are its basic ideas. Its importance was not really recognized during the Victorian period, however, nor was its significance felt in the anthologies of Victorian literature until recently. But it is Yeats who gives us the clue here, as he does in so many other things regarding the transition from Victorian to modern: “When I began to write I avowed for my principles those of Arthur Hallam in his essay upon Tennyson,”² and speaking of the 1890's Yeats says: “The revolt against the literary element in painting was accompanied by a similar revolt in poetry. The doctrine of what the younger Hallam called the Aesthetic School was expounded in his essay on Tennyson. …”³ Let us see what those “principles” and that “doctrine” were, and try to determine why they seemed so crucial to Yeats. For, since Yeats is one of the great originators of modernism, Hallam's ideas have great implications as forerunners of that movement.

Hallam's essay falls into two over-all divisions: the first is a discussion of the nature of the poetry “of Sensation,” and the second is a review of Tennyson's first book, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), as coming under the heading of that category.⁴ We shall analyze this division, and its several sub-sections, in that order.

I

Hallam begins by praising what he takes to be Wordsworth's notion that popularity is not a test of poetry, but then he disagrees with Wordsworth's too exclusive admirers who claim “that the highest species of poetry is the reflective.” These two points—the relation of intellect to poetry and the relation of poetry to its audience—will be his basic themes in this division of the essay as he tries to define the true nature of poetry.

Hallam's conception is that the poet's mind works in a different way from most men's minds, and that therefore what he writes is to be read and appreciated in a different way from other forms of discourse. Newman saw, however confusedly, that the poet works by feeling rather than reason, and Mill distinguished the varying ways in which the mind of the ordinary man, the mind of the man of business or of science, and the mind of the true poet worked. And Mill also showed how emotion is the dominant force in the true poet's mind, subordinating and absorbing ideas into its own tendency. The point is the modern one—derived in turn from the eighteenth-century psychologists and the romantics—that there are other kinds of structure than the logical kind, and that poetry has a structure of its own. The structure of poetry is associational rather than rational, and it proceeds according to the “logic” of feeling and imagery rather than reason. Once the full implications of this concept are grasped, poetry can be defended for being as “true” and significant as prose, while at the same time being seen as autonomous, as having an order and worth of its own. Poetry, that is, has to be taken out of competition with science, business, philosophy, morality, and religion, and yet it has simultaneously to be assigned to an alternative category that will be just as valuable.

This autonomy is the essential point of the aesthetic doctrine—not that poetry is all form without content, but rather that its form is its own. And the corollary of this is that the form subordinates the content, absorbs it, transmutes it, re-shapes it, and makes it something different from what it was before. And it is in the shaping powers of the imagination that the romantic-Victorian-modernist tradition finds the true differentia of the poet. Art is not an imitation of life but a re-creation of how the poet experiences life, a subjection of reality to the creative processes of the mind. Hence follows the nineteenth- and twentieth-century interest in the mind's looking at itself. Poetry is an interpretation of life, a kind of interpretation that is produced by no other form of discourse, and it works by means of structures that are duplicated nowhere else. The primacy of form implies, then, that poetry is to be analyzed in terms of its own structures and evaluated according to its own criteria. If art has its own forms—and this is basically what Coleridge meant by his principle of organic form—it has its own laws, and it creates it own world with its own rules.

It is autonomous, however, not in the sense that it is divorced from life but rather in the sense that the poet, as artist, is concerned more with perfecting his poem than with instructing his audience. The proper adjustment of parts to the whole, of means to the end, of details to the design, of materials to the intention, is what occupies his primary efforts. And even though his insight into and grasp of life may be—indeed, should be—true, his function as an artist is not discharged until he has embodied them successfully in a beautiful poem. For a poem must transform its materials in order to evoke the illusion of life. Things look different in different contexts, and an exact copy of reality does not seem real. Andy Warhol was simply reversing the normal artistic process when he reproduced soup can labels: whereas the usual operation is to alter, shape, select, and organize so as to get the proper effect of the thing represented, he produced an effect of strangeness by merely copying what he saw. In this sense, the formalist is the realist and the copier is the fantasist. That is why our family photographs betray us so, since we merely point the camera and shoot, whereas a real photographer, who can do us more justice, must be an artist to catch us as we really are. Thus the poet who wishes to create a profound impression of life must have more than profound ideas—he needs, in addition, a mastery of his medium. That is why Buchanan and Morley, in attacking the aestheticism of Rossetti and Swinburne in the name of content over form, were mistaken: the better the form of the poem, the truer the insight; the more didactic it tries to be, the worse its form will be and the falser its insight.

The distinction between Beauty and Truth, then, is not a way of isolating poetry from life but rather of isolating its quality as an art from its other qualities. Truth may be a necessary condition of great art, but it is not a sufficient cause. And it follows from these distinctions that a poem cannot be great merely by virtue of treating great ideas or great subjects, and conversely that great poems may be written that treat of apparently trivial things. As all our textbooks from Brooks and Warren on have told us, the poetry is not the content but in the form, not in the subject but what is done with the subject, not in what is said but in how it is said.

Thus Hallam says, “it is a gross fallacy, that because certain opinions are acute or profound, the expression of them by the imagination must be eminently beautiful.” The poet's job is not to write melodious philosophy but rather to create unified poems: “Whenever the mind of the artist suffers itself to be occupied, during its periods of creation, by any other predominant motive than the desire of beauty, the result is false in art.” For the poet's mind works according to its own principles and for the sake of its own ends: “for a man whose reveries take a reasoning turn, and who is accustomed to measure his ideas by their logical relations rather than the congruity of the sentiments to which they refer, will be apt to mistake the pleasure he has in knowing a thing to be true, for the pleasure he would have in knowing it to be beautiful. …” And this difference in mental processes will produce different kinds of writing. The reflective man “will pile his thoughts in a rhetorical battery, that they may convince, instead of letting them flow in a natural course of contemplation, that they may enrapture.” There is much in Wordsworth, for example, “which is good as philosophy, powerful as rhetoric, but false as poetry.” For poetry is different from either philosophy or rhetoric, and it works by congruity of sentiment rather than logical relation.

It remains now for Hallam to exemplify and explain this doctrine and so, anticipating Mill, he adduces Shelley and Keats as natural poets in contrast to Wordsworth.⁵ He concedes that there are differences between Shelley and Keats, but claims that there is “a groundwork of similarity sufficient for the purposes of classification, and”—here Hallam evinces his keen sense of history, a sense that will show itself more fully in a moment—“constituting a remarkable point in the progress of literature.” The similarity is that they “are both poets of sensation rather than reflection.” That this does not constitute a dichotomy between Beauty and Truth becomes clear as he explains what it means: “Susceptible of the slightest impulse from external nature, their fine organs trembled into emotion at colors, and sounds, and movements, unperceived or unregarded by duller temperaments. Rich and clear were their perceptions of visible forms; full and deep their feelings of music.” The difference between the poetry of reflection and that of sensation is a difference, not in content, but in form: “So vivid was the delight attending the simple exertions of eye and ear, that it became mingled more and more with their trains of active thought, and tended to absorb their whole being into the energy of sense.” It is not that aesthetic poetry has no ideas in it, representing a simple choice between manner as opposed to matter, but rather that it “mingles” ideas with sensations and feelings, and “absorbs” them into the process of imagery-making. For aesthetic poetry is organized according to the logic of images: “Other poets seek for images to illustrate their conceptions; these men had no need to seek; they lived in a world of images; for the most important and extensive portion of their life consisted in those emotions which are immediately conversant with the sensation.” Organic metaphor, as the modernist would say, in opposition to rhetorical or scientific metaphor.

The problem of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful resolves, not into an either/or option, but rather into a matter of hierarchical relation. Aesthetic poetry does not choose Beauty rather than the True or the Good; it subordinates them to the Beautiful. Aesthetic poetry may be full of ideas, but they are organized into poetry rather than philosophy. The difference is a difference in methods of organization. “This powerful tendency of imagination to a life of immediate sympathy with the external universe, is not nearly so liable to false views of art as the opposite disposition of purely intellectual contemplation.” For when the mind is working aesthetically, the Beautiful becomes a principle of organization rather than an abstract idea, and so is less liable to be misunderstood as a mere alternative to the True and the Good: “For where beauty is constantly passing before ‘that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude’; where the soul seeks it as a perpetual and necessary refreshment to the sources of activity and intuition; where all the other sacred ideas of our nature, the idea of good, the idea of perfection, the idea of truth, are habitually contemplated through the medium of this predominant mood, so that they assume its color, and are subject to its peculiar laws, there is little danger that the ruling passion of the whole mind will cease to direct its creative operations, or the energetic principle of love for the beautiful sink, even for a brief period, to the level of a mere notion in the understanding.”

Hallam admits that minds of this sort “are especially liable to moral temptations,” and that, in the larger scheme of things, the man as citizen “is of infinitely higher interest than” the man as artist. But this is no necessary contradiction of his aesthetic doctrine. The man as artist does and should have more freedom than the man as citizen, and the former should keep trying to enlarge the scope of the latter. But it is also appropriate that the latter will always lag behind, for experiments in life have direct consequences whereas those in art have only indirect effects. The freedom of art is paradoxical: it depends on art's separation from life, on its being relieved of the pressures of practical consequences, on its viewing life disinterestedly and apart from the necessities of ego-involvement; and yet at the same time, if this is merely a permitted freedom, a court-jester's license, and having ultimately no practical effect on life, it will in fact be “mere” aestheticism, sterile and trivial indeed. In order for the poet to fulfill his own function in his own way, he must be allowed this freedom, even though his poems can—and should—influence life for the better in the long run. In the meantime, in his daily life as a citizen he must be—and inevitably is—responsible for the consequences of his actions, as are all men.

This is not to say that he leads a double life, demonic within and conformist without, nor that he should be “consistent,” either in the sense of “living” aesthetically or in the sense of writing philistine verse. It is rather that, although both art and ethics should be based on the same passion for growth, openness, honesty, and freedom, they nevertheless belong to different categories and operate in different ways. The artist as citizen may violate the conventions and even break the laws of his own day, especially if they are narrow conventions and unjust laws, but he cannot expect to be exempted from calculating the costs of and paying the price for his nonconformity, any more than any other man. Although poets may possess “their mission as artists,” as Hallam says, “by rare and exclusive privilege,” they have, in “their mission as men,” no special privileges. If they do not want practical concerns to distort aesthetic concerns, they must also concede that aesthetic ones should not be allowed to distort practical ones.

The real danger, as Hallam says, is not that aestheticism will make men brutish (as Wilde fantasied in Dorian Gray over half a century later), but rather that moralism will make them too spiritual (and Wilde himself acknowledged the polarization by saying that his novel had too much of a moral). This is what is harmful to art, and we would do well to recall that the position here is being so earnestly advocated not by a Blake or a Byron or a Shelley but rather by a pure and devout early Victorian; “Not the gross and evident passions of our nature, but the elevated and less separable desires”—I think he means those amorphous spiritual desires that, unlike the merely physical passions, we cannot easily identify and condemn as being merely physical—“are the dangerous enemies which misguide the poetic spirit in its attempts at self-cultivation.” Too much moral passion can distort the poetic process more than too much sensual passion. “That delicate sense of fitness which grows with the growth of artistic feelings and strengthens with their strength, until it acquires a celerity and weight of decision hardly inferior to the correspondent judgments of conscience, is weakened by every indulgence of heterogeneous aspirations”—this must mean nonpoetic aims—“however pure they may be, however lofty, however suitable to human nature.”

It is no wonder, then, Hallam concludes this portion of the argument, since the true poet's mind works differently from that of other men, that true poets are not popular in their own day.

II

But this position raises another problem: does it mean that poets are shut off from other men, that men will never be able to understand poets, and that therefore art can have no effect on life after all? “We answer,” says Hallam, “this is not the import of our argument.” The poet may go beyond most men, but he begins where most men are and ultimately returns there. “Undoubtedly the true poet addresses himself, in all his conceptions, to the common nature of us all. Art is a lofty tree, and may shoot up far beyond our grasp, but its roots are in daily life and experience. Every bosom contains the elements of those complex emotions which the artist feels, and every head can, to a certain extent, go over in itself the process of their combination, so as to understand his expressions and sympathize with his state.”⁶ This, of course, is akin to Wordsworth's assertion that the poet is a man speaking to men. The artist does not deal with different materials from those with which we are all familiar; his contribution is rather “the process of their combination.” The poetry is not in the materials but rather in what is done with them—or, as Wordsworth puts it, the poet is endowed with a more lively sensibility than ordinary men.

This process requires, therefore, a certain ability on the part of the reader to grasp, understand, and appreciate the nature of poetic form; it “requires,” as Hallam puts it, “exertion.” Since the poet organizes his poem around a certain formal principle, it is necessary for the reader to be able to locate that same principle and read the poem in its terms. “For since the emotions of the poet, during composition, follow a regular law of association, it follows that to accompany their progress up to the harmonious prospect of the whole, and to perceive the proper dependence of every step on that which preceded, it is absolutely necessary to start from the same point, i.e. clearly to apprehend that leading sentiment of the poet's mind, by their conformity to which the host of suggestions are arranged.” This, it seems to me, is an even clearer picture of the nature of form and of the problems of formal analysis than we find in most modern critics; it is an almost Aristotelian conception, for it credits the poet with having a design in mind and it asks the critic to recover from the poem the principle of that design before analyzing how the parts relate to the whole. Hallam's conception of form, in other words, not only calls for part-whole analysis, but it also contains a principle of hierarchical order by means of which to do so. Although its sources in Hartley are clear, this hierarchical principle is also a part of Hallam's specifically romantic heritage, deriving in large part from August Wilhelm von Schlegel through Coleridge, and it is the very principle which, as R. S. Crane points out, the New Critical adherents of Coleridge omitted from their considerations.⁷

Such exertion, however, although it is possible for most readers, is not likely to be forthcoming, for most readers are lazy and prefer, therefore, to have their poetry either deal with the easy and familiar passions—“Love, friendship, ambition, religion, & c.,” as Hallam says—or be diluted with nonpoetic matters. “Hence, whatever is mixed up with art, and appears under its semblance, is always more favorably regarded than art free and unalloyed. Hence, half the fashionable poems in the world are mere rhetoric”—this over fifty years before Verlaine said that we must take eloquence and wring its neck—“and half the remainder are, perhaps, not liked by the generality for their substantial merits.” Thus, popularity is likely to be a sign of inferior poetry, and lack of it a sign of true poetry. Obscurity, the modernist might say, is almost a necessary condition of good art. Art springs from the personal vision, and it is bound to appear eccentric in a depersonalized age. Indeed, if it does not, it has probably sold out. This is not a poetic ideal, however, but is rather a historical problem, and it is to this problem that Hallam now turns.

It may be objected, he admits, that great poets used to be popular. Look at Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, for example. “If these are really masters of their art, must not the energy required of the ordinary intelligences that come into contact with their mighty genius, be the greatest possible? How comes it then, that they are popular?” The answer is that they lived during periods which were favorable to communication between author and audience. “In the youthful periods of any literature there is an expansive and communicative tendency in mind which produces unreservedness of communion, and reciprocity of vigor between different orders of intelligence.” And Hallam goes on to explain this historical shift in terms which ultimately derive from Schiller and which greatly resemble T. S. Eliot's “dissociation of sensibility” theory.⁸ “But the age in which we live comes late in our national progress.” Neo-classical poetry over-intellectualized the art, and the romantics tried to bring emotion back in.⁹ “With the close of the last century came an era of reaction, an era of painful struggle to bring our overcivilized condition of thought into union with the fresh productive spirit that brightened the morning of our literature.” Notice that he says “union” and not “competition,” for ideally, thought and feeling should work together.

This attempt at union, however, merely intensified the already developing fragmentation of what was once a “reciprocity of vigor between different orders of intelligence.” As Hallam says, “repentance is unlike innocence; the laborious endeavor to restore has more complicated methods of action than the freedom of untainted nature.” Organic development, we might say today, is irreversible. There is a sort of historical dialectic at work here, and as society becomes more objective, men feel a corresponding deprivation in their subjective lives. The efforts of the true poets, therefore, become increasingly more desperate on behalf of subjectivity, and they become more private as their audience gets more public. And this is bound to result in a dissociation of sensibility: “Those different powers of poetic disposition, the energies of Sensitive [or “sensuous,” as Hallam suggests in a footnote], of Reflective, of Passionate Emotion, which in former times were intermingled, and derived from mutual support for an extensive empire over the feelings of men, were now restrained within separate spheres of agency. The whole system no longer worked harmoniously, and by intrinsic harmony [no longer] acquired external freedom; but [instead] there arose a violent and unusual action in the several component functions, each for itself, all striving to reproduce the regular power which the whole once enjoyed.”

This fragmentation explains the morbidness, the subjectivity, the eccentricity, and the hostility toward technology which are so characteristic of modern poetry. “Hence the melancholy which so evidently characterises the spirit of modern poetry; hence that return of the mind upon itself and the habit of seeking relief in idiosyncrasies rather than community of interest. In the old times the poetic impulse went along with the general impulse of the nation; in these it is a reaction against it, a check acting for conservation against a propulsion toward change.” It may be pointed out, here and below, that the early Tennyson, despite his love and veneration for Hallam, did not entirely share his dear friend's views, and that in this connection he did make various attempts to align himself with progress—and not always with salutary results.¹⁰

Perhaps it is true, as some of Eliot's critics have said, that one cannot easily find a point in time separating the unified sensibility from the dissociated one, that the Middle Ages were just as wracked by torment and doubt as the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that the common man always had his cheap and popular art. Perhaps it is also true that technology has in some respects elevated the popular taste rather than degraded it, and may some day work a general improvement in culture. But it is also true, as has been eminently clear from Blake and Wordsworth on, that a Puritanical, industrial, and democratic society has so far created special problems for the serious artist. “We have indeed seen it urged in some of our fashionable publications, that the diffusion of poetry must be in the direct ratio of the diffusion of machinery, because, a highly civilized people must have new objects of interest, and thus a new field will be open to description. But this notable argument forgets that against this objective amelioration may be set the decrease of subjective power, arising from a prevalence of social activity, and a continual absorption of the higher feelings into the palpable interests of ordinary life.” Without being able to prophesy what Baudelaire and Eliot were to find poetically viable in the underside of urban life, and without even being able to guess at the actual strains which the effort to reconcile what public life was to become with the private vision would put on Hart Crane, Pound, and Williams, Hallam has nevertheless put his finger squarely on the causes of modern artistic alienation.

And it is precisely this alienation that Arnold was to lament in his letters of the 1850's as the unpoetical quality of the age, and this is why he was to define modernism in his 1853 Preface as “the dialogue of the mind with itself.” At the time of the Preface, however, although he agreed with Hallam that contemporary subjects do not necessarily constitute viable material for poetry, he was still more concerned with reforming poetry than with reforming society, and more concerned with both of these than with dwelling on the self, and so he took this subjectivity of the poet as a bad sign and urged him to take pains to inspirit and rejoice the reader rather than inflicting the morbid on him. Not so for Hallam, for good poetry, in his eyes, is going to be unpopular, and it is the fault of society rather than the artist. “Our inference, therefore, from this change in the relative position of artists to the rest of the community is, that modern poetry in proportion to its depth and truth is likely to have little immediate authority over public opinion.”

III

Hallam turns now to the second half of his essay in which he reviews Tennyson's first book. If the first half of his essay was concerned with definition, in which he isolated the nature of the poet's mind and the consequent nature of poetic composition, the second half is a classifying argument, in which he endeavors to show that “Tennyson belongs decidedly to the class we have already described as Poets of Sensation.” This “is sufficient,” as he remarks wryly, “to secure him a share in their unpopularity.”

Hallam begins by listing the “five distinctive excellencies of [Tennyson's] own manner,” and they all relate, of course, to his definition of the poet's mind as one which absorbs thought and feeling into the dominant train of sensation, and of artistic form as that which subordinates the parts to the whole according to this “regular law of association.” The first is Tennyson's “luxuriance of imagination, and at the same time his control over it.” The second is his ability to create moods of character so “that the circumstances of the narration seem to have a natural correspondence with the predominant feeling.” The third is the way he describes objects “and the peculiar skill with which he holds all of them”—and here Hallam anticipates Eliot's famous catalyst-analogy—“fused, to borrow a metaphor from science,¹¹ in a medium of strong emotion.” The fourth is the way Tennyson's meters and style modulate “to the swell and fall of the feelings expressed.” And the fifth is the way Tennyson implies rather than states his ideas, thereby subordinating Truth to Beauty.

It remains for Hallam to analyze some poems in the light of these claims, and, since his argument rests upon a concept of part-whole relations, he must do so in terms of entire poems rather than excerpts—“for no poet,” as he says, “can be fairly judged of by fragments, least of all, a poet like Mr. Tennyson, whose mind conceives nothing isolated, nothing abrupt, but every part with reference to some other part, and in subservience to the idea of the whole.” Accordingly, he discusses “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” in the light of its “unity,” “The Ballad of Oriana” in terms of “the author's intention” and “the design of the whole” and “the leading sentiment,” and so on. His analysis of “The Ballad of Oriana,” “Confessions of a Second-rate, Sensitive Mind,”¹² and the dramatic monologues about women calls for further comment in terms of Hallam's modernity on three counts.

The first point is the extension of his concept of organic form to include the organicity of language. The writer does not use the devices of poetic style to make things difficult for the reader, nor to elevate his language, nor to make the sound echo the sense, but rather to capture a meaning that could not be expressed otherwise. Poetry deals with special meanings, a different kind of truth than that of prose, as the New Criticism claims, and hence it needs a different kind of language. These meanings are inexpressible by means of ordinary discourse, and poetry must approach them obliquely and suggestively. In the light of these conceptions, the New Critic can claim that the language of poetry is more exact than that contained in the dictionaries.¹³

The point Hallam is making about “Oriana” is that, although it evinces a “happy seizure of the antique spirit,” it is nevertheless a modern literary ballad, what Hallam terms “lyrical” as opposed to the “epic” form. The difference is that the former is the result of conscious artistry, as is the work, he says, of Dante and Petrarch. “These mighty masters produce two-thirds of their effect by sound. Not that they sacrifice sense to sound, but that sound conveys their meaning where words would not.” Poetry deals with an area of experience which is beyond the power of the ordinary use of language. “There are innumerable shades of fine emotion in the human heart, especially when the senses are keen and vigilant, which are too subtle and too rapid to admit of corresponding phrases. The understanding takes no definite note of them; how then can they leave signatures in language?” Nor is it that they are merely imaginary simply because they are so elusive; they are just as real as more palpable objects. “Yet they exist; in plenitude of being and beauty they exist; and in music they find a medium through which they pass from heart to heart. The tone becomes the sign of the feeling; and they reciprocally suggest each other.”

IV

Hallam was discussing “this suggestive power” almost before Mallarmé and the French Symbolists did, and certainly long before their influence began to be felt in England and America (although certainly Poe and the romantics were already thinking along similar lines). He also appreciated the poetic uses of ambivalence long before Laforgue, Yeats, Hulme, Pound, and Eliot developed the idea of impersonality, and his discussion of “Confessions” brings out this second point. He likes the poem, for it is “full of deep insight into human nature, and into those particular trials which are sure to beset men who think and feel for themselves in this epoch of social development,” but he takes exception to the title. It is not only a bit too quaint, he says, but it is also incorrect. Such unresolved ambivalence is more “the clouded season of a strong mind than the habitual condition of one feeble and ‘second-rate’.” Keats, we recall, was struggling toward a concept of “negative capability,” the ability to remain in uncertainties and doubts without an irritable reaching after fact and reason.¹⁴ His ideal of the poet was that of the chameleon-poet rather than of the egotistical-sublime poet—Shakespeare rather than Milton or Wordsworth—the poet who could so project himself out of himself that he became his characters instead of creating characters who were merely mirrors of himself. This is an “aesthetic” idea, one which puts Beauty above Truth in the sense that it is the poet's function to give an impression of life rather than to utter philosophical and moral pronouncements. Thus Keats noticed that as much imaginative energy, if not more, went into the creation of Iago as of Imogene, just as Blake noticed, some years before, that Satan was the true hero of Paradise Lost. And this is an idea which has had great effect on the New Criticism, as is evidenced by Eliot's acknowledgement of the genius and truth of Keats's statements about poetry, in The Use of Poetry.¹⁵

Thus we find Hallam saying: “Ordinary tempers build up fortresses of opinion on one side or another; they will see only what they choose to see.” And if by chance they happen to see the torment of a divided mind, they will be frightened into a further rigidification of their inner selves. “The distant glimpse of such an agony as is here brought out to view is sufficient to keep them for ever in illusions, voluntarily raised at first, but soon trusted in with full reliance as inseparable parts of self.” Hallam knows full well that Tennyson thinks it is better to have made up one's mind, “but we should not despair of convincing Mr. Tennyson that such a position of intellect would not be the most elevated, nor even the most conducive to perfection of art.” The fact is, however, that Tennyson wrote very few subsequent poems which ended so indecisively. There is ambivalence aplenty in “Locksley Hall,” In Memoriam, and Maud, for example, but they each try to end, contrary to Hallam's advice, by hook or by crook, in some definite and affirmative way.

But “Confessions” is probably Tennyson's most modern poem, in conception at least, if not in execution. It portrays a man asking for faith from a god in whom he knows he should believe but cannot. A modernist trick if there ever was one—to want a faith one cannot credit, and to be in despair over its lack. And the poem ends in just that way:

O weary life! O weary death!
O spirit and heart made desolate!
O damned vacillating state!

This is a poem, unlike Empedocles, which perfectly fits the category Arnold was to reject some twenty years later because it portrayed a state of unrelieved distress where the suffering finds no vent in action. Empedocles does, after all, find a way out of his despair by committing suicide, an act which has some positive aspects in that he does it in order not to lose the final clearing of his vision just before he leaps into the crater. And the suffering finds an even more positive vent in action in many of Tennyson's other poems, but not in this one. He came, like many Victorians, to see the choice between introspection and action as an either/or option, and he, like Arnold, who was also a naturally rather morbid poet, panicked, and stampeded in the direction of action. Needless to say, Browning, and then Rossetti, Swinburne, and Hopkins—not to mention Meredith—were not similarly persuaded, and continued, each in his own way, to explore ways of coming to psychological and artistic grips with painful material.

Returning to Hallam's essay, we may look ahead two years to Tennyson's 1832 volume, where we find the further development of this conflict in “The Palace of Art.” Tennyson indeed had to consider an ambivalent mind as being second-rate, because it represented a threat to his sanity. Having taken to heart his friend Richard Trench's remark that “we cannot live in art,” and having been terrified by what he saw when his mind returned upon itself, he banished “The abysmal deeps of personality” (l. 223) as being too selfish a concern for art to dwell upon. This poem, which Robert Hillyer, one of our own anti-aesthetes, said was “acutely applicable in our own day as a refutation of the aestheticism of the school of Pound and Eliot,”¹⁶ is not that simple, however. Although the penultimate stanza punishes the soul of the artist for having dwelt too exclusively in the isolated palace of art, the final stanza leaves the palace gates open:

Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are
So lightly, beautifully built;
Perchance I may return with others there
                    When I have purged my guilt.

Tennyson, we may notice, rejects not art but rather an art which is centered on the self—which seems to many in the Victorian period an art divorced from life.

He does, however, have a hard time reconciling them, for he is both gifted and cursed with a morbidly compelling subjectivity and an overwhelmingly exotic sense of language and imagery against which to contend. Additionally, he has an excessively puritanical notion of what “life” should be. Although one should, I suppose, condemn his Lotos-Eaters for giving up the struggle, one can almost feel Tennyson's whole nature yearning in sympathy with their lassitude: “We have had enough of action” (l. 150). “Life” meant for Tennyson a vague kind of involvement with mankind, and a vague kind of struggle and effort. And it meant, in violent reaction against his own poet's nature, a rejection of idleness, relaxation, and self-exploration.¹⁷ Finally, he had, like many others, but unlike his dear friend Hallam, an overly-narrow view of the relation between Beauty and Truth in art, and he suffered from the common confusion between the poet as artist and the poet as citizen. For, as Hallam saw, not only is there no necessary contradiction between writing an artistically perfect poem and having insight into life, but also there is none between being a good artist and being a good man.

That the poet's allegiance is to how life looks and feels, as Hallam says, and to the proper ordering of his poem around this principle, and not to philosophical doctrine, moral improvement, and social progress, does not mean that he rejects Truth and Goodness in favor of Beauty, or that he divorces art from life. Beauty should not be identified with mere languor, nor should Truth and Goodness be equated with mere action. Idleness is not good simply because it can be “creative,” but more because introspection is as much a part of “life” as action—and so is morbidity. What is in the mind is at least as important as any railroad. And the way the poet's mind works is to incorporate ideas and ideals into the total context of what it means to be alive. The aesthetic idea of form does not set Beauty against Truth and Goodness, as we have seen, but rather incorporates them into a poetic order. The idea of the Beautiful is an idea of relationships rather than of exclusions, of a fusion of abstract and concrete rather than a rejection of one in favor of the other.

And, just as the poet's mind blends ideas, feelings, and sensations to capture a sense of the whole of life, so does his poem order its parts in relation to the whole. Although Hallam does not explicitly relate the idea of the dramatic monologue to that of negative capability, nor either to his earlier claim that Beauty should be the dominant principle of art, I think his ensuing discussion of Tennyson's dramatic monologues about women makes it abundantly clear that they are related. For the attempt to render a poem from the point of view of some imagined character is at once a principle of organization, a way of imaginatively rendering experience, and a method for remaining in uncertainties and doubts. In this kind of poem, the poet can be much more fruitfully true to “life” than if he tried to build up a fortress of opinion on one side or another. The dramatic monologue, in short, offers a specific structure for embodying an aspect of experience in an undogmatic and impersonal way.

V

So Hallam makes his third point by beginning the final section of his analysis thus: “A considerable portion of this book is taken up with a very singular and very beautiful class of poems on which the author has evidently bestowed much thought and elaboration.” He refers to those concerning Lilian, Isabel, Madeline, Mariana, and Adeline. He then analyzes the principle according to which these poems are organized. “Mr. Tennyson's way of proceeding seems to be this. He collects the most striking phenomena of individual minds until he arrives at some leading fact, which allows him to lay down an axiom of law. …” I think this means that the poet abstracts inductively from individuals certain recurring traits, which he then formulates into a definition of a type of human character; that the poet notices, in other words, that there are certain key resemblances among individuals which allow him to place them in certain groups. And “then, working on the law thus attained, he clearly discerns the tendency of what new particulars his invention suggests, and is enabled to impress an individual freshness and unity on ideal combinations.” This appears to mean that the poet gives dramatic vividness to his rendering of this type by re-imagining it as an individual and working with the new details thereby suggested, selecting those which are consonant with his leading idea and omitting those which are not. And indeed, this is how Hallam puts it: “These expressions of character are brief and coherent; nothing extraneous to the dominant fact is admitted, nothing illustrative of it, and, as it were, growing out of it, is rejected.” In this way the poet combines individuality with typicality, and multiplicity of detail with unity of design—or, as a New Critic might put it, texture with structure.

Remembering what Mill was to say about the lyric as a dramatic soliloquy, looking forward to Browning's development of the dramatic monologue, and anticipating what modern criticism was to make of the lyric as a dramatic mask—and, of course, we have Yeats's word for it that he was influenced by Hallam, and Pound's and Ransom's word that they were influenced by Browning—we may gain a fuller appreciation of what Hallam is saying here. “They are like summaries of mighty dramas.” Perhaps it would be better to say they represent a moment along the curve of a larger, but implied, action. “We do not say this method admits of such large luxuriance of power as that of our real dramatists; but we contend that it is a new species of poetry, a graft of the lyric on the dramatic, and Mr. Tennyson deserves the laurel of an inventor, an enlarger of our modes of knowledge and power.”

The whole point, then, of Hallam's essay is that a poem is an objective structure with its own principles of organization, and not just a versified expression of the poet's opinions. What better way to achieve this structure than to imagine it as representing a moment of human drama—or, as Aristotle might say—an imitation of an action? If a lyric poem can be seen as having a “plot” like a play, and if the speaker can be regarded as a character in a play, then the poem can be detached from the poet's private personality and handled as an aesthetic object having a life of its own. The poet's allegiance, then, is to the integrity of this object and not to philosophy, morality, or politics. And if the speaker is not “good” according to accepted moral standards, for example, the poet has no obligation to condemn him—only to present him in the fullest, truest, and most vivid way possible within the limits of the poem.¹⁸

Thus the “truth” of poetry, the modernist would say, is another and higher kind of truth than that of science, for it is more concrete, complex, and inclusive than factual truth. It is, as Hallam has been saying all along, a rendition of experience rather than a copying of it or an overt judgment on it. I think Aristotle meant something like this when he said that poetry is more philosophical than history, in that the poet, being chiefly characterized by his ability to make plots, is constrained not to a recital of things as they actually may have happened but rather to the need to fashion a unified sequence of incidents having a beginning, a middle, and an end, and being bound by what is humanly probable or necessary. And it is clear that this is what Keats meant by negative capability, in that the poet, being content to rest in doubts and uncertainties, should be able to portray an Iago as vividly as an Imogen. It is also clear that this is what Hallam meant earlier by saying that the poet should not build up a fortress of opinion on one side or another. It seems that Browning was aiming at something of the sort in poems such as “My Last Duchess,” and that Arnold was trying to express a similar conception when he said that the poet should get out of his own mind and present great and noble actions.

But Arnold, like Tennyson, as we have seen, tended to see the mind precisely as a depthless well of ambivalence rather than as a builder of fortresses, and so his feeling was that subjectivity and objectivity were opposed. This is not, however, the tendency of Hallam's argument, nor is it the conception of the modernists. Apparently, if one sees the mind as too uncertain, one will tend to look for escape in action; whereas if one sees it as too dogmatic, one will look for balance in dramatization. Although Eliot seems to overstate the case in favor of impersonality in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” I do not think he meant that objectivity excluded subjectivity but rather that it subordinated and transformed it. This interpretation is further substantiated by his essay on the later Yeats,¹⁹ and Yeats himself, of course—although he curiously seems to have had a mind more uncertain than dogmatic—was looking for a way, not of avoiding subjectivity, but rather of objectifying it. Now this can be done in a number of ways, some of which were known and used by the Victorians, some of which were not developed until the moderns, and some of which are still not commonly defined.

The first and clearest is the method being discussed here by Hallam, the one according to which the poet selects or imagines a specific character who is clearly not the poet—a character, it may be, from history, legend, or literature, and so one who has an entirely separate and distinct identity and biography. Tennyson's women-poems, his “Lotos-Eaters,” and his “Ulysses” are examples, as are Browning's famous monologues and Yeats's Crazy Jane poems. The relation between subjective and objective may work in two ways, depending upon which one is the starting point. The poet may begin either with a character and then try to get inside him or her, or with an inner state and then look for a character in which to embody it. Either way, however, subjective and objective will modify one another: in the first case, the poet will naturally tend to select characters whose traits find an echo in his own breast, although he will be able to distance and criticize these traits—as in Browning's “Fra Lippo Lippi,” for example, who is not simply a mouthpiece for the poet's philosophy of art but also a somewhat weak and foolish man; and in the second case, the poet will naturally tend to select characters who already offer some correspondence between their traits and the ones he wants to express—as in Tennyson's “Ulysses,” for example, whose pre-existing traits as an adventurer the poet must reconcile with his own need to fight off his depression over Hallam's death.²⁰

The second method is related to the first in its use of characters from history, legend, and literature, but it differs in that it uses them symbolically rather than literally. It represents not so much a graft of the lyric on the dramatic as a graft of the lyric on the epic. This is the sort of poem exemplified by Eliot's The Waste Land, Hart Crane's The Bridge, Pound's Cantos, and Williams' Paterson, in which the speaker—or the speaker's sensibility—moves about a metamorphosing epic landscape in the shape, variously, of Ulysses, Aeneas, Roland, Tiresias, and so on. Thus, whereas either version of the first method presents us with what is to be taken as an actual character, and leaves its relations with the subjective to inference, this second method more or less explicitly assumes that its central sensibility is the literal and unifying element of the poem, and presents the objective narrative elements as analogues of the conditions of that central sensibility. Characteristically, ancient is combined with modern, and symbolic parallels are seen between the journey of the hero toward the fulfillment of his destiny and the voyage of the soul toward wholeness. The public is seen as an aspect of the personal, and the personal is seen in terms of the public. Accordingly, the techniques devised are partly subjective and lyric, partly objective and narrative. The method is that of the juxtaposition of fragments—excerpts from documents lying side by side with inner meditations, descriptions of objects and places lying next to emotional outbursts—and the order of the whole is supposed to arise somehow from a gathering pattern of recurrences and contrasts. Needless to say, this method is more modern than Victorian, although I suspect that In Memoriam and Hardy's The Dynasts would bear looking into in these terms.

The third method is more rooted in tradition, and is represented by Yeats's “Dialogue of Self and Soul.” Here the poet projects two conflicting aspects of himself, and dramatizes their debate by giving each of them a separate and distinct voice. The medieval convention of debates between Owl and Nightingale doubtless lies behind this form, but I do not think it represents much of a factor in Victorian poetry and poetics.

The fourth method is the most elusive but the most promising. It rests upon the concept that, even when the poet is writing directly and autobiographically, if he writes a successful poem it will be an objective construct. The assumption is, and I think it accords with Hallam's argument, that any successful verbal discourse is the product of a selecting and shaping process, of an adjustment of parts to the whole, of means organized to achieve an end. Even when the poet writes about himself, therefore, and speaks in his own voice, he is, by virtue of the requirements of artistic form, creating an image of himself, a persona, a dramatic projection, and is not spilling himself as he really is all over the page.²¹ The sage and sensitive New England farmer who speaks many of Frost's poems is certainly very much like Frost himself, but he is a reflection only of certain elements in Frost which he found viable for poetry—no matter how much he himself may have imitated his own creation when appearing before the public in person, or may seem to be the same in the eyes of admiring biographers.²² Indeed, the speaker or speakers of any corpus of lyric poetry by a given author will tend, as the poet develops, to assume the lineaments of a character or characters acting out a continuing drama against the backdrop of a certain created world. Just as simply disguising personal materials may be no guarantee of objectivity—as in Tennyson's “Locksley Hall,” for example²³—so too may the most “naked” of poems be a successful dramatic projection—as in Robert Lowell's Life Studies, for example. The issue is best expressed, then, not in terms of objective versus subjective, but rather in terms of form—of whether the poet has embodied his materials, no matter how openly personal they may be, in a vivid and unified poem, and by means of an underlying insight into their significance for others as well as the poet. The problem, that is to say, is not to suppress one's personality in favor of impersonality; it is, instead, to embody and universalize that personality. If a personal poem fails, it does so not because it is personal, but rather because it lacks structure and insight—which, of course, is also true for the failure of any poem, regardless of how impersonal it may be. One may refer to structure and insight in terms of “objectifying” if one wishes, so long as such reference is not confused with “depersonalizing.”²⁴

Yeats added a useful twist to this method by building his personal and overlapping involvements in his thwarted courtship of Maud Gonne and in Ireland's struggle for independence into the shape of a poetic “myth,” and by exploiting his own ambivalences as a dramatic device for self-projection, self-exploration, and self-criticism. To develop a self-conscious, self-mocking, and self-questioning speaker is thus an additional way of becoming negatively capable, of not building up fortresses of opinion on one side or another, or distancing the poem from the poet, and of insuring its own integrity as an objective structure. In this way, not only can various—even opposing—voices be dramatized from poem to poem, as in “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Spur,” and not only can two separate voices be dramatized in the same poem, as in “Dialogue,” but also a single voice can be made to encompass and reconcile various moods, as in “Among Schoolchildren.” This last is at once completely personal and completely objective. It is this objectification of the subjective which Wordsworth, as both Keats and Yeats noted, lacked, and which Tennyson could not quite manage to control in “Ulysses” and “Locksley Hall.”

However this may be, it is possible to see many lyrics in Aristotelian terms as embodying a moment of human experience,²⁵ whether the speaker is someone very much like the poet or very different. If the speaker is responding to some specific situation in which he is placed, whether stated or implied, and if his utterance represents some specific sensory, emotional, and/or mental activity if he is alone, as in Marvell's “The Garden,” or a verbal action if he is talking to someone who is there in the situation with him, as in “To His Coy Mistress,” then it is not only possible but also desirable to regard it as an objective construct built on dramatic principles, no matter how similar to the poet the speaker seems to be. The New Critics often talk about persona, scene, situation, drama, tone, atmosphere, and so on, but they have not made these observations a functional part of their theory of poetic form, preferring to discuss the “drama” of meanings as they interact rather than the drama of human actions. Kenneth Burke is one of the few modern critics, outside of the Chicago School, who has evolved a theory of poetic “action,” but it is a theory of symbolic rather than of literal action. Thus Hallam can be seen not only as an anticipator of modernism but also as a corrector of it as well.

Hallam concludes his essay with a brief discussion of Tennyson's style, and, ending where he began, with a witty condition concerning popularity. In presenting Tennyson as a poet who is not likely to be popular, he says, he does not want to be taken as recommending him by reverse psychology, pretending to wish the opposite of what he says he believes. “We have spoken in good faith, commending this volume to feeling hearts and imaginative tempers”—those, that is, which are capable of the exertion required to read poems in terms of their own form—“not to the stupid readers, or the voracious readers, or the malignant readers, or the readers after dinner!” As E. E. Cummings said, “The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for most people. … You and I are human beings; most people are snobs.”²⁶ Hallam confesses, however, that those who scorn popularity when they do not have it, do not often reject when it comes. “So much virtue is not, perhaps, in human nature; and if the world should take a fancy to buy up these poems, in order to be revenged on [me], who knows whether even we might not disappoint its malice by a cheerful adaptation of our theory to ‘existing circumstances’?” Tennyson was to become popular, to be sure, and he was to do so by virtue of a poem lamenting Hallam's death, but I do not think he did so by remaining entirely faithful to the principles Hallam praises him for exemplifying here. It remained to others, and most notably Yeats, to appreciate and develop Hallam's brilliant insights for what they were—living seeds of the future planted in too-long dormant soil.

Notes

1. The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (New York: MLA [Modern Language Association], 1943), pp. 182-98. All of the emphases in the quotations from this essay are Hallam's. For my essay on Newman, who is mentioned just below, see “Newman, Aristotle, and the New Criticism: On the Modern Element in Newman's Poetics,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], 81 (1966), 261-71.

2. “Art and Ideas” (1913), Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier Books, 1968 [1961]), pp. 346-55.

3. “Estrangement” (1909), sec. 47, from The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats.

4. Helen Pearce, in “Homage to Arthur Henry Hallam,” The Image of the Work: Essays in Criticism, by B. H. Lehman et al, Univ. of Cal. Pubs., Eng. Sts., No. II (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of Cal. Press, 1955), pp. 113-33, 258-60, also analyzes the essay, but she does so mainly in terms of Hallam's knowledge and use of eighteenth-century associationism and of romantic criticism. Indeed, she sees him not as an innovator but rather as an intelligent critic of his time. I find, however, that when regarded from the perspective of modernism, Hallam appears much more original. Of course, as I myself point out, modernism owes much to these same earlier traditions, but it also differs in certain emphases and developments, and it is in these that Hallam seems, from the wisdom of hindsight, prophetic. Henry J. Smith's “Arthur Henry Hallam,” SAQ [South Atlantic Quarterly], 47 (1948), 204-15, dismisses the worth of Hallam's writings altogether, and finds the source of his effect on Tennyson and other contemporaries to stem from his personality. Harry Allen Hargrave, in “The Life and Writings of Arthur Henry Hallam,” (Diss. Vanderbilt, 1966), pp. 193-203, shows how Hallam went beyond Hartley and associationism (esp. pp. 196-7, 200).

5. Andy P. Antippas, in “Tennyson, Hallam, and The Palace of Art,” VP [Victorian Poetry], 5 (1967), 294-6, sees Hallam as disapproving of Keats and Shelley, and on the basis of a reading of Hallam's sonnet, “Long hast thou wandered on the happy mountain,” concludes that he wanted the poet to be a participant in the problems of mankind rather than a detached observer. Houghton and Stange, taking a more balanced view, see Hallam as sometimes liking didactic and reflective poetry: “The fact is that in the early thirties Hallam and Tennyson were both uncertain of their critical principles and tended to oscillate between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Classical’ poetics” (Walter E. Houghton and G. Robert Stange, eds., Victorian Poetry and Poetics [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2nd ed. 1968 (1959)], p. 848, n. 1). It seems to me, however, that Hallam, unlike Tennyson, was remarkably consistent in his critical attitudes—he lived, after all, only for two years more—as is seen in his other essays. “On Gabriele Rossetti's Dante Theories” (1832), for example, also to be found in Motter's ed. (pp. 237-79), is based on the underlying premise that poetry is to be read as poetry, not as something else. The sonnet (Motter, p. 112) cited by Antippas is more a personal farewell to poetry in favor of religion than a statement of the poet's function.

6. Here Antippas finds the most support for his argument that Hallam wanted the poet to be involved with other men, but this claim, it seems to me, fails to read Hallam's remarks in their actual context.

7. “The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks,” Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 83-107, esp. p. 90.

8. Johann Friedrich Schiller, “On Simple and Sentimental Poetry” (1795), anon. Eng. trans., Essays Aesthetical and Philosophical (Bohn Library, 1875): “The senses and reason, the receptive faculty and the spontaneously active faculty, have not been as yet separated in their respective functions: a fortiori they are not yet in contradiction with each other. … But when man enters the state of civilization, and art has fashioned him, this sensuous harmony which was in him disappears, and henceforth he can only manifest himself as a moral unity, that is, as aspiring to unity.” Cf. also Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793-5). F. N. Lees, in “The Dissociation of Sensibility: Arthur Hallam and T. S. Eliot,” N&Q [Notes and Queries], 14 (1967), 308-9, says: “Hallam's historical analysis is not identical with that of Eliot but their diagnoses are essentially the same. Eliot's view, then, is certainly not a view peculiar to a disciple of Remy de Gourmont and an admirer of the French Symbolists, even if (as René Taupin showed in 1929) his celebrated phrase and his attempted remedy are to be so explained.”

9. Houghton and Stange correctly point out that Hallam is taking an ultra-romantic view of neo-classicism here (Victorian Poetry and Poetics, p. 852, n. 17).

10. Cf. Pearce, “Homage,” p. 122.

11. Pearce points out that Coleridge employed this “fusion” idea in Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. XIV (“Homage,” p. 259, nn. 27-8). A similar notion is also found in Keats (see n. 15, below).

12. Tennyson's titles are given here as Hallam puts them (I have changed his italics to quotes, however), although they are not always exactly as Tennyson has them.

13. The modernist doctrine is sound enough, it seems to me, as far as poetry is concerned, but when it denies prose any stylistic organicity it claims too much. Poetry does not use a different language from prose—nor do the dictionaries “contain” language—but rather uses the same language, having the same potentialities, in different ways, depending upon the nature of the end in view. Language in general, as we know, has two aspects—the significant and the sensory, roughly corresponding to referential and emotive, denotative and connotative—and in any successful form of verbal discourse they are combined effectively with one another. And if certain things are best expressed, relatively speaking, by emphasizing the sensory aspect of style in a certain way, that applies to prose as well as to poetry. Nor is it true that the language of science is devoid of connotative power: even at its most clinical it conveys not only exact denotations but also the “atmosphere” of the laboratory, the “aura” of impersonality, the “glow” of objectivity, the “air” of a detached passion for rational truth. That is why writers in the social sciences so often try to use the language of the physical sciences, with however unfortunate results, in an attempt to capture the flavor of impartiality. The scientist chooses his style, that is, whether he is aware of it or not, for its suggestive powers as well as for its dictionary meanings (and, of course, a good dictionary will also deal with connotations). Furthermore, these meanings themselves are just as contextual or reflexive as those of the poet: the meanings in any verbal discourse are modified and in part created by the pressure of the context. Poetry may be differentiated from prose as having different forms answering to different ends, but it cannot be differentiated by virtue of its organicity. The distinction Hallam makes here is not between poetry and prose but rather between the art ballad, which is the result of conscious artistry and hence achieves much of its effect via suggestion, and the traditional or popular ballad, which cannot pause, as Hallam implies, to develop rich verbal effects. Thus, although I find Hallam quite modernist here, I feel he avoids the cul de sac that certain New Critical tendencies have led to.

14. Pearce notes this connection, in “Homage,” p. 113, and says that Hallam would have been delighted to see Keats's letter (to George and Thomas Keats, 21 Dec. 1817). Keats's letters were not published, of course, until 17 years after Hallam's essay (cf. Hargrave, “Life and Writings,” pp. 197-8). But the idea of the poet not imposing his own views upon his characters and of being able to project empathically into the minds of others could also have been found in Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Shelley. It is remarkable that the romantics, who were saddled so long with Wordsworth's “spontaneous overflow of power feelings” idea quoted out of context, were so concerned with the idea of impersonality.

15. Although Eliot did not refer to Keats when he first propounded his theory of impersonality in poetry in 1917, he did quote approvingly from the letter to Benjamin Bailey of 22 Nov. 1817, in his essay on Shelley and Keats of 1933. Keats wrote: “Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect—but they have not any individuality, any determined character. …” Eliot comments: “This is the sort of remark, which, when made by a man so young as was Keats, can only be called the result of genius. There is hardly one statement of Keats about poetry, which, when considered carefully and with due allowance for the difficulties of communication, will not be found to be true. …” See The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1933), p. 101.

16. In Pursuit of Poetry (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 158.

17. Thus John Speirs suggests, in Poetry Towards Novel (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1971), that the vein of psychological exploration developed by the romantic poets, being by-passed by the Victorian poets, was taken up by the Victorian novelists instead. There is a point, of course, at which introspection becomes non-productive, or—in Arnold's terms—“morbid,” and where it is healthy to turn outward, but Tennyson and Arnold in particular were extremely apprehensive about reaching that point too quickly, and this curiously set a dominant note in Victorian poetry. If one lacks sufficient ego strength to counterbalance the threat of going below one's defenses, or if the material is simply too painful, or if one gets stuck in morbid obsessing, or if one becomes so self-absorbed as not to be able to function, it would seem more fruitful to be getting up and doing something. On the other hand, it may also be observed that one almost never resolves an inner problem by seeking outlets; one simply holds it at bay, and in consequence pays the price in the energy which that effort consumes. To a degree, Browning found an artistic solution to the dilemma of Tennyson and Arnold by portraying others going into or revealing themselves, but how far this technique represents a successful objectification of Browning's own self-exploration, and how far it represents an evasion or displacement of them, is a moot point (see my discussion below). Similarly, in fiction a novelist has a ready-made structure for psychological exploration, in being compelled to create characters who are usually not literally himself. Perhaps the idea of the lyric “I” outside of the dramatic monologue not necessarily being the author's literal self, which comes out in some of Swinburne's essays and is a mark of later poetic theory, was not clearly enough established in the minds of Tennyson and Arnold. We may remark that this lack did not hinder Wordsworth in The Prelude, nor does it hinder our modern confessional poets. On the other hand, perhaps what Yeats saw as the reason for the failure of the Tragic Generation is related to the danger of going into the self without adequate ego-support to serve as guide, and the suicides of Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton may serve as sobering reminders of the risk involved in “tearing oneself to pieces,” as Arnold put it. In this connection, we may note that T. S. Eliot, whose early poetry represents psychological exploration to a painful degree, was almost obsessively insistent in his early criticism upon the impersonality of poetry, and was very concerned with presenting an impervious personal front to the world as a man. Yet even he became more mellow in his maturer years, both as a critic and as a person, and conceded that studying the later Yeats, as I show below, convinced him that a poet could get his actual self successfully into poetry.

18. Wayne Booth, of course, has mounted an extended attack, in The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1961), on this position as it became incorporated into modernist fiction and fiction theory, and this attack has been one of the most controversial points in his book. I do not think, however, that his moral position—which holds that a writer should leave us neither in doubts or uncertainties nor with the sympathetic contemplation of evil—is any essential consequence of his aesthetic position—which holds that a writer's means of persuading us to accept his world cannot be reduced to a formula and that the intrusive narrator can be just as organic a part of the objective presentation as the retiring narrator. Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience (New York: Random House, 1957), is the classic statement so far of the uses and structures of moral ambiguity (or “relativism,” as he terms it) in the dramatic monologue, but this is not the place to attempt to trace out the sinuosities of his argument nor of the controversies it in turn has engendered. C. K. Stead's The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (1964, rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1966), esp. pp. 33-34, presents a very good account of the history and meaning of the modernist conception of the mask, and shows how objectification can be combined successfully with “opinion.” My own position, which goes somewhat counter both to Booth and to Langbaum, is that we always know when an overwhelmingly evil character is evil, even though the author remains “neutral” or even empathetic, for the same reason that we know it when the author makes it clear what he thinks of such a character—from our own experience of the probable and necessary in actual life. Empathy—sensing how someone else sees the world—is not to be confused with sympathy—feeling favorable toward what someone else feels—and an evil character in Browning, or even in Robbé-Grillet, does not mislead us for a minute. Certainly in Browning, at least, despite his enormous emphasis on dramatization, we usually know just where we stand. Nor is the presentation of outsiders—even perverts and criminals—necessarily the same as the presentation of overwhelmingly evil characters, for literature has always striven, and especially in the last two hundred years, to transcend conventional categories in order to encourage us to broaden and deepen our views of reality.

19. “The Poetry of W. B. Yeats,” The First Annual Yeats Lecture, delivered to the Friends of the Irish Academy at the Abbey Theatre, June, 1940; subsequently published in The Southern Review, 7 (1942), 442-54. Eliot later included it in his collection of essays, On Poetry and Poets (1957, rpt. New York: Noonday Press, 1961), pp. 295-308.

20. Needless to say, such reciprocal modification may or may not result in a coherent poem. The interaction between a life-centered theory of art and the tenuous character of the man who proposes it, in “Fra Lippo Lippi,” seems to produce a satisfyingly rich and ambiguous portrait, in that Browning is more concerned with difficulties the artist as a human being has in withstanding audience pressure than with simply advancing an aesthetic position. Tennyson's need to buck himself up, however, put his Ulysses in the unsatisfyingly ambiguous position of having to condescend, to say the least, toward his wife, son, subjects, as he proclaims his reasons for beginning once again on a new series of adventures. The structure of the legend, that is to say, does not offer an entirely suitable embodiment of what Tennyson began by needing to say: seeking courage in facing one's grief over the death of a beloved friend does not find a very appropriate equivalent in the need to face one's middle-age crisis by leaving home and responsibility.

21. This is a modernist idea that is similar to Booth's notion of the Implied Author in fiction.

22. Indeed, as Lawrance Thompson's biography of Frost shows, there were many less attractive features of himself that Frost was unwilling or unable to come to terms with, either poetically or personally.

23. Another example is Thomas Wolfe's discovery that changing the names of people and places does not necessarily result in the objectification of the obsessive life-story forming practically the sole substance of his major fiction. His problem was not that he was too autobiographical; it was, rather, that he had difficulty in grasping the significance of his experiences as they related to his intense but vague and chaotic passions, hungers, longing, and compulsions.

24. These are issues similar to those raised in Mark Schorer's well-known “Technique as Discovery” essay of 1947. While I agree with the main thrust of his argument—that the meaning of a work cannot emerge properly unless the writer finds a way of distancing and structuring his materials—I think he confuses the work-reader relationship with the work-writer relationship. He claims, in effect, that a writer can only know what he means by first finding the appropriate distancing technique. But this is the way the work seems to the reader—with structure embodying insight—rather than to the writer, who must have a sense of the meaning of his materials before he tries to find means of embodiment. No amount of technical distancing between Lawrence and Paul, to use Schorer's most conspicuous example, Sons and Lovers, would have enabled Lawrence to “discover” and control his ambivalence about Paul vis à vis Miriam and Paul's mother, without Lawrence having been ready psychologically and emotionally beforehand to perceive and accept it. Had he told the story from Miriam's point of view, for example, surely a distancing technique, he could just as easily have revealed her as wanting to suck the soul out of Paul—as he actually did in the novel we have—as he could have shown her not to deserve this imputation. Of course, if he had used this technique, he might have discovered something about Paul's (and his own) confusion, but only if he had been able successfully to get empathically inside Miriam's consciousness to begin with. And if he had that, he could have used his present omniscient technique without his present ambivalence. So we are back where we started. Schorer, it seems to me, falls victim to the shortcomings of the extreme organicist position, which claims that if expression and its embodiment are inseparable, then the writer cannot know what he wants to say until after he has said it. This is to confuse process with product. While it is true that writers commonly make discoveries as they write, it is equally true that whatever they may discover en route becomes willy nilly a part of what they want to say, and that it is still this latter which serves to organize the remainder of the creative process. The finished poem, i.e., however it became finished, is still governed by whatever end in view the poet is finally aiming at. Thus, while the end in view itself may shift and vary throughout the writing process, its role as organizing principle does not, and it is this that ultimately determines meaning, not technique, which is more properly seen in terms of means to the end.

25. Many poems, such as Ralegh's “What Is Our Life?” and Emily Dickinson's “Tell All the Truth,” are expository or argumentative statements, and although they—like any form of verbal discourse—involve the proper adjustment of parts to the whole, it would be a mistake to see them as forming the same kind of wholes as are found in poems like Frost's “Stopping by Woods.” Any form offers to the poet the resistances of its own integrity, but this does not mean that all forms are alike. There is no suggestion in Hallam, as I have shown, that organicity is limited to poetry. His notion of poetry is based, unlike that of the New Criticism, on the concept of an intentional process, and hence on a hierarchical ordering of parts, and hence on a plurality of forms. Although he does say that poetry is not philosophy or rhetoric, I do not think he would see successful poems of statement as coming under these heads. Indeed, as a glance at Ralegh's and Emily Dickinson's poems will show, the speaker of such poems is also conceived as a persona in a situation—although now the situation is vis à vis the reader, and thus its structure differs from that of a speaker responding in an imagined world—and hence can, and should, be regarded just as dramatically, in its own way, as the speaker in “Stopping by Woods.” Of course, the same may be said of a successful prose essay, and that is exactly the point: it is not a matter of “objective” and “reflexive” form versus subjectivity and prose, but rather of form in general, or different kinds of forms, and of distinctions between success and failure in creating forms.

26. Introduction to Collected Poems (1938).