SOURCE: “Praelectiones Academicae. 1844,” in English Poetic Theory 1825-1865, Princeton University Press, 1950, pp. 46-65.

[In the following essay, Warren studies Keble's poetic theory as explicated in his Praelectiones Academicae.Warren observes that for Keble the basic function of poetry is as a psychological and spiritual catharsis.]

As Professor of Poetry at Oxford over a period of ten years from 1831 to 1841, John Keble, priest, poet, and Tractarian, delivered a remarkable series of Latin lectures on the nature of poetry and the poetic practice of the major Greek and Roman poets. Collected and printed in 1844 under the general heading, Praelectiones Academicae Oxonii Habitae, Annis mdcccxxxii … mdcccxli, with the subtitle, De Poeticae Vi Medica, the lectures were praised at the time by Newman and others of Keble's Oxford friends; George Saintsbury in 1904 noticed them briefly but appreciatively—had literary criticism been more than a pastime with Keble, “he would, I think, twenty years before Arnold, have given us the results of a more thorough scholarship, a reading certainly not less wide, a taste nearly as delicate and catholic, a broader theory, and a much greater freedom from mere crochet and caprice”;¹ and in 1912 the lectures were made available in English in a translation by Edward Kershaw Francis.²

The Praelectiones are really essays in Christian criticism. Open war is declared on secularism, materialism, utilitarianism, and liberalism. God, the sacramental universe, analogy, are working concepts; order, tradition, and decorum are pervasive ideals. Poetry is prayer, contemplation, a means of grace, the predisposition to piety. Unhappily, and in spite of many good things by the way, Keble's position is defensive and radically conservative. Not only is orthodoxy, especially in the matter of morals, the ultimate standard of literary value, but in politics and in the social and economic order orthodoxy is interpreted to mean conformity to Tory and High Church principles. The humanistic studies are defended against both pietist and utilitarian rather as effective conditioning of the feelings than of the intellect; and of the Christian virtues exemplified in the creative act and the artistic product, it is to the shyer, the more sentimental, the less virile, that Keble seems to be temperamentally committed.

Plato is perhaps the strongest single influence on Keble's poetic theory. The epigraph to the printed lectures is the figure of the rhapsode and the ring from the Ion, “Through them God moves men's souls in the way he pleases, and suspends one man from another.” The intimate correspondence of the visible universe with the human mind, the symbolic nature of objects and events, divine inspiration in a literal sense, possession, the profound and disturbing emotional power of poetry, the necessity of moral censorship, are all Platonic ideas central to Keble's argument. Keble's “seminal principle” of poetry from which he deduces all the rest owes much to Aristotle's concept of catharsis, but in general, like Newman, Keble finds Aristotle too narrow, too intellectual, too formalistic. Among other predecessors Longinus and Cicero are quoted with approval, and Reynolds supplies the point of departure for more than one discussion. Modern poetry, and with it modern criticism, are in a period of decadence, irresponsible and pretentious in their straining for original effect, lacking in clarity and repose. Exception is made, however, for Scott and Southey, and particularly for Wordsworth, to whom the lectures are dedicated, “true philosopher and inspired poet who by the special gift and calling of Almighty God whether he sang of man or of nature failed not to lift up men's hearts to holy things nor ever ceased to champion the cause of the poor and simple and so in perilous times was raised up to be a chief minister not only of sweetest poetry but also of high and sacred truth.” Wordsworth's characteristic ideas and beliefs turn up everywhere in the text with little modification. Coleridge, on the other hand, probably for theological reasons, is never mentioned by name, although Keble had certainly read him, and in some important respects Keble's theory is closer to Coleridge than it is to the Wordsworth of the early preface with its prevailing tendency towards “realism.”

Keble's definition of poetry is by confession unsystematic, the elaboration of a single root metaphor: poetry is “a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon men: which gives healing relief to secret mental emotion, yet without detriment to modest reserve: and, while giving scope to enthusiasm, yet rules it with order and due control.”³ In terms of the metaphor the poetic sensibility is “diseased,” and there is evidence that at times Keble so considered it in fact. Poets are “sufferers” and their condition often approaches insanity. Poetry, then, is the release, the expression of emotion—as Keble calls it, a safety-valve; but it is the expression of emotion under peculiar and characteristic conditions, “without detriment to modest reserve.” Poetic expression is never open or direct, but consists, as it were, of “certain veils and disguises” which yet “reveal the fervent emotions of the mind.”⁴ Aristotle's catharsis, romantic expressionism, and the Christian virtue of modesty come together here in an odd simulacrum of the Freudian theory of art as the means by which the neurotic introvert sublimates his libido.

The basic function of poetry is catharsis. All men, according to Keble's psychology, naturally find relief for strong emotion in expression. In primitive and uncultivated societies the expression of emotion is direct and uninhibited, but generally and almost invariably an innate reticence, a sense of “shame,” enforces the repression of personal feeling. To the sensitive, tortured by emotion and yet restrained by this “noble and natural” shame, and to some obsessed with vague aspirations to greatness or with “the vicissitudes of human affairs,” with “the marvellous ordered symmetry of the universe,” or with “the holy vision of true and divine goodness,” and for whom therefore the language of daily life as well is utterly inadequate, to these “sufferers,” unwilling, or unwilling and unable, to declare openly their inmost feelings, God in the gift of poetry has furnished the comfort which tears give to the harassed body. “It is the function of Poetry to facilitate, yet without prejudice to modest reserve, the expression of glowing emotion.”⁵

By this account there is in some sense a poetry of life in those characters and incidents which carry with them “evidence of some hidden emotion,” some refined consolation which appeases a yearning desire for the moment denied satisfaction. The play-acting of children and the inarticulate expression of the rural classes of their affection for particular places, their regard for the dead and for religion, are “incipient poetry.” In Wordsworthian vein Keble maintains that countryfolk have more in common with poetry than townspeople, but his reasons are his own:

Townsmen have less becoming reserve; they are more habituated to daily avocations in the full light of publicity: and so waste no time in search for expedients and indirect methods, but give full vent to their feeling.⁶

The idea of “publicity,” it should be apparent, is always painful to Keble; so much so, in fact, that in its extreme statement his theory rejects the element of communication in art altogether, and approaches Crocean expressionism. He speaks, for instance, of “those who are made poets by Nature and true feeling before they occupy themselves with literary style and metrical form”;⁷ and in another place he is quite explicit, “For in the present discussion we do not give the title of poet to him who publishes his verse with great popular acclaim, but rather to the man who meditates the Muse at home for his own delectation and solace.”⁸ Again in the extreme statement of the theory, and as the natural corollary, there is a sharp break between “nature” and “art,” expression and technique, content and form. In general the second term of each pair is a pejorative. The entire process of externalization is, at best, suspect and strictly secondary. It also follows that the essential characteristic of poetic expression according to this theory is spontaneity (Wordsworth?). That is “not poetry at all” which is not “obviously the spontaneous outburst of the poet's inmost feeling.”⁹ The concept of spontaneity brings up at once the familiar romantic difficulty with determinism, a difficulty of particular danger to Keble as a Christian critic, and a difficulty which he does not always succeed in avoiding. “Indeed,” he writes, “there is nothing for which this human lot of ours is more wont to be deplored than the fact that we cannot ourselves command our feelings or solace them by expression.”¹⁰ And he frequently uses the words blind impulse, instinctive, unconscious, unintentional, necessity, inevitable fate, in connection with the poetic process in a sense which can only be interpreted as deterministic. In all fairness, however, it must be said that, when he is aware of the issue, he is unequivocal, “It has indeed always been God's method not to override the free-will of men, even of His prophets when most strongly moved by the fervour of inspiration.”¹¹ He emphatically rejects historical literary determinism, the “too clever speculation of certain contemporary would-be critics, whose constant theme is that the age, not the writer, is the real author of all that is written: and that results both of talent and of literary achievement are produced by a kind of fatalistic destiny.”¹²

Keble takes notice of the classical doctrine of mimesis only to bend it to his own theory. He points out that Plato, who considered imitation the very essence of poetry, applied the term to all the arts, treating them under the general heading of music. This suggests that “each several one of the so-called liberal arts contains a certain poetic quality of its own, and that this lies in its power to heal and relieve the human mind when agitated by care, passion, or ambition,” and that poetry, of all the arts, is best fitted for this office because it makes use of rhythmical language.¹³ Keble, like Newman, is pursuing “the poetical,” an essence or spirit of poetry which can be expressed in terms of feeling. He clinches his argument by observing that poets have always been considered a little mad, but that artistic imitation is hardly characteristic of the mentally deranged; therefore it is obvious that imitation “does not carry the whole power” of poetry. It is the man who can use imitation to give relief who is the true poet. This, says Keble, is essentially Aristotle's position in his remarks on poetic enthusiasm and versatility.

“We share,” he says, “the agitation of those who appear to be truly agitated—the anger of those who appear to be truly angry. Hence it is that Poetry demands, either great natural quickness of parts, or an enthusiasm allied to madness. By the first of these we mould ourselves with facility to the imitation of every form; by the other, transported out of ourselves we become what we imagine.” For what else do these phrases, “enthusiasm allied to madness,” “transported out of ourselves,” imply, but that images of distant objects have sunk deeply into the poet's mind and that he fixes his gaze upon, or reaches out towards them with an almost morbid longing, utterly oblivious of present realities.¹⁴

Keble here seems to be somewhat closer to Freud than to Aristotle.

What is expressed, the matter of poetry, is emotion, “some hidden emotion,” some “yearning desire which for the present is denied satisfaction.”¹⁵ The richest of these emotions for poetry is “the unquenchable longing for some object which is absent.”¹⁶ We may “infer,” for instance, that Homer “betook himself to composition in order to appease in some measure his restless, burning passion for bygone days and departed heroes.”¹⁷ If the matter of poetry is powerful emotion, however, and its mode of expression spontaneous, the form of poetry would necessarily seem to be confined to the lyric. To meet this objection Keble goes to Quintilian for a classification of the emotions into pathos and ethos, feeling and character, or more broadly, passionate feelings and mild and gentle feelings. The longer forms are produced by ethos.

Now, strong passion visits us but rarely: we ordinarily follow the natural bent of our temperament and character; no wonder, then, that far the greater number of poetic productions strike the gentler note. Indeed, except some lyrics and elegies, and a few satires, I hardly recall one famous poem which is a pure and simple outcome of passion. All other poems reflect the character of a lifetime, and tastes which have become familiar to the mind by long association. Yet none the less, they must be acknowledged to spring from the inmost heart: you might indeed say that really and truly they are framed after and accord with the man's secret nature even more faithfully. Other remedies are at hand to allay or distract sudden access of anger or grief. Swift emotion both dies away spontaneously, and, moreover, is wont to arouse and stimulate genuine and stable strength of spirit. But what remedy is to be found for troubles which have clearly grown up with the character, silent and unnoticed, interpenetrating a man's whole life? Certainly, it will be a most effective solace if a man can, in some sort, enshrine in verse something of the form and feature of that which is closest to his heart.¹⁸

At this point Keble reinforces his theory by introducing his version of the eighteenth century concept of “the ruling passion”: “I am inclined to believe that no poet, indeed no human being, is without some master feeling which focuses and binds together into somewhat of a unity the fluctuating and many varying distractions of the mind.”¹⁹ It is the presence and especially the quality of the master passion that distinguishes the “Primary” poet, and it is the critic's task (which, by the way, is mainly instinctive)²⁰ precisely to discover and lay bare this central feeling. It is also characteristic that the poet is “for the most part unaware”²¹ of his obsession. Virgil's master passion, for instance, is the desire for the joy and beauty of natural objects; his interest in the epic machinery of the Aeneid is purely accidental and perfunctory; and Sophocles is denied Primary rank altogether largely because Keble can find no single emotional source for all of the plays. In the end Keble's theory puts a premium (a clear index of his moralistic bias) on the self-consistency of the poet's emotion with the result, curious in the light of his basic principles, that he has to defend the lyric poet against charges of “inconstancy,” and therefore of insincerity. There is a strong resemblance, it will be noted, between Keble's ethos and Newman's “moral centers.”

The definition of poetry as “the index to men's cares and the interpreter of their fancies”²² leads to a preoccupation with the poet's biography, real or imagined. “Indeed, the special hope which stimulates us to devote ourselves to these studies is the hope that we may in time become familiarly acquainted with great men and penetrate into their most intimate counsels: whence it follows that there is always something for us to learn.”²³ Interestingly enough, in the case of Homer this preoccupation suggests an analysis in some detail of Homeric imagery along lines rather similar to those developed later by Miss Caroline Spurgeon. Keble observes that his theory runs counter to the critical temper of the times; readers “will be repelled completely by this view, and will not, without reluctance, suffer themselves to be drawn away from the charms of language and imagery, and the outward show and ornament of Poetry, in order to pry into the secrets of the poet's mind. How, they demand, does it concern us, in what spirit and with what disposition the poet wrote, so long as his writings are such as delight and stimulate men's thought and feelings?” Allegory is rejected by modern taste on the same grounds; but in any case, whether the effect of poetry is achieved “by allegorical symbolism or by the transference of the poet's own passion and disposition to actual characters,” the reader “who once surrenders himself heartily to the poet's real meaning, will have little leisure for mere ornament and prettiness.” Keble is here insisting on the primacy of theme and subordination of artistic means, and at the same time he attempts to reconcile the rival claims of representation and expression:

Whether, therefore, throughout the whole course of a poem one story is really told in fact and substance, another outwardly in words—which is the characteristic of Allegory: or whether we make the true tenor of a poem to depend not so much upon the things described as upon the spirit and temper of the poet, in either case it is clear that the force and beauty of true poetry is twofold. For not only are the direct themes of the poem themselves expressed with lucidity and beauty, but the whole work is tinctured with the character and leanings of the poet as by some mysterious aroma: and in such wise, indeed, that all recognize that he burst forth into such expression naturally, and not for artistic effect. Should either of these two qualities be lacking, the poetry will be maimed and defective, or absolutely not poetry at all: maimed, unless the subject be faithfully and finely treated; not poetry at all, should it not be obviously the spontaneous outburst of the poet's inmost feeling.²⁴

This is a balanced statement, reminiscent of Wordsworth and pointing towards Arnold, but it does not excuse Keble from the “intentional fallacy.” For the most part, his attempts at biographical reconstruction and ventriloquism (like those of other nineteenth century critics) are practically worthless and almost invariably diversionary. Often, as with Sophocles,²⁵ one has the uncomfortable suspicion that moral prejudice against known or imputed biographical detail prevents Keble from really looking at the poetry. The “poetry” of Milton, Burns, Byron, and Shelley, seems to be vitiated in this way.

Although he uses both of the terms original and genius, and although he undoubtedly admired great men, Keble was too much of a traditionalist to come under the influence of the concept of original genius. His understanding of originality is rather classical or neoclassical than romantic. The Primary poet will be indifferent to novelty and untouched by ambition; he will repeat the old familiar themes; he will even plagiarize when he pleases.²⁶ By the same token, and in keeping with the moral reticence of his basic theory, self-expression is summarily ruled out. He will allow that “it is the prerogative of Homer, and of such as stand forth commandingly like Homer, to impress their own personality and standpoint upon their contemporaries”;²⁷ but he says that Byron, “one who should have been a minister and interpreter of the mysteries that lie hid in Nature, has, in spite of all the vehement passion and variety of his poetry, in the main given us nothing but the picture of his own mind and personality, excited now by an almost savage bitterness, and now by voluptuous exaltation.”²⁸

Keble's “seminal principle” acts to separate all poets into two classes: “on the one hand, we have those who, spontaneously moved by impulse, resort to composition for relief and solace of a burdened or over-wrought mind; on the other, those who, for one reason or another, imitate the ideas, the expression, and the measures of the former.” The first he calls “Primary Poets”; the second are poets only by courtesy title. The classification has old roots as Keble points out, the inspired rhapsodes of Plato and Democritus, Aristotle's versatile poet, the poet born-not-made of Horace.²⁹ In another form the distinction is that between “poets by Nature and necessity” and poets of “consummate skill and culture.” The Primary poets are again subdivided into poets of pathos and ethos (lyric and elegiac, and tragic, epic, and didactic); and poets who derive their basic impulse from ethos are further distinguished by their temperamental preoccupation with human action or with nature into active and contemplative. Homer and Virgil represent these two great types. Keble finds in the historical order of the appearance of active and contemplative poetry an index of Divine Benevolence revealing the two great sources of hidden solace to suffering mortals.³⁰

The characteristic marks of Primary poets are four, all of them, incidentally, moral. First, consistency; this is the evidence of truth of character and sincerity which can be observed in the poet's tastes and particularly in his choice of themes. Shakespeare, for instance, was always “heartily on the side of virtue” (his looser scenes are mere concessions to the spirit of the times). Second, the genuine poet will be indifferent to the desire for originality, and third, he will always show a modest reserve in expressing his profound emotions. The last of these has interesting consequences for the poet's technique. The parallel of the arcana disciplinae in the Early Christian Church will justify a certain obscurity in his poetry. Generally, fear of ridicule imposes the principle of indirection: the poet will avoid the real object of his enthusiasm; he will rather hint and suggest by subtlety of detail than describe fully or flatly; and he will frequently resort to understatement and “innocent” irony.³¹ These devices, it will be noted, prefigure the early Eliotine theory of the impersonality of art. One passage is particularly clear: according to the theory the poet's intimate feelings do not lie “wholly hidden,” but take “refuge as it were in a kind of sanctuary.”

Now, in the case of those who set themselves to weave a regular plot, I mean dramatic and epic poets, it is obvious that the composer's personality naturally holds itself apart and retires into the background. Opinions are expressed, judgments passed, praise and blame are meted out, not however as the utterances of Homer or Aeschylus, but as those of an Achilles or a Prometheus.³²

It is also characteristic “that those suffering most keenly through real, perhaps irreparable affliction, are the very men who most lightly trifle and play with words”³³ (George Herbert hid “the deep love of God which consumed him behind a cloud of precious conceits,” and Shakespeare jested in his scenes of grief).³⁴ Keble does not develop any of these points, but the mere recognition of the poetic function of irony and word-play is surprising in the theory of the period.

The critic who is primarily interested in emotion and moral ideas is unlikely to spend much time over questions of the medium or of form. Keble's attitude towards the medium is Hegelian with perhaps a suggestion of early Christian iconoclasm. Sensuous and material, the medium is conceived as an impediment to the expression of the artist's spiritual intuition. An art is more “poetical” as it succeeds in effecting expression by subordinating the medium. “Conception” (in eighteenth century terms) is all important; “execution,” particularly when it calls attention to itself, is the clear sign of artificiality. “The poetry of painting simply consists in the apt expression of the artist's own feeling.” Raphael, who embodies “in beautiful form the inner conception of the mind,” is poetical in contrast to Rubens, who “seizes those unlooked-for combinations of colour, light, and form which endlessly present themselves to the artist's mind and eye at the very moment of painting.” Raphael's weakness is really his strength, for

it is said that Raffaelle, while possessing a noble and lofty though perhaps somewhat unelastic genius, was somewhat careless and has left some works too crudely executed: as one who would indeed far rather violate the rules of art than not satisfy the inner vision, which he had conceived with marvellous beauty.³⁵

Sir Joshua Reynolds, by the way, is cited as the authority for Keble's argument. Sculpture, architecture, and music, in rising scale of perfection according to the transparency of the medium, approach poetry “on that side of its effect which is concerned in piercing into, and drawing out to the light, the secrets of the soul.”³⁶ By the same standard of expressiveness applied to the distinction between poetical prose and rhetoric, Plato is more poetical than Homer himself, while Cicero never rises to poetry. This is because Cicero always has his audience in mind; he is interested in producing a moving effect. Plato on the other hand, “seems absorbed in his own delightful themes; he writes to please himself, not to win over others; he generally hints at rather than speaks out his deeper truths; rich as he is in most beautiful thoughts, he seems to leave even more unsaid.”³⁷

There is no general discussion of the problems of form in the lectures. The weight of the theory bears heavily on “Nature,” expression, inner spirit, away from art (by which Keble usually means artifice), form or formalism, structure, framework, plot, “machinery.” If it is true that “a poet's fine frenzy is subject to law or control,”³⁸ according to Keble's principles the law or form ought to be organic. He seems to recognize this, but at the same time he also thinks of form in eighteenth century terms, even when, in keeping with the basic metaphor of the theory, he ascribes to it a medicinal function. The use of “those indirect methods best known to poets” already mentioned is part of this function.³⁹ At its best, Keble's argument calls for the due artistic subordination of all the formal elements of poetry to the presentation of theme. His position is roughly that of Newman, but there are anticipations of Arnold's Preface of 1853.

The attack on Aristotle follows the lines laid down by Newman and is plainest perhaps in the lectures on Sophocles. Sophocles is generally praised by Aristotelian critics for the finish and subtlety of his diction and for his skill in plot construction. But it is a question whether either of these grounds “necessarily touch the real art and poetic gift, or may not merely be viewed as their formal part and machinery.”⁴⁰ Words and meters, however, are “mere instruments” of “the heavenly flame,” and praise for these qualities raises the suspicion that the poet has nothing in common with “those who are made poets by Nature and true feeling before they occupy themselves with literary style and metrical form.”⁴¹ In the matter of plot construction, Keble finds Aristotle and the critics pandering to popular taste for exciting incident. There is, indeed, a legitimate use of plot by the poet, “not with intent that his books may be devoured by boys and girls for mere amusement, but that he himself may enjoy a profounder sense of the laws which silently control and govern all things.”⁴²

The “seminal principle” carries with it the implication “that there are plainly as many kinds of Poetry as of opinions and of men (for Poetry, native and true Poetry, is nothing else than each poet's innermost feeling issuing in rhythmic language.”⁴³ But if the “seminal principle” can give rise to expressionistic form, it also gives rise, apparently, to its opposite. In the case of the sonnet with all of its formal difficulties as practiced by genuine poets Keble is persuaded that “it was by no mere chance, but by a deeply-rooted instinct, that such men as these adopted this form, because the fact that it is unusually stringent enabled it to soothe and compose their deepest emotions and longings without violating a true reserve.”⁴⁴ Lyric poets in the same way deliberately choose to work with elaborate meters, so that with “marvellous skill, art of the most exquisite kind is made to minister its healing touch to disordered Nature.”⁴⁵ Keble's conclusion seems to be that, rightly understood, form is the principle of indirection in poetry, cleanly separable from its essence, which is emotion, and strictly subordinate to expression.

Indeed, on the same principle on which we have before declared that verse has more power to soothe than prose, we may, I think, plainly perceive why it is, that in composing a poem too, it is better to have some story or settled plan before us, than to utter the changing impulse of the moment. The very fact of orderly and methodized progress may not a little conduce to settlement of mind. … ⁴⁶

Poets, particularly young poets, are wrong in condemning skill and plan. “They think they have indeed written something great if by lucky chance they have stitched in, here and there, some striking and clever patches; caring nothing whether they are appropriate or inappropriate, since they deny that a poet's fine frenzy is subject to law or control.”⁴⁷ The subject must be faithfully treated and the poem must show evidence of spontaneous emotion. Keble would force classical and romantic elements together into an organic unity of which the integrating principle is theme. Of Aeschylus he writes,

All these descriptions are so splendid, if we only judge them by the test of poetic “vividness,” that it should surprise no one if most men, while duly honouring the philosophy of Aeschylus, yet at the same time contend that he was not seriously concerned about anything, except those artistic beauties which, as they insist, are the peculiar glory of Poetry. But if they once read with more kindly eyes even the Eumenides alone, willing to credit the poem with an aim a little more sacred and the possession of an under-meaning, it is almost impossible to say how greatly their delight would be increased even in that one pleasure, which they praise at the expense of all others; and how much more deeply skilful narration, or smooth sweetness of the verse, or charm of the imagery, would penetrate and permeate the inmost recesses of their hearts, when bathed and illuminated in a kind of heavenly light, glorifying a picture already beautiful in itself.⁴⁸

Matters of style, diction, imagery, and versification are all subordinate to expression. Keble disposes of the general problems of meter and imagery quite simply by making it axiomatic “that Poetry, of whatever kind, is in one way or another, closely associated with measure and a definite rhythm of sound,” and “that its chief aim is to recall, to renew, and bring vividly before us pictures of absent objects”; “it is the handmaid to Imagination and Fancy.” Meter and imagery both subserve the remedial function of poetry “in soothing men's emotions and steadying the balance of their mind.”⁴⁹ Like Newman the Platonist, however, Keble will call attention to the power of single words, “Truly, it is past belief how powerfully single words or phrases, even perhaps the cadences of syllables falling on the ear in a happy hour, call forth the hidden fire.”⁵⁰ This sort of statement surely holds the seeds of a theory of “pure poetry.”

Keble has little to say about the imagination. At least once in the course of the lectures it is given Coleridgean function along with Keble's own psychotherapeutic one.

Forthwith the fevered anxieties and ponderings which were spreading hither and thither like a flood, are now controlled and confined to a single channel: thither are directed or naturally flow all that crowds into the mind from all sides: and as Imagination strives to draw them together, while consciously or unconsciously she gives them outline and ornament, men gradually become their own physicians and do not resent the change that comes over them.⁵¹

At other times, however, Keble thinks of it in eighteenth century terms as a mode of memory, the image-making faculty, an associative power of the mind. When he says of it that “it paints all things in the hues which the mind itself desires,” he seems to place himself with Newman squarely in the category of the Baconian idealist. But in his analysis of the two-fold nature of poetry he claims that it is immaterial whether the imagination projects its own values into nature or whether it finds them already there.⁵² There is, in fact, some evidence in the lectures, especially in the passages dealing with nature poetry, that Keble also recognized the “naturalism” of Wordsworth and Ruskin. Homer, for instance, is praised for his “realistic power, and simple, direct clearness,” and Virgil is “the most delightful priest and interpreter of Nature.”⁵³

Keble's psychological analysis of Homer's imagery has been mentioned earlier. The view of imagery as the key to the poet's subconscious interests is a basic principle of Keble's theory, and his application of it is an interesting pointer towards modern critical method. Compare, he says, the lines, “in which Virgil treats, as I said, of his own favorite delights, with such lines as his description of Fame, or the picture of Mount Etna, or of the night vision of the fury Alecto. We shall infallibly find that these, which it is more than likely he introduced through poetic convention, not through any feeling of his own, are elaborated with a wealth of language and an ordered sequence of metaphor, whereas those springing from his own feeling are merely touched by the way, as it were, and incidentally.”⁵⁴ Keble goes on to define the emotional and moral centers, and the dominant and subordinate themes of his subjects very largely through examination of dominant and recurrent imagery.

On meter Keble has very little to add to what has already been said. By definition poetry is “nothing else than each poet's innermost feeling issuing in rhythmic language.” Verse has more “power to soothe” than prose; as a means of control, a principle of indirection, of escape from personality into form, poets, particularly lyric poets, voluntarily commit themselves to elaborate verse forms in the working out of which “art of the most exquisite kind is made to minister its healing touch to disordered Nature.”

The end of poetry in its psychological aspect is catharsis, which means relief and delight, perhaps delight in relief, at any rate delight. But poetry also has its moral aspect in which the end of poetry is truth, and especially Christian truth:

… in reading the Scriptures, we assuredly know that we are in presence of truth itself, and that not even the smallest detail need be withdrawn from their full story. Consequently it is by their standard, when we have once ascertained and tested it, that Homer and his fellows must be judged.⁵⁵

Ultimately, then, the function of poetry is moral and religious, “to lift to a higher plane all the emotions of our minds, and to make them take their part in a diviner philosophy,”⁵⁶ and Keble is on the horns of the familiar dilemma. He is not unaware of his problem, however, and while there is at times a crude moralistic bias in both the theory and the individual critical judgments, he does to some extent attempt to escape his own limitations. He recognizes the validity of “natural truths”;⁵⁷ he leans heavily on symbolic interpretation which he calls analogy or platonizing:

In fact, in modern times, good and pious men take pleasure in the study of the ancient poets largely for this simple reason, that they can tacitly transfer to the Great and Good God that which is said in Homer (it may be) or in Pindar, in honour of the fabled Jove, regarding them as dimly feeling after Him and foreshadowing the true Revelation and Sacrifice.⁵⁸

Surprisingly enough, he fights stubbornly through a whole series of ingenious and sometimes amusing manoeuvres for Lucretius' right to rank as a Primary poet in spite of his atheism. He was probably afflicted with insanity (which “for a time, holds us like a tragedy, rapt with a kind of pleasing horror”!); he may have been suffering from possession by evil spirits; in any case, we must not suppose “that nothing but what is base and impious could issue from such a source: for it seems with the Great and Good Ruler of us all to have been almost a law, to emphasize and declare his own decrees by the testimony, willing or unwilling, of his enemies, whether men or evil spirits.”⁵⁹ Finally, one can resort to “parody” in dealing with the parts of his poem.

And, in truth, you will not easily find any one among the poets who lacked the enlightenment of revealed Truth, who affords so many splendid lines which, as it were spontaneously, cast their testimony in favour of sound and sincere piety. Not one of them has left more numerous passages which any one, perhaps changing here and there a word or two, but yet maintaining the general tenor of the whole, can quote on the side of goodness and righteousness. Such a method of quotation is technically called a “parody” [paroidia].⁶⁰

Keble does not really develop an adequate answer to his problem, however, unless it is implicit in the idea of “the unwilling witness,” and his own judgments often seem to be arbitrary.

The final lecture in the long series stresses the interrelationship between poetry and religion, the true remedy for human ills. They are alike in their powers of healing. Both approach “each stage of beauty by a quiet and well-ordered movement.” Truth for both is difficult and will yield only to devotion. Poetry and religion are equally subject to “the vision of something more beautiful, greater and more lovable, than all that mortal eye can see”;⁶¹ and they make common use of the external world: poetry leads men “to the secret sources of Nature” for images and symbols which it lends to religion; religion clothes them with its splendor and returns them to poetry as sacraments.⁶² Poetry is the prelude to piety. All the great religious revivals of history have been prepared for by great poets, Plato and Virgil in antiquity, Spenser and Shakespeare in the Renaissance. Acknowledging the decline of religion and poetry in modern times, Keble sees no reason why men should not be raised gradually to a better life, “by a new order of Poetry.”⁶³

Keble's theory of poetry is strongest in its statement of value, weakest in its handling of form, and most interesting in its psychological basis. The malaise of the nineteenth century discovered in poetry a consolation, and consolation was justified times over in theory, by Keble, by Newman, by Mill and Arnold. Keble stands with Wordsworth and the romantics in their emphasis on the emotions and faithful expression (not self-expression, for there are always the methods of indirection), with Arnold and the neoclassics in their recognition of the importance of subject and the subordination of parts to whole. Although he tends to think of imagery and verse in theoretical contexts as decorative, he gives a psychological function to both, and in the case of imagery develops a strikingly modern technique of analysis. The theory is confused and often mistaken, but it offers its anticipations, it insists on the human values of poetry, and it tries to reconcile the best of old and new.

Notes

1. George Saintsbury, A History of English Criticism, New York, n.d., p. 535.

2. Keble's Lectures on Poetry 1832-1841, translated by E. K. Francis, 2 vols., Oxford, 1912. Quotations are from this text.

3. Ibid., I, 22.

4. Ibid., I, 47.

5. Ibid., I, 19-24, 36.

6. Ibid., I, 24-37.

7. Ibid., II, 218.

8. Ibid., I, 317.

9. Ibid., II, 37.

10. Ibid., II, 276.

11. Ibid., I, 61.

12. Ibid., I, 99. Does Keble mean Carlyle?

13. Ibid., I, 53.

14. Ibid., I, 56.

15. Ibid., I, 25-26.

16. Ibid., II, 262. One of the characteristics of Wordsworth's Poet is “a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.” Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, edited by N. C. Smith, London, 1905, p. 23.

17. Ibid., I, 100.

18. Ibid., I, 86-91.

19. Ibid., II, 96.

20. Ibid., I, 67-68.

21. Ibid., II, 397.

22. Ibid., I, 44.

23. Ibid., II, 225. Sophocles' interest in stagecraft is scored against him: “All such things have to do with the stage effect, not with the author.” Ibid., II, 221.

24. Ibid., II, 35-37.

25. Ibid., II, 222.

26. Ibid., I, 71-72.

27. Ibid., I, 167.

28. Ibid., II, 339 and 398.

29. Ibid., I, 53ff.

30. Ibid., I, 86ff.; II, 202-3 (Mill, Browning, Ruskin, and Arnold were all interested in the classification of poets); II, 274ff.

31. Ibid., I, 82-83. Spenser “betrays to us what was really ever in his thought, even when writing his Faerie Queene. Being, as he was, the most loyal and devoted of lovers, he has in many passages cleverly worked in allusions to his own love amid the praises of his Queen, and thus, without alienating the sympathy of his readers, or betraying his secret passion, he could ease his own love troubles through poetic expression.”

32. Ibid., II, 97.

33. Ibid., I, 82-83.

34. Ibid., II, 99; I, 83.

35. Ibid., I, 39-42.

36. Ibid., I, 48.

37. Ibid., I, 49.

38. Ibid., I, 91.

39. Ibid., I, 22.

40. Ibid., II, 217. Aristotle “nowhere even hints at his feeling any delight in the charms of Nature and all the beauty of earth and sky.” Ibid., II, 264.

41. Ibid., II, 218.

42. Ibid., II, 219.

43. Ibid., II, 35.

44. Ibid., II, 102.

45. Ibid., II, 100.

46. Ibid., I, 90-91.

47. Ibid., I, 91.

48. Ibid., II, 41-42.

49. Ibid., I, 21.

50. Ibid., I, 322.

51. Ibid., I, 59.

52. Ibid., II, 36.

53. Ibid., I, 168; II, 375; also I, 163, 173; II, 229, 244, 429.

54. Ibid., I, 78.

55. Ibid., I, 174.

56. Ibid., II, 157; also II, 272-73.

57. Ibid., II, 471; also II, 464.

58. Ibid., II, 314; also II, 199.

59. Ibid., II, 331ff.; also II, 442.

60. Ibid., II, 350.

61. Ibid., II, 480.

62. Ibid., II, 481.

63. Ibid., II, 478.