[In the following essay, Ross employs Pierre Bourdieu's economic theories to argue that the anti-classicist revolution set in motion by Joseph Warton's Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope is an attempt to define the function of culture, or the cultural field, whose autonomy had been increasingly driven by politics and economic exchange at the expense of poetics and art.]

Less than a decade after his death, Alexander Pope's preeminence in the English canon began to be challenged by polemicists hoping to rid English poetry of its neoclassical values and to promote a new ideal of what Joseph Warton and others called a “pure poetry” of feeling, as epitomized by Shakespeare's artless tragedies, Spenser's Gothic enchantments, and Milton's boundless sublimities. In a notorious passage from the dedication to Edward Young before his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, Warton made it clear that demoting Pope and other satirists in favor of the poets of the sublime and the pathetic would reaffirm the masculinist hegemony of the canon: “We do not, it should seem, sufficiently attend to the difference there is betwixt a man of wit, a man of sense, and a true poet. Donne and Swift were undoubtedly men of wit and men of sense, but what traces have they left of pure poetry?”¹ Young seconded Warton's poetic revolution and masculinizing rhetoric in his epochal Conjectures on Original Composition, where he heralded poetry's emancipation from classicist imitation, which, he claimed, “lays genius under restraint, and denies it that free scope, that full elbow-room, which is requisite for striking its most masterly strokes.”² If Pope believed that he had “pleas'd by manly ways” (Epistle to Arbuthnot, 337),³ Young had simply to reverse the gendering to devalue his former ally's translations of Homer: “by that effeminate decoration” of rhyme, Young insisted, Pope emasculated Homer's “various modulations of masculine melody” and “put Achilles in petticoats” (26). Such gendering was a common valorizing gesture of the period, though a change in its conditions of use was apparent here: whereas Pope had asserted his masculine poetic identity to distance himself from what he saw as the feminizing forces of the marketplace, Warton and Young appropriated this masculinity to defend themselves from the charge of having feminized literature by promoting a poetry of feeling and passion.⁴

My concern, however, is less with such gendering than with the possible interests served by this anticlassicist revolution, a revolution that has been as long celebrated as its causes have been undertheorized. In appearance, the rejection of classicism resembled other such revolutions in being another round in the perennial contest for distinction within the field of cultural production. These revolutions, Bourdieu has argued, are characterized by insurgent avant-gardes within a genre taking on established vanguards by proposing “to question the very foundation of the genre through a return to sources and to the purity of its origins. As a consequence, the history of poetry, the novel or theatre tends to appear as a continuous process of purification through which each of these genres, at the end of a thorough reappraisal of itself, its principles and its presuppositions, finds itself reduced to the most purified quintessence.”⁵ Like much of Bourdieu's anatomizing of culture, the territory he covers here may seem familiar; his comment on avant-gardes may recall the idea, implicit in modernist poetics, that modernity often involves a self-definition achieved by a rejection of an immediate past in favor of a more distant, ostensibly more authentic past.⁶ Yet the significance of Bourdieu's work has much to do with the explanatory force of his project, which combines a detailed sense of the structural relations and position takings within each field of activity with an equally strong sense of function; in his account, these fields are inhabited by agents and groups vying for power and distinction through various forms of capital, including the economic, the political, and the cultural. Thus he sees the “continuous process of purification” within artistic genres as resulting from a persistent need to define the cultural field's autonomy as a source of its own distinctive, noneconomic capital. The return to a genre's originating essence is a common strategy within the cultural “game,” since it signals a disavowal of naked economic interest on behalf of refining one's art to its seemingly purest form. Such a disavowal, Bourdieu has insisted, is one of the most powerful gestures for earning symbolic profits within the cultural field.⁷

Arguably, the poetic revolution waged in the critical discourse of the mid-eighteenth century involved more than just a purification of poetic forms or an intensified gendering of critical discourse. The decline of classicism as a model for production is especially striking since it had long been the preferred discourse through which to claim purity, distinction, and autonomy for one's poetic practice. Aside from the many appeals for a return to Attic simplicity that were sounded from late antiquity on, we may think of Petrarch, the first modern poet, who could valorize the classical heritage to assert his independence from the inhibitions of a moribund auctorial order and to enable his society's progress out of what he felt were the Dark Ages. Social progression was transformed into moral and artistic fixity in Ben Jonson's codified formal classicism, “the old way and the true,” which helped him distinguish his laureate professionalism from commercial interests as well as secure his artistic independence from powerful influences, Jonson announcing himself to the court as “thy servant, but not slave.”⁸ Jonson's economy of the centered self became cultural conservatism with Dryden and Pope, whose strategic pursuit of classicist refinement in poetry enabled them at once to assert their moral autonomy, to reap symbolic profits by mocking the mercenary exploits of dunces, and to present their work as essential to the preservation of English society from the corruption that they felt threatened to overtake it. After Pope, Samuel Johnson supposed, “to attempt any further improvement of versification will be dangerous,” but in fact no more classicist purification would be undertaken, as poetic practice had finally withdrawn from the social world.⁹

Classicism, long a recognized position to take for poets who coveted distinction, was eminently adaptable to changing circumstances, such as the rise of the vernaculars or the print trade. It offered working poets both a legitimizing cultural lineage reaching back to a revered ancient imperium and an enabling revisionist narrative of refinement and purification by which to define their modernity. Its decline in the eighteenth century must therefore have coincided with a reorganization of the cultural field so extensive as to alter the relations and position takings within the field. Accordingly, it is misleading to argue that the rejection of classicism reflected an emergent nationalist sentiment that spurned critical doctrines associated with the French in favor of native values. Not only was the alternative concept of “pure poetry” itself of French importation, but, if Bourdieu's assumption is correct, the goal of an artistic purification not based on classicist principles could have come about only with a further autonomization of the cultural from other fields, rather than with its yielding directly to political interests like nationalism.¹⁰ Nor is it adequate to suggest, as some recent literary historians have done, that authors could relocate the origins of poetic purity from the ancients to a native tradition, in the spirit of “better Ossian than Homer,” only with the establishment of a stable English canon during the period.¹¹ Pure poetry, according to Bishop Lowth, could be found just as easily among the Hebrew Scriptures.¹² Besides, the gesture of proclaiming a pure source among the moderns had been proposed authoritatively prior to classicism's ascendancy in the seventeenth century: Michael Drayton, for one, declared himself the herald of a British bardic past, while Spenser claimed to have drawn from Chaucer's well of English undefiled.

Drayton and Spenser, however, wrote within a social formation whose main currency was symbolic capital, that is, the measure of accumulated fame, prestige, honor, or other recognized personal power that could be used within any type of social exchange. As Bourdieu has suggested, “the logic of the pre-capitalist economy” relied heavily on symbolic capital, in that the Renaissance moral order was determined less by commercial profit than by symbolism, rhetoric, and representation (“Production of Belief,” 74).¹³ Though reluctant professionals, Drayton and Spenser, as much as Jonson and Dryden, were less anxious to define their autonomy from economic interests than not to compromise their moral and ideological integrity as national poets. They could not be seen to act merely out of self-interest, political or professional, since as national poets they were expected to promote the circulation of symbolic capital by using their rhetorical skills to refine the language of political signification. In effect, they were expected to bestow praise and fame on their patrons and the state in the very act of seeking them for themselves. Classicism, with its Horatian or Juvenalian postures of detachment, thus offered a poet like Jonson or Pope the means not only to assert an antique poetic purity that seemingly transcended economic interest but, more important, to present himself as a public-minded poet of sufficient moral independence to contribute genuinely to the common good in a style proper to his verbal talents. In this way classicism was the cultural analogue to the ideology of civic humanism, and the national poet the equivalent of the citizen who practiced autonomy in the confined space where he met with equals. The neoclassical poet-statesman saw his cultural practice as self-governing yet vigorously productive in its deployment of symbolic capital, itself conceived in terms of the masculinist values of honor, prestige, and devotion to the public realm.

As we know from J. G. A. Pocock's work, the values of civic humanism came into conflict in the eighteenth century with a newer ideology of commercial humanism, which reflected the altered historical conditions of capitalist exchange relations and emergent liberal republicanism. Commercial humanism emphasized a much broader and democratic political order, in which the citizen, in exchange for surrendering his autonomy to others who would represent him, became a specialized, private, even decentered individual who refined his moral being through a sympathetic social intercourse among the increasingly complex and differentiated human relations and products that commerce could furnish.¹⁴ And among those products and services were the arts, which were thought to help the subject learn how to modulate the disruptions of passion because they directly engaged the faculties of imaginative sympathy. Within the greatly expanded polis, cultural production would continue to play a role in maintaining the moral order, but it was no longer the same role as under a precapitalist economy, where it had helped circulate symbolic capital and its ideology of civic humanism. Under commercial humanism, in contrast, the new human relations fostered by commerce and the arts functioned to polish the subject's “manners” rather than to promote an active public virtue. Such relations were therefore “social and not political in character” (Pocock, 49). The masculinist values of civic humanism remained appealing to some, like Edmund Burke, who were fearful of culture's feminization because of the emphasis on sympathetic social intercourse, just as others, like Samuel Johnson, abided by the discourse of classicism because they believed in literature's potential to promote virtue directly rather than indirectly through the imagination and sensibility.¹⁵ Yet whatever specific values individual writers endorsed, the cultural field in general was no longer seen to support a set of political relationships. In addition, since economic capital had displaced symbolic capital as the main currency of social power, the cultural field had now to be perceived as operating at a further autonomous remove from the sphere of economic production; otherwise, the arts would be in direct competition with all the other commercial goods and services that facilitated the refinement of manners. In danger of being utterly commodified, the cultural field had to be redefined to remain a distinctive field of activity. As a consequence, a new structure of belief began to emerge, wherein the cultural field would be seen as deploying its own special and separable cultural capital.¹⁶

If symbolic capital denotes the aura of fame or prestige that can be valuable in any social situation, then cultural capital, according to Bourdieu, is the measure of accredited intellectual competence required to appreciate the meaning and value of specifically cultural artifacts and relations. Such goods and relations are to be treated as a sort of code fully decipherable only by those recognized to possess the necessary disposition, learning, and skill—this cultural competence being credited as a peculiar form of prestige that (in the case of aesthetic taste, say, or scholarly expertise) appears as an end in itself yet in fact represents one category among others of modern social power.¹⁷ This emphasis on learning and competence might seem to align cultural capital with classicism, since the usual polemical charge against the latter was that it was too codified and stressed correctness at the expense of creativity. As Young put it in his Conjectures, original genius is characterized by “unprescribed beauties, and unexampled excellencies,” which lie outside the “pale of learning's authorities and laws” (13-4). But cultural capital does not have to do with prescribed models of production as with the effects of experiencing or learning about art. Whereas classicism was based on an ideology of productive civic participation, commercial humanism proposed no theory of production, but only one of personal refinement through consumption. Under the aesthetic theories of the period, the enriching effects of art and literature were to be discerned through innate mental faculties of taste or judgment and understood in terms of felt experiences within the consumer's embedded moral sense, of meanings perceived by the reader's intuitive judgment, and of the shocks and terrors of the sublime on the viewer's sensibility. The ultimate source of these valuable effects, however, was a providential mystery. The poet could produce a highly rational work, according to Shaftesbury, but the cause of its affective power remained beyond rational comprehension: “Though his intention be to please the world, he must nevertheless be, in a manner, above it, and fix his eye upon that consummate grace, that beauty of Nature, and that perfection of numbers which the rest of mankind, feeling only by the effect whilst ignorant of the cause, term the je ne slay quoy, the unintelligible or the I know not what, and suppose to be a kind of charm or enchantment of which the artist himself can give no account.”¹⁸ In the Essay on Criticism Pope had introduced the related notion of “a Grace beyond the Reach of Art,” but it had to do with the poet's “natural” fire and the accidents of meaning (155). What concerned theorists from Shaftesbury to Kant was defining the aesthetic experience in terms of the reception of its effects, of which no one could know the cause. Their theories, as signaled in their central notion of taste, bespoke an ideology of consumption.

The ultimate consequence of this for the cultural field, which had to be distinguished from any type of economic production, was the loss of any coherent theory of artistic invention within critical discourse.¹⁹ Poetry's unique source of value, the je ne sais quoi, was seen to inhere in the poet's supersensitivities, or in some unknown internal energy that the poet-genius seemed to feel more intensely than could the consumer. Production within the cultural field was surrendered to pain and compulsion, to the unpredictable eruptions of genius and imagination, or to the repressed psychic energies within the alienated poet. For a classicist like Pope, the surrender to compulsion was to be resisted, since it implied the trivialization of artistic labor as a productive force within the moral order of the state. Yet with cultural autonomization apparently inevitable in the new world of commercial exchange, Pope had, by the last decade of his career, begun to acknowledge an idea of poetic compulsion; hence his despair that writing was the most inexplicable disorder (“Why did I Write?”), known only by its symptoms as a pathological infantile ictus: “As yet a Child, nor yet a Fool to Fame, / I lisp'd in Numbers, for the Numbers came” (Epistle to Arbuthnot, 125-8). Pope, like Juvenal, could nonetheless mythologize his poetic compulsion as providing its own unassailable moral purity, an instinctive integrity that enabled him to legitimize his disavowal both of Grub Street's feminizing commercialization of literature and of the traditional civic humanist target of political corruption.²⁰ For Young and the other anticlassicists who no longer had to contend with political interests, however, the poetic compulsion could be celebrated as a sign of how poetry's value and purity transcended all interests. Precisely because the origin of literary invention was irrational and its presence knowable only through its affective power, the value of the aesthetic experience was not to be questioned. “There is,” wrote Young, “something in poetry beyond prose-reason; there are mysteries in it not to be explained, but admired.” And if Pope's compulsion was an obscure, nearly disabling disorder, Young's anticlassicism transformed the poet's pain into a virile force: “For genius may be compared to the natural strength of the body” (14-5). Others later attempted to describe the creative process in more detail, but even for Wordsworth its precondition remained an irrational compulsion, the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”²¹

That creativity could spring from natural gifts had long been entertained in critical discourse, but it is only with the suppression of invention within the moral economy of commercial humanism that the source of poetic purity could be legitimately relocated from a historical practice identified with the ancients to a providential mystery that could only be identified by its effects. On the one hand, this meant that the poets of midcentury, eager to distinguish themselves from their classicist predecessors, could experiment with a broad array of vernacular and classical genres, from ballads to Pindaric odes, which they could claim to have served them in purifying English poetry, since this purity had no longer to do with specific poetic practices as with poetry's effects. Yet unlike their predecessors, who had to establish their moral autonomy from powerful political interests, these modern poets had to devote much of their poetry to asserting the special nature and authenticity of their poetic compulsion. After all, eighteenth-century economic man could himself be perceived as a creature of compulsion, “a feminised, even an effeminate being, still wrestling with his own passions and hysterias and with interior and exterior forces let loose by his fantasies and appetites” (Pocock, 114). Their compulsions not to be mistaken for such degradingly feminine commercial desires, the poets had to rely on the symbolic violence of presenting themselves as highly differentiated selves, whether possessed of the elusive poetical character, of Gothic self-absorption or medieval bardic consciousness, or, in Wordsworth's version, a “more than usual organic sensibility” (72). (As Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron have remarked, symbolic violence, the imposition of a cultural arbitrary in the service of social power, is most dramatically exemplified by the “discontinuous and extraordinary actions” of the self-mythologizing producer, such as “prophet, the intellectual ‘creator’ or the sorcerer.”)²² The modern poet's distinctiveness, unlike the classicist's, was to be defined not in terms of any formal revision of the existing tradition or purification of its conventions; despite their nascent cult of originality, these poets' canon-making gestures, notably Gray's Progress of Poesy, displayed such respect for tradition as to seem burdened by the past. Rather, poetic uniqueness was to be measured by its contrast with society and by its power to speak, as Mason said of Gray's Bard, “with a voice more than human.”²³ By extension, the effects their poetry produced had themselves to be highly differentiated, as evoking the sublime or the pathetic, in order to heighten the sense that poetry was the supreme discourse of sympathetic engagement. “Poetry, pure Poetry,” Richard Hurd typically wrote, “is the proper language of Passion.”²⁴ Whereas classicists like Dryden and Pope had pursued the refinement of poetic conventions as a means to enable symbolic productivity within a moral and political order, their successors saw this project of refinement as profoundly disabling to poetry, since the latter's unique affective power, they believed, was inevitably repressed or enervated when subordinated to the norms of a broadly social discursivity.²⁵

On the other hand, as the value of poetry was now keyed to its effects, the poetic experience could be convertible into cultural capital, since appreciating it now required a recognized measure of refined receptivity—if Gray's Bard spoke with a voice more than human, it would follow that, as the motto before Gray's Odes announced, his poetry was “vocal to the Intelligent alone.”²⁶ Whereas in the past poetry had been prized as an instrument for distributing praise and honor, now it was to be valued for the prestige it afforded those who could demonstrate a proper competence for appreciating it. More broadly, the new economy of cultural capital rendered amenable to social hierarchization the commercial humanist ideal that intercourse with the arts helped one develop a moral personality marked by a deep imaginative sympathy. Not surprisingly, the period's polemics for pure poetry could easily slide from specifying the nature of genius to insisting on how few readers were possessed of appropriate affectivity and taste. Joseph Warton, in the same passage in his essay on Pope where he introduces the idea of pure poetry, suggests that the true poet can be distinguished from the man of sense by the former's “creative and glowing imagination, acer spiritus ac vis [the fire and force of inspiration], and that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted and very uncommon character, which so few possess, and of which so few can properly judge. For one person, who can adequately relish, and enjoy, a work of imagination, twenty are to be found who can taste and judge of, observations on familiar life, and the manners of the age” (Elledge, 2:718). Warton may be merely promoting his own critical activity, but the symbolic violence of this valorization is revealing. The true poet can be differentiated by his “exalted and very uncommon character,” but the degree of differentiation can be measured only indirectly, by analogy with the one reader in twenty who is competent enough to judge the poetry. More important, the reader who demonstrates such competence may claim an apparent moral superiority over, or greater cultural capital than, the many who rely on the ordinary commerce of “familiar life, and the manners of the age” to form their moral being. This cultural hierarchy Warton then reinforces, again by analogy, with his ranking of English poets, among the first systematic efforts to hierarchize the canon in English critical discourse (Elledge, 2:720).²⁷

Presumably, Warton's reader might acquire the desired competence and ascend the cultural hierarchy by reading treatises like the Essay on Pope. Yet here Warton enacts a deeply implicit symbolic violence, since he does not actually say whether competence results from the experience of poetry or is rooted in some innate faculty of judgment, taste, or imagination comparable to the poet's. Eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists often equivocated as to where value resided, in the text or in the reader, since the argument from nature justified a cultural hierarchy, while the argument from nurture ensured a social function for the arts in helping to refine the passions. Thus Young could suggest that, while the source of creativity remained mysterious, the poet might benefit from the poetic experience as much as the reader: poetic composition “is not only a noble amusement, but a sweet refuge; it improves their parts, and promotes their peace: it opens a back door out of the bustle of this busy, and idle world, into a delicious garden of moral and intellectual fruits and flowers; the key of which is denied to the rest of mankind.” It does not ultimately matter, Young implies, whether the cultural capital denied to the rest of mankind originates in some providential gift or results from an ongoing sentimental education spent conversing among the arts. Nor does it matter “whether we write ourselves, or in more humble amusement peruse the works of others.” What does matter is that the poetic experience be opposed to “this busy, and idle world.” Young may argue against neoclassical imitation for the gifted poet, but the terms of his argument suggest that the writing and reading of poetry are valuable activities only when conducted in a condition of splendid withdrawal. The poetic experience, Young insists, is simply more enriching or “improving” than any other activity, and the more isolated and pure, the better: “With what a gust do we retire to our disinterested, and immortal friends in our closet … ? How independent of the world is he, who can daily find new acquaintance, that at once entertain, and improve him, in the little world, the minute but fruitful creation, of his own mind?” Within the now-masculinized domestic sphere, aesthetic disinterestedness can nourish the poet as much as the reader: free from the sordid desires of commercial life, if still materially dependent on the print trade, “an inventive genius,” says Young, “may safely stay at home; that, like the widow's cruse, is divinely replenished from within; and affords us a miraculous delight” (4-5, 20).

The scene of literature, formerly restricted to the drawing rooms of poets and statesmen, had become even more rarefied and autonomous, safely lodged in the reader's mind or the creator's solitary refuge. Only in such a state of seclusion, it seemed, could both the production and the reception of poetic value be properly undertaken, for what was said to be most disabling about social life was that its many complex and differentiated relations remained too distracting and “artificial” for the artist or reader to develop the particular disposition demanded by the special experience of poetry. The “still small voice of Poetry was not made to be heard in a crowd,” wrote Gray, the first notable English poet, if by no means the last, to legitimize an authorial identity by repudiating all claims of a modern social world.²⁸ The classicists had erred, it was believed, not so much because they had written with ethical or didactic purpose as because, for all their stances of detachment, they had failed to respect poetry's distinctive value by using their writing as a mechanism of social representation and symbolic exchange. Thus Warton concluded that Pope ought to be relegated to a second rank within a revised English canon, for the satirist's ultimate failing was to have vulgarized his poetic compulsion by trafficking in scenes of “familiar life.” Pope, Warton claimed, “stuck to describing scenes of modern manners, but those manners. … because they are familiar, uniform, artificial, and polished, are, in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse” (Elledge, 2:762). The idea would be popularized as the primitivist notion that poetic genius flowered best in “rude and uncultivated” ages: “True Genius, removed from the din and tumult of business and care, shoots up to the noblest height,” yet “its fate in advanced society, and amidst the croud of mankind, is very different. … intangled in those vexatious pursuits which interrupt the repose of mankind, its ardor is wasted in the tumultuous career of ambition, and its powers absorbed in the unfathomable gulf of sensual indulgence.”²⁹ Far from returning poetic forms and conventions to their purity of origin, such critical gestures were drastically altering the terms of disavowal by which the value of the poetic activity could be defined. In place of the classicist emphasis on the moral independence of the poet as civic-minded laureate, these gestures were valorizing the autonomization of an entire field of cultural production. The function and distinctiveness of this field had now to be set against the “crowd” in the marketplace, whose multiple sensual delights and subjective relations threatened to render poetry merely one of many diversions that could serve the subject in forming his moral being.

As an incentive to the subject, the experience of poetry was said to provide a superior form of moral enrichment, and the critical study of poetry to lead to a socially accredited expertise. This explains the appearance of works like Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry (1774-81), which offered the contradictory spectacle of massive groundbreaking scholarship presented in the service of a nostalgic lapsarian narrative telling of how the poetic imagination had suffered from the progress of learning. Deepening the paradoxical nature of Warton's endeavor was the historian's willingness to relate early English poets, and even transcendent geniuses like Spenser and Shakespeare, to the specific conditions of literary production: “In reading the works of a poet who lived in a remote age, it is necessary that we should look upon the customs and manners which prevailed in that age. We should endeavour to place ourselves in the writer's situation and circumstances.”³⁰ By this historicist gesture, Warton seemed to be reducing poetry to manners, in the same way that the classicist Pope was said to have done. Yet the reduction was only apparent, since Warton's History, as with almost the entire tide of critical, aesthetic, and scholarly discourse of the period, was intended to prescribe not a set of norms for poetic practice but the appropriate conditions of consumption and affectivity. Whereas the classicists had evidently erred in stressing learning at the expense of imagination, Warton's History, no less than the emergent industry of Shakespeare criticism and other varieties of scholarship, encouraged readers at once to immerse themselves in the imaginative productions of past English literature and to use learning to transport themselves imaginatively into the cultural horizons of the past in order to appreciate those productions fully. As such, not only the experience but the critical and historical study of literary works could be situated within a localized and disinterested realm of the aesthetic imagination. Within this realm, the reader was expected to undergo a process of acquiring competence as lengthy and difficult as any demanded by neoclassical values, but this cultural capital was now to be opposed to all other forms of social power, including the symbolic capital that poets had for so long considered it their function to circulate through their verse.

The rejection of classicism in favor of pure poetry was thus intimately related to the extended theoretical attempt, from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson to Kant, to define the ideally disinterested yet still valuable nature of the aesthetic experience. Both efforts were part of a reorientation of belief about the function of culture in a society increasingly driven by economic exchange. With the ascendancy of commercial humanism, the cultural field, whose autonomy had been for so long defined in opposition to both political and economic interests, was now relegated to a depoliticized social sphere where, as its value could be identified only by its effects, it was expected to enable the refinement of manners much like any other commercial activity or product. To preserve the autonomy of the cultural field and to maintain its utility in legitimizing a social hierarchy, the value of the aesthetic experience had to be converted into cultural capital, which ostensibly furnished the subject with a measure of distinction and moral benefit evidently unobtainable through the ordinary commerce among all the other goods and exchange relations of modern life.³¹ Pure poetry, in the sense of poetic effects free from all elements except emotion, was the objective correlative to disinterested reading, in the sense of an experience free from all the less refined and refining distractions of the social world. In misrecognizing the arbitrariness of proclaiming such purity and disinterest, the poets and critics at midcentury were contributing to a new structure of belief, which, regardless of the individual's intention, could only reinforce a sense of social distinction. As Bourdieu suggests in his critique of aesthetic disinterestedness: “It should not be thought that the relationship of distinction (which may or may not imply the conscious intention of distinguishing oneself from the common people) is only an incidental component in the aesthetic disposition. The pure gaze implies a break with the ordinary attitude towards the world which, as such, is a social break” (Distinction, 31). In rejecting classicism, these poets and critics did not so much stage a retreat from history, as is commonly argued, as attempt to valorize the special character of poetry as compensation for the denial of its former centrality within the political economy of the state.³² Unlike other poetic revolutions, theirs did not involve a formal purification of the genre's conventions so much as a social purification of the poetic experience, and their aim was apparent even when they attempted to justify pure poetry in formal terms; in Lowth's version, “The poetry of every language has a style and form of expression peculiar to itself, … the whole form and complexion different from what we meet with in common life” (Elledge, 2:689).³³ Only later, when the autonomy of the cultural field had been secured, could the continuous process of purification be once again restricted to literary forms, with Wordsworth, the most self-differentiating of poets, heralding the genre's return to the “language really used by men” (71).

Notes

1. Joseph Warton, “An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756),” rpt. in Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge, 2 vols. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961), 2:717.

2. Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1918), 13.

3. Line references for Pope's poetry are to the Twickenham edition, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. (London: Methuen, 1939-69).

4. On Pope and the gendering of the marketplace see Catherine Ingrassia, “Women Writing/Writing Women: Pope, Dulness, and ‘Feminization’ in the Dunciad,” Eighteenth-Century Life 14 (1990): 40-58.

5. Bourdieu, “Principles for a Sociology of Cultural Works,” in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 187.

6. See Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw, Theory and History of Literature, 3 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 260.

7. Bourdieu stresses that such a disavowal of economic concerns is “neither a simple ideological mask nor a complete repudiation of economic interest” but is necessary within any cultural practice whose authority and legitimacy derive to no small degree from its apparent autonomy from the realms of the economic and political. Disavowal and disinterest are thus practical negations employed by social agents within a practice who “can only work by pretending not to be doing what they are doing” (“The Production of Belief,” in Field of Cultural Production, 74-6).

8. Jonson, Epigram 18:2, and Works, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925-52), 4:33. Thomas M. Greene first discussed Jonson's valorization of moral fixity in his classic essay “Ben Jonson and the Centered Self,” Studies in English Literature 10 (1970): 325-48.

9. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 3:251.

10. The abbe Batteux, in Les Beaux-Arts reduits a un meme principe (1746), was evidently the first to use the phrase “poesie pure” to designate works of imagination in verse. See D. J. Mossop, Pure Poetry: Studies in French Poetic Theory and Practice, 1746 to 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 32-3. Douglas Lane Patey relates the English adoption of the phrase to the reorganization of knowledge in the later eighteenth century in his valuable essay “‘Aesthetics’ and the Rise of Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in English Literature 33 (1993): 587-608.

11. This is the argument of Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)—J. C. D. Clark also sees the rise of the vernacular canon as helping to displace an “Anglo-Latin tradition,” though he insists that “humanist classicism … lasted for longer, and was more powerful, than historians or literary scholars have generally allowed” (Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion, and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 2).

12. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753; trans. 1787), partly rpt. in Elledge, 2:687-703.

13. Distancing his sociology from Marxist economism, Bourdieu has lately argued that economic capital may be subordinate to symbolic capital even in capitalist economies, since acts of exchange may not be possible without symbolic disavowals of economic interests: “In an economy which is defined by the refusal to recognize the ‘objective’ truth of ‘economic’ practices, that is, the law of ‘naked self-interest’ and egoistic calculation, even ‘economic’ capital cannot act unless it succeeds in being recognized through a conversion that can render unrecognizable the true principle of its efficacy. Symbolic capital is this denied capital, recognized as legitimate, that is, misrecognized as capital” (The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990], 118). Jonathan Loesberg offers a fine account of the increasing significance of symbolic capital in Bourdieu's work in “Bourdieu and the Sociology of Aesthetics,” ELH 60 (1993): 1033-56.

14. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 37-50.

15. Nancy Armstrong first proposed the case for the feminization of culture in the eighteenth century in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3-27. Since then Adam Potkay has discussed the complex ambivalence in Macpherson's poems, which “are animated, at a deep level, with male ressentiment toward the very ideal of polite domesticity they help to formulate” (“Virtue and Manners in Macpherson's Poems of Ossian,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] 107 [1992]: 128). David Simpson has likewise considered the masculinist backlash in aesthetic theories of the period, notably Burke's “remasculinization” of the sublime (Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 126-31). See also Patey (n. 10 above) on the male appropriation of the “feminine” expressiveness of the lyric.

16. This is not to suggest that cultural capital was not operative in a precapitalist economy. Clearly, any author had to demonstrate special competences, rhetorical skills, and classical learning to achieve distinction within the cultural field, but the accumulation of cultural capital was not treated as an end in itself. Rather, the author was expected to use these skills to further the circulation of symbolic capital within a larger moral economy.

17. Bourdieu writes, “A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded” (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Task, trans. Richard Nice [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984], 2). My definition of cultural capital is based on Johnson's summary paraphrase, in his introduction to The Field of Cultural Production (7).

18. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson, 2 vols. (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), 1:214.

19. Howard Caygill, Art of Judgement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 100-2.

20. The commercialization of letters had earlier prompted several of the Augustans to toy with mythologies of compulsion even as they resisted the cultural autonomization which these mythologies implied. For the satirists, distressed by their deepening exile from the drawing rooms of state, poetry's masculine fire was transformed into afflictions of the affective body. Dryden, in his later work as a professional author, frequently complained of his failing memory and of being “a cripple in my limbs” (Of Dramatick Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols. [London: Dent, 1962], 2:272). Desire of any kind, Swift alleged, could stem from a mere disorder of the bowels. For the early Pope, poetic inspiration could be imaginatively equated with a disabling internalization of the Muses, in the Cave of Spleen and in Eloisa's imprisoned raptures, inflamed by thoughts of her lover's mutilated body. Yet Pope was less reluctant than his colleagues to find a measure of liberation in compulsion, as it enabled him to present himself ever more dramatically as a poet driven by innate disinterestedness (as opposed to the simple reactive indignation of the Juvenalian satirist). By the time of the Imitations to Horace, though, Pope had both fully masculinized this mythology and sentimentalized it so that it did not seem like an enslaving irrationality: “My Head and Heart thus flowing thro' my Quill, / Verseman or Prose-Man, term me which you will” (Satire, 2. 1.63-4).

21. Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, 2d ed. (1802), rpt. in Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, ed. W. J. B. Owen (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 72. On the eighteenth-century attempts to locate the source of genius in providence or nature see Ken Frieden, Genius and Monologue (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).

22. Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, trans. Richard Nice, 2d ed. (London: Sage, 1990), 31.

23. William Mason, ed., The Poems of Mr Gray, to which are prefixed Memoirs of his Life and Writing, 2 vols. (York, 1775), 2:91, quoted in Robert Folkenflik, “The Artist as Hero in the Eighteenth Century,” Yearbook of English Studies 12 (1982): 97.

24. Richard Hurd, Works, 8 vols. (1811; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1967), 1:104.

25. Susan Staves argues that for Pope, “refinement was a kind of bourgeois and nationalist scheme of improvement”; it gave him “a vivid sense of individually owning his poetic texts and a most entrepreneurial and patriotic attitude towards improving or refining them in his own interest and in the interest of the nation” (“Pope's Refinement,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29 [1988]: 146). Staves's historical claim is somewhat misleading: refinement had long been considered a rhetorical ideal, since one of the civic humanist poet's prime functions was to heighten the persuasive power of political discourse (see n. 33 below). Nonetheless, Pope was a special case, since his relation to civic humanism remained problematic throughout his career, and especially in his later work. Pope may have officially aligned himself with the great landowners Bolingbroke and Bathurst, but he “lived in a different world, made his living by his pen, cherished his independence. Only by considerable distortion, therefore, can Pope be transformed into the spokesman for civic humanism” (David B. Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984], 194). The public-minded laureate poets of old had similarly cherished their moral independence from powerful influences, but by the time Pope was writing his last satires, he was engaging in strenuous efforts to define an autonomous poetic subjectivity at odds with all dominant interests: spurning political allies in the fragmentary One Thousand Seven Hundred and Forty, abandoning the traditional project of refinement in the final Dunciad, and ultimately presenting himself as a poet of sublime egotistical rage in the Epilogue to the Satires. In this final mode Pope was intent to wage all-out “cultural combat” in order to assert his distinctiveness (Carole Fabricant, “Pope's Moral, Political, and Cultural Combat,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29 [1988]: 180). By assuming a stance of total disavowal in the name of culture, Pope effectively announced the very project of cultural autonomization that his detractors would soon champion.

26. The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longmans, 1969), 157.

27. Classicism had recognized a hierarchy of genres according to which poets were to be evaluated and ranked. In practice, however, it was rarely applied to English writings systematically, in part because promoting English literary production as a whole was thought more important than submitting it to close evaluative scrutiny. Lengthy, uncritical catalogs of English poets were thus common in Elizabethan writings, where they served to denote a fundamental concord among artists and courtly English society. Rankings of authors like Warton's began to appear in the mid-eighteenth century, I would argue, because it was only then that there developed a need to legitimize a cultural hierarchy.

28. Gray, Correspondence, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 2d ed., 3 vols. (1935; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 1:296. On Gray's authorial self-definition in relation to the book market see Linda Zionkowski, “Bridging the Gulf Between: The Poet and the Audience in the Work of Gray,” ELH 58 (1991): 331-50.

29. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767), 292.

30. Thomas Warton, Observations on “The Fairy Queen” of Spenser (1754), rpt. in Elledge, 2:772.

31. That the valorization of pure poetry reflected an attempt to autonomize the cultural field from economic exchange relations is implicit in Terry Eagleton's summary account of the emergence of an aesthetic ideology during the eighteenth century: “In a notable historical irony, the birth of aesthetics as an intellectual discourse coincides with the period when cultural production is beginning to suffer the miseries and indignities of commodification. The peculiarity of the aesthetic is in part spiritual compensation for this degradation: it is just when the artist is becoming debased to a petty commodity producer that he or she will lay claim to transcendent genius. But there is another reason for the foregrounding of the artefact which aesthetics achieves. What art is now able to offer, in that ideological reading of it as aesthetic, is a paradigm of more general social significance—an image of self-referentiality which in an audacious move seizes upon the very functionlessness of artistic practice and transforms it into a vision of the highest good” (The Ideology of the Aesthetic [Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990], 64-5).

32. John Sitter made the case for a post-Augustan “flight from history” in Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 77-103. William C. Dowling has since proposed a revision of Sitter's thesis, wherein the Gothic revival in midcentury poetry reflected a change from the Augustans' “retrospective radicalism” to a modern notion of historical progressivism (“Ideology and the Flight from History in Eighteenth-Century Poetry,” in The Profession of Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reflections on an Institution, ed. Leo Damrosch [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992], 135-53). Dowling's argument anticipates mine in several respects, including the use of Pocock's intellectual history to suggest how the generational shift from the Augustans to their successors involved differing responses to new economic realities. Dowling suggests that the poets at midcentury were as dismayed with these new realities as the Augustans but that their opposition did not take the form of political satire; instead, they promoted the realm of the imagination as a sanctuary from the “desacralization of the world” (148). Though I agree generally with Dowling's assessment, I propose that the historical change he discusses was far more complex and consequential than he allows. I follow Boutdieu in suggesting, rather, that the rejection of classicism and the concomitant valorization of the imagination were aspects of a much broader process of autonomization, wherein the entire cultural field had to be distinguished more fervently than ever from the commercial world, now that the new realities of exchange threatened to become the only currency of social power.

33. Lowth's observation may recall Gray's notorious remark, in his letter of 8 April 1742 to West, that “the language of the age is never the language of poetry.” Yet Gray, at least in the context of this letter, rehearses the traditional view that the poet enriches the language through verbal innovations and refinements. The poet, in this view, may be in the rhetorical avant-garde but does not write in a language peculiar to poetry. For this reason, I cannot entirely agree with John Guillory's argument in his otherwise brilliant chapter on Gray in Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85-133. Guillory suggests that Gray promoted “poetic diction” as a point of “distinction between serious and popular literature—a distinction between two bodies of writing which are alike in respect of being equally ‘fictional’ or ‘imaginative,’ equally distinguishable from philosophy or history, but unlike in value” (131). I would argue that the linguistic capital of poetic diction had long been recognized as a point of distinction for English poets, from neo-Chaucerian “aureation” and Elizabethan “eloquence” to metaphysical “wit” and Augustan “refinement,” though for the Elizabethans and Augustans, in particular, it was less a matter of distinguishing one's poetic accomplishments from those of rivals or from popular forms than from the “barbarous” practices of the previous poetic generation. Rather, it was cultural capital, conceived of as a special category of aesthetic competence to be acquired by literary consumers, that became recognized only during the eighteenth century, as a result of what Bourdieu calls the autonomization of the cultural field. Guillory thus rightly notes that Gray's most widely read poem itself enacts the central equivocation of the period's aesthetic theories: “The Elegy is thus at once peculiarly accessible to a wide reading public at the same time that its narrative reinscribes this access as innate rather than acquired. The very attractiveness of its pastoralizing narrative effaces the struggle for cultural capital and propels the reader into that imaginary identification which, as Bourdieu has pointed out, continually misrecognizes bourgeois culture as a kind of ‘aristocracy of culture’” (121).