SOURCE: Pole, David. “Cleanth Brooks and the New Criticism.” British Journal of Aesthetics 9, no. 3 (July 1969): 285-97.

[In the following essay, Pole surveys Brooks's work on critical interpretation of poetry.]

There are two reasons that might serve as justifying the close study of a particular thinker; either his weight and importance in himself or the width of his influence on others. And both, I suggest, are relevant to some special examination of the critical theorizing of Mr. Cleanth Brooks. Brooks has been ungenerously characterized—I recall seeing the phrase somewhere—as a man with a keen nose for a fashionable idea—which is, if you like, true enough. But, I think, the same point might have been put rather differently: his work incorporates and sums up a large tradition, indeed, sum it up and sets it forth systematically; he also quotes and carefully answers his several critics. Brooks, in other words, consciously theorizes—among writers in the field a relatively rare and welcome merit. (The great exception is doubtless I. A. Richards; but Richards's ambitious theorizing or, to be plain, his preposterously bad pseudo-scientific psychology has little or no connexion, as has often been noticed, with his real and great merit as a practical critic.) True, there are theoretical suggestions to be found in Richards too; his would-be neurological model admits of re-interpretation. And Brooks, in fact, has amply acknowledged the debt. His debt to Empson, I shall seek to show, is equally clear. Lastly, the tradition is still much with us, even though Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn (the fullest and most orderly setting-forth of his position), which I shall concentrate on, appeared over twenty years ago; thus Professor Wimsatt, even in his most recent book, Hateful Contraries, still declares his broad adherence to the ‘tensional’ theory, as he calls it—which means in substance, I suppose, the theory of Brooks. It subsists, in a large sense, as the reigning orthodoxy. (Of course Dr. Leavis and his powerful following remain on one side, but that would be a study for another occasion.)

At the bottom of it all in a way—and perhaps as the most acceptable part of it—I possibly ought to notice a looser view; one best represented, I think, by a couple of sentences from the preface to the second edition of Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity:

What I do suppose is that, wherever a receiver of poetry is seriously moved by an apparently simple line, what are moving in him are the traces of a great part of his past experience and the structure of his past judgements. Considering what it feels like to take real pleasure in verse, I should think it surprising, and on the whole rather disagreeable, if even the most searching criticism of such lines of verse could find nothing in their implications to be the cause of so straddling a commotion and so broad a calm.¹

That we are here in a region of important and potentially fruitful insight need hardly be doubted; though as to its common application some reservations will appear in the sequel. But this at least I shall take as plain: it hardly suffices to talk merely, say, with reference to Burns's or Blake's lyrics, of their ‘wonderful simplicity’ and nothing more. Thus ‘The Cat is on the mat’ is wonderfully simple. Something deeper must be moving within or underneath that simplicity; informing it, so to speak; and, I suppose, Brook's account of those further forces is broadly familiar. Underneath lies a tension, and harmonization, of conflicting—or at least potentially conflicting (a difference I could have wished Brooks to pay more attention to)—of diverse views, feelings or attitudes.

Exposition presents obvious difficulties; I must assume some familiarity with Brooks's work, at least with the poems that he discussed. He himself, as I emphasized, goes to work commendably systematically: first quotes a number of poems, or samples of poetry, in fact nine, from Donne and Shakespeare to Tennyson and Yeats; secondly offers careful analyses of each; and lastly proceeds to theorize, generalizing on the basis so thoroughly laid. At most I can attempt to recall briefly one or two of his more typical analyses—analyses, it seems to me, I should add, varying greatly in quality: that of Wordsworth's Westminster Bridge I find the least satisfactory, and much of Gray's Elegy pretty dubious; but that on Herrick seems to me largely excellent, and still more, what I shall give my main attention to, the discussion of The Rape of the Lock.

Our themes, once again, are to be these: conflict, ambiguity (Empson's word), irony and, of course, harmonization. So in the present case. I recall the bon mot with which Disraeli shortly settled the then raging Darwinian controversy: ‘The question is whether man is an ape or an angel; I am on the side of the angels.’ (Whether or not the angels were on the side of Disraeli has, I believe, still to be disclosed.) The question here, broadly speaking, is whether the poet's heroine, Belinda, is a species of angelic creation, a kind of divinity, or a more or less ordinary young woman with good looks and quite her fair share of feminine frivolity; at least, over-simplifying, that forms a large part of the question. And if angelic, Pope asks (through the mouth of Clarissa) to what end?

Say why are beauties praised and honoured most,
The wise man's passion, and the vain man's toast
Why decked with all that land and sea afford,
Why angels called and angel-like adored … ?

Both views are, let me stress, visible there, are things that the poem makes real to us; and the conflict between them, at least a prima facie conflict, whatever we hear of ‘harmonization’, hardly needs underlining.

Brooks enters into details of all sorts, which I shall have to skirt lightly, but a few words on the recurrent analogy of the sun: which may either typify the heroin's serene self-sufficiency or alternatively her self-admiring and easy-going non-commitment. It appears from the start of the action:

Sol through thin curtains shot a timorous ray
And oped those eyes that must obscure the day …

(The stock Romantic analogy equating the lady's eyes with that heavenly luminary.) And again the sun rises ‘not with more glory’

Than issuing forth the rival of his beams
Launched on the bosom of the silver Thames.

And finally, at the very end of the poem (on the supposed stellar translation of Belinda's ‘ravished hair’):

For, after all the murders of your eye,
When, after millions slain, yourself must die:
When those fair suns are set, as set they must,
And all those tresses shall be laid in dust,
This lock the must shall consecrate to fame,
And mid the stars inscribe Belinda's name.

Brooks's comment here, apt enough it seems to me, is that whether or not the poet took his heroine wholly seriously, his seriousness in one particular is hardly in doubt; namely, concerning his own poetic name, indeed immortality. He made that promise of lasting memory, meant it, and magnificently kept it. Arabella Fermour, Belinda's original, died somewhat over two hundred years ago and was buried in a village in Hertfordshire, in a parish church where not even her monument remains. (The church was remodelled sometime during the last century.) But one thing remains, that sable tress, eternally severed from the lustrous profusion of its fellowship, that everyone still knows of: ‘This lock the muse shall consecrate to fame’.

Brooks deals, too, illuminatingly and at length, with the metaphor of rape written into the poem's very title, and with the war of the sexes depicted in Canto IV, asking how seriously we are in fact meant to take it all. But that issue, which I can not linger on, leads me to the main point, which for Brooks is the poet's attitude to a certain central virtue, namely chastity. He believed in it, certainly; but Pope, Brooks insists, was a good humanist. He believed in it as a negative virtue; not, in other words, as something meant for keeps. To finish the quotation I began earlier from Clarissa's speech, in which Brooks finds (so far as such a thing could admit of abstraction) the main moral of the poem: to what end serve all this allurement and adornment ‘unless good sense preserve what beauty gains?’ The point is, doubtless, precisely what beauty gains; in other words the attraction of the opposite sex, and ultimately marriage and motherhood; to all of which, we gather, despite his apparent lightness of tone, Pope's attitude is profoundly serious.

I have hardly begun to do justice to the detail and fineness of Brooks's analysis. Perhaps, just before passing on, it is worth noticing that Pope can afford an eastward glance towards the busy world of the City, where ‘The merchant from the exchange returns in peace’, and even towards Tyburn, without detriment to his own perfect toy scene set up in Hampton Court. There is no suggestion of callousness in the contrast; his sureness of touch precludes that. Rather the thrills of a game of ombre and the agonies of the rape of a lock of hair are set in vivid but diminutive perspective (one recalls, perhaps, the first book of Gulliver's Travels).

But to proceed to our own more proper business, namely the larger theoretical-critical moral that Brooks draws: all we see here, built into the poem, is in effect a whole complex of attitudes; that is many relatively simple attitudes taken together, simultaneous in tension and in harmony; a harmony—the great point—properly to be grasped in nothing short of the whole poem. We may attempt, Brooks himself indeed has attempted, something by way of abstract statement, that is some statement of the same sort of position; such a statement, however, is no more than a skeleton of the thing itself. But I had best, perhaps, quote Brooks's own words, turning to the chapter called The Heresy of Paraphrase. The enemy here, so to speak, is the theorist who distinguishes first poetic ‘content’ (what per impossibile an adequate abstract statement would paraphrase) from, secondly, what the poet presumably—his special poetic expertise—pours or moulds it into, some appropriate ‘form’. Now that ‘content’, on a Brooksian approach, is just one single aspect among others; you can abstract any aspect you please. What matters after all is the whole thing, the poem itself, and the meaning of the poem qua poem, its poetic or imaginative meaning, which inheres in nothing less than the whole—not, in other words, in any abstractable ‘content’. Thus he writes:

though it is in terms of structure that we must describe poetry, the term ‘structure’ is not a wholly satisfactory term. One means by it something far more internal than the metrical pattern, say, or sequence of images … [nor] certainly ‘form’ in the conventional sense in which we think of ‘form’ as a kind of envelope which ‘contains’ the ‘content’. The structure is obviously conditioned by the very nature of the material which goes into the poem. The nature of the material sets the problem to be solved, and the solution is the ordering of the material.²

And again:

The unity is not unity of a sort to be achieved by the reduction and simplification appropriate to an algebraic formula. It is a positive unity, not a negative; it represents not a residue but an achieved harmony.³

Brooks goes on to recall—I spoke of his place within and virtual summing-up of a tradition, a theoretical movement at least—the variety of terms, more or less familiar, pointing in the same way: Empson's ambiguity, paradox, complexity (of attitudes), irony (his own earlier favourite), and so on. To extend the list, we saw, Wimsatt has since added tension.

One other example, briefly at least, before passing on. Brooks finds in Herrick's Corinna's Going A-Maying a crucial tension—what we might expect him to find—between the poet's explicit Christianity and the pagan imagery that none the less runs throughout. So the question is this: Are we innocently and unquestioningly to fall in with the ‘harmless folly of the time’, to treat it as—if we treat the poem seriously at all, it is hard not to treat it—something much more than harmless folly? The latter of course yields just the sort of reading Brooks's whole theory demands; and to get the poem's meaning qua poem, once again, there is no way but to read it or re-read it as a whole.

Brooks, I said, shows careful and commendable candour in setting out and answering his own critics, the critics of his earlier work; answering them largely successfully, it seems to me (with the possible exception of Mr. Winters); inasmuch as, I suspect, they themselves have not quite succeeded in articulating what perhaps underlay their real criticisms. First Brooks quotes from Mr. Herbert Muller, who complains that the critic-theorist

considers only technique, mechanism, outward show. He overlooks the unifying attitudes, the world of view, the quality of mind, the informing spirit—all that … enables a Shakespeare or a Goethe to be as simple, forthright and eloquent as he pleases.⁴

Once again I can perhaps do no better than give Brooks's answer in his own words:

to say that Shakespeare could be as simple as he pleased suggests the poetry resides in certain truthful or exalted statements which need only to be stated simply and forthrightly. But the assumption, as Muller himself knows, is desperate; and on this assumption one could never explain why such a poetic material, when stated in clear expository prose is not poetry, or why only those who are great poets have managed to locate and exploit such ‘poetic material’.⁵

But the adjective ‘eloquent’ is what Brooks chiefly falls foul of: for he sees it as fatally reinstating the vicious dichotomy of ‘form’ and ‘content’. Poetry proper will either reside in mere externals, ‘eloquent’ form; or alternatively, the other horn of the dilemma, in some sufficiently exalted body of moral or philosophical truth; which it then clothes in fitting finery, appropriate poetical ‘form’. We can hardly deny that Muller's own language invites some such criticism, his contrast of ‘informing spirit’ and ‘outward show’—tell-tale phrases which reveal his real terms of thought. Another critic dealt with, Mr. Donald Stauffer, makes it his main objection that Brooks, fixated with complexity, has no room for truly simple poetry, one familiar Romantic ideal; all the stress is on conflict and diversity. Once again I shall gives Brooks's answer in his own words. If the statement means

that a poet may be able to write without giving a sense of pomposity—that he can give a sense of casual and simple directness—the point may be granted at once. If the statement means that the poet can make his poem one by reducing to order the confusions and disorders and irrelevancies of ordinary experience in terms of one unifying insight, granted again.⁶

But Stauffer, it would seem, wants simple matter simply stated; and then, as I said at the start, any child's reading book furnishes an abundance of unimpeachable examples: though I fear that Brooks's own talk of ‘unifying insight’ is more like a papering over the cracks than a probing for underlying theoretical strains and stresses that they may indicate.

To summarize and repeat: the whole poem embodies and unifies a potentiality of conflicting attitudes, than which anything less is more or less as arbitrary limitation; for it will not be anything that can helpfully be called a paraphrase, a statement of the ‘content’, but an abstract or aspect and nothing more.

Here, however, Brooks faces a difficulty, and I fear a serious one. After all, what has he himself been doing, at least attempting, in all that has gone before—for instance in his analysis, outlined above, of The Rape of the Lock? He cannot be wholly unaware of it; he is too scrupulous a thinker. In fact he seeks to meet it—rather, one might fear, to brush it aside—in a footnote; a long footnote, but important enough, I think, to quote, at least the first half, in full:

We may, it is true, be able to adumbrate what the poem says if we allow ourselves enough words, if we make enough reservations and qualifications, we attempt to come nearer the meaning of the poem by successive approximations and refinements, gradually encompassing the meaning and pin-pointing the area in which it lies rather than realizing it.⁷

All this deserves looking at. Let me pick on two words, first ‘approximation’ (the critic gets nearer the meaning of the poem by ‘successive approximations …’) and, still more important, that final ‘realizing’. But for the former, it is plainly false: criticism can be refined or developed as much as you like, there is nothing of approximation or anything resembling approximation in the case. Criticism remains criticism, its own literary mode with its own function, poetry poetry. Otherwise we might contemplate our reaching the point where we should say: ‘Having now the advantage of Brooks's analysis (or that of some later critic), we can forget about that antic eighteenth-century poet and his mock heroic poem in five cantos, The Rape of the Lock’; which, in Euclid's phrase, is absurd. The second significant word I spoke of came at the end of the passage quoted: Brooks writes of pinpointing the area of meaning rather than ‘realizing’ it. It is not accidental; he needs some such addendum. For why, after all, is Brooks's first claim, at least, as we saw, his implicit claim, foredoomed to failure? Why can criticism, however adequate as criticism, never take the place of poetry itself, or even approximate to it—so that we might ultimately hope to scrap the one in favour of the other? Brooks himself, we find, has unwittingly let us know: whatever, qua critic, he does with those meanings, attitudes, or what you will, what he leaves undone is all very plain: namely, to realize, make them real or else vivid to us. He does not, in other words, bring them home to us; or act, like the poet, on the imagination. More follows: only grant that, and significant consequences—significant for the ‘tensional’ theory at least—immediately appear. What I have described, that is what poetry does—and I fear that the formula will sound disconcertingly simple—at least one thing it does is precisely that: it realizes its ‘content’ imaginatively. But, as I say, grant that and you are no longer committed to complexity; for, as Brooks's critics urged all along, what it serves to realize may be as simple or straightforward as you please. It may be. It need not; and often, of course, it is decidedly otherwise. But then it is not a very startling discovery that those writers whom we value most highly are those who have felt and thought deeply; nor that life, so considered, is unlikely to strike one as simple. In a major work at least you are likely to find prima facie conflicting attitudes, or even really and irreducibly conflicting attitudes. What does not follow is that in all poetry we are bound to find them. I am brought back to Muller's controversial phrase ‘eloquent’; let a simple attitude be expressed vividly, if you like eloquently, and therewith we already have poetry—even if only of a relative humble sort. It would be easy to cite simple lyrics, say of Burns; but for tactical reasons I rather choose to instance Waller's lines On His Mistress's Girdle:

That which her slender waist confined
Shall now my joyful temples bind,
No monarch but would give his throne
His arms might do as this has done …

which ends with the couplet:

Give me but what this ribbon bound
And take the rest the sun goes round.

Here you have a poem that seems positively cut out for some sort of Brooksian analysis; urbane, witty, consciously ‘conceited’, very much of the metaphysical tradition—and, of course, it was, in the twenties and thirties, the great vogue and revival of the metaphysicals that underlay this whole critical approach; that to which Brooks's own work belongs. Yet for all that it is basically simple, at least the experience behind it is simple. It is merely one of abandoned and joyful ardour; which, one hopes, less gifted persons must occasionally have been happy enough to have known. It is joyful, hence playful and hyperbolical, even if you like ironical. The complexities are unquestionably present. But Brooks, I suggest, has confused complexities subserving the vivid realization of experience (or perhaps expression) with those of the experience itself. Does it follow that I am committing the ‘heresy of paraphrase’; that I cannot explain why a plain prose statement would not have done just as well? I answer that I can: that statement in the ordinary prosaic mode might have made us understand, cognize the poet's mood; it might do all that but not ‘realize’ it for us, not make it imaginatively vivid—which, to repeat, is not to deny that major literary work is likely to embody deep feeling and searching reflection; nor that observers who ponder long and profoundly over human experience rarely find it devoid of complexities—which, however, is no very staggering news. So here I locate the crack in Brooks's theory: the urn, well-wrought as it may be, has hidden flaws, and will ultimately not hold water, even Parnassian water—or whatever other more ethereal fluid.

I spoke earlier of several of Brooks's critics: another has appeared on the scene since the publication of the work I have been dealing with. Mr. Murray Krieger in his book The New Apologists for Poetry urges two main objections to Brooks—though I shall not spend a lot of space on the first, which appears to me to rest on a plain mistake. I mention it chiefly to shelve it; it is desirable that we should not seem to have left parts of the ground uncovered. The point of the ‘contexual’ theory, according to Krieger (yet another synonym for the theory for which we have already found so many), is that references are, so to speak, internal or inward-directed;⁸ one aspect of the poem, it seems, always referring us back to another, keeping us, as it were, within the poem itself; the poem, then—one old-established notion, one main strand of traditional Romanticism—is its own self-contained object of contemplation; it stands so, rather than as mirroring the world beyond. Now that is just wrong. And strangely enough Krieger elsewhere, as we shall see, shows himself thoroughly aware of what makes it wrong: namely that the precise claim made for this sort of language, of complex, ambiguous poetic language—as it is described—is just what enables it to mirror, and alone enables us adequately to mirror, all the shifting complexities of actual life.

I turn to Krieger's second and more searching criticism—which, incidentally, presupposes the falsity of the first (unless the one is invalid, the other can never be launched). He quotes Brooks's own words, and again the passage may be worth reduplicating:

his task [Brooks writes, that is, the poet's task] is to unify experience. He must return us to the unity of experience as man knows it in his own experience. The poem, if it be a true simulacrum of reality [pace Krieger's ‘inward reference’ interpretation]—in this sense, at least an ‘imitation’ of reality—by being an experience rather than a mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience.⁹

The objection here is obvious enough; a perfect ‘simulacrum of reality’, one might expect, so far from representing anything like an imaginative unity, a harmonization or oneness, would be just about as chaotic as the original—whose distressing refusal to conform to our tidy demands or preconception is something that has been lamented often and in vain. Even Ulysses, it has been remarked, has more obvious regularity than Dublin. Krieger accordingly treats all Brooks's stress on unification, harmony and so on as a kind of afterthought, an appendage to the essential Brooksian doctrine; which is certainly mistaken. It is not only that we find these terms there from the start, and in one case, italicized, as we saw, but that the concept of bringing together, of somehow reconciling would-be conflicting attitudes, is the centre of the doctrine itself. Yet genuine difficulties remain. At least some of Brooks's phrases, his reference to a ‘true simulacrum of reality’ for instance, seem rather to suggest what is more humbly called a slice of life; as, say, you might take a cinecamera and start and leave off shooting at some arbitrary point—a technique I suspect some successful, modish directors of adopting—without any unity whatever. It boils down to this: grant that Brooks is right, he is certainly right to stress unity and harmonization; yet he can only stress it; it remains, on his theory, something which we must take on trust, an uncashed cheque.

Accepting, then, in large part the importance of what Brooks has to tell us, I find it still needs, what I shall seek finally to supply, some theoretical underwriting.

I return to my main original example, The Rape of the Lock. Belinda is presented as an erotic, or erotically desirable object; hence, in Romantic eyes, very much more. She gets transformed into an angel or a divinity—which should not surprise us. We are surely familiar with this tendency of erotic feelings to exalt and idealize their objects—at least where they are not merely animal (a Freudian might suspect, indeed, precisely so as to suppress and deny the animal, that is as a counter-formation; the state described as ‘being in love’ somewhat resembling a local neurosis). But the present point is simply this: that there exist psychological facts, which are as hard as physical facts and as useless to argue with; that it only remains to accept and to live with them. And their acceptance is a main part of common wisdom. Hence few readers quarrel with the idealization of Belinda, which may doubtless be a little absurd; but the absurdity, if so, is in human nature, about which there is not much one can do. What would certainly be foolish would be to forget or lose sight of the other side: granted she is physically very attractive, likely to arouse desire and hence, to repeat, in romantic breasts, adoration; and she is, in all fairness, a genuinely nice, substantially unaffected, charming girl; but also—let us add—very human; which among other things includes carnal. Woman, like man, is a rational animal; hence a fortiori an animal. Recall Disraeli's question, ape or angel? Of course, neither. But though decidedly not an angel, yet ‘angel-like adored’; and if not an ape, at least as we see a creature sharing the ordinary instincts of animal nature. These things, and both things, are there; I mean that they are there in the poetry; which constitutes a part of its complexity. Now first to repeat what I have already argued: to make a poem a poem, to make it more than a piece of analysis, they must not be only and barely there but must also be realized, made vivid or brought home to us. So much for that; but my present theme is harmonization. The question that faces us—I suggest that faces Brooks, though he never sees it—is how it is that those attitudes, admittedly in conflict, do not merely remain in conflict. We achieve, he says, a ‘unifying insight’ where what might surely seem more naturally predictable in the circumstances would be a head-on collision. And in fact unresolved incoherence, tendencies that merely jar or conflict, constitute a by no means unfamiliar aesthetic fault; rather something that critics do often complain of.

We must answer, I think, at two levels. And for the first I have already hinted at the answer: life not being simple—and since we cannot make it so—we have no choice but to accept the co-existence of attitudes and the like that we cannot reduce to order—whose acceptance, to repeat, constitutes no small part of human wisdom. True, the theoretical desideratum of reducing complexity to order always remains with us; its drive underlies a great part of natural science; the patient humility of accepting the unreduced recalcitrance of brute facts is something which even scientists—at the risk of blatant apriorism (like that of I. A. Richards)—must also learn to respect and accommodate. Now that, underneath, at the deeper level, is what makes endurable or acceptable the portrayal of such unresolved conflicts; what remains is the question, at the poetical or technical level, of how—as I may say—it is put across.

I propose, without apology, to offer certain humble analogies. Clearly we are most of us much readier, generally speaking, to listen to views we disagree with, even to trenchant criticism of ourselves, which are offered with imagination and tact; which means that they are so offered as to let us know—rather, make us feel—that the speaker also sees, or sees as if from, our own point of view. Thus from a public platform: ‘The railwaymen have, of course, an understandable sense of grievance, yet …’ or: ‘I come to bury Caesar not to praise him …’ but realize none the less that he was a splendid chap.

You may accuse me, in using such comparisons, of denigrating Pope's fine poetic art. Of course I grant this much: so far as he does the same sort of thing he does so in ways infinitely subtler. And here a further point. I am led to reflect on what is surely the most glaring omission in Brooks's whole treatment. Certainly he covers a wide range of poetry, but his method has nothing to tell us of the difference between The Rape of the Lock a playful poem, the genre being mock heroic, the heroine treated with amused affection, and the exalted seriousness of some passages (‘And hear the mighty water rolling evermore’) that he quotes from Wordsworth. His concern is with value; which he always finds in the same achievement, a complex harmony. The poems here are essentially alike and, one would gather, those other differences are things that hardly matter. The achievement, in either case, to repeat, is the projection of a varied vision, comprehensive and adequate; which is serious. Pope, in his basic concerns, is still serious, and serious in much the same way as Wordsworth.

The view I shall offer is the very opposite. What Brooks has nothing to say about might pass for the most important thing of all; I mean what I shall call the poet's tone—playful, solemn, mock heroic or so on. For it is that tone, principally or most often or characteristically, that makes possible the desired effect; it is the tone or the conviction it carries (where it succeeds) that makes conjointly acceptable those apparent incompatibles or conflicts. It serves, if anything serves, to convince us of the poet's real awareness of those conflicting demands; of his awareness at once of the conflict and the necessity of contemplating both; of living simultaneously with both, without our ceasing to be aware of the conflict and aware of it as of something at once deep and real. This Pope achieves, and does so in the mode of the mock heroic. That in principle it might have been done differently I do not mean to deny; but the felicity of his particular choice, given of course his own sureness in handling it, is evident enough. Mock heroically, we are able to see Belinda simultaneously as adorable and absurd, and as angelic—at least to understand those who see her as angelic—and eminently human. (Byron in Don Juan, Mr. R. K. Elliot has pointed out to me, roughly unifies its absurdly chaotic and heterogeneous material—even ranging from comedy to horror—by mere unity of tone; all except, I would add, the lyric The Isles of Greece, which does not belong but he evidently felt too good to leave out.)

The same issue, let me finally observe, might have been differently tackled, approached from a very different angle. I have spoken of what I called ‘wisdom’—a high-sounding phrase perhaps calculated to call up some image as of a bearded sage in his cell, having attained the art rightly to number ‘every star that Heaven doth shew / And every herb that sucks the dew’; it may, in plainer words, suggest contemplative withdrawal from the world of action. But that is another issue. Indeed often a man of action amidst daily necessities, immediate pressures, must go ahead, choose either this way or that—or, of course, stand dithering and do nothing (this last, however, at least as regards its effective consequences, is no less a commitment, a given course of action, than either of the former). But let us add this: even where the necessities of the case in fact allow two alternatives and two only, we might place more reliance on an agent, a leader perhaps, who still remains conscious of the complexities, conscious of the multiplicity of other possible viewpoints which might in other only slightly different circumstances, have led him differently—even though in acting he of necessity sweeps them irrevocably behind him, puts them unavoidably aside. Alternatively the step may not be irrevocable: such an agent might be readier to revise his views, adapt his course promptly, in the light of small signs that may be warnings, in the light of changed circumstances or new evidence, rather than sticking pig-headedly to it through thick and thin. Now here we place Brooks's ‘complexity’, I mean his proper emphasis on complexity; it is part though not all of what we rightly value in poetry. And underlying it, as I hope I have been able to show and as critics sharing this broad approach have so often emphasized, but not, I think, wholly succeeded in making intelligible, is our whole concern with the extraliterary business of life. Nature, I conclude, comes before art; and poetry, however valued in itself, supposes a pre-poetic reality, much as monuments suppose memorable acts.

References

1. W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1949, Introduction, xv.

2. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, 1947, p. 178.

3. Op. cit., p. 179.

4. Quoted in Cleanth Brooks, op. cit., p. 205.

5. Op. cit., p. 205.

6. Op. cit., p. 203.

7. Op. cit., p. 188, note.

8. Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry, p. 128 ff.

9. Cleanth Brooks, op. cit., p. 194; quoted in Murray Krieger, op. cit., p. 195.