SOURCE: Warren, Alba H., Jr. “The Topics of English Poetic Theory, 1825-1865.” In English Poetic Theory, 1825-1865, pp. 3-34. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950.

[In the following excerpt, Warren outlines the numerous and varied perspectives of early Victorian literary critics.]

CRITICISM

The period of creative activity that dates roughly from the Lyrical Ballads to the death of Byron was succeeded by a period of critical reflection and assessment. The new period was not wanting in poetry and it witnessed the rise of the Victorian novel, but it was also notable for an access of criticism which reached its climax in Matthew Arnold. Arnold, writing in 1865, was certain of the value of the critical endeavor; it was second only to the creative activity itself, and its function was to provide intellectual situations in which the creative artist could work: but if Arnold was able to write of the critical office at all in philosophic terms, it was because he had in front of him a quantity of responsible criticism from which to generalize.

Criticism of the period between 1825 and 1865 was not a concerted effort. There was no center for educated opinion in England such as Arnold found in the French Academy; the romantics had cast off rules and standards, and the new critics recognized few common aims. Besides this, criticism had a wide variety of functions to perform. It had to defend poetry itself from the utilitarians and the practical-minded politicians, businessmen, and social reformers. It had to convey information to a public avid for facts and resorting to book clubs and circulating libraries in a way it never had before. It had to meet the growing demand for reading matter in the newspapers and in a dozen new periodicals and reviews. Furthermore, in respect of its materials, the body of romantic poetry and beliefs, criticism was also faced with a threefold task: to analyze and consolidate the romantic achievement, to evaluate its practice and its theory, and to spread the word in all the corners of England. One forgets that the real appreciation of Keats and Shelley dates from the middle of the century.

The new criticism lacked the homogeneity that might have been expected of it. The state of criticism was chaotic, infected with purely personal opinion, and, to use Matthew Arnold's term, capricious. But there was a common critical attitude which held that poetry was serious and that the business of writing about poetry was earnest. There was no truce with the dilettante, for the new critics stood with Wordsworth against the men “who talk of Poetry as of a matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry.” It was the critics themselves, in fact, who pointed out the confusion of critical aim in their own times, and if there was any one thing common to their efforts, it was the attempt to get to the bottom of poetry, to draw up laws and principles, to put poetry on a scientific footing.

The spirit of science was expressed in criticism in a notable succession of documents dealing with poetic theory. Criticism was convinced that a proper application of the deductive and inductive methods of science to the question “What is Poetry?” would reveal a logical structure as satisfying to the mind as any of the scientific studies. “However opinion may vary,” wrote one critic in 1854, “as to the comparative merits of our present poets and those of other times, it will on all sides be admitted that the aesthetic principles, upon which poetry itself is based, are now much more generally understood than in any former period. It is a mistake to define poetry merely as an art. It is such only in the endless instances of its application to practice. But in its dependence upon principles of human nature, rather than upon rules,—and in its existence antecedent to, not springing from experience, it partakes of the nature of science.”¹ There were critics who resented and resisted the encroachment of science, of course—Carlyle, to name only one—but even these went on with the analysis of the poetic mainsprings in their own way.

The materials of criticism in the period from 1825 to 1865 are largely derivative. If criticism had a tone of its own, a tone of serious and earnest inquiry, it is hard to find any original invention or discovery, freshness or enthusiasm: the period is “post-romantic” rather than anything else. There were conservative elements; academic critics like Newman and Keble retained something of the neoclassic spirit; the school of taste represented by Lord Jeffrey lasted on well into the middle of the century; and the partisan and sectarian criticism of the great reviews and some of the lesser ones did not disappear at once. There were critics who still contended that poetry had nothing to do with locomotives and the electric telegraph. Generally, however, the more thoughtful criticism accepted the body of stimulating ideas provided by Wordsworth and Coleridge in England and Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and set to work to make use of what they found.

It is probably true that the Early Victorians knew more about poetic theory than any of their predecessors. In the first place they had a greater quantity of empirical data, and again they had a wider perspective, coming after the two movements of classicism and romanticism. But over and above all this the interest in speculation led to a review and a revaluation of the theory of poetry in general from Plato to Shelley. Of the ancients Aristotle is naturally the most frequently referred to. His theory of imitation is misunderstood and generally “modified” in the attempt to make room for the expression of emotion, or it is completely discarded as commonplace and officious if not impossible and misleading. Bacon is undoubtedly the first Elizabethan, and he is usually mentioned in connection with Aristotle as holding the opposite theory of poetry; but Sidney, Puttenham, and others are equally well-known. Neoclassical theory is represented in the period by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who is universally discredited along with Burke, Kames, Archibald Alison, and a little later, Dugald Stewart. The primary sources of post-romantic ideas are, of course, Wordsworth and Coleridge. From one or the other, sometimes from both, the critics derived their inspiration, their matter, and their method, and for many of the critics Coleridge was the medium of information on the German poets and philosophers.

The majority of poetic illustrations can be found in four poets, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, while examples of malpractice are taken principally from Pope and Young in the eighteenth, and Byron and Shelley in the nineteenth century. The attitude towards Byron is an extremely interesting one; admiration for his assertive personality struggles with a moral disapproval of his life and “gloomy scepticism,” which is transferred to his poetry. At intervals of every ten years some critic will remark that Byron's influence is on the wane, but Arnold's preface in 1881 attests a persistent popularity.

The period of criticism from 1825 to 1865 was marked by the endeavor to formulate laws and principles of poetry. From the body of available critical material a certain number of key terms can be abstracted which might stand for the fundamental concepts of post-romantic theory—genius, insight, fact or reality, truth and sincerity. All of these terms apply to the nature of poetry as an essence or spirit rather than to the nature of poetry as an art, and accurately reflect a primary stress in theory on content rather than the medium. More often than not the word poetry means the poetical—the poetry of life, the poetry of architecture, the poetry of childhood, and even the poetry of science. It is perhaps possible to give the key terms a further expansion in the form of a “creed,” which, allowing for a wide disagreement on any number of the articles, might still be accepted as a basic belief by a majority of the writers on theory. The articles of such a manifesto might read as follows:

1. Poetry is a science with ascertainable laws, which, if correctly formulated, will be universally valid in the sense in which the laws of science are valid.
2. Poetry is what the genius says or makes.
3. The organ of genius is insight.
4. The quality of insight depends on the moral perception of the genius.
5. The object of poetry is truth.
6. Beauty is the outward manifestation of truth.
7. The matter of poetry is fact or reality, physical, moral, and spiritual.
8. Poetry must have a practical end, preferably moral, whatever its immediate object.
9. Poetry must contain great ideas.
10. Any subject is fit for poetry if it is treated imaginatively. This includes ordinary feelings, steam engines, and “the grand subject.”
11. The form of poetry is determined by the imagination as it expresses itself in imagery or measured language.
12. Style, the “body” of poetry, is directly related to the poet's moral being.
13. The models the poet will follow are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth.
14. Poetry is the greatest of all the arts.

The formulation of articles in this manner must not suggest a unanimity of critical opinion which simply does not exist. Such a table represents at best an ideal theory for the period, but if handled lightly and with full awareness of its typical defects, it can be useful to mark weight and trend and shift in connection with the analyses of specific problems that follow, in which the oppositions or the attempts at synthesis in any given case are presented as a summary statement of the complete view.

POETRY AND SCIENCE

The relation of poetry and science in post-romantic criticism was a many-sided one. Science, as the word was used in connection with poetry, might have any one of a dozen meanings. It might stand quite simply for any activity of the reason, or for rationalism, logic, the process of analysis, deductive and inductive, for philosophy, materialism, utilitarianism, or for the particular disciplines of biology, geology, botany, politics, or economics. A critic could use any selection and interpretation of these to prove that the spirit of science was hostile to poetry, that poetry and science were striving towards the same goal by different means, that poetry was a science, that poetry made the truths of science more impressive; all of these could be proved as well as their contraries.

The most significant of these relationships is the antithesis between poetry and science as modes of discourse. The antithesis was posed in The Critique of Judgment in terms of Kant's distinction between the reason and the understanding. “In order to decide whether anything is beautiful or not,” Kant wrote, “we refer the representation, not by the Understanding to the Object for cognition but, by the Imagination (perhaps in conjunction with the Understanding) to the subject, and its feeling of pleasure or pain.”² Coleridge's definition of a poem as “that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth,”³ is a transposition of the Kantian statement, and in this form it became accessible to English criticism through the Biographia Literaria. Thus George Brimley in “Poetry and Criticism” (1855) places the distinction between poetry and science, not in the materials, but in the faculties which apprehend and operate upon the materials. “The understanding takes any object presented through the consciousness, and proceeds to analyze it into separate qualities, to name it and refer it to a class of objects with which it possesses certain of its qualities in common.” The imagination on the other hand “takes the same object that we supposed before presented to the understanding;—as by chemical attraction it lays hold on precisely that part of the phenomenon which the understanding rejects, passing lightly over and taking little heed of that which the understanding was in quest of.”⁴

The distinction between science and poetry had another source in criticism, however, where it took a somewhat different form. This was Wordsworth's Preface of 1802. Wordsworth, unlike Coleridge, was a sensationalist; for him, to know was to feel, and poetry itself was a kind of knowledge as objective as science. The antithesis between poetry and science is based on a difference in materials and the use to which the knowledge is put. “The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and inalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellowbeings.”⁵ The materials of poetry are universals, human and emotional values, and the object is “general” truth. The materials of science, on the other hand, are particular facts considered apart from their relation to the human emotions, and the object is truth, local and particular. Because the appeal of science is to knowledge specifically acquired by the individual, it is unsocial and uncommunicative, while poetry “binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society.” Wordsworth's formulation of the antithesis is followed by Leigh Hunt who writes, “Poetry begins where matter of fact or of science ceases to be merely such, and to exhibit a further truth, that is to say, the connection it has with the world of emotion, and its power to produce imaginative pleasure”;⁶ and by John Ruskin, who says that the object of poetry and science is truth—in one case truth of fact plus truth of emotion, in the other mere truth of fact.

The distinction according to ends is made by John Stuart Mill and by George Moir in his “Treatise on Poetry” (1839). Mill declares that the object of poetry is to act on the emotions, thus differentiating it from its logical opposite as Wordsworth had said; and Moir, relying on the authority of Coleridge, makes the end of science “to instruct, to discover, and to communicate truth,” while the end of poetry is to give “immediate Pleasure.”⁷

Coventry Patmore in “The Ethics of Art” (1849) writes that the artistic is the antithesis of the scientific, for its materials are phenomena and “the First Cause” as distinguished from the exclusive preoccupation of science with second causes. “Donne writes very poetically—

‘We have added to the world Virginia, and sent
Two new stars lately to the firmament.’

Here the phenomena—that is to say, the facts considered only in their effects, and apart from the method of their origin—are alone regarded; and the mind delights in beholding the simple result of a couple of scientific discoveries conveyed in its simplest possible form.”⁸

Patmore's distinction is primarily one of materials, but it also involves the mode in which the materials are regarded. The distinction in mode is perhaps the more valuable; it was made by Mill and Brimley, and with telling effect by David Masson in “Two Theories of Poetry” (1853).

Let the universe of all accumulated existence inner and outer, material and mental, up to the present moment, lie under one like a sea, and there are two ways in which it may be intellectually dealt with and brooded over. On the one hand, the intellect of man may brood over it inquiringly, striving to penetrate beneath it, to understand the system of laws by which its multitudinous atoms are held together, to master the mystery of its pulsations and sequences. This is the mood of the man of science. On the other hand, the intellect of man may brood over it creatively, careless how it is held together, or whether it is held together at all, and regarding it only as a great accumulation of material to be submitted farther to the operation of a combining energy, and lashed and beaten up into new existences.⁹

The antithesis between science and poetry is a critical commonplace of post-romantic theory. It is the natural point of departure in all theories which attempt a definition of the poetic essence, and the relationship is explored in all its facets, ends, materials, mode, faculty, function, and appeal. Its original formulation by Coleridge and Wordsworth is generally acknowledged by the critics, who add little if anything of their own. There is nothing in the later criticism to compare with Wordsworth's statement that “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.”

POETRY AND TRUTH

The problem of artistic truth which was raised in romantic criticism by the assimilation of the end of poetry to that of science provoked a wealth of interesting speculation. “Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing,” Wordsworth wrote in 1802, “it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal.”¹⁰ Commenting on this passage in the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge contends that by making truth rather than pleasure the immediate object of poetry Wordsworth has destroyed “the main fundamental distinction, not only between a poem and prose, but even between philosophy and works of fiction.”¹¹

Wordsworth and Coleridge represent the dichotomy between imitation and creation, representation and expression, objective and subjective truth, which is characteristic of post-romantic criticism. The opposition was dramatized as a conflict between the theories of Aristotle and Bacon. “Aristotle makes the essence of poetry to consist in its being imitative and truthful;” says David Masson, “Bacon in its being creative and fantastical.”¹² Masson remarks that it would be possible to extend the Aristotelian theory and make it correspond with the Baconian, although in reality the two theories are antithetical. “If both are true, it is because the theorists tilt at the opposite sides of the shield.” As a matter of fact, neither theory is held strictly in the period, and there was more than one attempt at synthesis. In the Westminster Review for 1858, for instance, a critic writes that all great poets are many-sided. “Their poetry is both mimesis and poesis. They illustrate both the Aristotelian and Baconian theory of poetry, as well as much more.”¹³

The Aristotelian, the realist or the “concrete idealist” (the terms are synonymous in Early Victorian criticism), finds his truths in nature and reproduces them in the medium of language. The truths of poetry are thus universals, and poetry is true in the sense that it represents these universals accurately. The correspondence of the imitation with reality is an objective one. In the nineteenth century the doctrine of “characteristic truth” takes the place of the Aristotelian universals. The essence of the object for artistic purposes is its characteristic form or type, and it is this characteristic type which the artist represents. Of the Aristotelians, John Ruskin with his “naturalist” ideal was by far the most consistent and influential. Ruskin preached the exact representation of facts or truths of nature without generalization or selection, and without the intrusion of arbitrary moral or emotional peculiarities that belong to the artistic temperament. Truth is the object of art, and only so much beauty is allowed in the representation as is consistent with truth. Coventry Patmore in “The Ethics of Art” (1849), Walter Bagehot in “Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry” (1864)—Bagehot invents the word—“literatesque” for the characteristic type in literature—and Aubrey De Vere in his reviews of Sir Henry Taylor's minor poetry, are all more or less followers of Ruskin.

The Baconian, in contrast to the Aristotelian, believes that poetry is the product of a tendency in the mind to assimilate objective reality to its own emotional and intellectual needs. “Poetry,” Bacon had written in the Advancement of Learning, “doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind.”¹⁴ If poetry is true for the Baconian, its truth does not necessarily consist in a correspondence with external reality, but is rather in the coherence of the mental process itself; its criterion is subjective. Bryan Waller Procter's essay “On English Poetry” presents the case for the Baconians in its purest form. Poetry, he says, is “a thing created by the mind, and not merely copied either from nature, or facts in any shape.” It has no existence in nature, although it finds its materials there, for if it did, it would be mimetic and not creative. The truth of poetry is a truth of imagination and its criterion is therefore imaginative. “However it may be true in itself (and it ought to be true), as a compound image or signification of consistent ideas, it must not be in all respects literally true.”¹⁵ Poetry is true according to the subjective logic of the imagination. John Stuart Mill, for whom poetry is a peculiar manner of associating ideas, E. S. Dallas, David Masson, and Sydney Dobell in his lecture on “The Nature of Poetry” (1857), in which poetry is the perfect expression of a perfect mind, are all Baconians.

One of the most ornate of the analyses of poetic truth in the criticism of the period is contained in Aubrey De Vere's review of Sir Henry Taylor's minor poems in 1849. De Vere breaks up the notion of poetic truth into a number of separate categories, truth of nature, truth of character, truth of sentiment and thought, truth of passion, truth of style, truth of diction, truth of observation, and truth of keeping; and he discusses each one in some detail.

Truth of nature, “that practical Truth which constitutes reality” in poetry, is contrasted with abstract thought on the one hand, and with “the miscreations of morbid passion, capricious fancy, or fashionable convention” on the other. De Vere's definition of truth of nature derives directly from Ruskin, and perhaps indirectly from Carlyle, and it represents a larger interpretation of the “truth of fact” which plays such an important part in the transcendental poetic theories of both Carlyle and Ruskin. In these theories nature reveals its mysteries only to the gifted eye of the genius. Here the genius does not select and arrange the materials of nature according to some “internal formative principle,” but rather he subjects himself to nature, allows nature to speak for itself, and follows “the footsteps of truth whithersoever it goes.”¹⁶

Truth of keeping is the most comprehensive of the various kinds of poetic truth in De Vere's analysis. It includes at once the organic unity of the poem, a unity determined “not by external rule, but inwardly, by the imagination, which conceived the poem originally, and conceived it as a whole,” and the higher unity of the poet's total being, in which the work of art is regarded as the unified product of the whole man. The theory of poetry as the expression of the whole man derives from Goethe and was invoked by most of the post-romantic critics, by Hunt, Ruskin, and Dobell, to name only three. Truth of keeping attests the individuality of the artist, the verisimilitude of his representation of reality, and the moral and intellectual self-possession of the artist who produces the work of art.

The dichotomy between the Aristotelians and the Baconians has by no means been resolved in modern aesthetic speculation. A satisfactory solution will probably not be reached until the problem is properly formulated, and here it seems, the various and ingenious speculations of the Early Victorians may have some contribution to make.

POETRY AND NATURE

Science in dealing with nature is determined by the structure of external reality. Poetry, on the other hand, if it is to be more than a mere transcript of reality, a photographic image of nature, must provide for the operation of the human mind on its materials. Thus some stand on the relation of poetry and nature is fundamental in any poetic theory. The problem, at least as old as Plato and Aristotle, can be formulated in a number of ways, but two of these should suffice as a background for the solutions offered by nineteenth century criticism. Does the poet reproduce an exact mental image of reality in the medium of language, or does he represent the results of a process of mental abstraction from the detail of nature? Does the poet perceive values in and behind nature, distinct from his own consciousness, or does he, by projecting the forms of his own consciousness, create a nature of his own? The answers to these questions in Early Victorian criticism were, broadly speaking, three, and they were suggested by answers which had been given in the previous criticism of the neoclassic and romantic periods.

The neoclassic theory of art as it was drawn up by Sir Joshua Reynolds advocated the imitation of “central forms,” which had no real existence in nature, but which were “generalized” from nature according to a standard of beauty or natural perfection in the mind of the artist. The nature represented in art was a “general” nature, nature divested of all its local and particular traits and all its accidental deformities. This is the normative or perfectionist theory of art.

Reynolds' doctrine of central forms was categorically rejected by Wordsworth in favor of a “realist” interpretation of nature in art. Wordsworth held that the human mind was exquisitely fitted to the external world, and the external world to the individual mind. Here nature is divinized and beauty as one of its properties is held inviolable.

Beauty—a living Presence of the earth,
Surpassing the most fair ideal Forms
Which craft of delicate Spirits hath composed
From earth's materials.(17)

The artist, then, according to Wordsworth will reproduce the forms of nature as they are in reality, since the creative process lies in “the blended might” of mind and matter. In the same way the poet will imitate the passions of men, and while the imitation must necessarily fall short of the actual expression of the passions in life, its value lies in its close resemblance to reality.¹⁸

Coleridge also rejected the doctrine of central forms, but he held that poetry was “ideal,” “that it avoids and excludes all accident; that its apparent individualities of rank, character, or occupation must be representative of a class.”¹⁹ Coleridge differs from Reynolds in holding that the ideal of poetry is “an involution of the universal in the individual.”²⁰ A similar position was taken by Hazlitt in his papers “On the Imitation of Nature” and “On the Ideal.” “In general,” Hazlitt writes, “we would be understood to mean, that the ideal is not a voluntary fiction of the brain, a fanciful piece of patch-work, a compromise between innumerable deformities, (as if we could form a perfect idea of beauty though we had never seen any such thing,) but a preference for what is fine in nature to what is less so. There is nothing fine in art but what is taken almost immediately and entirely from what is finer in nature.”²¹

These three fundamental positions, the perfectionist, the realist, and the idealist, are all represented in Early Victorian poetic theory. The positions are by no means consistently held, however, and nature mysticism of one kind or another adds to the complication; but in spite of the confused thinking on the subject and the even more confused phraseology, it is possible to distinguish the main outlines of the various theories.

Ironically enough, John Henry Newman in “Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics” presents an unmistakable perfectionist attitude towards nature. The poet must generalize from nature, he says, according to the eternal forms of beauty in his mind, divesting nature of all local and individual peculiarities, and purifying and refining its grosser elements. Poetry is also the perfection of the actual for Bryan Waller Procter, who contends that poetry is ideal, because unlike history and biography, it arranges facts according to an intellectual principle for the purposes of beauty and morality.

The “naturalist ideal” of John Ruskin contrasts with the normative ideal of Newman and Procter. “It is naturalist,” says Ruskin, “because studied from nature, and ideal, because it is mentally arranged in a certain manner.”²² The poet's mind, however, is merely a mirror, and the poet an accurate scribe of his vision. “The work of these great idealists is, therefore, always universal; not because it is not portrait, but because it is complete portrait down to the heart, which is the same in all ages: and the work of the mean idealists is not universal, not because it is portrait, but because it is half portrait,—of the outside, the manners and the dress, not of the heart.”²³ Ruskin's realist attitude towards nature is variously interpreted by Aubrey De Vere, Coventry Patmore, and Walter Bagehot. Two sentences from Patmore's article on “The Ethics of Art” may help to illuminate the theory.

There are faces, forms, characters, landscapes, and skies, which are not to be excelled by art; but such high natural revelations confine themselves wonderfully to the eye of the born artist, and require to be clothed anew by him, in order to become visible to the common gaze. In this kind of imitation, however, the ideal is still at work: the artist detects and selects the essential, rejecting non-essentials; the faculty of such detection and selection being of a piece with the mind's creative power.²⁴

The Coleridgeans of post-romantic criticism present an equally impressive front. They include James Montgomery, author of Lectures on Poetry (1833), E. S. Dallas, and David Masson. Masson writes that the key word in poetic theory is imagination, for poetry is undoubtedly creation, not imitation, and the poet is properly a creator.

The poet is emphatically the man who continues the work of creation; who forms, fashions, combines, imagines; who breathes his own spirit into things; who conditions the universe anew according to his whim and pleasure; who bestows heads of brass on men when he likes, and sees beautiful women with arms of azure; who walks amid Nature's appearances, divorcing them, rematching them, interweaving them, starting at every step, as it were, a flock of white-winged phantasies that fly and flutter into the heaven of the future.²⁵

Historically, the realist theory of the relation of art and nature is by far the most interesting. It had little effect on the practice of poetry beyond the feeble attempts of Wordsworth's imitators to reproduce his unadorned manner and a poem or two like Rossetti's “My Sister's Sleep” with its careful detail, but its repercussions in other fields were exciting. In painting the factual drawing of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and in the novel the realistic narrative of Thackeray and George Eliot can be taken as practical illustrations of the theory of imitation in art.

IMAGINATION AND FANCY

The mind in its dealings with nature for artistic purposes makes use of the faculty of imagination. As the image-making faculty of the mind, imagination can have either or both of two functions according to definition: it can image the real, in which case its function is reproductive, or it can image the unreal or fantastic, in which case its function is productive. Neoclassical criticism tended to confine the imagination to its productive activity, and regarded its operation in poetry as one of combining and associating images. Kant, however, in making the imagination a mediator between reason and understanding, included both functions in his definition, which was used by Coleridge and Wordsworth in formulating their theories of imagination and fancy for English criticism.

Coleridge, primarily interested in the metaphysical implications of the theory, equated the imagination and reason, and made it the creative, originating function of the mind which deals with wholes; and he equated the understanding with fancy, differing from imagination in kind, a noncreative, associative faculty of the mind which deals with parts. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was more interested in the effects of the imagination and fancy as they were manifested in poetry, and his account in the Preface of 1815 was primarily illustrative. The creative activity of the imagination in both cases sets off the theory against the imagists and associationists.

Post-romantic theories of imagination and fancy are almost entirely derivative, and have little or nothing to add to the discoveries of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Carlyle pours scorn on the distinction between faculties of the mind, but his “insight” by which the poet intuits the spiritual reality embodied in the forms of nature is roughly equivalent to Coleridge's imagination. G. H. Lewes in The Principles of Success in Literature (1865) reduced the imagination to the mere image-making faculty, and E. S. Dallas in the Poetics makes an abortive attempt to define imagination in terms of the unconscious activity of the mind. For the rest, criticism merely elaborates on the earlier formulations, introducing minor variations of which the contention that fancy is only a lower degree of imagination is perhaps the most worthy of record.

The single contribution of value to the theory of imagination was made by John Ruskin in the second volume of Modern Painters. Taking a hint from Leigh Hunt's analysis of the manifestations of imagination, Ruskin developed a theory of a penetrative function by which the imagination seizes the object in its very core of reality and meaning. Here imagination is a quality of perception itself, a theory in keeping with Ruskin's “naturalist ideal” and his theory of imitation in art. One further point should be mentioned in connection with post-romantic theories of imagination: the quality of imaginative perception or creation depends upon the poet's moral nature. In Ruskin's words,

He who habituates himself, in his daily life, to seek for the stern facts in whatever he hears or sees, will have these facts again brought before him by the involuntary imaginative power in their noblest associations; and he who seeks for frivolities and fallacies, will have frivolities and fallacies again presented to him in his dreams.²⁶

THE END OF POETRY

No matter how carefully or in what terms post-romantic theorists distinguished the immediate end of poetry, as pleasure, beauty, or truth, they seem to have been far more concerned with its ultimate end, in particular its relation to morals and society. It was still possible in the general cultural situation of the Early Victorian period, at least in theory, to conceive of poetry as an effective social and moral force, and so far in England it had occurred to no one to claim autonomy for the aesthetic experience. True enough, Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, had succeeded in delimiting an area of “pure” judgment, but this area was confined to certain natural objects such as flowers, and certain abstract designs such as architectural borders and wallpaper; in dealing with beauty, directly or even indirectly (horses or houses, for example) related to human beings, he conceded that moral values necessarily condition the ideal of beauty, and that therefore judgment in these cases must be “impure.” Quite simply, after ruling out the moral criterion in the judgment of taste, Kant brings it squarely in again. Thus, in England, while De Quincey is at some pains in his essay on “The Poetry of Pope” to prove that the element of instruction enters not at all even into didactic poetry, on the other hand he distinguishes a literature of power from a literature of knowledge on the ground that the former engages the “great moral capacities of man”; and while he defines power as the “exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite,”²⁷ he is at the same time prepared to admit a zealous public censorship. The antitheses here are by no means exclusive, but that is precisely the point. Another element of the general problem is the eminent practicality (in the Arnoldian sense) of the Early Victorians, or to put it differently, they had no real respect for contemplation. In any case one finds in their criticism, often in the criticism of a single man, a curiously ambivalent attitude towards art: a certain impatience and hostility towards the works of imagination because they are less than “reality,” and an equally one-sided faith in art as a revelation of reality itself. This attitude is especially characteristic of Carlyle, Browning, and Ruskin.

All these points could be profusely illustrated. E. S. Dallas, for instance, in his Poetics professes to give a pleasure theory of poetry, but pulls the teeth of his argument with the statement that the poet lays “in ambush other ends as mighty and as earnest as any that rule mankind.”²⁸ Carlyle attacks the pleasure theory head on: “On all hands, there is no truce given to the hypothesis, that the ultimate object of the poet is to please. Sensation, even of the finest and most rapturous sort, is not the end, but the means.”²⁹ All literature must have “a didactic character,” and the modern poet is the man who can “instruct” us in the mysteries of life. Procter calls poetry a “moral science” and G. H. Lewes in “The Inner Life of Art,” “the phasis of a religious Idea.” Masson places the creative impulse in a state of “moral uneasiness” which stirs the poet to “scheme” a plan or story, a sort of allegory of his mood as a whole, as a means of objectifying his state.

The idea of poetry as the handmaid to reason, morals, and religion is pervasive in the period. Procter, Keble, Patmore in “The Ethics of Art,” and William Allingham in his essay “On Poetry” (1865) all give compendious summaries of the practical values of poetry, and Matthew Arnold, after registering the lone protest against impure aesthetics in the early letters to Clough, will come finally to a view of poetry as a “magister vitae” and a substitute for religion itself.

THE POET

Criticism was agreed as to the ultimate end of poetry, and it found common ground again in a basic definition of poetry as the expression of genius. The definition of poetry as “that which is produced by the poet” rests firmly on the concept of original genius, a concept which was formulated in English criticism as early as 1759 in Edward Young's “Conjectures on Original Composition,” and which played an important part in eighteenth century aesthetics. The concept is obviously subversive of all theory, but with Kant the problem is rather one of rationalizing the experience of genius than attempting to explain its nature, and in this form it was taken over by Wordsworth and Coleridge. On the other hand Shelley's much quoted “Defence” and most of Carlyle's remarks on poetry assume the inexplicable nature of the creative activity.

“Poetry is the image of man and nature,” wrote Wordsworth, and post-romantic criticism echoed the thought in every manner of phrase. “Why do we love and reverence Art? Because it gives a natural scope, and lasting expression, to Genius.”³⁰ “A perfect Poem is the perfect expression of a Perfect Human Mind.”³¹ “Great Art is precisely that which never was, nor will be taught, it is preeminently and finally the expression of the spirits of great men.”³² Even Matthew Arnold at times seems to have held some such theory, “Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius.”³³

The critics split into two opposed camps on the subject of the poet's nature, one contending with Wordsworth that the poet is “a man speaking to men,” the other contending that the genius differs not only in degree but in kind. In the nineteenth century the trend was away from the latter. “We are all poets when we read a poem well,” writes Carlyle,³⁴ and he is followed by E. S. Dallas, “what it [the theory that the poet differs in kind] gives to genius it gives at the cost of humanity.”³⁵ In this view the poet is merely one manifestation of “the grand fundamental character,” the great man, and it is mainly due to circumstance that he expresses himself in art rather than science or politics.

The ideal poet, however, has certain distinguishing characteristics, and these are variously described. Above all the poet possesses “insight” or vision. “The ideal, the typical Poet has all but superhuman power of vision and speech,” says William Allingham. Insight, intuition, intellect, imagination, these are the qualities that enable the poet to reach the Divine Ideas of Plato, to read men's hearts, and to illuminate the least fact of nature. Second only to insight in importance is the poet's “sincerity”; he humbles himself before his art and contents himself with an accurate report of his vision. Sincerity, says Carlyle, is “the measure of worth.” Sincerity implies the moral health of the poet, and the Early Victorians were staunch in maintaining that the defective or diseased mind was incapable of poetry. For the rest, the powers of the poet are of all kinds. He thinks in images, he associates ideas under the influence of a dominant feeling, he produces “fictitious concretes.” In all these operations the poet's mind performs unconsciously or almost unconsciously, for the great poet is always forgetful of self.

The critics of the nineteenth century conceived the function of the poet in grandiose, Shelleyan terms; and in this case, if in no other, practice followed theory, for it seems legitimate to recognize in the later Browning and Tennyson the attempt to realize the ideal of the philosopher-poet which criticism held out to them. Criticism was no doubt intrigued by the notion of “pure poetry” and the lyric cry, but it usually looked at the palace of art from the outside. In “a serious time, among serious men” the concept of the poet must have more practical bearings; the poet must be “the exemplar of his age,” its teacher and guide. The poet is the mediator between the soul and the infinite, according to Browning, the revealer of “the open secret” of nature, according to Carlyle. He makes truth more “impressive,” and above all he binds men together in fellowship of feeling.

The poets are classified and ranked in a number of different ways. The seers or men of genius, the originators, contrast with the men of talent, the men who reproduce, arrange, and modify the work of the seers. Another classification is based on a difference in the orientation of the poet's moral nature and a corresponding difference in the function of imagination. Here one class of poets is preoccupied with the outward world, and another with the aspiration for the ideal, and their poetry is “nationalist” or “ideal”—in Browning's terms, “objective” and “subjective.” Both of these bases of rank and distinction enter into Ruskin's grouping of “creative” and “perceptive or reflective” poets, the former remarkable for their insight and accurate report, and the latter for the analysis of emotion. A more unusual variant of the common distinction between poets of “will” and poets of “impulse” is that of John Stuart Mill, in which the poets are divided according to the dominance of thought or feeling in the process of associating images into “poets of culture” and “poets of nature.” Mill's ideal is needless to say a combination of the two in the philosopher-poet.

Early Victorian accounts of the poet are perhaps too Platonic, too remote to be of any value to modern criticism. Matthew Arnold alone registered a protest against the exalted notions of his contemporaries. The true poets, he says, “do not talk of their mission, nor of interpreting their age, nor of the coming Poet; all this, they know, is the mere delirium of vanity; their business is not to praise their age, but to afford to the men who live in it the highest pleasure which they are capable of feeling.”³⁶

POETRY AND THE ARTS

If Arnold was almost alone in emphasizing the technical side of the poetic activity, the careful construction of the poem itself (and so seems closer to the more practical attitude of modern criticism towards the poet as a skilled craftsman), it was because the criticism of his time was ruled by the notion of poetry as an essence or utterance, and tended to ignore the claims of poetry as an art or craft. The distinction between “poetry,” the spirit, and “poesy,” the product, as Dallas puts it, was indeed admitted, but after the admission little was done with “poesy.” The common attitude is suggested in Newman's strictures on Aristotle. “We may be allowed to suspect him of entertaining too cold and formal conceptions of the nature of poetical composition,” Newman writes, “as if its beauties were less subtile and delicate than they really are.”³⁷ Some interesting speculation was made during the period, however, by Masson, and by Sydney Dobell. The former has some good things to say about poetry as the art of producing “a fictitious concrete,” and the latter almost arrives at a theory of the poem as an expanded metaphor.

The essence of poetry is common to all the arts, and post-romantic criticism is frequently concerned with pointing out its manifestations in painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. “All the fine arts,” Coleridge had said in “The Principles of Genial Criticism,” “are different species of poetry. The same spirit speaks to the mind through different senses by manifestations of itself, appropriate to each.”³⁸ Coleridge defined three such kinds of poetry, poetry of language, poetry of the ear, and poetry of the eye, and these three were linked by a common essence, “the excitement of emotion for the immediate purpose of pleasure through the medium of beauty.” John Keble likewise found a common essence for the various arts in his definition of poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling for the relief of the mind, and the poetry of painting or sculpture is thus “the apt expression of the artist's feeling.”³⁹ A favorite illustration of this thesis is the contrast between Raphael and Rubens, in which Rubens is condemned for his attention to technique and workmanship. In the classification of the arts according to essence, there is some difference of opinion as to which of the arts is the most “poetical.” Poetry itself perhaps receives the majority of votes, but music, because its medium is the most immaterial and its language the most universal, is frequently preferred. Music and poetry are almost inseparable, however, and the critics are fond of citing Milton's lines,

Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav'ns joys,
Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Vers.

When poetry is considered as an art rather than an essence, the argument takes a somewhat different form. B. W. Procter, for instance, writes that poetry is the first of the fine arts because it combines all the best qualities of the other arts with a peculiar virtue of its own, the beauty of painting, the simplicity of sculpture, and the moving cadences of music, while it is more permanent than any of them; and Leigh Hunt writes to the same effect that “Poetry includes whatsoever of painting can be made visible to the mind's eye, and whatsoever of music can be conveyed by sound and proportion without singing or instrumentation.” “But,” he adds, “it far surpasses those divine arts in suggestiveness, range, and intellectual wealth;—the first, in expression of thought, combination of images, and the triumph over space and time; the second, in all that can be done by speech, apart from the tones and modulations of pure sound.”⁴⁰

Post-romantic criticism leans heavily on the great Germans, Lessing and Hegel in particular,⁴¹ in its delimitation of the work of the separate arts, but it had a number of curious and specific comments of its own to make. James Montgomery, for instance, in his Lectures on Poetry states that poetry is superior to painting, because it is not limited to a moment of space and time, but he also contends that portrait-painting has the advantage of poetry, “because there the pencil perpetuates the very features, air, and personal appearance of the individual represented; and when that individual is one of eminence,—a hero, a patriot, a poet, an orator,—it is the vehicle of the highest pleasure which the art can communicate; and in this respect portrait painting (however disparaged) is the highest point of the art itself,—being at once the most real, intellectual, and imaginative.”⁴²

Some feeling for the formal element in poetry is revealed in the frequent reference to poetry in sculptural terms. Poetry, says Montgomery, is a “school of sculpture” in the more permanent medium of language, and John Stuart Mill notes that Tennyson's poems are “statuesque” in the precision and distinctness of their outline. Dallas will go so far as to argue from analogy that the object of the drama is beauty, the formal object of painting and sculpture, rather than truth, which is the proper object of the epic. This tendency to refer to the formal qualities of poetry in terms of another art was at least partially due to the lack of a critical vocabulary—one thinks of the universal use of the Dutch painters to stand for the concept of realism in both painting and poetry—and it marks the almost total absence of any interest in the problems of the medium in the Early Victorian period.

POETRY AND LITERATURE

The delimitation of poetry from other kinds of literary discourse is carried out along conventional lines with little originality of interpretation. Specific arguments take more than one form according to the definition of the poetic essence or the nature of the poetic activity; but the majority of the critics are content with rephrasing and adapting Aristotle's statement that poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history. Typical of this approach is John Henry Newman who writes,

Poetry, according to Aristotle, is a representation of the ideal. Biography and history represent individual characters and actual facts; poetry, on the contrary, generalizing from the phenomenon of nature and life, supplies us with pictures drawn, not after an existing pattern but after a creation of the mind. Fidelity is the primary merit of biography and history; the essence of poetry is fiction.⁴³

Because no one mistakes fiction for fact, says Montgomery, poetry is a better transmitter of knowledge, and it has a wider influence than history, for it tells us more about society, customs, arts, sciences, and domestic details.

Equally popular with the argument from universals is the distinction based on the definition of poetry as the expression of states of feeling or as the spontaneous overflow of emotion. In this category belong Mill's often quoted statement that eloquence is heard and poetry overheard, and Keble's notion that rhetoric is directly addressed to an audience, and is concerned with producing a practical effect, while poetry is self-contained and indirect in expression. Here, too, perhaps should be mentioned De Quincey's well-known distinction between the “literature of knowledge” and the “literature of power.” “The function of the first,” he says in the essay on “The Poetry of Pope,” “is—to teach; the function of the second is—to move: the first is a rudder; the second, an oar or a sail.” Newton's Principia is “a provisional work,” the Iliad, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, “are not militant, but triumphant”; they “never can transmigrate into new incarnations.”

Of the various theories offered during the period on this subject David Masson's is the most original and suggestive in that it stresses the peculiar imaginative structure of the poem. Masson's definition of poetry as an “artificial concrete” made up of imaginative elements serves to distinguish poetry from other forms of literature, from scientific prose, which tends to the abstract, from oratorical prose or the literature of moral stimulation, which directs the mind or induces a certain state of mind or feeling, and from history, which deals with actual facts which are presented to the mind by the memory.

In a critical tradition which tends to define poetry almost exclusively in terms of the expression of emotion, it often happens that no distinction is made between poetry and prose. Where, as in Wordsworth and the majority of Early Victorian critics, the formal element in poetry is slighted and the logical opposite of poetry is taken to be science, it is quite possible to say, as Keble does, that Plato is more poetical than Homer himself. B. W. Procter, who rejects the antithesis of poetry and science, holds that poetry differs from all prose because it is essentially complicated, while prose presents single and obvious ideas arranged for purposes of reasoning, instruction, and persuasion. The critics will thus fall into two main categories in relation to the problem of poetic form, according to whether they consider verse essential or nonessential to the definition of poetry as an art.

VERSE

The theory of verse in post-romantic criticism is generally confused and unsatisfactory, and it is hard to trace any clear outline through the various discussions. Still, broadly speaking, there are two fundamental positions on the basis of which the critics can be classified. These are quite simply that verse is or is not essential to poetry. The critics who hold the latter position define poetry in terms of a poetic essence or spirit, such as creation, feeling, catharsis, or imagination, and for them verse is merely the conventional form, garb, or vehicle of the essence. Procter, Newman, Keble, Mill, and Moir, to mention only a few who come together in this respect, will naturally have very little to say about verse in their criticism. Keble, for instance, remarks in his first lecture that poetry is in one way or another associated with measure and a definite rhythm of sound, and he virtually ignores the subject throughout the remaining prelections. Two critics of this first group, while holding that verse is “accidental” (in the logical sense), to poetry, believe it is the concomitant of the emotion which generates poetry. Brimley says—and in this he agrees with critics who belong in class two—that all emotion which is not mere pain is impelled to rhythmical expression; but the essence of poetry is imaginative perception and not necessarily measured emotion. Masson makes the same observation; notes that verse is most characteristic of the poetry of feeling, the lyric; and suggests that verse was originally connected with oratory, lingering on in modern poetry only as an accepted convention.

The critics who hold that verse is essential to the definition of poetry offer various explanations for their theories. Generally, they refuse to separate form and substance. The metrical form of poetry distinguishes it from prose, and constitutes it one of the fine arts. “Verse is the form of poetry”; writes G. H. Lewes, “not the form as a thing arbitrary, but as a thing vital and essential; it is the incarnation of poetry. To call it the dress, and to consider it apart as a thing distinct, is folly, except in technical instruction. Rhythm is not a thing invented by man, but a thing evolved from him, and it is not merely the accidental form, but the only possible form of poetry; for there is a rhythm of feeling correspondent in the human soul.”⁴⁴ In this second group also belong those critics who consider verse necessary to the “perfection” of poetry. Leigh Hunt and Coventry Patmore offer this theory of verse. In “English Metrical Critics”⁴⁵—according to A. E. Housman one of the two works on prosody of any value in English literature—Patmore writes, “Perfect song is perfect speech upon high and moving subjects.” Patmore is unique in insisting that meter should make itself felt in poetry at all times. The distinction between verse-poetry and mere versifying is made on the grounds of content; as Leigh Hunt says, fitness for song marks the poetical subject. Critics of both groups are also emphatic that verse is no trammel to the poet, but is resorted to freely and by choice.

William Allingham holds most of these theories at once, and a summary of his treatment will suggest the general line of argument in many of the critical documents. Meter as the form of poetry is not mere grace or ornament; on the contrary it makes poetry an art, for it has been found by experience to give words their greatest possible force and beauty, and in most cases it conveys the highest thoughts better than prose. Meter draws the mind into the mood of poetry and holds it there. It raises a succession of pleasurable expectations and in due succession fulfills them, thus showing a constant obedience to law and a boldness in mastery.⁴⁶ Allingham, somewhat in the manner of Carlyle, finds a “Beautiful Proportionality” in nature which is represented by a corresponding “Beautiful Proportionality” in the thoughts and their vehicle. “Plan, ideas, images, style, words, are all modulated to one harmonious result.”⁴⁷ Poetry, the most complete mode of human expression, is distinguished from prose by the suitableness of its subject matter for metrical treatment. Ideally it is harmonious thought and feeling in harmonious words.

There seems to be little in any of this of permanent value for the theory of poetry in general, for in spite of an original idea or two contributed by Dallas and Dobell, it is all vague and transcendental. Of the relation of verse to meaning, the most fruitful field of modern speculation, only hints are to be found here and there in Early Victorian criticism. Newman, for instance, states casually that meter is a “suitable index” to the sense of poetry, and Masson notes that meter “assists” in the creation of meaning. “Coleridge very pertinently remarks somewhere,” says Carlyle, “that wherever you find a sentence musically worded, of true rhythm and melody in the words, there is something deep and good in the meaning too.”⁴⁸

IMAGERY

The critics who deny that verse is of the essence of poetry are likely to hold to imagery as the staple and substance of the poetic activity, while the critics who take the opposite point of view will generally consider imagery an embellishment or at most an element of secondary importance. The antithesis is not inevitable, however, for G. H. Lewes, after disparaging the function of imagery in 1842, went over to the other camp in 1865; and E. S. Dallas insists from the beginning that imagery and verse are “twinborn” products of the imagination.

The meaning of the word image itself was by no means fixed in the period. Ordinarily it is taken to mean a visual image, a picture presented either to the eye of the body or the eye of the mind. Critics of this narrow definition attack Erasmus Darwin, and point out that poetic imagery appeals to senses other than the visual. But there were wider definitions embracing any sensuous concrete, in Procter's terms, any idea of character, person, or place. Certain critics and reviewers tended to oppose imagery as sensual, emotional, and luxurious, to the intellectual and “immortal” part of poetry, making a distinction between an image and a thought, between the purely visionary and the reality of experience. Sir Henry Taylor in the notorious preface to Philip Van Artevelde scores the romantic poets for their profusion of glowing imagery and the visionary quality of their imaginations, divorced from all sense of the rational and the real, and something of the same attitude is behind Matthew Arnold's discussion of Keats and Shakespeare in the Preface of 1853. Uncertainty of the precise nature and function of imagery is reflected in the various contexts in which the problem is discussed by the more systematic critics. George Moir, for example, states that imagery is not to be confused with “the lower department” of diction in poetry, while it is precisely in the department of diction that James Montgomery has his say on the subject.

Procter, Moir, and Brimley all hold to the theory that imagery is the staple of poetry. Imagery is conceived as a means of dealing with abstract ideas, of concentrating and dissipating them by means of the imagination and fancy, of presenting them as “concretions of diverse phenomena organized into phenomenal unity by the pervading vital influence of a subjective idea.” The words of poetry, writes Brimley, must be “alive with presentative significance.”⁴⁹ Where verse is addressed to the emotional faculties, imagery (or poetry proper) is addressed to the perceptive and speculative faculties. Poetry is performing its proper function when it is organizing diverse phenomena into unities, and for this words must present “real, living objects.”

Other accounts of imagery are more or less individual. Sydney Dobell conceives of images as equivalents for objects and emotions: a poem is an expanded metaphor. Masson, while holding that verse is perhaps more essential, says that the aim of the poet is imagery, which he defines as a “secondary concrete adduced by the imagination in the expression of a prior concrete.”⁵⁰ Its forms are simile, metaphor, and personification. Leigh Hunt finds the proper function of the imagination in the production, or perhaps discovery, of images, and other images brought in to illustrate them. The images vary in nature according to whether they are the result of the imagination or the fancy. These two terms are unsatisfactory to Hunt, for imagination suggests too great solidity in its imagery, and fancy is too much restricted in its meaning to the purely visual.

The idea of imagery as a structural element in poetry is probably the most fruitful contribution of post-romantic theory, but criticism was too preoccupied with content and the practical ends of poetry to push the idea to its logical conclusion. Arnold's attitude towards poetic expression in the Preface in 1853, while it contradicts the general feeling towards profuse imagery, is based on a subject-theory of poetry. It is worthy of note that the quality of the imagery in any given poet, like the quality of imagination and fancy, is made to depend upon the moral sensibility of the poet himself.

The pattern of the typical problems and solutions of Early Victorian poetic theory is, one recognizes, summary, tentative, and diffuse, but it may serve to suggest the main points of interest to the critics of the period, and something of the variety and range of speculation in their criticism. At the same time it may also serve to counterpoint the more detailed discussion of the nine extended statements on poetic theory which follows.

Notes

1. The London Quarterly Review, ii, 1854, pp. 440-41.

2. Kant Selections, edited by T. M. Greene, New York, 1929, p. 375.

3. Biographia Literaria, edited by J. Shawcross, Oxford, 1907, ii, 10.

4. George Brimley, Essays, London, 1882, “Poetry and Criticism,” pp. 191, 193.

5. Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, edited by N. C. Smith, London, 1905, p. 27.

6. Leigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy, New York, 1845, p. 3.

7. George Moir, Treatises on Poetry, Modern Romance, and Rhetoric; Being the Articles under those Heads, Contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Seventh Edition, Edinburgh, 1839, p. 2.

8. The British Quarterly Review, x, 1849, p. 446.

9. The North British Review, xix, 1853, p. 165.

10. Op. cit., p. 25.

11. Op. cit., ii, 104.

12. Op. cit., p. 161.

13. The Westminster Review, lxix 1858, p. 122.

14. Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Oxford, The World's Classics, 1929, p. 90.

15. B. W. Procter, Essays and Tales in Prose by Barry Cornwall, 2 vols., Boston, 1853, “On English Poetry (1825),” ii 131.

16. The Edinburgh Review, lxxxix 1849, “Taylor's Eve of the Conquest,” p. 364.

17. Wordsworth, The Recluse, London, 1888.

18. “Here is the new version of Imitation, and I think that it is the best so far.” T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, London, 1933, p. 75.

19. Op. cit., ii 33-34.

20. Ibid., p. 159.

21. The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, edited by A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover, 12 vols., London, 1904, xi 228.

22. The Works of John Ruskin, edited by E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, London, 1904, v Modern Painters, iii 113.

23. Ibid., pp. 127-28.

24. Op. cit., p. 445.

25. Op. cit., p. 165.

26. Op. cit., p. 124.

27. The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, edited by D. Masson, 14 vols., Edinburgh, 1890, xi 56.

28. E. S. Dallas, Poetics, London, 1852, p. 273.

29. The Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, 30 vols., London, n.d., Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, xxvi 56.

30. William Allingham, Varieties in Prose, 3 vols., London, 1893, “On Poetry,” iii 259-60.

31. Sydney Dobell, Thoughts on Art, Philosophy, and Religion, London, 1876, p. 7.

32. John Ruskin, op. cit., p. 69.

33. Essays in Criticism, First Series, London, Macmillan and Co., 1895, “The Literary Influence of Academies,” p. 50.

34. Op. cit., Heroes and Hero-Worship, v 82.

35. Op. cit., p. 226.

36. Poems, London, 1853, p. xxviii.

37. Essays Critical and Historical, 2 vols., London, 1871, i “Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics,” p. 8.

38. Op. cit., ii 220-21.

39. Keble's Lectures on Poetry, translated by E. K. Francis, 2 vols., Oxford, 1912, i, 42.

40. Op. cit., p. 2.

41. Cf. Matthew Arnold's ‘Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon.’

42. James Montgomery, Lectures on Poetry, London, 1833, p. 12.

43. Op. cit., p. 9.

44. George Henry Lewes, The Principles of Success in Literature, edited by T. S. Knowlson, London, 1899, pp. 193-94.

45. The North British Review, xxvii, 1857, pp. 67-86.

46. Hunt also stresses the poet's pleasure in mastery of metrical difficulty.

47. Op. cit., p. 262.

48. Op. cit., Heroes and Hero-Worship, v, 90.

49. Op. cit., pp. 195-96.

50. Op. cit., p. 174.