Pope is, for the most part, still mired in the classical model of Rational/ Irrational, and there can be no doubt where the bulk of his sympathies lie on the issue - his ideal strategy for meaning is to allow freedom within clearly proscribed boundaries. Given the choice between “wit” and “judgment”, judgment is clearly the superior partner, since without it, wit will almost certainly run amok. But then, just as you’ve written him off as a stuffy young fogey there’s this:
A prudent chief not always must display
His powers in equal ranks and fair array,
But with the occasion and the place comply.
Conceal his force, nay, seem sometimes to fly.
Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,
Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.
He seems to be saying “give me a chance to experiment a bit”. And yes, I may fail. But then again, what may seem an ill-judged flight of fancy may point the way to new discoveries. But it’s all a bit of an after-thought, and there’s nothing here as radical as Sidney. The writer’s imagination continues to look rearwards over its shoulder, and to be restrained by the anchor chain of classical tradition; but it’s also held back by an almost neurotic obsession with propriety and the discipline inherent in the 20-syllable rhyming couplet (known among literary types as the “heroic couplet”).
It’s true that the ‘Essay on Criticism’ seeks to defend poetry from the over-zealous or insensitive critic by perhaps making it seem a little more responsible than it needs to be, but Pope himself rarely strayed from his own recommendations. Indeed, in the introduction to his translation of ‘The Iliad’, published in 1715, he virtually excuses the formal conservatism of the age by blaming the overbearing influence of critics, most of whom:
are inclin'd to prefer a judicious and methodical Genius to a great and fruitful one . . . because they find it easier for themselves to pursue their Observations through an uniform and bounded Walk of Art, than to comprehend the vast and various Extent of Nature.
It’s no accident that the early 19th-Century novelist Thomas Love Peacock, in his excellent and entertaining essay ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ referred to this period in English literature as ‘the age of authority’, built on a classical model whose poetry:
. . . is characterized by an exquisite and fastidious selection of words, and a laboured and somewhat monotonous harmony of expression: but its monotony consists in this, that experience having exhausted all the varieties of modulation, the civilized poetry selects the most beautiful, and prefers the repetition of these to ranging through the variety of all. But the best expression being that into which the idea naturally falls , it requires the utmost labour and care so to reconcile the inflexibility of civilized language and the laboured polish of versification with the idea intended to be expressed, that sense may not appear to be sacrificed to sound [itals mine].
In Peacock’s view, writing in 1820 (over 100 years after Pope), “appropriateness” was the way forward: so an overbearing emphasis on technique would throttle meaning (“sense”) in favour of formal rules. In short, poets were paying too much attention to the craft of writing, and not to developing ways in which form might mirror the meaning they’re trying to communicate. ‘One approach fits all’ was not a sufficiently responsive way to successfully embody the wide range of subject matter literature should be addressing, and so the odds of poetry becoming an agent of intellectual change would be shortened if writers continued to value discipline over investigation. Once more, there isn’t a ‘best’ way’ - it’s simply horses for courses. But if literature doesn’t have the tools, it can’t do the job expected of it.
It’s another one of those aesthetic dicta beloved of Plato, and as to how poets may go about creating this appropriateness, Peacock falls largely silent. But he does know that being a Romantic Poet is most decidedly how not to do it.
In some respects, Romanticism is the very embodiment of the freedom from formal restraint Peacock was calling for. As a movement, it’s a very broad church, among whose English congregation were poets as diverse as Blake, Byron and Coleridge. But some common threads do run through their writings:
Þ the need for a freer, more subjective expression of passion;
Þ emphasis on the need for spontaneity in thought and action and in the expression of thought;
Þ increasing importance attached to natural genius and the power of the individual imagination;
The poet was busy romping around Greece (Byron), the Lakeland hills (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey) or sitting buck naked in his Lambeth garden (Blake) re-connected to his Muse, and not in a hothouse metropolitan society where inspiration was drowned out by stylistic conformity, the clash of coffee cups and the insistent murmur of literary gossip. Meaning was free to roam wherever the poet thought it should, taking in whatever subject matter, high or low, caught its attention. But there’s no pleasing some folk, and Peacock reserves some of his most stinging barbs for the Grasmere club;
The highest inspirations of [current] poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated [itals mine] passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment: and can therefore serve only to ripen a . . . morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life an useful or rational man. (1)
So once again, writers were being criticized for their sentimental attachment to the Irrational, just as Plato had censured them all those years before. And not only that, their meaning was an undisciplined, unrepresentative exercise in hyperbole. Not enough control. Too personal. And over-dramatized. The German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who is often described as the father of Romanticism, but who had a foot in both this and the Classical tradition (like Byron), wrote that Romanticism was a form of nervous disorder that placed too much reliance on subjective meaning.
Which is grossly unfair; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and De Quincey can easily be accused of being aesthetic tourists, but they represent far more than just a bunch of fotherington-tomases (2) with a naive attachment to pretty places. In Wordsworth’s personal cosmos (at least when he was young), Nature was what breathed life into meaning.
Now this isn’t a bad moment to look at what is meant by the word ‘Nature’, since it has at least three related definitions that have strong influences on what’s going on at this point in the argument, and a lot of what’s preceded it:
1) Nature is, of course, the green stuff between the towns, and that’s where many of the Romantics reckoned aesthetic salvation lay. If you can only move out to where the air is fresh and clear, it will have an automatic remedial effect on your art by uncluttering the mind and freeing the sensibilities. And this is the basis of Peacock’s attack on them; he’d no doubt have got just as much mileage out of the yuppie who thinks that getting back to nature simply involves buying a cottage in the country he only uses at weekends, a Barbour jacket and an SUV that never gets mud on its tyres. Then there’s;
2) What Makes Things As They Are. It’s the essential quality of something, its essence. Which, in part anyway, is deterministic, as in “Human Nature”. That’s the way humans behave, so don’t expect any different. And last we have;
3) A quality of unaffectedness, of something not having been interfered with, something in its original state.
Where Nature has intruded into the discussion thus far, it’s mainly been in guises 2 and 3; Plato’s ‘essences’ are squarely in type 2, a category they share with Pope’s ‘Nature’, which represent a sort of non-negotiable meaning - Nature is What Must Be Like It Or Not. TBWTW Longinus uses Nature to counterpoint Art, so he’s in type 3, in the company of the other classical thinkers who viewed creativity as an organic process - Nature is What Is. But the Romantics’ Nature is an amalgam of all 3; it represents freedom (Type 1) as well as these other two. But, to be fair to Peacock (and Goethe), it is a freedom which is, at base, irrational. And the Romantics, of course, knew it.
In the poem ‘Tintern Abbey’ for example, Wordsworth struggles to give this deeply personal sense of Nature some kind of form; it’s
. . . a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
I always get the feeling (which I can’t necessarily prove) that Wordsworth doesn’t want to dig too deeply into the meaning of the “sense sublime” in case it pops like a balloon never to return. Letting the daylight in on magic isn’t necessarily a good idea, and he deliberately won’t push his luck by analysing it too closely. Or maybe he simply couldn’t. Sometimes, he wanted to keep the feeling irrational.
But at other times he didn’t; one of the perennial complaints about Wordsworth’s scheme, on the other hand, is that the conclusion he does leap to, that Nature = God, is too simplistic, too much of a rationalization, a leap too far that he doesn’t make convincingly enough. We know what he’s feeling is a ‘oneness’ with his muse, but why does that feeling necessarily have a religious character? Because God made Nature, you reply, and it’s a sign of Wordsworth’s essential philosophical conservatism that he makes that convenient jump into Pantheism, a pre-existing doctrine around a hundred years old at that point (3), and then into formal religion. He may not have set out to prove that God is the ultimate validator of meaning and Nature is his rubber stamp, but that’s the conclusion he arrives at. (4)
Coleridge, on the other hand, doesn’t routinely bring God into the argument in the same way his friend and colleague did, although the supreme deity does get a brief namecheck in ‘Frost at Midnight’ in relation to his capacity for binding all earthly meaning together. More often than not, though, Coleridge’s philosophical scrupulousness (or capacity for fence-sitting or simply religious squeamishness, depending on how you look at it) remains secular. In a letter written in October of 1797, he expresses his doubts to a more committed Pantheist, John Thelwall:
I can at times feel strongly the beauties you describe -- in themselves and for themselves. But more frequently all things appear little -- all the knowledge that can be acquired, child's play; the universe itself, what but an immense heap of things? I can contemplate nothing but the parts, and parts are all little! My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great, something one and indivisible -- and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or even caverns, give me a sense of sublimity or majesty! But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity!
So God, or any kind of uniting principle, is proving elusive for him. Whereas Wordsworth would have jumped in with both feet, Coleridge didn’t feel routinely able to make that intellectual commitment to something -anything - that would hold his art together.
So, as far as meaning is concerned, he’s edging towards a Modernist conception of an atomized universe (or perhaps more properly multi-verse), which, like many of the more nostalgic modernists we’ll encounter soon, didn’t exactly make him happy. He wasn’t celebrating this diversity; he was mourning the absence of an overarching Meaning in his life and work that would help him make sense of it. A rock is just a rock, a tree just a tree without it. Its absence is artistically paralysing.
Footnotes:
1. I could quote reams of Peacock’s essay, which is a masterful Philippic not just attacking Wordsworth, but any writer with a scintilla of sentiment in his style. The vehemence of this almost burlesque performance is real, though; Peacock was genuinely worried that as science advanced, literature would become marginalized and even extinct if it persisted in dabbling in what he viewed as childish, superstitious, inconsequential subject matter. So he was with Plato on this one.
2. the lower-case third form poet (and cissy) in Geoffrey Willans’s ‘Down With Skool’ whose perennial cry “Hello trees, hello sky, hello birds” marked him out as “a wet and a weed.”
3. The word ‘pantheism’ first appears in English in 1696, in John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious. A quick definition is that God’s in everything natural. So Nature is a celebration of God.
4. Sometimes, Wordsworth goes for closure a little too eagerly: witness the bathos in the last two lines of ‘Resolution & Independence’. The poet, feeling down in the dumps, meets a lonely old leech gatherer, who, he quite rightly assumes, is financially worse off than himself owing to falling demand for his wares, yet who seems to be fairly chipper about the situation he’s in. Wordsworth leaps to the conclusion that he’s been sent for a purpose - to cheer him up whenever he’s gloomy. You can almost see the light bulb switching on above his head:
"God," said I, "be my help and stay secure!;
I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!"
A clear case for showing not saying, methinks.
A prudent chief not always must display
His powers in equal ranks and fair array,
But with the occasion and the place comply.
Conceal his force, nay, seem sometimes to fly.
Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,
Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.
He seems to be saying “give me a chance to experiment a bit”. And yes, I may fail. But then again, what may seem an ill-judged flight of fancy may point the way to new discoveries. But it’s all a bit of an after-thought, and there’s nothing here as radical as Sidney. The writer’s imagination continues to look rearwards over its shoulder, and to be restrained by the anchor chain of classical tradition; but it’s also held back by an almost neurotic obsession with propriety and the discipline inherent in the 20-syllable rhyming couplet (known among literary types as the “heroic couplet”).
It’s true that the ‘Essay on Criticism’ seeks to defend poetry from the over-zealous or insensitive critic by perhaps making it seem a little more responsible than it needs to be, but Pope himself rarely strayed from his own recommendations. Indeed, in the introduction to his translation of ‘The Iliad’, published in 1715, he virtually excuses the formal conservatism of the age by blaming the overbearing influence of critics, most of whom:
are inclin'd to prefer a judicious and methodical Genius to a great and fruitful one . . . because they find it easier for themselves to pursue their Observations through an uniform and bounded Walk of Art, than to comprehend the vast and various Extent of Nature.
It’s no accident that the early 19th-Century novelist Thomas Love Peacock, in his excellent and entertaining essay ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’ referred to this period in English literature as ‘the age of authority’, built on a classical model whose poetry:
. . . is characterized by an exquisite and fastidious selection of words, and a laboured and somewhat monotonous harmony of expression: but its monotony consists in this, that experience having exhausted all the varieties of modulation, the civilized poetry selects the most beautiful, and prefers the repetition of these to ranging through the variety of all. But the best expression being that into which the idea naturally falls , it requires the utmost labour and care so to reconcile the inflexibility of civilized language and the laboured polish of versification with the idea intended to be expressed, that sense may not appear to be sacrificed to sound [itals mine].
In Peacock’s view, writing in 1820 (over 100 years after Pope), “appropriateness” was the way forward: so an overbearing emphasis on technique would throttle meaning (“sense”) in favour of formal rules. In short, poets were paying too much attention to the craft of writing, and not to developing ways in which form might mirror the meaning they’re trying to communicate. ‘One approach fits all’ was not a sufficiently responsive way to successfully embody the wide range of subject matter literature should be addressing, and so the odds of poetry becoming an agent of intellectual change would be shortened if writers continued to value discipline over investigation. Once more, there isn’t a ‘best’ way’ - it’s simply horses for courses. But if literature doesn’t have the tools, it can’t do the job expected of it.
It’s another one of those aesthetic dicta beloved of Plato, and as to how poets may go about creating this appropriateness, Peacock falls largely silent. But he does know that being a Romantic Poet is most decidedly how not to do it.
In some respects, Romanticism is the very embodiment of the freedom from formal restraint Peacock was calling for. As a movement, it’s a very broad church, among whose English congregation were poets as diverse as Blake, Byron and Coleridge. But some common threads do run through their writings:
Þ the need for a freer, more subjective expression of passion;
Þ emphasis on the need for spontaneity in thought and action and in the expression of thought;
Þ increasing importance attached to natural genius and the power of the individual imagination;
The poet was busy romping around Greece (Byron), the Lakeland hills (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey) or sitting buck naked in his Lambeth garden (Blake) re-connected to his Muse, and not in a hothouse metropolitan society where inspiration was drowned out by stylistic conformity, the clash of coffee cups and the insistent murmur of literary gossip. Meaning was free to roam wherever the poet thought it should, taking in whatever subject matter, high or low, caught its attention. But there’s no pleasing some folk, and Peacock reserves some of his most stinging barbs for the Grasmere club;
The highest inspirations of [current] poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated [itals mine] passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment: and can therefore serve only to ripen a . . . morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life an useful or rational man. (1)
So once again, writers were being criticized for their sentimental attachment to the Irrational, just as Plato had censured them all those years before. And not only that, their meaning was an undisciplined, unrepresentative exercise in hyperbole. Not enough control. Too personal. And over-dramatized. The German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who is often described as the father of Romanticism, but who had a foot in both this and the Classical tradition (like Byron), wrote that Romanticism was a form of nervous disorder that placed too much reliance on subjective meaning.
Which is grossly unfair; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and De Quincey can easily be accused of being aesthetic tourists, but they represent far more than just a bunch of fotherington-tomases (2) with a naive attachment to pretty places. In Wordsworth’s personal cosmos (at least when he was young), Nature was what breathed life into meaning.
Now this isn’t a bad moment to look at what is meant by the word ‘Nature’, since it has at least three related definitions that have strong influences on what’s going on at this point in the argument, and a lot of what’s preceded it:
1) Nature is, of course, the green stuff between the towns, and that’s where many of the Romantics reckoned aesthetic salvation lay. If you can only move out to where the air is fresh and clear, it will have an automatic remedial effect on your art by uncluttering the mind and freeing the sensibilities. And this is the basis of Peacock’s attack on them; he’d no doubt have got just as much mileage out of the yuppie who thinks that getting back to nature simply involves buying a cottage in the country he only uses at weekends, a Barbour jacket and an SUV that never gets mud on its tyres. Then there’s;
2) What Makes Things As They Are. It’s the essential quality of something, its essence. Which, in part anyway, is deterministic, as in “Human Nature”. That’s the way humans behave, so don’t expect any different. And last we have;
3) A quality of unaffectedness, of something not having been interfered with, something in its original state.
Where Nature has intruded into the discussion thus far, it’s mainly been in guises 2 and 3; Plato’s ‘essences’ are squarely in type 2, a category they share with Pope’s ‘Nature’, which represent a sort of non-negotiable meaning - Nature is What Must Be Like It Or Not. TBWTW Longinus uses Nature to counterpoint Art, so he’s in type 3, in the company of the other classical thinkers who viewed creativity as an organic process - Nature is What Is. But the Romantics’ Nature is an amalgam of all 3; it represents freedom (Type 1) as well as these other two. But, to be fair to Peacock (and Goethe), it is a freedom which is, at base, irrational. And the Romantics, of course, knew it.
In the poem ‘Tintern Abbey’ for example, Wordsworth struggles to give this deeply personal sense of Nature some kind of form; it’s
. . . a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
I always get the feeling (which I can’t necessarily prove) that Wordsworth doesn’t want to dig too deeply into the meaning of the “sense sublime” in case it pops like a balloon never to return. Letting the daylight in on magic isn’t necessarily a good idea, and he deliberately won’t push his luck by analysing it too closely. Or maybe he simply couldn’t. Sometimes, he wanted to keep the feeling irrational.
But at other times he didn’t; one of the perennial complaints about Wordsworth’s scheme, on the other hand, is that the conclusion he does leap to, that Nature = God, is too simplistic, too much of a rationalization, a leap too far that he doesn’t make convincingly enough. We know what he’s feeling is a ‘oneness’ with his muse, but why does that feeling necessarily have a religious character? Because God made Nature, you reply, and it’s a sign of Wordsworth’s essential philosophical conservatism that he makes that convenient jump into Pantheism, a pre-existing doctrine around a hundred years old at that point (3), and then into formal religion. He may not have set out to prove that God is the ultimate validator of meaning and Nature is his rubber stamp, but that’s the conclusion he arrives at. (4)
Coleridge, on the other hand, doesn’t routinely bring God into the argument in the same way his friend and colleague did, although the supreme deity does get a brief namecheck in ‘Frost at Midnight’ in relation to his capacity for binding all earthly meaning together. More often than not, though, Coleridge’s philosophical scrupulousness (or capacity for fence-sitting or simply religious squeamishness, depending on how you look at it) remains secular. In a letter written in October of 1797, he expresses his doubts to a more committed Pantheist, John Thelwall:
I can at times feel strongly the beauties you describe -- in themselves and for themselves. But more frequently all things appear little -- all the knowledge that can be acquired, child's play; the universe itself, what but an immense heap of things? I can contemplate nothing but the parts, and parts are all little! My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great, something one and indivisible -- and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or even caverns, give me a sense of sublimity or majesty! But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity!
So God, or any kind of uniting principle, is proving elusive for him. Whereas Wordsworth would have jumped in with both feet, Coleridge didn’t feel routinely able to make that intellectual commitment to something -anything - that would hold his art together.
So, as far as meaning is concerned, he’s edging towards a Modernist conception of an atomized universe (or perhaps more properly multi-verse), which, like many of the more nostalgic modernists we’ll encounter soon, didn’t exactly make him happy. He wasn’t celebrating this diversity; he was mourning the absence of an overarching Meaning in his life and work that would help him make sense of it. A rock is just a rock, a tree just a tree without it. Its absence is artistically paralysing.
Footnotes:
1. I could quote reams of Peacock’s essay, which is a masterful Philippic not just attacking Wordsworth, but any writer with a scintilla of sentiment in his style. The vehemence of this almost burlesque performance is real, though; Peacock was genuinely worried that as science advanced, literature would become marginalized and even extinct if it persisted in dabbling in what he viewed as childish, superstitious, inconsequential subject matter. So he was with Plato on this one.
2. the lower-case third form poet (and cissy) in Geoffrey Willans’s ‘Down With Skool’ whose perennial cry “Hello trees, hello sky, hello birds” marked him out as “a wet and a weed.”
3. The word ‘pantheism’ first appears in English in 1696, in John Toland's Christianity not Mysterious. A quick definition is that God’s in everything natural. So Nature is a celebration of God.
4. Sometimes, Wordsworth goes for closure a little too eagerly: witness the bathos in the last two lines of ‘Resolution & Independence’. The poet, feeling down in the dumps, meets a lonely old leech gatherer, who, he quite rightly assumes, is financially worse off than himself owing to falling demand for his wares, yet who seems to be fairly chipper about the situation he’s in. Wordsworth leaps to the conclusion that he’s been sent for a purpose - to cheer him up whenever he’s gloomy. You can almost see the light bulb switching on above his head:
"God," said I, "be my help and stay secure!;
I'll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!"
A clear case for showing not saying, methinks.
