CHAPTER XXXThe Definition of a PoemMen take the words they find in use among their neighbours, and that they may not seem ignorant what they stand for use them confidently without much troubling their heads about a certain fixed meaning. . . . it being all one to draw these men out of their mistakes, who have no settled notions, as to dispossess a Vagrant of his habitation, who has no settled abode. This I guess to be so; and every one may observe in himself or others whether it be so or not.Locke.Itmay be useful to collect here some of the results of the foregoing sections and consider them from the point of view of the practising critic. The most salient perhaps is the desirability of distinguishing clearly between the communicative and the value aspects of a work of art. We may praise or condemn a work on either ground or upon both, but if it fails entirely as a vehicle of communication we are, to say the least, not well placed for denying its value.But, it may be said, it will then have no value forusand its value or disvalue for us is all that we as critics pretend or should pretend to judge. To make such a reply, however, is to abdicate as a critic. At the least a critic is concerned with the value of things for himself and for people like him. Otherwise his criticism is mere autobiography. And any critic worth attention makes a further claim, a claim to sanity. His judgment is only of general interest in so far as it is representative and reflects what happens in a mind of a certain kind, developed in a certain fashion. The services of bad critics are sometimes not less than those of good critics, but that is only because we can divine from their responses what other people’s responses are likely to be.We must distinguish between standard or normal criticism and erratic or eccentric criticism. As critics Lamb or Coleridge are very far from normal; none the less they are of extraordinary fertility in suggestion. Their responses are often erratic even when of most revelatory character. In such cases we do not take them as standards to which we endeavour to approximate, we do not attempt to see eye to eye with them. Instead we use them as means by which to make quite different approaches ourselves to the works which they have characteristically but eccentrically interpreted.The distinction between a personal or idiosyncratic judgment and a normative is sometimes overlooked. A critic should often be in a position to say, “I don’t like this but I know it is good”, or “I like this and condemn it”, or “This is the effect which it produces upon me, and this quite different effect is the one it should produce.” For obvious reasons he rarely makes any such statements. But many people would regard praise of a work which is actually disliked by the praiser as immoral. This is a confusion of ideas. Any honest reader knows fairly well the points at which his sensibility is distorted, at which he fails as a normal critic and in what ways. It is his duty to take these into consideration in passing judgment upon the value of a work. His rank as a critic depends at least as much upon his ability to discount these personal peculiarities as upon any hypothetical impeccability of his actual responses.So far we have been considering those cases in which the vehicle is sufficiently adequate and the critic sufficiently representative and careful for the response to be a good index of the value of the poem. But these cases are comparatively rare. The superstition which any language not intolerably prolix and uncouth encourages that there is something actual,the poem, which all readers have access to and upon which they pass judgment, misleads us. We naturally talk about poems (and pictures, etc.) in a way which makes it impossible for anybody to discover what it is we are talking about. Most critical discussion, in other words, is primarily emotive with only a very loose and fourfold equivocal reference. We may be talking about the artist’s experience, such of it as is relevant OF about The experience of a qualified reader who made no mistakes, or about an ideal and perfect reader’s possible experience, or about our own actual experience. All four in most cases will be qualitatively different. Communication is perhaps never perfect, so the first and the last will differ. The second and third differ also, from the others and from one another, the third being what we ought unrestrictedly to experience, or the best experience we could possibly undergo, whereas the second is merely what we ought to experience as things are, or the best experience that we can expect.Which of these possible definitions of a poem shall we adopt? The question is one of convenience merely; but it is by no means easy to decide. The most usual practice is to mean bythe poemeither the first or the last; or, by forgetting what communication is, to mean both confusedly together. The last involves the personal judgment to which exception was taken on the previous page, and has the further disadvantage that there would be for every sonnet as many poems as readers. A and B, discussingWestminster Bridgeas they thought, would unwittingly be discussing two different things. For some purposes, for the disentanglement of some misunderstandings, it is convenient to define a poem temporarily in this manner.To define the poem as the artist’s experience is a better solution. But it will not do as it stands since nobody but the artist has that experience. We must be more ingenious. We cannot take any single experience as the poem; we must have a class of more or less similar experiences instead. Let us mean byWestminster Bridgenot the actual experience which led Wordsworth on a certain morning about a century ago to write what he did, but the class composed of all actual experiences, occasioned by the words, which do not differ within certain limits from that experience. Then anyone who has had one of the experiences comprised in the class can be said to have read the poem. The permissible ranges of variation in the class need (of course) very careful scrutiny. To work them out fully and draw up a neat formal definition of a poem would be an amusing and useful occupation for any literary logician with a knowledge of psychology. The experiences must evidently include the reading of the words with fairly close correspondence in rhythm and tune. Pitch difference would not matter, provided that pitch relations were preserved. Imagery might be allowed to vary indefinitely in its sensory aspect but would be narrowly restricted otherwise. If the reader will run over the diagram of a poetic experience given in Chapter XVI and consider in what respects his and his friends’ experiences must agree if they are to be able to refer to them indifferently as though they were one and the same without confusion or misunderstanding, he will see what kind of thing a detailed definition of a poem would be.This, although it may seem odd and complicated, is by far the most convenient, in fact it is the only workable way of defining a poem; namely, as a class of experiences which do not differ in any character more than a certain amount, varying for each character, from a standard experience. We may take as this standard experience the relevant experience of the poet when contemplating the completed composition*.Anyone whose experience approximates in this degree to the standard experience will be able to judge the poem and his remarks about it will be about some experience which is included in the class. Thus we have what we want, a sense, namely, in which a critic can be said to have not read the poem or to have misread it. In this sense unrecognised failures are extremely common.The justification for this outbreak of pedantry, as it may appear, is that it brings into prominence one of the reasons for the backwardness of critical theory. If the definition of a poem is a matter of so much difficulty and complexity, the discussion of the principles by which poetry should be judged may be expected to be confused. Critics have as yet hardly begun to ask themselves what they are doing or under what conditions they work. It is true that a recognition of the critic’s predicament need not be explicit in order to be effective, but few with much experience of literary debate will underestimate the extent to which it is disregarded or the consequences which ensue from this neglect. The discussions in the foregoing chapters are intended as no more than examples of the problems which an explicit recognition of the situation will admit and of the ways in which they will be solved.
Men take the words they find in use among their neighbours, and that they may not seem ignorant what they stand for use them confidently without much troubling their heads about a certain fixed meaning. . . . it being all one to draw these men out of their mistakes, who have no settled notions, as to dispossess a Vagrant of his habitation, who has no settled abode. This I guess to be so; and every one may observe in himself or others whether it be so or not.Locke.
Men take the words they find in use among their neighbours, and that they may not seem ignorant what they stand for use them confidently without much troubling their heads about a certain fixed meaning. . . . it being all one to draw these men out of their mistakes, who have no settled notions, as to dispossess a Vagrant of his habitation, who has no settled abode. This I guess to be so; and every one may observe in himself or others whether it be so or not.
Locke.
Itmay be useful to collect here some of the results of the foregoing sections and consider them from the point of view of the practising critic. The most salient perhaps is the desirability of distinguishing clearly between the communicative and the value aspects of a work of art. We may praise or condemn a work on either ground or upon both, but if it fails entirely as a vehicle of communication we are, to say the least, not well placed for denying its value.
But, it may be said, it will then have no value forusand its value or disvalue for us is all that we as critics pretend or should pretend to judge. To make such a reply, however, is to abdicate as a critic. At the least a critic is concerned with the value of things for himself and for people like him. Otherwise his criticism is mere autobiography. And any critic worth attention makes a further claim, a claim to sanity. His judgment is only of general interest in so far as it is representative and reflects what happens in a mind of a certain kind, developed in a certain fashion. The services of bad critics are sometimes not less than those of good critics, but that is only because we can divine from their responses what other people’s responses are likely to be.
We must distinguish between standard or normal criticism and erratic or eccentric criticism. As critics Lamb or Coleridge are very far from normal; none the less they are of extraordinary fertility in suggestion. Their responses are often erratic even when of most revelatory character. In such cases we do not take them as standards to which we endeavour to approximate, we do not attempt to see eye to eye with them. Instead we use them as means by which to make quite different approaches ourselves to the works which they have characteristically but eccentrically interpreted.
The distinction between a personal or idiosyncratic judgment and a normative is sometimes overlooked. A critic should often be in a position to say, “I don’t like this but I know it is good”, or “I like this and condemn it”, or “This is the effect which it produces upon me, and this quite different effect is the one it should produce.” For obvious reasons he rarely makes any such statements. But many people would regard praise of a work which is actually disliked by the praiser as immoral. This is a confusion of ideas. Any honest reader knows fairly well the points at which his sensibility is distorted, at which he fails as a normal critic and in what ways. It is his duty to take these into consideration in passing judgment upon the value of a work. His rank as a critic depends at least as much upon his ability to discount these personal peculiarities as upon any hypothetical impeccability of his actual responses.
So far we have been considering those cases in which the vehicle is sufficiently adequate and the critic sufficiently representative and careful for the response to be a good index of the value of the poem. But these cases are comparatively rare. The superstition which any language not intolerably prolix and uncouth encourages that there is something actual,the poem, which all readers have access to and upon which they pass judgment, misleads us. We naturally talk about poems (and pictures, etc.) in a way which makes it impossible for anybody to discover what it is we are talking about. Most critical discussion, in other words, is primarily emotive with only a very loose and fourfold equivocal reference. We may be talking about the artist’s experience, such of it as is relevant OF about The experience of a qualified reader who made no mistakes, or about an ideal and perfect reader’s possible experience, or about our own actual experience. All four in most cases will be qualitatively different. Communication is perhaps never perfect, so the first and the last will differ. The second and third differ also, from the others and from one another, the third being what we ought unrestrictedly to experience, or the best experience we could possibly undergo, whereas the second is merely what we ought to experience as things are, or the best experience that we can expect.
Which of these possible definitions of a poem shall we adopt? The question is one of convenience merely; but it is by no means easy to decide. The most usual practice is to mean bythe poemeither the first or the last; or, by forgetting what communication is, to mean both confusedly together. The last involves the personal judgment to which exception was taken on the previous page, and has the further disadvantage that there would be for every sonnet as many poems as readers. A and B, discussingWestminster Bridgeas they thought, would unwittingly be discussing two different things. For some purposes, for the disentanglement of some misunderstandings, it is convenient to define a poem temporarily in this manner.
To define the poem as the artist’s experience is a better solution. But it will not do as it stands since nobody but the artist has that experience. We must be more ingenious. We cannot take any single experience as the poem; we must have a class of more or less similar experiences instead. Let us mean byWestminster Bridgenot the actual experience which led Wordsworth on a certain morning about a century ago to write what he did, but the class composed of all actual experiences, occasioned by the words, which do not differ within certain limits from that experience. Then anyone who has had one of the experiences comprised in the class can be said to have read the poem. The permissible ranges of variation in the class need (of course) very careful scrutiny. To work them out fully and draw up a neat formal definition of a poem would be an amusing and useful occupation for any literary logician with a knowledge of psychology. The experiences must evidently include the reading of the words with fairly close correspondence in rhythm and tune. Pitch difference would not matter, provided that pitch relations were preserved. Imagery might be allowed to vary indefinitely in its sensory aspect but would be narrowly restricted otherwise. If the reader will run over the diagram of a poetic experience given in Chapter XVI and consider in what respects his and his friends’ experiences must agree if they are to be able to refer to them indifferently as though they were one and the same without confusion or misunderstanding, he will see what kind of thing a detailed definition of a poem would be.
This, although it may seem odd and complicated, is by far the most convenient, in fact it is the only workable way of defining a poem; namely, as a class of experiences which do not differ in any character more than a certain amount, varying for each character, from a standard experience. We may take as this standard experience the relevant experience of the poet when contemplating the completed composition*.
Anyone whose experience approximates in this degree to the standard experience will be able to judge the poem and his remarks about it will be about some experience which is included in the class. Thus we have what we want, a sense, namely, in which a critic can be said to have not read the poem or to have misread it. In this sense unrecognised failures are extremely common.
The justification for this outbreak of pedantry, as it may appear, is that it brings into prominence one of the reasons for the backwardness of critical theory. If the definition of a poem is a matter of so much difficulty and complexity, the discussion of the principles by which poetry should be judged may be expected to be confused. Critics have as yet hardly begun to ask themselves what they are doing or under what conditions they work. It is true that a recognition of the critic’s predicament need not be explicit in order to be effective, but few with much experience of literary debate will underestimate the extent to which it is disregarded or the consequences which ensue from this neglect. The discussions in the foregoing chapters are intended as no more than examples of the problems which an explicit recognition of the situation will admit and of the ways in which they will be solved.