The Twentieth Century I: The Early Decades PART II--Blamires

M. Phil English, Bharathiar University--Blamiers—

Approaches--Unit III

Summary by Dr. S. Sreekumar

Syllabus for Unit III
The Romantic Age (Blamires, pp 217-380)
The Victorian Age
The Twentieth Century I: The Early Decades
The Twentieth Century II: Post-war Developments

The Twentieth Century: The Early Decades

PART II

[the study  material is in two parts]

Academic Criticism

George Saintsbury,  Herbert Grierson,  A. E. Housman, A.C. Bradley, E. K. Chambers and W.P.Ker

Most of the critics of the early twentieth century were creative writers. None of them except Ford held academic positions or were involved in the teaching of English Literature.

However a group of critics who were mainly teachers of literature dominated the academic arena. Students of literature turned towards them for critical help. The average student was more indebted to them than to James or Yeats, Ford or Eliot. These critics kept alive the tradition of narrative criticism in which writers were historically placed, their works explored and their personalities explored. These critics  were known as academic critics. They are George Saintsbury,  Herbert Grierson,  A. E. Housman, A.C. Bradley, E. K. Chambers and W.P.Ker.

George Saintsbury ( 1845-1933)

George Saintsbury won the chair of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University. His numerous publications included A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, The English Novel and The Peace of the Augustans.

Saintsbury was a ‘hedonist’ in literature in that he was not much interested in the ‘subject-matter’. He savored the stylistic delights of literature and made his readers share that.

 Sir Herbert Grierson  (1866-1960)

He was Saintsbury’s successor at Edinburgh. He had none of the charms of the former but his scholarship provided a literary landmark when he edited Donne’s poems in 1912 and Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century in 1921. Grierson’s assertion of Donne’s importance is both enthusiastic and well-reasoned. Donne is one of those whose poetry is ‘inspired by a philosophical conception of the universe and the risk assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence.

A. E. Housman

For Housman the function of poetry is not to transmit thought but to ‘transfer emotion’. The metaphysical poetry was condemned by him because they gave more importance to simile and metaphor, ‘things inessential for poetry’. The poetry of the eighteenth century was condemned as ‘sham’. He condemned Dryden for the sheer empty inflation of language. He does not deny that Pope was a ‘poet’ but insisted that the use of the word ‘poetry’ for what Pope wrote was dangerous.

Housman’s assertions may appear naïve to modern readers. He goes so far as to declare, ‘Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it’. He added that the four poets of the 18^th century in whose work the true poetic accent can be heard where all mad: Collins, Smart, Cowper and Blake.

A.C. Bradley

In the world of Shakespeare studies, Bradley is much admired even today. Bradley held chairs in Liverpool, Glasgow and Oxford. He was acclaimed as the successor in the tradition of romantic criticism. He analyzed  the tragedies in detail with a thoroughness so intense in respect of characterization that the ‘dramatis personae’ become detached from their setting and are investigated as though they were living human beings under detective scrutiny.

Bradley’s analyses are thoughtful and perceptive, they probe details of personal response in Shakespeare’s characters with a subtlety and sympathy which gave his work an infectious appeal to generations of students

E. K. Chambers

Chambers analyzed the conditions in which Shakespeare wrote. In his two works—The Mediaeval Stage and  The Elizabethan Stage—he investigated the conditions.  The fruits of his research has benefitted Shakespearean studies ever since.

W.P.Ker

He held a chair at University College, Cardiff and then at University College, London. He was a specialist in Norse as well as in English literature. His chief works are Epic and Romance, The Dark Ages, and English Literature: Mediaeval.  He word his learning lightly and explored the various genres of medieval literature in a way which appealed to the general reader.

CAMBRIDGE INFLUENCES

I.A.RICHARDS, WILLIAM EMPSON, F.R.LEAVIS

I.A.RICHARDS (1893-1979)

His works

Principles of Literary Criticism

Practical Criticism

Coleridge on Imagination

The Foundation of Aesthetics

The Meaning of Meaning

Richards finds very little value in the criticism followed so far. The central question, ‘what kind of activity poetry is and what is its value? is left untouched.

The Nature of Poetry

Richards examines the workings of the human mind. It is a system of impulses, which may be defined as the reactions produced in the mind by some stimulus and culminating in an act. There are moments in a man’s life when his impulses respond to a stimulus in such an organized way that the mind has a life’s experience. Poetry is a representation of this ordered state of mind. By poetry Richards means not only verse but all imaginative literature, which is also the product of the same state of mind.

Poetry and communication

Communication of experience is not the poet’s work. Nor can he do away with the communicative aspect of his experience altogether.

Communication thus becomes inseparable from poetic experience. Richards examines what kind of language poetry uses.

u There are two uses of language—referential or scientific and emotive.

u The use of the word ‘fire’ is no more than a reference to a corresponding object in life. But poetry may use it for a different purpose. For example, the phrase ‘my heart on fire’ where ‘fire’ means ‘an excited state of mind’. This is how the poetic words are emotive.

u Science makes statements while poetry makes pseudo-statements. A statement says something and ‘is justified by its truth’.

u But a pseudo-statement is only a statement in name. ‘Heart on fire’ is not literally true. Thus a pseudo statement says nothing at all. What it says has the purpose of evoking the emotion or attitude of mind which the poet considers valuable and for which there are no verbal equivalents.

The Value of Poetry

 

Experience results from the play of impulses. Impulses are of two types—Appetencies and aversions (desires and dislikes). The mind prefers the satisfaction of appetencies (eating, drinking, and sleeping, for instance). In the same way it seeks the satisfaction of elevating appetencies to those that are depraving. Appetencies that elevate the poet also elevate the society. This is the value of poetry to society.

The Value of his criticism

è Richards turns criticism into a science. He considers it a scientifically analyzable activity.

è There is clearly a definable reason for every aspect of literature. The science that unearths the secrets of literature is psychology.

è An adequate knowledge of psychology is an essential preliminary to literary criticism.

è Richards has inspired a host of followers, the most notable among whom is William Empson and given an entirely new turn to Anglo-American criticism. But his method was too technical to be popular.

William Empson  (1906-84)

 He was the student of Richards at Cambridge. He made a full-scale investigation into multiplicity of meaning in Seven Types of Ambiguity.  He later agreed that ambiguity was not the best term to have used for the combination of multiple significances that occur in the use of words in poetry.

Empson came under fire for his comments on venerated figures like William Wordsworth and Tennyson. But his book became a classic of literary studies. His method involved close analysis of poetry with detailed concentration on word-by-word explication.

Empson’s term ‘ambiguity’ covers any ‘verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions’. He divides the kinds of ambiguity into seven, though he accepts that this is a somewhat arbitrary classification and that the types overlap.

F.R.LEAVIS (1895—1978)

Besides founding a quarterly review, Scrutiny, which ran for a little over 21 years, from May 1932 to October 1953, Leavis has also written the following critical works:

New Bearings on English Poetry , For Continuity, Revaluation

Education and the University, The Great Tradition, The Common Pursuit

His Conception of Literature

Leavis’s primary concern is culture—‘a way of living, ordered and patterned’ in accordance with some ideal of a civilized community’. In the pre industrial ages when men lived in closely knit communities in small villages, such an ideal was easily realised. The conditions today are very different. Working for mass production with machines and hurdled together in big industrial towns, men have ceased to have that feeling of oneness and shared ideals which they once had. The tastes and habits have also degenerated. The tastes are formed by films, newspapers, advertisements, popular fiction—all of which exploit ‘the cheapest emotional response’ of the people.

Therefore the common man has to be taught to discriminate between true culture and false culture. It is this function which literature at its best effectively discharges. Literature is not just an aesthetic experience but one dictated by the writer’s deep interests in life.

His concept of the Business of Criticism

u That literature of the past really matters which has value for the present.

u It follows therefore that of the two literatures—those of the past and the present—the latter matters more to the critic, because in it he can see what is still alive of the literature of the past and the modifications made in it by the present age. For a critic to be interested only in the literature of the past is to be traditional in the bad sense.

u Literature matters vitally to civilization. Leavis expects a critic to be concerned with the work in front of him as something that should contain within itself the reason why it is so and not otherwise.

u One discovers in Leavis’s critical practice the following stages—a complete response to the work in hand, its close scrutiny or analysis, and finally judgment of its significance.

The Question of Criteria

Leavis nowhere lays down ‘rules’ whereby to judge the merit of a work of art. All he does is to demonstrate by examples of good critical practice what there is to approve or condemn in a work. Judgement of a work must be sought within the work itself—the reason why it is so and not otherwise. The question never arises whether the work fulfils the requirements of any standard other than itself. But it is true that this is easier said than done. There are chances that the critic may go astray. To this Leavis answers that the common reader must be given rigorous training form the beginning to form his own judgement instead of having it formed for him.

The value of his criticism

  Leavis believed that literature belonging to the ‘great tradition’ must enrich man’s cultural heritage.

 A true critical enquiry is not just an interest in literature for its own sake but a concern for the values of life it promotes.

 Leavis reorders literary history. In the conventional literary history we find the lives and achievements of all known writers, good, bad, and indifferent. To Leavis it indicates lack of discrimination. Hence in his books he includes only those writers that qualify for ‘the great tradition’ in each genre. In this connotation of tradition he is indebted to Eliot which he acknowledges in book after book. Perhaps this is the meaning of tradition in Longinus also when he declares only those works as ‘truly beautiful and sublime which always please and please all’.

 Finally by his insistence of  on seeking the worth of a work in the work itself, for which he develops I.A. Richards’s method of close analysis, he makes the critic self-reliant, rescuing his from a mere parrot-like repetition of accepted opinion. In this method he is followed by a host of disciples all over the world and most notably by the ‘new critics’ of America.

SYMBOL AND MYTH

One or two books were written during the 1920s and 30s which helped to warn the readers to the character and potency of poetic utterance.

 Owen Barfield, a member of the circle of friends who gathered around C.S. Lewis published Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, where he took Richards to task for failing to recognize that the very vocabulary they used (terms such as ‘reference’ and ‘stimulus’ ) are figurative in origin and therefore required close scrutiny. He argued that it is impossible to build any semantic theory on the contrast between ‘scientific’ and ‘metaphorical’ language. He decried the false dichotomy between science and poetry as modes of knowing and experiencing life.

The notion was taken up by Maud Bodkin in her book Archetypal Patterns in Poetry.  Bodkin had a psychological and literary background and she explored the feelings and associations evoked by certain passages of poetry. She focused on Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner to show the part played by primordial images which recur in poetry. The recurring motifs here are the guilt-haunted wanderer (the figures of Cain, the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, and the like) which appear to be merged with that of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Maud Bodkin stresses the point that the growth of meaning in a poem is independent of the poet’s conscious intention.

Interest in the analysis of Shakespeare’s imagery was stimulated when Caroline Spurgeon published Shakespeare’s imagery. It was the first attempt at systematic classification of recurring images in Shakespeare. But the critic who made the most fruitful tabulation was Wilson Knight. His works like The Wheel of Fire and The Imperial Theme brought acute poetic sensitivity to bear on images and image-clusters. These books exercised a crucial influence in drawing out the symbolic content in Shakespeare. Knight’s work heralded an outburst of interest in symbolism which soon became familiar not only to students of Shakespeare and other poetic dramatists, but also to readers of novels by Dickens, Hardy, and other novelists whose mind worked poetically.