The English Poetic Mind

Charles Williams

Description

‘The English Poetic Mind’ (1932) is Williams’ discussion of the source of the poetic impulse, creativity and drive behind three prominent English poets: Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth. The text is reflective of Williams’ imaginative and critical approach to literature and his appreciation of poetry and verse. Charles Williams (1886-1945) was a British theologian, playwright, novelist and poet. As a member of the ‘Inklings’ literary group at Oxford, his work supported a strong sense of narrative. For Williams, spiritual exchanges were an undercurrent to life, and his Christian fantasy writing, such as 'Descent into Hell' (1937), earned him many followers. This classic work is now being republished in a new modern edition with a specially commissioned introductory biography.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 06 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528767378
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE ENGLISH POETIC MIND
BY
CHARLES WILLIAMS
Copyright 2018 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
CHARLES WILLIAMS
Charles Walter Stansby Williams was born in London in 1886. He dropped out of University College London in 1904, and was hired by Oxford University Press as a proof-reader, quickly rising to the position of editor. While there, arguably his greatest editorial achievement was the publication of the first major English-language edition of the works of the Danish philosopher S ren Kierkegaard.
Williams began writing in the twenties and went on to publish seven novels. Of these, the best-known are probably War in Heaven (1930), Descent into Hell (1937), and All Hallows Eve (1945) - all fantasies set in the contemporary world. He also published a vast body of well-received scholarship, including a study of Dante entitled The Figure of Beatrice (1944) which remains a standard reference text for academics today, and a highly unconventional history of the church, Descent of the Dove (1939). Williams garnered a number of well-known admirers, including T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and C. S. Lewis. Towards the end of his life, he gave lectures at Oxford University on John Milton, and received an honorary MA degree. Williams died almost exactly at the close of World War II, aged 58.
Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes
From whence tis nourished .
TIMON OF ATHENS

More tuneable than lark to shepherd s ear ,
When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear .
MIDSUMMER NIGHT S DREAM
The singing masons building roofs of gold .
HENRY V
A sense ,
Death-like, of treacherous desertion felt
In the last place of refuge, my own soul .
THE PRELUDE
A little onward lend thy guiding hand
To these dark steps, a little further on .
SAMSON AGONISTES
They are lost in the hollows!
They stream up again!
What seeks on this mountain
The glorified train ?-
They bathe on this mountain ,
In the spring by their road;
Then on to Olympus ,
Their endless abode!
-Whose praise do they mention?
Of what is it told ?-
What will be for ever;
What was from of old .
EMPEDOCLES ON ETNA
PREFACE
T HE following essays are based on two convictions: (1) that Troilus and Cressida is of a great deal more importance in a study of Shakespeare than has generally been allowed, (2) that the central crisis of Troilus is in direct poetic relation to the culminating crisis in Wordsworth s account of his own history in the Prelude . From these convictions I went on to consider whether that crisis had any parallels in the work of the other English poets, and whether it might, not unreasonably, be related to the Satan of Milton, compared with the Nightingale of Keats, and contrasted with the Lancelot of Tennyson. Upon this subject it would have been possible to write a book either of five hundred or of two hundred pages; I chose two hundred with equal reluctance and decision.
I have called it the English Poetic Mind rather than the English Poetic Genius , because the word genius, in that context, might be supposed to have reference rather to English than to Poetic ; to allude to the feelings which (as Sir Arthur Quiller Couch has suggested) should be aroused in us when we stand by the tomb of the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral rather than to those which are aroused by the reading of Henry V . With the patriotism of Shakespeare and Milton and the rest I have nothing to do; only with their poetry. But to omit the geographical limitation altogether would have been too bold; the present title sounds more like the tentative suggestion which the book is meant to offer.
Even so, all the English poets are not here: Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden, for example. I can only plead that two hundred pages are better than five hundred, and that to do more than is here done would have meant the five hundred: it would have had to be a full volume with notes and appendices and longer quotations and digressions and defences and explanations all complete. Aristotle on tragedy and De Quincey on power and Coleridge on poetry and everybody on Shakespeare and almost everybody on Keats would have had to come in. To the general critical intelligence of our own times I owe of course a profound debt, poorly as this study may seem to pay any of it; to the critical authority of the past a proper obedience. But on the central question of Troilus I am not conscious of owing any particular debt at all. Something of the possibility I tried to put into verse in my Myth of Shakespeare ; it is here defined in prose.
Of one fact I am a little proud. The suggestions made here are quite unexclusive. Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth may have been moved by any personal cause or aiming at any moral or metaphysical purpose conceivable-it does not matter, I have been concerned with the poetry only as it exists, and with its interrelation. Even the prose statements which the poets themselves made about their poetry are omitted. Criticism has done so much to illuminate the poets, and yet it seems, with a few exceptions, both of the past and the present, still not sufficiently to relate the poets to the poets, to explain poetry by poetry. Yet in the end what other criterion have we? Wordsworth s poetry is likely to explain Shakespeare s poetry much better than we can, because poetry is a thing sui generis . It explains itself by existing. There has been a great deal too much talking of what the poets mean . They also are mortal; they also express themselves badly sometimes; they also sometimes fail to discover quite finally the exact scope of their desire. We can enjoy ourselves talking about them, of course; the multitudinous printed chat of generations lies behind and around us. But criticism -is it being stupid to say that in the end the poets themselves must do that also for us? We know so little unless they tell us; we feel as they direct us; we are disordered and astray unless they govern us. Poetry is a good game-let us take it lightly. But it is also liberty and power -let us take it seriously. Ad maiorem poetarum gloriam -there is but one ascription more worthy than that, and in the tradition of Christendom it was amid a cloud of songs as well as of seraphs that the Divine Word accepted incarnation.
C. W.
CONTENTS
I. A NOTE ON GREAT POETRY
II. THE GROWTH OF A POET S MIND
III. THE CYCLE OF SHAKESPEARE
IV. MILTON
V. WORDSWORTH
VI. THE CRISIS IN LESSER POETS
VII. CONCLUSION
APPENDIX
I
A NOTE ON GREAT POETRY
T HE word poetry is generally used in one of two senses. It either means the whole mass of amusing and delightful stuff written in verse, or it is restricted to those greater lines, stanzas, or poems which are comparatively rare even in the work of the great poets. There is no certain method of deciding on these last, except by personal experience (which is not quite reliable) or by authority-the judgement of sensitive readers over many years. There is no way of discovering how the thing is done, nor exactly how a great line produces its effect. But it is to some extent possible to see what the difference is between the lesser kind of verse and the greater.
Wordsworth in the Prelude (1, 149-57), defines three things as necessary for the writing of poetry. They are (i) the vital soul , (ii) general truths , (iii) external things-Forms, images . With these possessions in himself he feels prepared for his own arduous work . The distinction exists for the reader as well. The third necessity ( aids Of less regard ) is an obvious part of most poetry: it includes metaphors, similes, comparisons; even the story, and the persons in narrative or dramatic verse or the hypothetical speaker, the individual poet, in lyric. These things are needful to build up a poet s praise , and at their most exquisite they play an important part in the whole. But the greatest poetry can exist without them. A rose-red city, half as old as Time is a lovely line. It stops at being that.
General truths - subordinate helpers of the living mind -on the other hand, though more important, are less reliable aids: for they have a way of pretending to be the living mind, the vital soul itself. Some of the poets-Longfellow, Tennyson, Wordsworth himself-appear occasionally to have thought they were writing poetry when they were merely communicating general truths, or what appeared to them to be so. The Excursion , as opposed to the Prelude , gives examples of this; although even the Excursion , if a reader will only accept the conditions it postulates, as he is ready to accept the plot of King Lear , may turn out to be a better poem than is often supposed. Perhaps, however, such a couplet as Hamlet s yields the best example of general truths, which, adequately expressed, delight us almost as much by rational as by poetic strength-

Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
But what then is the vital soul , without which the forms and images and general truths lack something? It is genius ; it is poetry . But that takes us no farther. It cannot be merely the relation of labials and gutturals, or the play of stresses and pauses. These are, in another shape, the forms and images . It cannot be the diction-however exact or unexpected; that is but a general truth. All such things are subordinate helpers of the living mind , which must itself use them for its own purpose. What does that mind do i