A. First must come the difficulty
of making out the plain sense of poetry. The most disturbing
and impressive fact brought out by this experiment is that a large
proportion of average-to-good (and in some cases, certainly, devoted)
readers of poetry frequently and repeatedly fail to understand
it, both as a statement and as an expression. They fail to make
out its prose sense, its plain, overt meaning, as a set of ordinary
intelligible, English sentences, taken quite apart from any further
poetic significance. And equally, they misapprehend its feeling, its
tone, and its intention. They would travesty it in a paraphrase. .
. . [Moreover] it is not confined to one class of readers; not only
those whom we would suspect fall victims. Not is it only the most
abstruse poetry which so betrays us. In fact to set down, for once,
the brutal truth, no immunity is possessed on any occasion, not by
the most reputable scholar, from this or any of these critical dangers.(12)
B. Parallel to, and not unconnected
with, these difficulties of interpreting the meaning are the difficulties
of sensuous apprehension. Words in sequence have a form to
the mind's ear and the mind's tongue and larynx, even when silently
read. They have a movement and may have a rhythm. The gulf is wide
between a reader who naturally and immediately perceives this form
and movement . . . and another reader, who either ignores it or has
to build it up laboriously with finger-counting, table tapping and
the rest; this difference has most far-reaching effects.
C. Next may come those difficulties
that are connected with the place of imagery, principally visual
imagery, in poetic reading. They arise in part form the incurable
fact that we differ immensely in our capacity to visualise, and to
produce imagery of the other senses. Also, the importance of our imagery
as a whole , as well as of some pet particular type of image, in our
mental lives varies surprisingly. Some minds can do nothing and get
nowhere without images; others seem to be able to do everything and
get anywhere, reach any and every state of thought and feeling without
making use of them. Poets on the whole (though by no men as all poets
always) may be suspected of exceptional imaging capacity, and some
readers are constitutionally prone to stress the place of imagery
in reading, to pay great attention to it, and even to judge the value
of the poetry by the images it excites in them. But images are erratic
things; lively images aroused in one mind need have no similarity
to the equally lively images stirred by the same line of poetry in
another, and neither set need have anything to do with any images
which may have existed in the poet’s mind. Here is a troublesome source
of critical deviations.
D. Thirdly, and more obviously,
we have to note the powerful very persuasive influence of mnemonic
irrelevancies. These are the misleading effects of the reader’s
being reminded of some personal scene or adventure, erratic associations,
the interference of emotional reverberations from a past which may
have nothing to do with the poem. Relevance is not an easy notion
to define or to apply, though some instances of irrelevant intrusions
are among the simplest of all accidents to diagnose.
E. More puzzling and more interesting
are the critical traps that surround what may be called stock responses.
These have their opportunity whenever a poem seems to, or does, involve
views and emotions already fully prepared in the reader’s mind, so
that what happens appears to be more of the reader’s doing than the
poet’s. The button is pressed, and then the author’s work is done,
for immediately the record starts playing in quasi- (or total) independence
of the poem which is supposed to be its origin or instrument.
Whenever this lamentable redistribution
of the poet’s and the reader’s share in the labour of poetry occurs,
or is in danger of occurring, we require to be especially on our guard.
Every kind of injustice may be committed as well by those who just
escape as by those who are caught.
F. Sentimentality is a
peril that needs less comment here. It is a question of the due measure
of response. This over-facility in certain emotional directions is
the Scylla whose Charybdis is—
G. Inhibition. This, as
much as Sentimentality, is a positive phenomenon, though less studied
until recent years and somewhat masked under the title of Hardness
of Heart. But neither can well be considered in isolation.
H. Doctrinal adhesions
presents another troublesome problem. Very much poetry—religious poetry
may be instanced—seems to contain or imply views and beliefs, true
or false, about the world. If this be so, what bearing has the truth-value
of the views upon the worth of the poetry? Even if it be not so, if
the beliefs are not really contained or implied, but only seem so
to a non-poetical reading, what should be the bearing of the reader’s
conviction, if any, upon his estimate of the poetry? Has poetry anything
to say; if no, why not, and if so, how? Difficulties at this point
are a fertile source of confusion and erratic judgment.
I. Passing now to a different
order of difficulties, the effects of technical presuppositions
have to be noted. When something has once been done in a certain fashion
we tend to expect similar things to be done in the future in the same
fashion, and are disappointed or do not recognise them if they are
done differently. Conversely, a technique which has shown its ineptitude
for one purpose tends to become discredited for all. Both are cases
of mistaking means for ends. Whenever we attempt to judge poetry from
outside by technical details we are putting means before ends, and—such
is our ignorance of cause and effect in poetry—we shall be lucky if
we do not make even worse blunders. We have to avoid judging pianists
by their hair.
J. Finally, general critical
preconceptions (prior demands made upon poetry as a result of
theories—conscious or unconscious—about its nature and value), intervene
endlessly, as the history of criticism shows only too well, between
the reader and the poem. Like an unlucky dietetic formula they may
cut him off from what his is starving for, even when it is at his
very lips. (13-15)
