BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Well-Meant Urn
The Well Wrought Urn. By Clcanth Brooks. (Dobson. 10s. 6d.)
MR. BROOKS has followed up his Modern Poetry and the Tradition with a book in which he illustrates his earlier suggestion as to how the history of poetry should be re-written. Analysing " The Canonisation," "Corinna's Going a-Maying," "L'Allegro-I1 Pen- seroso," "The Rape of the Lock," Gray's " Elegy," the " Immor- tality" Ode, Keats's "Grecian Urn," "Tears, Idle Tears" and Yeats's "Among School Children," he seeks a common basis for the excellence of all these poems. In both books he rightly contends against two heresies: the first that all judgements of poetry cannot but be subjective (if you can call such sloppy defeatism " heresy "); and the more dangerous doctrine that criticism must be " relative." that is, as though formulated by a contemporary of the poet—a heresy only if carried too far—and he fights admirably for the principle that there is a stable standard. There is, he maintains, a something which all good poems possess in common ; the problem is to find out what it is.
He is obviously prejudiced in favour of the Metaphysicals ; every poem is to be judged by the paradoxical tension it provides. It is no use Mr. Brooks disclaiming this, as he honourably tries to do in a late chapter, telling us that by paradox and irony he doesn't really mean paradox and irony, but that " I gotta use words when I talk to you," and there are no other words available. His dogma wouldn't really matter if he were prepared to kick it away as dis- carded scaffolding once he has built up the idea of the poems he considers, but he insists on making the poem conform to the theory. So he stretches the poor thing on the rack of paradox, and tortures
it till it yields up secrets that it never possessed; though he very often illuminates the poem up to a point, he pules the argument to a further point where obfuscation ensues. Sometimes the simplest things arc either argued about unnecessarily or distorted to fit the theory, and we find ourselves murmuring: 44 explain a thing till all men doubt it, And write about it, goddess, and about it."
In fact, we suspect a new pedantry. This mining for meaning in poets is, as we know, very much the fashion, and it is to be wished that our modern poetic schoolmen would once a year read—yes, Book IV of The Dunciad, of course—but also that conversation between Aesop and Homer so charmingly reported by Fontenelle. When Aesop congratulates Homer on wrapping up so much allegory in his tales, Homer declares that to do such a thing never entered his head, and repudiates the scholiasts' suggestions that his works enclosed the secrets of every knowledge, including mathematics.
Again, Mr. Brooks suffers from the academic vice of wishing to erect a hierarchy, which for him will be on the basis, not of truth, or of experience and expression, but of complexity. Well, that has its virtues. He is further in line with academic thought today in making imagery the clue to criticism ; so it is rather odd that, basing
himself on Dr. I. A. Richards, and the passage in Biographia Lireraria in which Coleridge discourses on the reconciliation of opposites, a fragment which every lecturer in English quotes, he should regard all Professors of English as creatures immeasurably beneath con- tempt and invariable shutters out of the light—a proposition I cannot unreservedly support. It may be that it takes one pedantry to drive out another ; but it must be confessed that Mr Brooks's procedure is remarkably like cannibalism.
It may be, indeed it is, curmudgeonly to gird- at a book which gives so much pleasure and stimulus. In many respects Mr. Brooks does fulfil the critic's purpose in making the poem more enjoyed because better understood. He is sometimes admirable—on the Herrick, for example, allowing for a little naiveté about Frazer. He is good, too, about " The Rape of the Lock," though it may be doubted if his discoveries really are such. Every schoolboy knows that the poem contains double entendres delightfully calculated to bring a blush to the cheek of the Young Person, and Dr. Leavis has already shown that Pope can in certain respects be classed with the Metaphysicals. He makes excellent conversation over the Words- worth " Ode," though he goes oddly agley when discussing " West- minster Bridge," is of the utmost value in revealing the underlying themes of the Yeats, and refreshing in his common-sense insistence that " Beauty is truth . . ." is a dramatic utterance on the part of the urn.
But valuable as some of Mr. Brooks's observatiorts are, he must be firmly combated over his assumption that poetry is to be judged solely by its imagery, its paradoxical content, its complexity. Alone among present-day critics, it seems, Dr. Edith Sitwell insists that music, rhythm, vowel sounds, textures and so forth are an integral part of what a poem " means." Mr. Brooks's scansion of a couple of lines in Wordsworth makes his possession of an ear highly sus- pect, and it is significant that, though so largely based on Coleridge, he never quotes the sentence about " the known effects of metre." Is it not possible that in these " studies in the structure of poetry " he has forced an alien structure on his selected gems, while all the while the common structure of music lay to his hand ? Or again, if he rejects this, might we not find that the something in common which these poems possess is the sense of nostalgia ? A very good case could be made out for this, for in a sense the underlying ethos of all his poems is "Alas that time should pass! " Would this make Mr. Brooks out to be a sentimentalist ? Heaven forbid ! He would
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