My son asked me a few weeks ago, what exactly poetry is? We discussed it for a while, and I mentioned that it is best and easiest, to find poems, and then to answer that question by realising that those poems are examples of poetry. At the time, I was reading Sir Thomas Wyatt and Francois Villon’s collected poems. I said that these, for example, are poetry.
I then found myself rereading Wordworth’s Preface to the 1800 Lyrical Ballads which he and Coleridge published. In the Preface, Wordsworth directly sets out to define what poetry is. Surprisingly, his definition closely matches what I recall TS Eliot said somewhere among the mass of his essays on the subject. Wordsworth says that poetry is distinct from other forms of writing because it has pure feeling or emotion as its content, and that it aims only to give enjoyment; and that in some way it instructs the emotions or instructs and corrects and enlarges the sensibility of the reader.
But I thought about this more, and reflected that I usually don’t give any importance to my feelings, to emotion. These days, it is common to see television programmes in which a reporter for the BBC interviews some successful marathon runner at the end of a race, or somebody who has won a lengthy court case, whose first question asks them how they feel. It’s an idle question with an obvious answer. Stoicism, or the restraint of feelings, is the right attitude toward life, I have usually held. We should not feel anything.
Then, recently, leafing through a book of the late 1950s, one of many written in that time about the almost miraculous value of Eliot’s poetic work, and also about the equally valuable work of WB Yeats, I saw that the way Eliot composed poetry was to write lines expressing emotion. He wrote individual lines, and organised them not according to a rational plan, but according to an emotional plan. He felt his way toward getting them right.
Now, I understand why this poet reduced poetry down to a distillate, an essence – emotion – as a kind of priority. In the early 1900s, when he began writing, the sciences were producing discoveries, the technologists were find their way into the universities; philosophy, and history, had become professions; the novel was in its great period; dramatists were producing plays in prose. So, he felt it was inappropriate to include any narrative, science, history, philosophy, drama, etc., in his poems. But he was not the first to discover that poetry should find and know its place, alongside other apparently stronger forms of expression.
If, that is to say, poetry had ever had other jobs: telling stories, or examining history, or expounding religion, philosophy, or science and technology – that was no longer true, and writing such poems in the 1900s was no longer an appropriate thing to do.
And this was already apparent to Wordsworth, when he set out to explain why he had written ballads about poor and lower middle class people rather than the more standard form of poetry. He claimed that he wanted to extract something pure, the feeling, from mere human situations. And to do so with a form of natural uncultivated language – to arrive at pure poetry.
There are so many questions raised here, that it overwhelms me. I start to think about writing poetry today, and whether there is any point to it; about the tradition of poetry, and whether it still has any existence except as an object of scholarship; about what exactly feelings are; about what actually distinguishes poetry from the other forms of expression or writing.
However, what most puzzles me is, the question about what emotion exactly is, because, strange as it seems, I have never had any interest in my ‘feelings’. As I have said, emotion has always seemed to me to be something to govern, to suppress, for the sake of being efficient and competent at something else.
Which is paradoxical, because while I’m happy to disagree with Eliot and Wordsworth, I suspect that I am missing something. So, I have become fascinated by the notion of feeling, or emotion, and the sensibility which is supposed to give rise to them. And, unconcerned about being too ambitious in this essay, I will also touch on the other matters. Perhaps this essays is no more than a set of wild notes trying to define poetry, which could possibly be worked up into something more expository, at a later date, if what they say still seems important and true. I also have something to say about virtue.
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1. If I asked, what is emotion? and what is pleasure?, the two essential characteristic outcomes which result from reading poetry, I would be doing something a bit more than Wordsworth and Eliot did, in the Lyrical Ballads, or the Harvard lectures from 1932 (On the Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism), where these matters are discussed. For good reason: we all know what emotion and pleasure are, don’t we? And if we need a better explanation, of what emotion and pleasure are, then we should ask the psychologist, or the neurologist, or something of that kind. That is what Eliot might have said, in his day. But those days it seems to me are already over. Those were the days when poetry had its own place among the sciences and arts. Since it no longer has one, since nobody writes or reads it, my attitude, bitter and disappointed, is to consider psychology and the others to have had their day, too. So I go my own way and do it myself.
2. As I shall show, working from notes made recently, I consider ‘feelings’ to be roughly speaking what the ancients and the tradition called ‘virtues’. Now, if my account of what we mean by ‘emotion’ conflicts with the current scientific account, I am not alarmed or worried.
3. I have usually read poetry for educational purposes, for self-instruction. But this has changed over years. How I used to read, and how I do so now, are different things. When I was speaking with my son over the weeks, I had said, that I personally read poetry in order to be instructed, to learn something. To learn about the tradition, our past, our language; and also out of curiosity and admiration. But when I was much younger, I would read poetry in order to gain experiences. I also used to favour works of imagination. For me, the emotion poetry aroused was neither here nor there. And the pleasure was usually stifled and overcome by the more serious demand that I had to read, learn, become cultivated, no matter the cost. Some people will find this shocking, but I consider my life to be a schooling in the things the compulsory and comprehensive education system failed to provide. So, I have always gone out on my own, to learn. And poetry, for vast periods of time, was something I studied and read so that I could be cultivated and have knowledge. Some would say, that what I have been doing is scholarship. But Milton and Sidney, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively, said the same thing: that poetry is educational.
4. The Renaissance men, who were poets and often politicians, soldiers, explorers, statesmen, and so on, considered poetry to be, taking Sidney’s Apologia as an example: personal adornment, honour to the nation, instruction and education, and amusement and delight. It was only later in life that I found any amusement and delight in poetry, I must confess. So, I still don’t look for it much.
5. As a general starting point, ninety years on from Eliot’s 1932 lectures, if we look at the situation today, the world is so vast, and the importance of poetry so little, that you feel overwhelmed by the effort to have to go out and find it. It seems to me as if nobody is writing poetry, and nobody is reading it. I cannot directly explain why I feel like this, but I do know that in recent times when I have gone out looking, I have found what you might call a brand of dreadful politically correct expression and serious disappointment. I mean Benjamin Zephaniah, a British born poet of self-conscious West Indian extraction, and later Lemn Sissay, again British born, and of self-conscious Somalian origin, have been placed at the summit of poetic achievement, even though it is clear that this not solely because their work is any good. The work of these men is not in itself of any value, but they have value for political purposes. They have between them taken up a lot of time on the BBC’s radio stations, because they representatives of ‘poetry’, even though they are actually and above all, representatives of cultural diversity. Everyone knows this. Poetry is also, these days, associated with feminist expressions of recovering from abusive relationships with their menfolk. And, so on.
6. I do not claim that things were any better in the 1980s, when I used to go out looking in the world then. At that time, there was a stripped down version of poetry represented by Craig Raine, for example, who had a trick of writing short stanzas, each with a striking simile. This style or method was called ‘Martian poetry’, because the trick consisted in aligning common objects alongside other common objects in a comic and striking way which only an alien visitor would ever do. Raine is also descended from the Russian author of Dr Zhivago. That Raine had famous antecedents is a form of the nepotism common in our culture. He is not considered a good poet because of his work, I think. In another instance, the Freud family have made a great success of things. Lucien Freud died very famous, although he possessed only limited actual talent. In the 1980s there was also a great deal of poetry of The Troubles, or poetry from Northern Ireland. We could call this type of writing a valve-release. The tension of civil war was interesting, and the job of the ‘poet’ was to write about that tension. Seamus Heaney belonged to this tradition, and the emphasis on violence was also apparent in his friend, Ted Hughes. Meanwhile, Harold Bloom made claims for John Ashberry, calling him the greatest living American poet, and similar claims were made about Geoffrey Hill in England. But it is almost impossible to understand what these men wrote; I am sure that they were able to produce meaningful verses, but they seem to have refused to do so, out of some enormous arrogance. Their highly educated works are a total dead end for poetry. Then there were the working class poets, and so on.
7. If one were to subscribe to the most prestigious poetry journal in Britain, Poetry Review, in 2024, one would not find much pleasure, or even much emotion. I must move on. My point is that poetry seems to have died along with everything else in Britain. The most recent edition of Poetry Review opens with at least four pieces of writing directly commenting on the situation in Israel, and all from one strongly partisan perspective. These works differ in no significant way from television reporting or commentary. Only about a quarter of the writers published in this quarter’s edition were born in Britain; but they are published for the sake of diversity, I have no doubt. The verses in the volume are always offensively untraditional, with unmusical lines, avoidance of rhymes, and avoidance of capitalisation, and particularly an avoidance of any coherent linear meaning. The editorial introduction sometimes refers to ‘the poetry community’, as if poetry were being written by a specialist group of committed activists, writing only for other members of their community. I feel that only those who are part of the community have any interest in reading these poems. It never used to be like that.
8. But this is no surprise, and it seems foolish to have expected anything better. Men of the world would point out to me, out looking for poems and poets in 2024 as I am, that poetry just doesn’t matter, and that it was wrong to have imagined that the situation would be better than it actually is. But such cynical indifference should also extend to everything else which has begun to fall apart in the same period. If we allow poetry to decline and die, those of us who have done this have also, not coincidentally, done the same to the church, the armed forces, the education of the young, heavy industry, exports, the family and social reproduction, the tradition of scientific investigation, exploration, and technological discovery, nationhood and national cohesion in general. They have all gone into decline or ceased to exist already.
9. To go back some years, to how it used to be, or to what the tradition is. Shelley’s essays on poetry, from the around the 1820s, inform us that the poet is ‘the unacknowledged legislator of mankind’. Before a public still reading poetry, he was consciously putting his work forward as an opponent of established religion and social order. Later in the century, Matthew Arnold worked out a system in which art and poetry were a complete substitute or replacement for organised religion, which he perceived to have lost its way. This was followed by a situation in which, at the time when Eliot began writing, art was trying to tear itself away from the role of art-as-religion, or art as legislation on morals; it did so under the slogan ‘art for art’s sake’. I cannot for my own reasons, allow that art or poetry can replace Christianity.
10. By whatever means, criticism, which is what I am doing here, and the poet, must come to terms with this past. Poetry once had a social function in Shelley, and in Arnold and their contemporaries. And there are people still writing and struggling with this tradition. Even if it were only me, the present writer, someone is thinking about it. Prior to Shelley, there was Johnson, Pope, Dryden, Milton, Jonson, Spencer, and so on.
11. I cannot claim that I can revive the past. It is likely that people still read some poetry; I can only imagine they read historical poetry with any pleasure. Poetry does have an educational instructional value, for me at any rate; it does reflect the language of the people as its highest conscious point, and its most refined sensibility; and it is a matter of national honour and survival; it does improve you to read it, particularly old poetry, which has survived as the best. Reading old poetry improves the taste and judgement, if nothing else. But poetry lays claim to actually improving the character, the sensibility, as Wordsworth said. But the tradition and the old poetry loses a great deal, and dies, if no one is doing it in the present day.
12. Poetry’s medium is musical language. It is also a specific work of language. And it does have a social function.
13. We have not yet established what emotion, or feeling, is. As I have said, I have a problem understanding the importance of ‘emotion and feeling’, and sensibility. But this is in part because there is a separate tradition, which neither Eliot nor Wordsworth addressed directly, which is that poetry is also the medium in which imagination is at work. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria lays out this claim, and it is clearly true.
14. Additionally, poetry has to my mind the higher ambition which Heidegger and the German tradition make for it. Heidegger held that poetry was a rival to philosophy in some respect, and that they overlap in the investigation of Being, or life in general. There was some cross fertilisation between Germany and England during the romantic period. It has seemed to me that along with a great deal else, the result of that fertilisation died in Europe and in Britain, with the end of the second world war.
15. For Heidegger, poetry makes a clearing in the darkness of Being. What is meant by ‘the clearing of Being’ is this, it seems to me: an expansion of mind, an expansion of consciousness, a change in the character of a person by an alteration of the sensibility, an act of discovering the world from a new angle. Heidegger and Coleridge found in poetry a means of doing battle with pure rationality, which Heidegger in particular considered an overwhelming disaster. To let feeling or emotion come forth instead. Now, here is where I begin to understand Eliot, when he says that poetry is concerned to provide emotional language.
16. Contemporary poetry is only judged to be any good, once the reader has also already grasped the tradition of poetry. The new must fit into the old, or transform the old. The new poem will find its place among the tradition. A reader develops taste by having become familiar with the tradition.
17. But we also gain taste and judgement from our religion. For, obviously, there is no strict criterion for any good and bad, poor and excellent, outside of a revealed code of value. In one way or another, poetry always went on alongside Christianity and the Church. Whether as a substitute, as a permitted activity which enriched public life, as a rival, or as the work of a society in a state of development. One of the most remarkable things about Shakespeare, is the total absence of any mention of religion. We understand that he was not permitted to mention it in that era on the stage. Either side of his work stand Chaucer and Spencer, the one late medieval and overtly Christian, the other concerned with virtues and values of the church. And afterward, Milton and the Protestants, building a new church, and taking part in that. The poet worked in a field where story telling and the creation of a parallel world was the main point.
18. We cannot fail to mention that this: the poets who came after Milton, who for a century were engaged in an English nationalism during a time of continental wars, and who excelled at criticism and a dry cultivated highly civilised poetry. These classified themselves as Moderns, as against the Ancients, by which they meant the Latin and Greek models which were then being taught in schools. It was the time of civilisation and empire building at home and abroad; the Enlightenment period of consolidation of what had gone before; the end of the medieval period; complete victory of Protestantism. Here feeling did come to the fore as the thing about which poetry had to be written. The cultivation of proper sentiments, the education in virtue and good sense, was the objective which Pope and Johnson set themselves. Lord Byron claimed to admire Pope above all the others, because he understood that virtue and moral right was what poetry should be involved in.
19. And now let me look at emotion, sensibility, with which poetry is concerned. We are suspicious about exactly what feeling is. Feeling is a disposition toward all of existence. That is how I would describe emotion and feeling. Emotion is the primary mode of being alive, of being here, of being engaged in the world, or even of being outside the world and detached from it. Notice how I have made this advance into understanding emotion, because I have associated poetry with the Heideggerian type of investigation into Being? That we are here, with a particular, ill defined, mood or feeling, is the principle way in which we experience life. It is an amorphous being here, but because we always have a determinate way of feeling life, we say that this is an emotion.
20. One can live with a feeling of hope, without knowing precisely why. And that is what hope is: an emotion of positivity, without any sound rational basis. It is a way of facing life. That is an emotional comportment, an emotion. Or, as another example, one can feel sadness about life. It is not often possible to locate the reason for such a sadness. The feeling might not even have a precise cause. It is simply a proper reaction to the state of being alive to feel in despair. The cause of the despair is trivial.
21. We endure with a feeling at all times. The feeling covers up or discloses the whole world to us. The feeling defines what we are at most times. So, with a mood or comportment or disposition of despair, our life is determined. As a result of the mood, we might refuse to act, be unable to think, and so on. In this way, a feeling is the determinative thing for how the world appears, and what it actually is. Now this, I offer, is what poetry should be involved in, in the classic sense of ‘emotion’.
22. I will shortly go on to show what is obvious to some already. Feelings such as ‘hope’ or ‘courage’, or ‘despair’, are not only emotions. They are also virtues and vices. They are the key to religious comportment also.
23. Let us remind ourselves of the theological virtues, as set out by the Fathers. Hope, faith, and love are the theological virtues; and these are also what psychologists would call emotions. In the pre-Christian era, the following were the cardinal virtues: temperance, courage, justice, wisdom. The Golden Rule virtue, which the Greek culture tended to favour, was moderation or temperance.
24. I should point out that temperance or moderation, a Stoic indifference, is generally the only emotion which I have ever favoured, and which explains my indifference to the association of poetry with emotion. There is no need to elaborate at length about what a virtue is, because the thing about emotions and virtues is, they endure and colour everything. A man who hopes, who has hope, sees the good in every event. And likewise, the man who feels despair, or is in despair, sees no value or point in anything. To refine the point and describe exactly what causes despair or hope is to miss the point. The emotion precedes and decides what the world and life will be, and it can’t be pinned down.
25. Let us get ahead a little bit. When Spencer wrote the Fairie Queene, he had in mind to devote each of twelve books to a particular virtue. Each of these virtues was, to his mind, deeply entwined with concern with final things, theological things – with God.
26. And let me say this just once, because it seems so obvious that it doesn’t bear or need repeating: along with almost entirely losing the church, we have also almost entirely forgotten the point of poetry: it is meant to embody and provide us with the virtues, the emotions. Perhaps, without a church and a sound theology, these emotions are doomed, too.
27. I don’t want to overdo it. Without virtue what is left? Apathy, that familiar sense of deadness and emptiness, of pointlessness and meaninglessness which is characteristic of life in the twenty-first century. Which leads to an epidemic of prescription drug use. Which leads to our constant involvement in diversions and stimulations. As Baudelaire had it, apathy and boredom are the predominant feelings of the people without a church.
28. Feelings and virtues determine what people think about the world. They shape the world. For, the world, or more accurately, existence, has no character of its own. Existence is rather shapeless, because we are free and at liberty. So, we have to make existence into a world. We project a world. Now, a man in despair, or a man who lacks courage, will make a certain type of world.
29. You may see how amorphous and subject to emotion the world actually is, by examining the confusion of political opinions, accounts, histories, and theories. Those who are convinced that there is a conspiracy of what they call ‘The Left’, or ‘the Liberals’ or whatever, all differ and disagree about what exactly is the cause which the Left are pursuing. And likewise, those who claim that ‘the Right’ are on the rise, find it impossible to say who the Right are for definite, or what they believe in. What motivates the judgements people make about politics, is something more like confusion and anger, and the feeling of frustration. The mind and reason are simply nowhere near strong enough to prove much about the world, or to understand it. So, emotions decide everything.
30. The predominant feeling or comportment of poetry in Pope and Byron, who are the most cultivated of the poets, tends toward amusement and distant observation in a cynical mode. It is poetry in which the deeper feelings are hidden, for the sake of good taste. Their poetry is, as it were, allied with the church and eternal truth, and it takes care to comment in a comical and bitter way on the stupid activity of actual humans. By doing so, Pope and Byron encourage the sentiment or the emotional distance which lead to moderation or temperance.
31. Where societies are very civilised, and orderly, their poetry can tend toward sentimentality; it is poetry made for its own sake; in such eras, feelings are aroused for the sake of stimulation. This is what we should call bad poetry.
32. But the primary virtues embodied and taught in a traditional English poetry, I would suggest, are these: Faith, love, hope; courage, wisdom, justice, temperance.
33. Heidegger concluded or left unfinished his great and only systematic work, by locating the very centre of all existence in this: a man facing death resolutely. This feeling might be termed courage. To interpret what that great work means, he said that in a purely philosophical, rational discussion of what life is, and what it is about, wisdom and courage are the very heart of all Being. We must interpret Being as something consisting of virtue.
34. In his Poetics, Aristotle said that the work of poetry has this purpose, where tragic drama is concerned, at any rate: to purge the audience of harmful emotions. By harmful emotions he specifically listed fear and (self)-pity. While this shows that poetry should be working with emotions and working at the heart of man, it also shows that there is a distinction to be made between work which arouses an emotion so as to purge it, and work which simply expresses an emotion. Poetry is not proper if it merely gives vent to an emotion; it has also, or has rather, to arouse that emotion.
35. The following questions arises. Do we read poetry so as to arouse emotions and to keep them, or does poetry actually arose them and then purge them out? What is left of a man who has lost all of his emotions in this way? I do not know the answer. However, the highest point for the Christian mystic is said to be apatheia, or to have controlled his passions entirely.
36. The poet should be one of the most privileged or gifted people of the age. Now, this only applies to him in so far as he is a writer. He does not need to be a perfect human being. But the use of language should be superlative, the highest possible refinement, the greatest sensibility, in the use of our common language.
37. So, I return to the current state of things in our time. We live in a time of the decline of national independence, the decline of the church and belief in God. We naturally mistrust the virtues and the state of virtue.
38. And this is what we mean when we talk about the soul. Although the theologians and Church Fathers talk about the soul, it long ago fell out of fashion to refer to it ourselves. But what the word ‘soul’ means is, those properties which a man has acquired by education and experience, which predispose him to do good and be virtuous. They are not his mind exactly; the soul is deeper than the mind, and is a kind of reservoir of steady virtue acquired by learning. It is the predisposition. His emotional ground. A man who is in despair has lost is soul. He is still alive, he still has a mind, but he is as it were paralysed by fear and dread. His soul is the eternal part, which precedes life in the world. It is his being-here, the opening of consciousness itself.
39. This is the topic of true poetry, what we have discussed here. Mood, emotion, disposition, virtue, the education of the soul. Where men live in a feeling of panic, or constant dread and anxiety, detached so much from themselves that they feel hardly anything – even at the moment when the world is on the edge of nuclear annihilation, as it is now – in such an age there will be no poetry, or, the absence of poetry is a symptom along with others. In technological societies, there is no intrinsic value in anything. Rather, things have a functional value, and a cost, a relative value compared to other things. That is where we have landed.
40. If anyone were in any doubt, if asked whether I think poetry should be involved in setting out the ground for virtues, and teaching them somehow, I would answer. I understand that some poetry appears to teach the opposite, to teach vice, or whatever, but this is not so. People will say that Baudelaire or Villon, or some works of Bryon teach vice. It is not so.
41. When we say ‘teach’, that does not mean to say that poetry should be didactic. It is not clear to me that you can teach virtue in a prescriptive way. For instance, it is unclear whether the poetry of Homer (about whom a little bit a bit further on) taught the Greeks how to be virtuous, or whether he merely described their virtuous way of life, with its rules of conduct. It is even or especially a question, whether by showing vice – which is often the case in Homer – the result is that the reader learns virtue. But the general idea I have in mind is, that if a man who is virtuous is able to command the language in the proper way, the poetry will inspire in him educative virtue.
42. You could also ask, how it is that any teaching takes place at all, at any time, anywhere? Learning is a paradoxical process of the student finding it in himself to activate his intellect. Socrates resolved this paradox by saying that all true learning is actually remembering things learned in a previous life in eternity.
43. Prayer and meditation also bring about the operation of the virtues. I do conjecture that poetry has a similar task to the highest forms of prayer. In its work of imagination, and leading the mind outside of reality into a complete and harmonious world (which is what poetry aspires to be), it goes alongside the transcendental prayer of the ascetic. And this would be the purpose of poetry in its form as imaginative work of beauty.
44. The poetry should be harmonious. It should be enjoyable, and give pleasure. Wordsworth claims that words in meter are more pleasing than those with the usual unexpected and completely unpredictable stresses, period lengths, and jarring abutting syllables which is typical of prose and normal speech. The meter can be varied, to the extent that it seems to be free, Eliot says. But free verse is, when done properly, if anything, harder to write and to achieve than poetry in standard meters. Free verse, which I myself do not like to use, means that the writer has to work out new combinations, types, and numbers of feet, and that he has to trust to his own ear, much more than the one who uses the traditional forms. The aim of poetry must be harmony, or else the pleasure is lost. This can easily be seen from any recent edition of Poetry Review, where in every one of the pieces of verse, the lines are simply bad prose chopped up at more or less random point; and where like modern ‘classical music’, we fully expect that the orchestra will make a painful noise on the ear. To be generous to it, most contemporary verse looks like a set of notes waiting to be given some measure, and to be turned into a poem. For successful free verse, we can look at Walt Whitman, for example, whose work could not with any profit have been done in a confined verse form. Most of DH Lawrence’s work, in broad imitation of Whitman, is an example of how the same thing can fail.
45. As everyone knows, most Renaissance poetry is love poetry. The Italians were the first to use a modern, vulgar European language, and they invented the form of the love sonnet and the associated ballads for use in modern Italian. Now, love is a virtue and an emotion. The purpose of the poetry, as Dante said, was broadly theological. Indeed, it is chivalric love: a Christian type of approach to love. (Note: It is not strictly correct that the Italians were first, since they were following the poets of the Langue d’oc and oeil, of southern France.)
46. The emotion we call ‘love’ is the highest virtue, for the following reason, to be brief. At its deepest level, existence in itself is an emotional comportment toward the world, which is founded in emotion. And this is natural where the creator is himself said to have a fatherly relation of love to his creation. Emotion is the foundation of the world. It is Being itself. The poetry of the Italians and the troubadours is effectively an investigation in to reality. Their poetry is meant to teach or embody the proper type of love which the creator favours and approves of.
47. A poem is about making the world appear in a certain light. Ideally, a true poem or a set of poems by the same author, sets out a common vision of what reality is. He creates unreal things with which to experience and feel, so that the reader of the poem does not need to alter actual life in order to experience these things himself. He is safe, experimenting, as it were, in mind only.
48. As we have already said, reality is malleable, and subject to freedom of choice. Reality’s nature evades us. So our disposition, our emotion, our pre-existing mood or orientation of the soul determines how the world will appear. Not to say, that events are in the control of the human subject. But a man does open up and perceive or make himself conscious of the world, and he does things in it over time, things which depend on his disposition and his mood. And what he does in turn brings about the things which will happen to him over time. For instance, if he chooses to become rich and wealthy in money, and succeeds, then he will fully deserve the evil fate which awaits some men of that kind, and will not be able to blame ‘life’ or anyone else, when they find themselves with money and nothing else. But I am being flippant.
49. Respecting virtue, disposition, feeling, and the ancient Homeric world, where poetry had more status and value, Alisdair MacIntyre, the moral philosopher, devotes large parts of his great work, ‘After Virtue’, to the Homeric poems, and the Homeric society. The poem expresses the epic era Greek society code of conduct. Emotion, poetry, virtue, and social behaviour and reality, all come together in a primitive society. And the imaginative distance of the poetry allows the poet and reader to understand their society, while those who are taking part in it would not otherwise understand it. Which is to say many things, I know. Perhaps we can draw this out: that poetry teaches and explains the heroic virtues.
50. I have some notes to append, as a conclusion. When Eliot in the introduction to that 1932 sequence of lectures at Harvard, describes poetry loosely, he says that it: “poetry represents [the people’s speech] at its highest point of consciousness, its greatest power and its most delicate sensibility”. I draw attention to this for its implicit nationalism. Eliot was convinced that the nation, the class system, rising by virtue of merit, and Christian belief and the church, were all of them essential. Every English poet has believed this, or, has lived in a system where this system of church, class, merit, nation, has prevailed. I do not think poetry would survive without it.
51. The people and the poet have to have something orderly to be conscious of, and to be sensitive to. When England or Great Britain is under such pressure to mix with large foreign states and large foreign populations, as it is today, it is no wonder that there is so much trouble in every area of our traditional poetry.
52. I have spoken of ‘virtue’. It is worth remembering that virtue is from the Latin and Italian, meaning power, energy, strength and skill.
53. Where there is no religious belief, there is no possibility of virtue. Doing or feeling right becomes a pointless activity for an atheist. Or, where the atheist aspires to do right, he has no means of choosing correctly. Besides which, from my perspective as a Christian, the mere act of unbelief is itself a failure of the virtue of faith, and decline and wrong-doing is inevitable. Faith simply is an essential virtue, so to speak.
54. The combination of feeling, insight, imagination, linguistic command, harmony, sensitivity, intense feeling, and power of creation – which poetry demands of the one writing it, is vanishingly rare, even in good times.
55. The world, consisting of the men who run it and the men who suffer in it, is simply too complex, to large and mobile and free, for it ever to be understood by any of those taking part in it, except in a general way, an emotional way. Then it can be seen as a whole with the gut instinct, and that is how we do approach it in general. A poem is able to present discrete parts of it, in detail, while offering full complete understanding, by making an imaginary, purely linguistic ‘poem’ to be laid out over it, or outside it; it should also improve the character of the soul, and provide some encouragement to the development of sensitive emotional comportment, development of virtue in the soul of the reader.