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Table of Contents

The four corners of this book lie at the following points (i) the use of the word Reason by Wordsworth in the Prelude; (ii) the abandonment of the intellect by Keats in the Nightingale and the Urn; (iii) the emphasis laid on Reason by Milton in Paradise Lost; (iv) the schism in Reason studied by Shakespeare in the tragedies. Add to these the four middle points of (i) the definition of Beauty by Marlowe in Tamburlaine; (ii) the imagination of it by Keats in the same two odes; (iii) the identification of it with Reason in Paradise Lost; (iv) the humanization of it in the women of Troilus and Othello and the later plays; and the ground plan will be sufficiently marked. The studies are meant as literary, and not as either philosophical or aesthetic criticism. They do not attempt to consider what the poets ought to do, only what they have done, and that from the special point of view of their explicit use of those two words, or of their implicit attention to them.

The book is therefore but an exploration of the content of certain places of poetry, in an order suggested by the relative richness of that content. There are obviously many other places that might be considered, and the present way is open to the objection that it has been chosen to fit a predetermined pattern. Patterns are the bane, as they are the necessity, of criticism as of life; they can be corrected only by destruction, and no doubt this pattern will soon enough be destroyed. But their creation and destruction is our only method; and I am not conscious of having anywhere dishonestly forced an interpretation or ingeniously sought for correspondences. At least this pattern does not go outside the verse; it can therefore be considered and (if desirable) denied by any reader of the verse without expert biographical, historical, or philosophical knowledge.

After a small preliminary discussion the order of the chapters moves from the definitions of Wordsworth and Marlowe through the arguments of Pope, the allegories of Spenser, and the contemplation of Keats, to the division of reason in Shakespeare. The greater achievements of Milton and the later Shakespeare suggest two hemispheres of imagination, and it is with the cartography of those two hemispheres, one inhabited by Reason, the other by Unreason, that the later chapters are concerned. That definition is theirs on their own showing; it is Paradise Lost which pretends to deal with Reason, and Lear which pretends to deal with Unreason. Even the strongest opposition to the present pattern might admit so much.

The relation between poetic experience and actual experience, which has divided some critics, has been no more than touched on. That relation is of high importance, yet it is obscure. We must not make poetry serve our morals, yet we must not consider it independent of our morals. It is not a spiritual guide, yet it possesses a reality which continually persuades us to repose upon it even in practical things of every day. We have only to enjoy it, but only in proportion as we enjoy it with our whole being can it be said of it that no man shall take its joy from us. But that discussion is beyond the purpose of the present book.

C.W.