The Neoclassic Dilemma
The Burden of the Past & The English Poet | Pt. II
In Walter Jackson Bate’s second lecture, “The Neoclassic Dilemma,” he talks of the 18th-century artist or poet feeling like a “late comer” on the world stage.
“Whatever else can be said of the spate of critical writing that suddenly begins in the middle of the eighteenth century in England, we can describe it as an attempt, however confused at first, to reground the entire thinking about poetry in the light of one overwhelming fact: the obviously superior originality, and the at least apparently greater immediacy and universality of subject and appeal, of the poetry of earlier periods.”
So it is to the great credit of the 18th-century neoclassic project that, in light of a new and burdensome self-consciousness, it not only produced its own considerable achievements but educated and brought to maturity figures often associated with the 19th century—Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge.
While the neoclassic premises freed the poet from his immediate predecessor, there was the accompanying burden of those same standards being applied to the living writer’s written and unwritten work. One answer to this dilemma was a return to the role of the poet as teacher. “Didactic” was not yet a dirty word. Poetry was then still public in a sense that is hard for us to grasp, and everyone from the most exacting mind to the reasonably intelligent found pleasure and mental “profit” in verse, even if there was a shortage of epic themes. Poetry again aligned itself with the classical ideal of perfected utterance, “the best possible way of saying anything, addressed to a wide audience.” This is what Alexander Pope, an exemplar of neoclassical success, referred to when he wrote in “An Essay on Criticism” that
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d, Something, whose truth convinc’d at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind.
Pope, reflecting on the advice given to him by his mentor William Walsh, said that:
Mr. Walsh…used to tell me that there was one way left of excelling; for though we had several great poets, we never had any one great poet that was correct; and he desired me to make that my study and aim.”
The poet, conscious of his historical uniqueness, could rightly respond to anyone pining for a return to Homer and the ancient world that they lived in a categorically different society, and thus different demands were to be made on the poet. In Thomas Blackwell’s Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer he wrote that the “very nerve of the Epic Strain” is the “Marvelous and Wonderful…But what marvelous things happen in a well-ordered State?”
So poets adapted; as part of that adaptation they leaned on refinement, or being “correct,” but, as Bate notes, with “social and individual progress, at least as a hope.” The same call to adapt came in early 20th-century poetry, except whereas the 18th-century practitioners first considered what was most desirable for their age, their descendants two centuries later were content to simply place a dark mirror up to their darkening age, as we saw in Eliot’s Wasteland.
For all their good sense, the 18th-century neoclassic crew couldn’t shake the sense of fighting shy of grandeur for the sake of propriety, “as though it were something approaching mortal sin.”
“Where indeed were the Virgils or where was even the promise of one?” asked Bate in lieu of his 18th-century subjects. “The thought was to cross more than one mind that the burning of the Alexandrian library had its advantages…”
Their critics faced up to these difficulties admirably.
John Brown’s deliciously 18th-century book, titled “Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions of Poetry and Music” (1763) surveyed the increasing specialism of the arts. A more than worthwhile read in its own right, Bate provides a helpful summary:
Brown begins with a comprehensive survey of primitive and semi-primitive life. In every case, the arts, especially poetry, are an intrinsic part of the tribal or national life and acquire a high prestige because of this. Poetry, song, and dance are united not only with each other but with governmental legislation and the priesthood. The close interconnection of laws, oracles, poetry, music, and public ceremony provides the fertile soil from which, in a still more advanced society, the greater forms of poetry rapidly and firmly emerge—epic, building on “a kind of fabulous history,” and other major forms developing afterwards. But, as the branches from the trunk of a tree continue to divide further into progressively smaller branches, the specialism of genres begins, ending finally in the short occasional poem, didactic verse, or satire. Attempts to overcome the situation are inevitably artificial. Opera, for example in its hope to reunite poetry and music, is being developed now long after a time when “the general state of manners in Europe” would “naturally produce it.
This analysis was coupled with what was widely accepted within the general study of language— that metaphor and poetic suggestiveness general decrease as a language becomes more exact and denotative through the proliferation of more analytic writing.
Still others pointed to the increase in critical writing as responsible for generalized timidity among writers. “Whatever its value in other ways,” said Bate, “it could certainly be expected to make life more difficult for the artist.” It has been lamented ad nauseam that today seemingly one of the primary aspects of modern literature is its supine susceptibility to becoming the subject of academic study. But as Bate notes, for all the increase in criticism “one of the subjects of least concern to this vast critical output is what most encourages or permits creative fluency” and that this is in large part because critics “were not eager to argue against the basis of what they themselves spent their own time doing.”
So in the face of an increasing specialization, a growing critical apparatus, and a deepening consciousness of the great models of the past, how does a poet proceed? To tell someone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps in such a situation smacks of naivety or cruelty. And yet, any specific answers, which the 18th-century made serious efforts to provide, can quickly give rise to complaints of suffocation.
We’ll pick up this series with Bate’s third lecture, “The Eighteenth-Century Reconsideration,” and continue our examination of the 18th century’s Jacob-like wrestling with the classical angel, the classical ideal, and attempt to secure its blessing.