the study of poetry essay

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English literature essays, matthew arnold as a literary critic.

by S. N. Radhika Lakshmi

Introduction: Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), the Victorian poet and critic, was 'the first modern critic' [1], and could be called 'the critic's critic', being a champion not only of great poetry, but of literary criticism itself. The purpose of literary criticism, in his view, was 'to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas', and he has influenced a whole school of critics including new critics such as T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and Allen Tate. He was the founder of the sociological school of criticism, and through his touchstone method introduced scientific objectivity to critical evaluation by providing comparison and analysis as the two primary tools of criticism. Arnold's evaluations of the Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats are landmarks in descriptive criticism, and as a poet-critic he occupies an eminent position in the rich galaxy of poet-critics of English literature.

T. S. Eliot praised Arnold's objective approach to critical evaluation, particularly his tools of comparison and analysis, and Allen Tate in his essay Tension in Poetry imitates Arnold's touchstone method to discover 'tension', or the proper balance between connotation and denotation, in poetry. These new critics have come a long way from the Romantic approach to poetry, and this change in attitude could be attributed to Arnold, who comes midway between the two schools.

The social role of poetry and criticism

To Arnold a critic is a social benefactor. In his view the creative artist, no matter how much of a genius, would cut a sorry figure without the critic to come to his aid. Before Arnold a literary critic cared only for the beauties and defects of works of art, but Arnold the critic chose to be the educator and guardian of public opinion and propagator of the best ideas. Cultural and critical values seem to be synonymous for Arnold. Scott James, comparing him to Aristotle, says that where Aristotle analyses the work of art, Arnold analyses the role of the critic. The one gives us the principles which govern the making of a poem, the other the principles by which the best poems should be selected and made known. Aristotle's critic owes allegiance to the artist, but Arnold's critic has a duty to society. To Arnold poetry itself was the criticism of life: 'The criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty', and in his seminal essay The Study of Poetry' 1888) he says that poetry alone can be our sustenance and stay in an era where religious beliefs are fast losing their hold. He claims that poetry is superior to philosophy, science, and religion. Religion attaches its emotion to supposed facts, and the supposed facts are failing it, but poetry attaches its emotion to ideas and ideas are infallible. And science, in his view is incomplete without poetry. He endorses Wordsworth's view that 'poetry is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science', adding 'What is a countenance without its expression?' and calls poetry 'the breath and finer spirit of knowledge'.

As a critic Arnold is essentially a moralist, and has very definite ideas about what poetry should and should not be. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas, he says, is a poetry of revolt against life, and a poetry of indifference to moral ideas is a poetry of indifference to life. Arnold even censored his own collection on moral grounds. He omitted the poem Empedocles on Etna from his volume of 1853, whereas he had included it in his collection of 1852. The reason he advances, in the Preface to his Poems of 1853 is not that the poem is too subjective, with its Hamlet-like introspection, or that it was a deviation from his classical ideals, but that the poem is too depressing in its subject matter, and would leave the reader hopeless and crushed. There is nothing in it in the way of hope or optimism, and such a poem could prove to be neither instructive nor of any delight to the reader. Aristotle says that poetry is superior to History since it bears the stamp of high seriousness and truth. If truth and seriousness are wanting in the subject matter of a poem, so will the true poetic stamp of diction and movement be found wanting in its style and manner. Hence the two, the nobility of subject matter, and the superiority of style and manner, are proportional and cannot occur independently. Arnold took up Aristotle's view, asserting that true greatness in poetry is given by the truth and seriousness of its subject matter, and by the high diction and movement in its style and manner, and although indebted to Joshua Reynolds for the expression 'grand style', Arnold gave it a new meaning when he used it in his lecture On Translating Homer (1861):

According to Arnold, Homer is the best model of a simple grand style, while Milton is the best model of severe grand style. Dante, however, is an example of both. Even Chaucer, in Arnold's view, in spite of his virtues such as benignity, largeness, and spontaneity, lacks seriousness. Burns too lacks sufficient seriousness, because he was hypocritical in that while he adopted a moral stance in some of his poems, in his private life he flouted morality.

Return to Classical values

Arnold believed that a modern writer should be aware that contemporary literature is built on the foundations of the past, and should contribute to the future by continuing a firm tradition. Quoting Goethe and Niebuhr in support of his view, he asserts that his age suffers from spiritual weakness because it thrives on self-interest and scientific materialism, and therefore cannot provide noble characters such as those found in Classical literature. He urged modern poets to look to the ancients and their great characters and themes for guidance and inspiration. Classical literature, in his view, possess pathos, moral profundity and noble simplicity, while modern themes, arising from an age of spiritual weakness, are suitable for only comic and lighter kinds of poetry, and don't possess the loftiness to support epic or heroic poetry. Arnold turns his back on the prevailing Romantic view of poetry and seeks to revive the Classical values of objectivity, urbanity, and architectonics. He denounces the Romantics for ignoring the Classical writers for the sake of novelty, and for their allusive (Arnold uses the word 'suggestive') writing which defies easy comprehension.

Preface to Poems of 1853

In the preface to his Poems (1853) Arnold asserts the importance of architectonics; ('that power of execution, which creates, forms, and constitutes') in poetry - the necessity of achieving unity by subordinating the parts to the whole, and the expression of ideas to the depiction of human action, and condemns poems which exist for the sake of single lines or passages, stray metaphors, images, and fancy expressions. Scattered images and happy turns of phrase, in his view, can only provide partial effects, and not contribute to unity. He also, continuing his anti-Romantic theme, urges, modern poets to shun allusiveness and not fall into the temptation of subjectivity. He says that even the imitation of Shakespeare is risky for a young writer, who should imitate only his excellences, and avoid his attractive accessories, tricks of style, such as quibble, conceit, circumlocution and allusiveness, which will lead him astray. Arnold commends Shakespeare's use of great plots from the past. He had what Goethe called the architectonic quality, that is his expression was matched to the action (or the subject). But at the same time Arnold quotes Hallam to show that Shakespeare's style was complex even where the press of action demanded simplicity and directness, and hence his style could not be taken as a model by young writers. Elsewhere he says that Shakespeare's 'expression tends to become a little sensuous and simple, too much intellectualised'. Shakespeare's excellences are 1)The architectonic quality of his style; the harmony between action and expression. 2) His reliance on the ancients for his themes. 3) Accurate construction of action. 4) His strong conception of action and accurate portrayal of his subject matter. 5) His intense feeling for the subjects he dramatises. His attractive accessories (or tricks of style) which a young writer should handle carefully are 1) His fondness for quibble, fancy, conceit. 2) His excessive use of imagery. 3) Circumlocution, even where the press of action demands directness. 4) His lack of simplicity (according to Hallam and Guizot). 5) His allusiveness. As an example of the danger of imitating Shakespeare he gives Keats's imitation of Shakespeare in his Isabella or the Pot of Basil . Keats uses felicitous phrases and single happy turns of phrase, yet the action is handled vaguely and so the poem does not have unity. By way of contrast, he says the Italian writer Boccaccio handled the same theme successfully in his Decameron , because he rightly subordinated expression to action. Hence Boccaccio's poem is a poetic success where Keats's is a failure. Arnold also wants the modern writer to take models from the past because they depict human actions which touch on 'the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time'. Characters such as Agamemnon, Dido, Aeneas, Orestes, Merope, Alcmeon, and Clytemnestra, leave a permanent impression on our minds. Compare 'The Iliad' or 'The Aeneid' with 'The Childe Harold' or 'The Excursion' and you see the difference. A modern writer might complain that ancient subjects pose problems with regard to ancient culture, customs, manners, dress and so on which are not familiar to contemporary readers. But Arnold is of the view that a writer should not concern himself with the externals, but with the 'inward man'. The inward man is the same irrespective of clime or time.

The Function of Criticism

It is in his The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864) that Arnold says that criticism should be a 'dissemination of ideas, a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world'. He says that when evaluating a work the aim is 'to see the object as in itself it really is'. Psychological, historical and sociological background are irrelevant, and to dwell on such aspects is mere dilettantism. This stance was very influential with later critics. Arnold also believed that in his quest for the best a critic should not confine himself to the literature of his own country, but should draw substantially on foreign literature and ideas, because the propagation of ideas should be an objective endeavour.

The Study of Poetry

In The Study of Poetry , (1888) which opens his Essays in Criticism: Second series , in support of his plea for nobility in poetry, Arnold recalls Sainte-Beuve's reply to Napoleon, when latter said that charlatanism is found in everything. Sainte-Beuve replied that charlatanism might be found everywhere else, but not in the field of poetry, because in poetry the distinction between sound and unsound, or only half-sound, truth and untruth, or only half-truth, between the excellent and the inferior, is of paramount importance. For Arnold there is no place for charlatanism in poetry. To him poetry is the criticism of life, governed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. It is in the criticism of life that the spirit of our race will find its stay and consolation. The extent to which the spirit of mankind finds its stay and consolation is proportional to the power of a poem's criticism of life, and the power of the criticism of life is in direct proportion to the extent to which the poem is genuine and free from charlatanism. In The Study of Poetry he also cautions the critic that in forming a genuine and disinterested estimate of the poet under consideration he should not be influenced by historical or personal judgements, historical judgements being fallacious because we regard ancient poets with excessive veneration, and personal judgements being fallacious when we are biased towards a contemporary poet. If a poet is a 'dubious classic, let us sift him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him. But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best . . . enjoy his work'. As examples of erroneous judgements he says that the 17th century court tragedies of the French were spoken of with exaggerated praise, until Pellisson reproached them for want of the true poetic stamp, and another critic, Charles d' Héricault, said that 17th century French poetry had received undue and undeserving veneration. Arnold says the critics seem to substitute 'a halo for physiognomy and a statue in the place where there was once a man. They give us a human personage no larger than God seated amidst his perfect work, like Jupiter on Olympus.' He also condemns the French critic Vitet, who had eloquent words of praise for the epic poem Chanson de Roland by Turoldus, (which was sung by a jester, Taillefer, in William the Conqueror's army), saying that it was superior to Homer's Iliad . Arnold's view is that this poem can never be compared to Homer's work, and that we only have to compare the description of dying Roland to Helen's words about her wounded brothers Pollux and Castor and its inferiority will be clearly revealed.

The Study of Poetry: a shift in position - the touchstone method

Arnold's criticism of Vitet above illustrates his 'touchstone method'; his theory that in order to judge a poet's work properly, a critic should compare it to passages taken from works of great masters of poetry, and that these passages should be applied as touchstones to other poetry. Even a single line or selected quotation will serve the purpose. From this we see that he has shifted his position from that expressed in the preface to his Poems of 1853. In The Study of Poetry he no longer uses the acid test of action and architectonics. He became an advocate of 'touchstones'. 'Short passages even single lines,' he said, 'will serve our turn quite sufficiently'. Some of Arnold's touchstone passages are: Helen's words about her wounded brother, Zeus addressing the horses of Peleus, suppliant Achilles' words to Priam, and from Dante; Ugolino's brave words, and Beatrice's loving words to Virgil. From non-Classical writers he selects from Henry IV Part II (III, i), Henry's expostulation with sleep - 'Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast . . . '. From Hamlet (V, ii) 'Absent thee from felicity awhile . . . '. From Milton's Paradise Lost Book 1, 'Care sat on his faded cheek . . .', and 'What is else not to be overcome . . . '

The Study of Poetry: on Chaucer

The French Romance poetry of the 13th century langue d'oc and langue d'oil was extremely popular in Europe and Italy, but soon lost its popularity and now it is important only in terms of historical study. But Chaucer, who was nourished by the romance poetry of the French, and influenced by the Italian Royal rhyme stanza, still holds enduring fascination. There is an excellence of style and subject in his poetry, which is the quality the French poetry lacks. Dryden says of Chaucer's Prologue 'Here is God's plenty!' and that 'he is a perpetual fountain of good sense'. There is largeness, benignity, freedom and spontaneity in Chaucer's writings. 'He is the well of English undefiled'. He has divine fluidity of movement, divine liquidness of diction. He has created an epoch and founded a tradition. Some say that the fluidity of Chaucer's verse is due to licence in the use of the language, a liberty which Burns enjoyed much later. But Arnold says that the excellence of Chaucer's poetry is due to his sheer poetic talent. This liberty in the use of language was enjoyed by many poets, but we do not find the same kind of fluidity in others. Only in Shakespeare and Keats do we find the same kind of fluidity, though they wrote without the same liberty in the use of language. Arnold praises Chaucer's excellent style and manner, but says that Chaucer cannot be called a classic since, unlike Homer, Virgil and Shakespeare, his poetry does not have the high poetic seriousness which Aristotle regards as a mark of its superiority over the other arts.

The Study of Poetry: on the age of Dryden and Pope

The age of Dryden is regarded as superior to that of the others for 'sweetness of poetry'. Arnold asks whether Dryden and Pope, poets of great merit, are truly the poetical classics of the 18th century. He says Dryden's post-script to the readers in his translation of The Aeneid reveals the fact that in prose writing he is even better than Milton and Chapman. Just as the laxity in religious matters during the Restoration period was a direct outcome of the strict discipline of the Puritans, in the same way in order to control the dangerous sway of imagination found in the poetry of the Metaphysicals, to counteract 'the dangerous prevalence of imagination', the poets of the 18th century introduced certain regulations. The restrictions that were imposed on the poets were uniformity, regularity, precision, and balance. These restrictions curbed the growth of poetry, and encouraged the growth of prose. Hence we can regard Dryden as the glorious founder, and Pope as the splendid high priest, of the age of prose and reason, our indispensable 18th century. Their poetry was that of the builders of an age of prose and reason. Arnold says that Pope and Dryden are not poet classics, but the 'prose classics' of the 18th century. As for poetry, he considers Gray to be the only classic of the 18th century. Gray constantly studied and enjoyed Greek poetry and thus inherited their poetic point of view and their application of poetry to life. But he is the 'scantiest, frailest classic' since his output was small.

The Study of Poetry: on Burns

Although Burns lived close to the 19th century his poetry breathes the spirit of 18th Century life. Burns is most at home in his native language. His poems deal with Scottish dress, Scottish manner, and Scottish religion. This Scottish world is not a beautiful one, and it is an advantage if a poet deals with a beautiful world. But Burns shines whenever he triumphs over his sordid, repulsive and dull world with his poetry. Perhaps we find the true Burns only in his bacchanalian poetry, though occasionally his bacchanalian attitude was affected. For example in his Holy Fair , the lines 'Leeze me on drink! it gies us mair/ Than either school or college', may represent the bacchanalian attitude, but they are not truly bacchanalian in spirit. There is something insincere about it, smacking of bravado. When Burns moralises in some of his poems it also sounds insincere, coming from a man who disregarded morality in actual life. And sometimes his pathos is intolerable, as in Auld Lang Syne . We see the real Burns (wherein he is unsurpassable) in lines such as, 'To make a happy fire-side clime/ to weans and wife/ That's the true pathos and sublime/ Of human life' ( Ae Fond Kiss ). Here we see the genius of Burns. But, like Chaucer, Burns lacks high poetic seriousness, though his poems have poetic truth in diction and movement. Sometimes his poems are profound and heart-rending, such as in the lines, 'Had we never loved sae kindly/ had we never loved sae blindly/ never met or never parted/ we had ne'er been broken-hearted'. Also like Chaucer, Burns possesses largeness, benignity, freedom and spontaneity. But instead of Chaucer's fluidity, we find in Burns a springing bounding energy. Chaucer's benignity deepens in Burns into a sense of sympathy for both human as well as non-human things, but Chaucer's world is richer and fairer than that of Burns. Sometimes Burns's poetic genius is unmatched by anyone. He is even better than Goethe at times and he is unrivalled by anyone except Shakespeare. He has written excellent poems such as Tam O'Shanter, Whistle and I'll come to you my Lad, and Auld Lang Syne . When we compare Shelley's 'Pinnacled dim in the of intense inane' ( Prometheus Unbound III, iv) with Burns's, 'They flatter, she says, to deceive me' ( Tam Glen ), the latter is salutary.

Arnold on Shakespeare

Praising Shakespeare, Arnold says 'In England there needs a miracle of genius like Shakespeare's to produce a balance of mind'. This is not bardolatory, but praise tempered by a critical sense. In a letter he writes. 'I keep saying Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is'. In his sonnet On Shakespeare he says; 'Others abide our question. Thou are free./ We ask and ask - Thou smilest and art still,/ Out-topping knowledge'.

Arnold's limitations

For all his championing of disinterestedness, Arnold was unable to practise disinterestedness in all his essays. In his essay on Shelley particularly he displayed a lamentable lack of disinterestedness. Shelley's moral views were too much for the Victorian Arnold. In his essay on Keats too Arnold failed to be disinterested. The sentimental letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne were too much for him. Arnold sometimes became a satirist, and as a satirical critic saw things too quickly, too summarily. In spite of their charm, the essays are characterised by egotism and, as Tilotson says, 'the attention is directed, not on his object but on himself and his objects together'. Arnold makes clear his disapproval of the vagaries of some of the Romantic poets. Perhaps he would have agreed with Goethe, who saw Romanticism as disease and Classicism as health. But Arnold occasionally looked at things with jaundiced eyes, and he overlooked the positive features of Romanticism which posterity will not willingly let die, such as its humanitarianism, love of nature, love of childhood, a sense of mysticism, faith in man with all his imperfections, and faith in man's unconquerable mind. Arnold's inordinate love of classicism made him blind to the beauty of lyricism. He ignored the importance of lyrical poems, which are subjective and which express the sentiments and the personality of the poet. Judged by Arnold's standards, a large number of poets both ancient and modern are dismissed because they sang with 'Profuse strains of unpremeditated art'. It was also unfair of Arnold to compare the classical works in which figure the classical quartet, namely Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra and Dido with Heamann and Dorothea, Childe Harold, Jocelyn, and 'The Excursion'. Even the strongest advocates of Arnold would agree that it is not always profitable for poets to draw upon the past. Literature expresses the zeitgeist, the spirit of the contemporary age. Writers must choose subjects from the world of their own experience. What is ancient Greece to many of us? Historians and archaeologists are familiar with it, but the common readers delight justifiably in modern themes. To be in the company of Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra and Dido is not always a pleasant experience. What a reader wants is variety, which classical mythology with all its tradition and richness cannot provide. An excessive fondness for Greek and Latin classics produces a literary diet without variety, while modern poetry and drama have branched out in innumerable directions. As we have seen, as a classicist Arnold upheld the supreme importance of the architectonic faculty, then later shifted his ground. In the lectures On Translating Homer, On the Study of Celtic Literature, and The Study of Poetry , he himself tested the greatness of poetry by single lines. Arnold the classicist presumably realised towards the end of his life that classicism was not the last word in literature. Arnold's lack of historic sense was another major failing. While he spoke authoritatively on his own century, he was sometimes groping in the dark in his assessment of earlier centuries. He used to speak at times as if ex cathedra, and this pontifical solemnity vitiated his criticism. As we have seen, later critics praise Arnold, but it is only a qualified praise. Oliver Elton calls him a 'bad great critic'. T. S. Eliot said that Arnold is a 'Propagandist and not a creator of ideas'. According to Walter Raleigh, Arnold's method is like that of a man who took a brick to the market to give the buyers an impression of the building.

Arnold's legacy

In spite of his faults, Arnold's position as an eminent critic is secure. Douglas Bush says that the breadth and depth of Arnold's influence cannot be measured or even guessed at because, from his own time onward, so much of his thought and outlook became part of the general educated consciousness. He was one of those critics who, as Eliot said, arrive from time to time to set the literary house in order. Eliot named Dryden, Johnson and Arnold as some of the greatest critics of the English language. Arnold united active independent insight with the authority of the humanistic tradition. He carried on, in his more sophisticated way, the Renaissance humanistic faith in good letters as the teachers of wisdom, and in the virtue of great literature, and above all, great poetry. He saw poetry as a supremely illuminating, animating, and fortifying aid in the difficult endeavour to become or remain fully human. Arnold's method of criticism is comparative. Steeped in classical poetry, and thoroughly acquainted with continental literature, he compares English literature to French and German literature, adopting the disinterested approach he had learned from Sainte-Beuve. Arnold's objective approach to criticism and his view that historical and biographical study are unnecessary was very influential on the new criticism. His emphasis on the importance of tradition also influenced F. R. Leavis, and T. S. Eliot. Eliot is also indebted to Arnold for his classicism, and for his objective approach which paved the way for Eliot to say that poetry is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality, because it is not an expression of emotions but an escape from emotions. Although Arnold disapproved of the Romantics' approach to poetry, their propensity for allusiveness and symbolism, he also shows his appreciation the Romantics in his Essays in Criticism . He praises Wordsworth thus: 'Nature herself took the pen out of his hand and wrote with a bare, sheer penetrating power'. Arnold also valued poetry for its strong ideas, which he found to be the chief merit of Wordsworth's poetry. About Shelley he says that Shelley is 'A beautiful but ineffectual angel beating in a void his luminous wings in vain'. In an age when cheap literature caters to the taste of the common man, one might fear that the classics will fade into insignificance. But Arnold is sure that the currency and the supremacy of the classics will be preserved in the modern age, not because of conscious effort on the part of the readers, but because of the human instinct of self-preservation. In the present day with the literary tradition over-burdened with imagery, myth, symbol and abstract jargon, it is refreshing to come back to Arnold and his like to encounter central questions about literature and life as they are perceived by a mature and civilised mind.

(Original material by S. N. Radhika Lakshmi edited and revised by Ian Mackean)

• Aristotle: Poetics
• Matthew Arnold
• Margaret Atwood: Bodily Harm and The Handmaid's Tale
• Margaret Atwood 'Gertrude Talks Back'
• Jonathan Bayliss
• Lewis Carroll, Samuel Beckett
• Saul Bellow and Ken Kesey
• John Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress and Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
• T S Eliot, Albert Camus
• Castiglione: The Courtier
• Kate Chopin: The Awakening
• Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
• Charles Dickens
• John Donne: Love poetry
• John Dryden: Translation of Ovid
• T S Eliot: Four Quartets
• William Faulkner: Sartoris
• Henry Fielding
• Ibsen, Lawrence, Galsworthy
• Jonathan Swift and John Gay
• Oliver Goldsmith
• Graham Greene: Brighton Rock
• Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
• Ernest Hemingway
• Jon Jost: American independent film-maker
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Will McManus
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Ian Mackean
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Ben Foley
• Carl Gustav Jung
• Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Hodge, George Lamming
• Rudyard Kipling: Kim
• D. H. Lawrence: Women in Love
• Henry Lawson: 'Eureka!'
• Machiavelli: The Prince
• Jennifer Maiden: The Winter Baby
• Ian McEwan: The Cement Garden
• Toni Morrison: Beloved and Jazz
• R K Narayan's vision of life
• R K Narayan: The English Teacher
• R K Narayan: The Guide
• Brian Patten
• Harold Pinter
• Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker
• Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock
• Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre: Doubles
• Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre: Symbolism
• Shakespeare: Twelfth Night
• Shakespeare: Hamlet
• Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Women
• Shakespeare: Measure for Measure
• Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra
• Shakespeare: Coriolanus
• Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale and The Tempest
• Sir Philip Sidney: Astrophil and Stella
• Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene
• Tom Stoppard
• William Styron: Sophie's Choice
• William Wordsworth
• William Wordsworth and Lucy
• Studying English Literature
• The author, the text, and the reader
• What is literary writing?
• Indian women's writing
• Renaissance tragedy and investigator heroes
• Renaissance poetry
• The Age of Reason
• Romanticism
• New York! New York!
• Alice, Harry Potter and the computer game
• The Spy in the Computer
• Photography and the New Native American Aesthetic

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12 Matthew Arnold: “The Study of Poetry”

Dr. Jyotsna Pathak

Matthew Arnold: “The Study of Poetry”

Arnold is one of the foremost critics of the 19th century. In his writings he critiqued and com- mented extensively on cultural and social issues, religion and education. He was the first critic to pose questions within the context of the modern industrial society. He was a humanist for whom man in the industrial society was condemned to a mechanized existence with a fractured spiritual and moral sensibility. He criticized the narrow mercantile concerns of the 19th century bourgeois and their obsession with utilitarianism and reason. He rejected the growing scientific temper and positivism of the age. The central concern for Arnold was the problem of living fulfilled lives in an industrial society. In his criticism he attempts to move from the exteriority of bourgeois exist- ence to an interiority of the self. It is in line with this that criticism, culture and poetry become modes of interiority in order to nullify the exteriority of bourgeois existence. It must be noted that this essay is not directed at the professional men of letters but rather the general middle-class reader with an interest in poetry.

Conflict between Science and Religion  

“The Study of Poetry,” written as General Introduction to The English Poets, edited by T. H. Ward, is one of the most influential texts of literary humanism. This essay contains some of his best-known pronouncements about poetry and poets. It is preeminently an essay about judgment and evaluation. It insists on the social and cultural functions of literature, it ability to civilize and to cultivate morality, as well assist providing bulwark against the mechanistic excesses of mod- ern civilization. In the essay, Arnold claims an elevated status for poetry over science, religion, theology and philosophy. He postulates that the fields of science, religion, philosophy and poli- tics are awash with Charlatanism. These ideologies deliberately obfuscate facts and create confu-  sion between that which is good and desirable and that which is fake and harmful. Religion fails to address fundamental questions facing man since its status has been threatened by science which in turn falsely presents itself as the new arbiter of knowledge. Moreover, was he points out in the essay, religion places meanings on facts which are being proved to be incorrect and false. In contrast to this poetry rests meaning in ideas and these are infallible. Philosophy is incapable of providing moral and spiritual sustenance to man since it is itself grappling with entrenched and unresolved questions and problems. In view of this fact, according to the critic, only poetry is in a position to offer any kind of spiritual and emotional succor to man. Poetry is also, accord- ing to him, the only viable method of interpreting life. To interact with poetry it is imperative that the reader views the poetic object as it really is by avoiding the historical and personal falla- cies. By rejecting an abstract system and foregrounding his touchstone method Arnold challeng- es the reader to accept his critical taste and judgment. His assumption is that reasonable people, without absolute standards, can agree on the quality not only of a poet’s artistry but of his ‘criti- cism of life’. To his credit, Arnold’s surviving notebooks, filled with short quotations from the classics, suggest that he really practiced the method he advocated. In this essay Arnold is con- cerned with ranking English poets and deciding as to which ones may be singled out as being truly classic. In this endeavor some of his statements were controversial when first stated. In to- day’s age of shifting canons these are proving to be extremely controversial.

The Importance of Poetry or Poetry as a Spiritual Force  

The critic apprises his readers of the fact that if poetry were to play such a central role in the lives of men, then it is imperative that it be of a “higher order of excellence.” This means that not only should poetry maintain a higher standard but also that it be judged by more stringent param- eters than any other field of study. Therefore the distinctions of ‘excellent and inferior,’ ‘sound  and unsound,’ and true and untrue’ gain significance in the case of poetry, considering the fact that it has a “higher destiny.” According to Arnold it is necessary to hold poetry to such higher standards since in the increasingly mechanized world it will prove to be the only source of succor and peace to man. It is only poetry that gives a criticism of life; however the value and credibility of such a criticism is in direct proportion to the degree with which poem approaches the ideals of truth and beauty. Arnold’s humanism implied that he imparted to poetry the power to sustain and delight man in the dreary confines of modern existence. It is for this reason that he was insistent in the creation of “the best” poetry. He further elaborates that it is because poetry sustains man in times of troubles that he should be extremely critical and conscious of what he is reading. Read- ing is not passive exercise but rather a collaborative endeavor. Since the act of reading poetry influences the mind and the spirit, Arnold insists that the reader be constantly aware of what he is reading and judge as to whether it is for his benefit or not. He insists that every act of reading poetry should give a sense of the excellent and a sense of joy. If one feels these while reading poem then it is the true estimate of the worth of the text being read. He goes on to suggest that it is only a careful reading of poetry that allows us to identify the caliber of poets and to identify them as good or bad. It is only after this has been done that the reader can choose to accept or reject the artist and this work. The study of poetry is an exercise, he says in the essay, that re- quires consistent scrutiny: the reader should be able to identify when a work falls short in terms of language or meaning and give it the correct rating It is only when the reader does this that he will be in a position to identify good poetry and enjoy it. Thus “negative criticism” in the study of poetry is essential to identify good literature and enjoy it. In fact he stresses the fact that mere- ly knowledge of the efforts made by the artist in creating the work, or information regarding its weaknesses; or knowledge of the biographical details of the poet are meaningless if they do not  assist in raising the level of enjoyment when the reader interacts with the poem. This is another drawback of historical fallacy; the student becomes so obsessed with historical details that he uses sight of the text itself.

Nonetheless, Arnold accepts the fact that it is fairly easy to be carried away by the historical rep- utations of poets and works as well as by personal affinities and likings in the act of reading po- etry. He calls these two distractions or fallacies, the historical and personal fallacy respectively. Historical fallacies occur when the reader is swept away by the reputation of the artist or by the role of the poem or poet in the historical development of a nation’s literature, or a genre or type of poetry. Poems are markers in the artistic development of individuals. Interestingly this occurs primarily with classical poets. Thus it is probable and possible that critics and readers give great- er significance to works than they actually deserve. In the case of historical fallacy these exag- gerations aren’t very important since they generally do not impact the general public. Moreover, these exaggerations are done by literary men, whose judgments and words could lose meaning and validity if they continue to lavish excessive praise on clearly mediocre works and artists. A negative impact of historical fallacy is that it posits false models as ideals that need to be emulat- ed and followed. Since these poets and their work are given exaggerated importance it gives the impression that withdrawing the artist and his creation from the immediate social milieu doesn’t do any violence to either the text or the artist. As an example of historical fallacy Arnold men- tions Chanson de Roland , a 12th century romance. He agrees that while the work has verve and freshness, it is primarily of linguistic important win tracing the growth and development of the romance. It lacks simplicity and greatness, the markers of great poetry. Therefore, according to Arnold, the critic M. Vitet is incorrect when he labels it an epic. He also mentions the French obsession with the court-poetry of the 17th century as an example of historical fallacy. Pellison  has already dismissed any claims this poetry may have to greatness by underlying its lack of po- etic verve. Nonetheless the student of French literary history diligently studies them as models of perfect classical poetry. This detailed study and the philological groundwork should ideally assist in the enjoyment of the poem; instead, paradoxically the student gets bogged down by the details he has amassed that he is distracted from actually enjoying the best works of poetry. Ironically philological groundwork raises the probability of over-rating the value of an artistic work.

Historica/Personal Fallacy  

Personal fallacy is based on a flawed personal estimation of a poet or his work originating either in personal liking or circumstance. Personal fallacy generally occurs with contemporary or mod- ern poets.

Arnold postulated the touchstone method as a means of avoiding the historical and personal fal- lacies. It is difficult to articulate as to what constitutes great poetry; however it is easy to identify great poetry. Therefore, instead of referring to a critic who would then give abstract ideas about what constituted ‘good’ poetry, he suggested that it would be more useful if the reader kept be- fore him some lines and expressions by the greatest poets of the English language while reading poetry. Then all that he had to do was compare the poem he was reading with these references and judge for him as to how useful he found them. This method would work because the reader knows when he is in the presence of great literature since it evokes a strong response from him. Arnold insisted that it was irrelevant whether the lines used as touchstone and the poem being read was of the same type and genre. According to him the selected lines by poets like Shake- speare, Milton, Dante and Homer would serve to judge not only the character of poetic quality but also the degree of the quality. Poetic worth resides in the matter and substance of the poem  and also in the manner and style in which this matter is communicated. It follows that a high de- gree of matter and substance can only be communicated in an appropriately high degree of man- ner and style. Thus the two necessarily accompany each other. Arnold drew on Aristotle’s com- parison between poetry and history where the ancient critic found poetry to be superior in both truth and seriousness; Arnold postulated that the high degree of matter and substance in poem existed because it had a high degree of truth and seriousness. Similarly, the manner and style of a poem resided in its style, diction and movement.

The Touchstone Method  

Arnold compares the French poetry of the 12th and 13th centuries with Chaucer’s work to prove this point. The 12th and the 13th centuries were the time of indisputable French hegemony Euro- pean language and literature. During this time French poetry comprised of the langue d’oil and langue d’oc . The former is the poetry of northern France; modern French has evolved from it. The latter is the language of the troubadours of southern France. It was this language that influ- enced Italian literature, the first literature of modern Europe. However major French poetry that dominated Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries was in langue d’oil . Although love-poetry orig- inated in England in the 12th century, nonetheless it was deeply influenced by the love-poetry written in langue d’oil . During most of the Middle Ages it was the latter which enjoyed hegemo- ny in Europe; but is unsurprisingly not read much now. It was the arrival of Chaucer on the scene in the 14th century that reversed the situation. His use of words, rhyme, meter and stanza for- mation completely overshadowed French poetry. The substance of his poetry is undeniably supe- rior to those of the French poets; he has a large, simple and kind view of human life and observes the world from a truly humanistic viewpoint. Moreover poetry reveals a large, free and sound representation of things. In style and manner also his work is superior to the French; there is a  liquidity of diction and a fluidity of movement in his verse that is absent in the French works. This tradition of fluidity continued in the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser and Keats. It would not be amiss therefore, to suggest that, Chaucer is the ‘father of our splendid English poet- ry’ and that real poetry begins with him. Chaucer is a towering figure in the history of the growth and development of poetry; he overwhelms the poetic output from the time the love-poetry of the French up to the Elizabethan era. Despite this Arnold does not acknowledge Chaucer as a real classicist. Unlike Dante, whom Arnold recognizes as a classic poet, Chaucer lacks seriousness which Aristotle mentions as a marker of good poetry. Thus the touchstone method reveals that even though Chaucer is a great poet, he does not rank among the greatest classic poets of the English language.

According to Arnold the criticism and analysis of poetry of this period makes it difficult to look beyond the historical estimation of the worth and value of poetry produced during this time. The 18th century considered that it had produced greater works of poetic merit, and had introduced more innovations and developments in poetry than had been produced in any other time ever. The impact of this self- praise was such that right up to Arnold’s time it was the poetry of Dry- den, Addison, Pope and Johnson that were seen as good verse. Using the touchstone method Ar- nold questions the veracity of the claim that the 18th century poets are classic. He argues that the years following the Restoration are characterized by a rejection of the Puritan ethic. This, “nega- tively” for Arnold, took the form of a rejection of the spiritual life of the period. The new age required a prose that regularity, precision and uniformity. While the writers of the time attempt- ed to achieve these in their writings, the spirit of poetry was sadly neglected and suppressed. Their verse also heralds the advent of the age of prose and reason. However it does not render a poetic criticism life. In fact Arnold takes pains to point out that their work lacks the seriousness,  style and manner of ‘high poetry.’ Thus while the writers of the age wrote great prose they were middling versifiers; and cannot be labelled classic.

Among the poets of the time, Arnold finds Gray to be a frail classic; he emulated the conventions and modes of the classical poets from the ancient world. His ideas never emerge from his own consciousness but are competently aped. With Burns, a poet of the late 18th century, Arnold re- veals the dangers posed by personal fallacy in assigning poetic worth. According to Arnold it is in his poems of aspects of Scottish life that Burns reveals his true self. Arnold suggests that this familiarity with the Scottish world goes against the poet when the reader is not a compatriot. The critic mentions that though Burns’ poetry reveals the poet’s triumph over the harsh Scottish land- scape, his poetry does not come out favorable when analyzed through the touchstone method.  For Arnold, Burns is the best example of personal fallacy leading to a misleading assessment of poetic worth. He considers Burns’ poems insufficiently bacchanalian since they lack the sincerity of this type of poetry. He finds bravado reflected in Burns’ poetry which makes them insincere and unsound to him. Arnold acknowledges that while there is an “application of ideas to life” in his poetry these are not as per the laws of poetic truth and beauty. His work reveals that he has exemplary command over language; however it lacks the “high seriousness” which is a sign of complete sincerity. According to Arnold in contrast to Dante, Burns preaches in his poems; his articulations do not emerge from the deepest recesses of his soul and are therefore superficial. In Arnold’s assessment Burns’ poetry is primarily ironic; his work may reveal truth of manner and matter, nevertheless he lacks the poetic virtue of the classical poets.

Arnold concludes his essay by comparing Chaucer and Burns. While both poets reveal a huge width of vision in term of human life and the world, the feeling of freedom in Chaucer’s works has been transformed into a “fiery, reckless energy.” Similarly, Chaucer’s benign state of exist-  ence finds itself morphed into an overwhelming sense of pathos over both human and non- human nature. Arnold finds great force and energy in Burns without the charm of Chaucer’s po- etry.

The essay despite claims towards absolute markers of poetic worth refuses to engage with any formal qualities of ‘good’ poetry. Arnold seems to be suggesting that if the content of a poem is sufficiently “serious,” it will automatically find expression in a serious form. This is his primary objection with Burns’ poetry; it is not serious enough. Arnold also refuses to place the poet and the poem within its historical context. This is deliberately done so as to maintain the idea that art is ameliorative.

Arnold effectively dismisses the claims of the French critic he cites regarding the canonization of certain works as classics, a process which forecloses further investigation into the origins, influ- ences, the immediate circumstances and possible motivations of the work. His reliance on some ineffable literary sensibility which somehow knows how to judge could be considered a form of obscurantism, since it is an appeal to experience and to make judgments on the basis of a sensi- bility which resists articulation.

• http://www.cssforum.com.pk/css-optional-subjects/group-v/english-literature/92538- mathew-arnold-study-poetry.html
• http://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/essays/detail/69374
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold
• http://www.english-literature.org/essays/arnold.php

The Study of Poetry Summary and Analysis

By matthew arnold (1822-1888), key information.

Published date: The essay was first published in 1880 as the general introduction to the anthology “ The English Poets ” edited by T. H. Ward. In 1888, the essay was published in the second series of essays “Essays on Criticism”.

Division of the essay: The essay is divided into two parts:

       i.            The nature and function of poetry

     ii.            Evaluation of English poets from Chaucer onwards

Arnold has started his essay with a declaration that the future of poetry is immense অপরিসীম since religion has been materialistic. With the passage of time, people will realize that poetry will satisfy them and give shelter in times of crisis. Besides poetry interprets ব্যাখ্যা life properly. Science will be incomplete without poetry because poetry is the soul of all branches of knowledge. Arnold shows logic referring to William Wordsworth that basically poetry is the spirit of all branches of knowledge.

Arnold relates that all branches of knowledge have been charlatans. Theology is charlatan because people feel doubt as to the doctrine of theology that is why there is a conflict between religion and science. Philosophy is also a charlatan because philosophy is unable to answer all the questions. Arnold does not declare directly that politics is charlatan but he does give a designation to politics as the art of governing mankind, not the best art of governing mankind.

Then Arnold asserts that the high position of poetry cannot be preserved without maintaining three basic rules.

       i.            There must have been criticism of life in poetry

     ii.            To write poetry, a poet must follow the rule of poetic truth and beauty

  iii.            And maintenance of grand style

Here in this essay, Arnold means to say that by reading poetry the audience can identify their faults and mistakes for the purpose of rectification and they must apply the powerful ideas picked up through reading poetry. By the term poetic truth, Arnold is similar to Aristotle who defines poetic truth as “Poetic truth how something should happen or will happen”. This definition of poetic truth asserts that poets never tell lies; that means there is no place for charlatanism in poetry and the message of poetry will last for generation after generation.

By grand style, Arnold gives a guideline that for composing poetry a poet has to adhere to মেনে চলা meter and figurative language which provide delight to the readers while reading poetry. (The Study of Poetry Summary and Analysis )

Now Arnold talks about the judgment of poetry for the purpose of fixing classic and non-classic poets through his inventive and scientific touchstone method. For the proper judgment of poet Arnold provides directions based on three estimates অনুমান.

       i.            Real estimate

     ii.            Personal estimate and

  iii.            Historical estimate

Arnold believes in real estimates for the judgment of poetry properly and completely because real estimates of poetic evaluation focus on the criticism of life and the high seriousness of poetry. Personal and historical estimates without the presence of real estimate create overrate and exaggeration অতিরিক্ত এবং অতিরঁজন.

Then Arnold evaluates all the poets of English literature from Chaucer onwards whether they are classic or not. He emphasizes that a single line of poets can make them classic if there is criticism of life and high seriousness that means grand style.

Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton have been given the prestige of classical poets because their poetry deserves the universal criticism of life and high seriousness. But the matter of sorrow is that Chaucer has been called a non-classic poet though Arnold has provided a long and praiseworthy evaluation of Chaucer as the father of English poetry and having liquid diction like Milton, Keats, Wordsworth, and Byron Chaucer’s poetry does not possess high seriousness, grand style.

John Dryden and Alexander Pope are also not classic poets. Dryden has been considered to be the puissant গৌরবময় and glorious founder of prose writing and Pope is the priest of prose composition. Overall, they are the classics of prose, not poetry.

Arnold discovers in his essay that the complete modernism of English literature started in the Romantic period of English literature. Therefore, the romantics are the first modern poets. All the romantics except Shelley are considered to be classic poets because of Arnold’s less possession of lyricism.

Real Burns who is an influential Scottish poet has been evaluated like Chaucer. Finally, Arnold asserts that the readers who can apply the touchstone method properly can read classical poems. (The Study of Poetry Summary and Analysis )

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The Study of Poetry by Matthew Arnold

Table of Contents

Introduction

Contrary to the Platonic prediction, Arnold believes that poetry has significant use in the process of knowledge creation and progression of human beings. As an artistic endeavor, Poetry provides reflection and commentary on the finer aspects of survival and struggles.

It is elemental to the investigations in Theology and Science. Arnold claims that the need for poetry and its faculties will help human beings harness purpose and tranquillity in the times and generations to come.

Arnold believes that the central thought of the poem matters more than any other concept in the poem so much so that it becomes the central fact of the poem. This idea is what links to the emotions of the reader and provides a vent to them.

Reading Poetry

He goes on to highlight different mechanisms by which people analysis and censor various works of poetry and poets. He enumerates three distinct methods of the same, naming those estimates:

• Real estimate: This refers to unbiased and unprejudiced evaluation with a fine balance between historical context and innovation and flair of the individual poet.
• Historical estimate: Here the historical background dominates the value judgment with innovation and creativity has given less importance than the historical context of the poem.
• Personal estimate: This is rife with personal and cognitive biases of the individual reader and dependent on their preferences and tastes.

Even though historic and personal estimates are less reliable and arbitrary, they are more commonly seen than the real estimate. Arnold calls this a natural consequence of human choice.

Often the context of the text dominates the reader’s perception and makes them overlook its manifest flaws. Historical significance can hide these shortcomings in plain sight as it tends to exalt the poem to an elevated status like classics or iconic.

An iconic poem acts as the barometer for other poems. It is held at the standard against which other works are compared. This comparison helps in arriving at the true value of a poem.

Arnold exhorts people to devour such classic works of poetry to educate their sense of judgment and censure but still remain aware of their own flaws and errors.

Inspiration and Imitation

Arnold argues that poets are often so inspired or moved by the classical works of poetry that they often tend to borrow their content or ideas. It is often an issue for the poets who cannot detach themselves from their favorite classics and thus are prone to erroneous conclusions.

Historic estimates in the case of poets from earlier times and personal estimates in case of contemporaneous poets create difficulties in ascertaining the true value and significance of poetry.

Touchstone Method for Evaluating Poetry

Borrowing Longinus’s concept of true sublimity to say that the time-tested classics act as the ‘touchstone’ to judge all other works of poetry. However, this does not warrant a need to have an exact replica of such content and quality in the works under the scanner.

He named a few touchstones like Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, and Dante, etc. These particular exponents of poetry were able to enhance the experience of reading poetry through their matter and style.

Arnold believes that the best poems have a kernel of truth in their matter and a sense of singular flair in their construction or manner. For critics, it is imperative to apply such a method judiciously and rigorously in order to develop the ability to find real estimates of poetry.

In case a reader is unable to find the high value while evaluating a classic than it is his/her shortcoming and not the poems.

Analysis of the English Classics

Arnold then highlights the impact of French poets (especially from Northern France) on their English counterparts. However, their poetry was dominated by romance over serious and graver themes of human life.

Arnold is full of praise for Chaucer who he believes wrote in ‘liquid diction’ and was a great exponent of both content and style. According to Arnold, Chaucer scores high on the real estimate but does not come to the level of a classical poet lacking seriousness of someone like Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare who all are classical poets.

He considers Pope and Dryden as classical prose of the restoration period . He calls Gray a classic but relegates Burns to the fortune of Chaucer. They both lacked seriousness in their content according to Arnold even though their works contain both truth and great skill.

Coming to his contemporaries he points to the influence of personal estimates when judging the likes of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth and so demits any judgment of their works.

Continuity of the Classics

Arnold claims since the classics works have been able to stand the test of time and longevity they have an indwelling ability of self-conservation. This ability is a function of the self-preserving and enduring nature of human beings.

According to Arnold, human nature remains consistent through various epochs and times and since the classics deal with the topics and issues highlighting and commenting on human suffering, emotions, and nature.

As long as they stimulate such emotions and thoughts in the readers that will remain alive in their hearts and minds.

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Before Prosody: Early English Poetics in Practice and Theory

The primary purpose of the essay is to offer medieval English poetry as a case in point for historical poetics.

Modern Language Quarterly

Since the sixteenth century, the history of English poetics has had two sides: a history of theory and a history of practice. [1] In the late sixteenth century, classically educated men subjected accentual-syllabic English verse to Latin quantitative scansion and attributed the confused result to deficiencies in English poetry and the English language. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from John Milton’s metrical experiments to George Hickes’s monumental Linguarum Veterum Septentrionalium Thesaurus (1705), poetry and prosodic theory were both under continual development. The late nineteenth century witnessed an upsurge in the production of both English poetry and theoretical writing about its metrical forms. In the early twentieth century, Anglo-American modernists championed free verse through poetic compositions as well as directive treatises.

Contemporary literary scholars are mapping new connections between the history of theory and the history of practice. Yopie Prins, Meredith Martin, and other scholars of Victorian poetry have called for a ‘historical poetics’ that would reevaluate the received narrative of English literary history by recovering alternative ways of theorizing and experiencing poetic form (Hall 2011; Martin 2012; Prins 2008). Martin’s 2012 book, The Rise and Fall of Meter , trawls now-obscure poetics manuals and the annals of prosodic infighting to challenge the inevitability of modern scansional techniques. Through a combination of archival research and cultural analysis, Martin implicates the concept of meter in British war and nation-building, from Empire Day to the National Service League to the New English Dictionary . The unlikely protagonists of Martin’s new literary history are the prosodist George Saintsbury and the poet-prosodists Robert Bridges, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Coventry Patmore. Martin argues that meter mattered in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England, and in ways that were strategically obscured (and then simply forgotten) by later polemicists and practitioners.

In addition to meter, this emergent research program reconsiders two other literary topics of enduring critical interest. On one side, historical poetics shades off into the histories of poetic genres, especially lyric, as in the essays gathered in the January 2008 issue of PMLA under the heading “The New Lyric Studies” (cp. Jackson 2014). On the other side, historical poetics shades off into the histories of poetry per se , with focus on the twentieth-century amalgamation of diverse literary forms and practices into an idea of Poetry with a capital ‘P.’ These two projects of historical recovery converge in Virginia Jackson’s book-length study, Dickinson’s Misery (2005). By coordinating material and cultural analysis with a critique of editorial and critical history, Jackson seeks to relocate the lyricism of Emily Dickinson’s verse from practices of poetic composition to practices of poetic reading. In Jackson’s account, the New Critical flattening of poetry into Poetry and the explosion of the genre of the lyric are best comprehended as one and the same historical process. Jackson proposes to break into new understandings of the histories of English poetry, less by offering a new account of poetic form than by fixing critical attention on “the history of lyricization” (2008: 183) as a cultural process in its own right.

From different angles, Simon Jarvis and Jonathan Culler have endeavored to broaden the scope of historical poetics to include the description of poetic forms in their aesthetic richness and historical dynamism. In a pair of essays responding to Prins’s program of historical poetics, Jarvis argues for “technique” as “the way in which the work of art most intimately registers historical experience” (2010: 931; cp. 2014). Conceiving of poetry as “an institution, a series of practices as real as the belief in them and the capacity for them” (2010: 933), Jarvis questions the presumption that the representation of poetic practices mirrors the practices themselves. “The history of verse thinking is not the same as the history of representations of verse thinking” (932), he cautions. Similarly, Culler qualifies the poststructuralist critique of the category of lyric, emphasizing the distinction between theory and practice. In the case of the genre of lyric, Culler contends that “the weight of tradition helps make there be something to be right or wrong about” (2009: 883; cp. 2014, 2015). Jarvis’s and Culler’s reformulations of historical poetics share the assumption that the historical development of literary practices might matter as much as, and differently from, the historical development of metaliterary discourses.

Disagreement about the grounds on which to reconstruct the history of verse activates long-standing tensions between extrinsic and intrinsic or conceptual and practical approaches to literary history. Prins registers the familiar admonition that formalism become historicist when she submits that “practical application is not the point of historical poetics. There are other, more interesting questions” (2008: 233). Jarvis makes the less familiar gesture of recommending that historicism become formalist: “Historical poetics needs above all to be wary of thinking that it can exit from the painful difficulty of specifying the history of verse technique” (2014: 115). Tension between ostensibly opposite ways of stating a research problem is partially a function of the historical period under consideration. Distinctions between extrinsic and intrinsic literary histories, or between form and the representation of form, became newly contentious as the professional study of prosody picked up steam in the mid nineteenth century. Dennis Taylor argues that the Victorian period “was the first period to discover a theory of metre adequate to the genius of its poets” (1988: 3-4). It was in the late nineteenth century (though in Russia, not England) that the phrase ‘historical poetics’ was first wielded (Jarvis 2010: 932). Jarvis frames his reformulation of historical poetics in terms of the study of pre-Victorian poets, primarily Pope and Wordsworth.

Thus far, historical poetics has been most strongly associated with the study of nineteenth-century poetry. This essay takes a longer view onto the histories of English poetry from the perspective of Old English and Middle English verse. The primary purpose of the essay is to offer medieval English poetry as a case in point for historical poetics, thereby bringing a different literary archive to bear on the methodological debate sketched above. Medievalists have much to contribute to the conversation about the historical perplexities of English verse, particularly since medieval poets have left behind no ars poetica explicating their understanding of English meter and poetic style. Medieval English poets practiced literary form at a time when vernacular poetics had not yet become an academic subject or a sustained cultural discourse. As such, the case of medieval English verse throws into relief the terms of modern debates about the idea and practice of poetry.

The contribution of this essay to the field of historical poetics will be to indicate a constitutive gap between the practice and theory of verse. Meaningful difference between the practice and the theorization of verse may strike some readers as self-evident. However, such difference is not always assumed in the new wave of research into the history of poetics. The gap between the practice and theory of English verse was wider in the medieval centuries than at any other time, but coming to terms with this gap, I argue, yields methodological lessons that can be carried forward into later periods of study.

Medieval English poetry was composed, copied, and consumed not only before prosody but also before modern education, modern militarism, modern nations, modern racialism, the globalization of English, and the development of English literature as an academic discipline—all central themes in Martin’s book. Through three case studies drawn from ongoing research on the alliterative tradition, this essay seeks to demonstrate what is distinctive about the cultural work of early English poetics. I focus on the alliterative tradition because subsequent developments in literary history render it paradigmatically alien from a modern perspective. The term ‘alliterative’ (an eighteenth-century designation, unknown to medieval poets) refers to the unrhymed meter used in Beowulf (?eighth/tenth c.), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth c.), and around 300 other English poems. Despite the modern nomenclature, it is not alliteration per se but a set of metrical principles governing patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables that is definitive of this meter. Thus alliterating prose and alliterating accentual-syllabic poems (such as Pearl ) fall outside the alliterative tradition. Though it is not the primary purpose of this essay to discuss alliterative meter in detail, more technical studies are cited where appropriate.

The three case studies concern the continuity of alliterative meter across ten centuries of literary history, c . 650-1550 CE; Geoffrey Chaucer’s perceptions of alliterative romance in the late fourteenth century; and the northern and prophetic coloring of alliterative verse after 1450. Each case study begins by summarizing formal and cultural contexts for alliterative verse and ends by positioning knowledge about alliterative verse as a contribution to historical poetics. The conclusion connects medieval practice and modern theory more directly by looking forward to the sixteenth century and the inauguration of sustained metadiscourses of English poetic form. By combining methodologies from metrics, cultural studies, historiography, literary criticism, and genre studies, I propose to assess the historical significance of alliterative verse (and, by implication, other medieval English poetry). This essay takes its place beside recent scholarship that historicizes Old English and Middle English poetic forms (Bahr 2013; Brantley 2013; Butterfield 2011; Cannon 2004; Johnson 2013; Thornbury 2014; Trilling 2009; and Tyler 2006).

As its subtitle indicates, this essay traverses the dialectic between the practice and the theory of verse by moving from practice to theory. This movement is facilitated by the order of case studies: in the case of alliterative meter, no prosodic metadiscourse survives, and probably none ever existed; in the case of Chaucer’s perceptions of alliterative romance, the perceptions are sparse and largely inadequate to the poetic practice they describe; while in the case of post-1450 alliterative verse, literary history witnessed a more subtle feedback loop between perception and practice. By arranging the case studies from least to most self-reflexive, I mean to trace a historically dynamic relationship between the perception and the practice of verse in this poetic tradition. The conceptual movement from practice to theory has come to seem less intuitive than the reverse in the light of modern “prosody wars” (Martin 2012: 2), but I argue that it better represents the elaboration of prosodic metadiscourse upon and around preexisting poetic practices in early English literary culture.

Across the three case studies, I will emphasize the compatibility of the competing definitions of historical poetics summarized above. In recovering the cultural meaning of medieval English poetic forms, this essay takes the view that the extrinsic and intrinsic approaches to poetics are complementary. On the one hand, I share Martin’s skepticism that poetics and cultural studies can or should be conducted separately. Martin’s concept of “metrical cultures” (2012: 14) can illuminate medieval English verse with little adjustment. I also take to heart Prins’s caveat that “the sound of poetry is never heard without mediation” (2008: 229). If anything, the caveat is even more appropriate for early English poetics. Since its rediscovery by modern antiquarians, the sound of early English verse has never been heard without considerable mediation. On the other hand, I will also affirm with Jarvis that “[t]he relationship between thinking about verse and thinking in verse is not necessarily a cooperative one” (2014: 115). The practical/theoretical dichotomy implied by Prins’s declaration that “practical application is not the point of historical poetics” risks merely inverting the overinvestments of the New Criticism: the dividing line between form and history remains intact, but researchers have now migrated to the side of history. In my view, historical poetics should strive to understand literary form and literary history as mutually constitutive. At the interface of formalist and historicist research protocols, Prins’s historical poetics and Jarvis’s historical poetics converge.

Before turning to the first case study, a note on the state of the field. The discussion of early English poetics in this essay is not intended to represent the consensus view among medievalists. For many aspects of the study of alliterative verse, no consensus exists. This is especially true of the subfield of alliterative metrics, which is currently experiencing a growth phase. Important discoveries have been made since 2005 but without yet displacing prior critical appraisals (overviews: Cable 2009; Cole 2010: 162-64; Weiskott 2013b, forthcoming-b). Throughout, I summarize and cite the published arguments that seem to me the most persuasive, in service of the goal of making a medievalist contribution to a larger conversation about the historical study of poetry. Statements that rely primarily on original research are accompanied by citations.

Alliterative Meter, 650-1550: Practice before Theory

The term ‘alliterative meter’ denotes the unrhymed meter used in Old English poetry, as in Beowulf ; in Early Middle English alliterative poetry, as in Lawman’s Brut ( c . 1200) [2] ; and in Middle English alliterative poetry, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman ( c . 1370-90). Because the study of Old English poetry and the study of Middle English alliterative poetry have usually been conducted separately, and because no extant alliterative poem is datable to the period c . 1250-1340, some scholars have expressed doubts about the continuity of the alliterative tradition from Old to Middle English (Blake 1979; Salter 1988: 170-79; Turville-Petre 1977). Skepticism about continuity arose in response to early twentieth-century scholars whose arguments for an alliterative longue durée appeared unduly nationalistic to a later generation (Cornelius 2012). More recent scholarship reaffirms continuity in alliterative verse history. It does so by reconstructing a plausible formal trajectory for the alliterative meter, Old English to Early Middle English to Middle English (Putter, Jefferson, and Stokes 2007: 260-62; Russom 2004; Weiskott 2013a, 2013b; Yakovlev 2008).

From Old to Middle English, certain aspects of the alliterative meter remained remarkably stable. Two forms of metrical continuity lend themselves to brief description. First, in all phases of the alliterative tradition, the metrical line consisted of two ‘half-lines,’ divided by a mid-line syntactical break or ‘caesura.’ Thus the first lines of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight take the following form, where a tabbed space represents the caesura:

                      Hwæt we Gar-Dena     in geardagum

                      (“Listen! We [have heard] of the Spear-Danes’ | [glory] in days of yore”)

                      Siþen þe sege and þe assaut     watz sesed at Troye.

                      (“After the siege and the onslaught | was finished at Troy”)

At no point in the evolution from Old to Middle English alliterative meter does the caesura cease to bear metrical significance. Second, in all phases of the alliterative tradition a binary distinction between content words (nouns, adjectives, etc .) and function words (articles, pronouns, etc .) determined metrical stress assignment (Duggan 1990; Momma 1997: 28-54; Russom 2009). Content words normally receive metrical stress, while function words normally do not. In the lines cited, the content words Gar-Dena , geardagum , sege , assaut , sesed , and Troye receive metrical stress on their root syllable(s), while the function words hwæt , we , in , siþen , þe , and , watz , and at do not. Thus the lines scan as follows, where ‘S’ represents a metrically stressed syllable and ‘x’ represents a metrically unstressed syllable:

                      x           x    S      S x     x    S     S x

                     Hwæt we Gar-Dena     in geardagum

                     x   x     x  S  x x      x x   S         x     S  x  x      S  x

                    Siþen þe sege and þe assaut | watz sesed at Troye .

Both forms of continuity—half-line structure and the hierarchy of content words and function words—distinguished alliterative meter from non-alliterative English metrical traditions as these developed from the late twelfth century onward. In Chaucer’s fourteenth-century pentameter, for example, the unit of composition is the line, not the half-line, and metrical stress is determined to a larger degree by contextual phrasal and rhythmical contour. Thus the opening line of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales scans as follows, with metrically stressed function words underlined:

                     S           x   S    x      S     x     S    x    S   x

                      Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

or possibly

                     x           S   x   S x   S      x     S    x    S   x

                     Whan that Aprillë with his shoures soote.

Here the function words whan (or possibly that ) and with receive metrical stress due to the expectation of an alternating rhythm. Promotion of function words and (after c . 1100) demotion of content words did occur in alliterative meter, but as uncommon metrical expedients rather than constitutive features of metrical stress assignment.

Other aspects of the alliterative metrical system changed or disappeared over the course of 900 years. Two forms of metrical change lend themselves to brief description. First, Old English meter accords a special license to verbal prefixes, e.g. , be- in becuman ‘become’ (Cornelius 2015: 475-76; Yakovlev 2008: 57-60). Unlike other metrically unstressed syllables, verbal prefixes may be omitted altogether from the metrical count (‘prefix license’). Thus Beowulf 271a scans as follows, where ‘p’ represents an omitted prefix:

                     p     S    x x  x     S    S

                     Gewat þa ofer wægholm

                     (“[the ship] went then over the billowy sea”)

The pattern pSxxxSS is metrically equivalent to SxxxSS, a normal pattern. Verbal prefixes are less frequently omitted for the sake of meter in Early Middle English alliterative verse (Yakovlev 2008: 198-200); by the fourteenth century, the prefix license has disappeared from the metrical system. Second, in certain metrical positions Old English meter permitted alternation between monosyllabic (‘short’) and multisyllabic (‘long’) sequences of metrically unstressed syllables (‘dips’). In the first line of Beowulf cited above, for example, the first half-line begins with a long dip ( xx SSx) while the second begins with a short dip ( x SSx). In the course of metrical history, alternation between short and long dips came to be regularized in the second half-line (Cable 1991: 66-84; Duggan 1986; Putter, Jefferson, and Stokes 2007: 19-118). By the fourteenth century the second half-line must contain one long dip. Thus, where the metrical patterns xSSx and xxSSx were equally acceptable for the Beowulf poet in either half-line, the Gawain poet avoids placing the pattern xSSx in the second half-line.

This continuous history of poetic practice must be pieced together with modern scholarly tools: there survives no medieval theory of alliterative meter. It is doubtful whether an alliterative ars poetica ever existed, for poets had little cause to theorize vernacular prosody at a time when English was a second choice to Latin in literary culture. From the seventh to the mid sixteenth century in England, ars metrica and ars poetica referred exclusively to Latin meter and were almost always composed in the Latin language (Purcell 1996: 71-120; Ruff 2005). Faute de mieux , scholars have scoured alliterative poetry itself for pronouncements about poetic form. However, the four passages most often nominated as reflexive statements about meter are all better interpreted otherwise (Cornelius 2012: 270-71; Pearsall 1977: 153-54). For example, when the Gawain poet identifies his tale as being “With lel letteres loken” (“held together with loyal letters,” 35), he was probably referring to literary composition and oral recitation (with letteres = ‘writing’) rather than to alliteration per se . Even if the reference is to alliteration, it is difficult to extrapolate a metrical theory from such a generalized allusion. Quite simply, for 900 years alliterative meter constituted an untheorized cultural practice (Cornelius forthcoming: Ch. 1). Medieval authors could think and write with some precision about vernacular language (Wogan-Browne et al . 1999), yet this kind of formalized self-consciousness did not extend to vernacular prosody. Evidently poets became inculturated in the alliterative tradition not through formal instruction but by repeated imitation of their contemporaries and predecessors. As a result, twenty-first-century theories of the alliterative metrical system have no direct medieval antecedents. The modern field of alliterative metrics reaches back only to the eighteenth century and later, when this meter was recognized first as quantitative, then as an arrangement of alliterating sounds, and finally and most enduringly as accentual (Cornelius 2015; Weiskott forthcoming-b).

The absence of sustained theoretical attention to alliterative meter during the Middle Ages did not prevent meter from carrying cultural baggage. To the contrary, alliterative meter embodied and refracted many cultural forms over 900 years. For example, alliterative meter appears to have been persistently marked as vernacular in literary culture. Many of the most-copied alliterative poems are brief proverbs that survive only indirectly, in Latin or non-alliterative English contexts. These alliterative snippets showcase sententiousness and vernacularity. Thus cultural preconceptions shaped the alliterative tradition at a fundamental level, that of manuscript survival. More broadly, the politics of alliterative writing changed profoundly after the twelfth century, when non-alliterative English meters were first introduced on the model of French, Italian, and Latin verse forms. Whereas Old English meter had occupied the entire space of English poetry, by the fourteenth century the alliterative meter has assumed a minor position in a newly diversified metrical landscape. The gradual marginalization of the alliterative tradition within the English literary field was a centuries-long cultural process that inflected the meaning and form of alliterative verse. The next section uses the case of Chaucer’s metaliterary comments to explore the idea of alliterative verse in late medieval English literary culture in greater detail.

The medieval English situation confirms, with particular clarity, Jarvis’s view that thinking in verse and thinking about verse are different activities. In English literary history, the practice of poetics predates the theory of prosody by 900 years. On a long view, the emergence and consolidation of prosodic metadiscourse, not the practice of meter, is the historical process in need of special explanation. In this way, the alliterative tradition defamiliarizes the nineteenth- and twentieth-century prosodic discourses analyzed by Martin. The “more interesting [ i . e . theoretical] questions” adumbrated by Prins must themselves be understood as historically specific, insofar as they depend on post-medieval critical categories. The absence of a metadiscourse of vernacular prosody in medieval English literary culture directs attention to meter as an unselfconscious ingrained practice, that is, a habitus , in both the medieval and the Bourdieusian sense of the term. To say this is not to isolate medieval English meters from culture or history but, on the contrary, to begin to identify the forms through which poetic traditions functioned as cultural institutions.

Chaucer and Alliterative Romance: Perceptions or Practice

If medieval English writers almost never set about to construct theoretical explanations for vernacular metrical practices, they could nevertheless perceive those practices, represent them poetically, and deploy stereotypes about them. Poets working after the introduction of non-alliterative English meters in the twelfth century certainly recognized the metrical choices that lay before them. Yet this recognition was always pressurized by longer histories of metrical form. The twelfth-century schism between the alliterative tradition and English poetry per se had a lasting impact on late medieval perceptions of this verse form—indeed, a more lasting impact than late medieval writers themselves could have appreciated (Weiskott 2013a: 34-48). Lacking modern disciplinary tools, medieval contemporaries essentially lacked access to metrical history. Given changes in language, orthography, meter, and forms of textualization [3] between the tenth and fourteenth centuries, one might doubt whether Middle English poets or audiences knew the first thing about Old English poems (Cameron 1974; Sauer 1997). It is telling that one of the most explicit medieval comments about alliterative meter came in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, roughly 200 years after alliterative meter first became visible as one of several metrical choices in the vernacular. It is also telling that this comment came from a non-practitioner: Geoffrey Chaucer.

Chaucer ( d . 1400) was a bureaucrat, a courtier, a translator, and a vernacular poetic innovator. His use of the English language connects him to, but also distinguishes him from, contemporary and earlier writers working in English, French, Italian, and Latin. Almost uniquely among pre-1400 poets, Chaucer is no less easily categorized as a European writer who happened to write in English than as an English writer with international aspirations (Butterfield 2009: 8-10; Smith 2006). His attachments to meters mirror his attachments to languages. Over the course of his career, Chaucer pushed the boundaries of the non-alliterative English metrical traditions as these had developed for two centuries before his birth. A master of the French-derived English tetrameter, Chaucer also synthesized French and Italian precursors to craft a new English meter, known today as the pentameter (Duffell 2000). Although his literary canonization over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries helped render the alliterative tradition alien for later writers and scholars, in his own day Chaucer typified the sensibilities of an aggressive London literary avant-garde —in matters metrical no less than in other respects.

In what has become the most famous medieval remark about alliterative verse, Chaucer has his Parson declare to the other Canterbury Tales pilgrims, “I kan nat geeste ‘rum, ram, ruf,’ by lettre” (X 43; all quotations of Chaucer are fr. Chaucer 1987). The Parson’s remark is often pressed into service as evidence of the provincialism of the Middle English alliterative tradition. Yet it is not primarily intended to denigrate alliterative verse but to characterize the Parson as one totally lacking in poetic skill (Mueller 2013: 5-6). If alliterative meter is not supposed to rate highly for Chaucer’s fashion-forward audience, it nevertheless makes the short-list of forms that lie beyond the Parson’s abilities. That he rhymes “but litel bettre” (X 44) and is “nat textueel” (X 57) belies the Parson’s excuse for foregoing alliterative meter (“I am a Southren man,” X 42), and it is by no means certain that Chaucer is here endorsing the designation of alliterative verse as lowbrow, provincial, and generically typecast. The immediate meaning of the reference seems to be only that a bumbling southerner would be likely to disparage alliterative poetry in such terms. Ultimately, the value of mentioning the “‘rum, ram, ruf,’ by lettre” may not be metropolitan snobbery so much as the implication that Chaucer himself was better informed about alliterative verse.

This Chaucerian one-liner adumbrates a continuum of perception within which the alliterative tradition operated in the late medieval centuries. On the one hand, Chaucer marks off the alliterative meter as socially, generically, and geographically exotic. The implicit comparisons between the homely and the sophisticated, between romance and everything else, and between the south and the north of England serve to consolidate Chaucer’s position in a literary and cultural avant-garde . On the other hand, the alliterative meter also appears here as a skill, a cultural practice that eludes a plainspoken southern parson. All of these perceptions of the alliterative meter had a history already in the fourteenth century, and all of them would gain further traction in the following two centuries, as alliterative verse became increasingly marginalized within the English literary field.

Internal views of the alliterative tradition, from the perspective of a practicing poet, a scribe, or a well-versed reader, must have differed from Chaucer’s external view. Chaucer’s Parson gives voice to a prosodic stereotype: like all stereotypes, this one exaggerates certain features of its target and ignores others. In fact, none of the Parson’s three implied opinions about alliterative verse—that it is northern, low-class, and circumscribed by the genre of romance—do justice to contemporary poetic practice. Piers Plowman , by far the best-attested Middle English alliterative poem, partially takes place in London and certainly circulated in manuscript there; the poem has been thought to mark a significant juncture in London literary history (Hanna 2005: 243-304). Some other fourteenth-century alliterative poems were likely composed in or near the metropolis, e.g. , A Bird in Bishopswood and A Complaint against Blacksmiths (Kennedy 1987; Salter 1988: 199-214). Nor were alliterative poets déclassé; they labored in the same multilingual and international literary environment as Chaucer. Many Middle English alliterative poems take the form of direct translations of French or Latin texts, while others show mastery of subtle theological distinctions or the finer points of courtly cuisine. Alliterative poetry embodied rather than antagonized an upwardly mobile English poetic establishment. Finally, alliterative verse comes in more flavors than romance. Piers Plowman can be variously classified as a political tract, an allegorical debate, a satirical treatise, and a prophecy: it is perhaps least easily apprehended as a romance. The poet of the arch-romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is also thought to have composed Cleanness and Patience , two theological/homiletic treatises in alliterative meter.

Discrepancies between the terms in which Chaucer discussed alliterative meter and the ways in which it was actually practiced in his lifetime do not negate Chaucer’s perceptions. To the contrary, the discrepancies illustrate an important point about meter and the perception of meter: the former can exceed (or, put differently, fail to live up to) the latter. Through the character of the Parson, Chaucer put the idea, but not the practice, of alliterative meter to work. One reason to take such work seriously would be to weave metrical perceptions into cultural history.

The Canterbury Tales represents perhaps the first time in the history of English alliterative verse that metaliterary perceptions were expressed with enough specificity to begin to tell the cultural stakes of meter. Alliterative verse had always been a culturally charged idea and series of practices; Chaucer identified it as a topic for conversation as well. The conversation about alliterative meter went on in fits and starts from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century and then, in a more professional mode, from the eighteenth century to the present. Both of these conversations, separated by the unalliterative seventeenth century, are of intrinsic historical interest, and either might be made the subject of a cultural history in the style of Martin’s book. Yet I have suggested here that historians of verse must resist the temptation to subsume historical poetic practices under historical discourses about those practices. The cultural meaning of reflexive commentary on meter remains underspecified when divorced from analysis of the metrical-cultural situation that the commentary addresses. It is important to inquire into Chaucer’s attitudes toward alliterative meter; it is equally important to recognize that his attitudes overstate the fourteenth-century metrical-cultural situation. The extreme rarity and severe inadequacy of contemporary accounts of alliterative verse are salient features of the tradition itself, and features that can only be appreciated by combining formalist and historicist methodologies.

The Alliterative Tradition after 1450: Perceptions and Practice

In the decades after Chaucer’s death, the cultural meaning of English meter changed in unprecedented ways. Through normal literary influence, the increasingly central position of London in English literary culture, and some special pleading by Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, William Caxton, and other taste-makers, Chaucer’s pentameter rapidly ascended the ranks of English meters. The fifteenth century witnessed the inception of a Chaucer canonization industry that quickly installed Chaucer atop a newly metropolitan hierarchy of English poets. The Chaucer canonization industry was also a pentameter canonization industry: by the end of the fifteenth century, the pentameter had come to occupy the position of honor in a reconfigured metrical menu. The last extant alliterative poems were composed toward the middle of the sixteenth century, after which time the alliterative meter disappeared from the active repertoire of English verse forms. The period between 1450 and 1550 thus marks a turning point in alliterative verse history and a new phase in the interplay between metrical perceptions and metrical practice.

One indication of the cultural and metrical pressures bearing on late alliterative verse is the emergence of a new kind of alliterating English poetry in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This new kind of poetry, typified by the Awntyrs off Arthure (late fourteenth/early fifteenth c.), employed heavy alliteration, alliterative poetic vocabulary, and even alliterative rhythms in an elaborately rhymed stanza structure. Alliterating stanzaic poems like Awntyrs tell the story of certain aspects of alliterative meter going mainstream in new, composite meters. Though traditionally grouped together with (unrhymed) alliterative poems, the alliterating stanzaic poems differ from them both metrically and syntactically (Cornelius forthcoming: Ch. 5; Lawton 1980: 611-12). In the remainder of this section, I focus on the unrhymed poems.

In contrast to the relative abundance of alliterative poetry dating from the previous hundred years, only eight extant (unrhymed) alliterative poems are datable to after 1450: the Ireland Prophecy (Weiskott forthcoming-c) and the Vision of William Banastre (Weiskott forthcoming-a), both late fifteenth-century political prophecies; the Prophecie of Beid , Prophecie of Bertlington , Prophecie of Waldhaue , and Prophesie of Gildas , late political prophecies from the printed Whole Prophesie of Scotland , &c . (1603); William Dunbar’s Treatise of the Two Married Women and the Widow ( c . 1500); and the battle poem Scottish Field (1515-47). Though alliterative meter clearly remained a viable choice after 1450 in certain literary and social contexts, these eight poems testify to the increasing marginalization of alliterative poetry in literary culture. The perceived capacities of the alliterative form must have undergone severe restriction after 1450. Fully six of the eight poems are political prophecies; all eight have connections to Scotland, whether thematic, geographical, or codicological. All eight are recorded in northern dialect forms in manuscript and early print. The idea that the alliteration tradition was pushed northward by the Chaucerian tradition describes a late medieval cultural stereotype about alliterative meter as much as it describes an actual historical process. The feedback loop between poets, printers, compilers, scribes, and an incipient reading public colored the alliterative tradition northern after 1450, completing a process of prosodic typecasting that had begun at least a century earlier.

The pivotal event in the final chapter of alliterative verse history was the appearance in 1550 of the first print edition of Piers Plowman , edited by Robert Crowley (Stinson 2008: 178-81). Two more printings followed in rapid succession later in the same year. Here an alliterative poem has become the object of quasi-scholarly inquiry. Crowley’s brief preface, “The Printer to the Reader,” is a monument in the history of textual criticism. It features, inter alia , description of alliteration as a formal feature: “the nature of hys miter is, to haue thre wordes at the leaste in euery verse whiche beginne with some one letter” (Short Title Catalogue [STC] 19906, ii r ). Especially telling is Crowley’s perception that alliterative meter is old-fashioned: “He [Langland] wrote altogyther in miter: but not after y e maner of our rimers that write nowe adayes (for his verses ende not alike)” (ii r ). This remark implies that Crowley did not regard alliterative meter as a live option in 1550. Nevertheless, Crowley trusts that his prefatory remarks on verse form will enable readers to enjoy the meter of Piers Plowman (“This thinge [ i.e. , alliteration] noted, the miter shal be very pleasaunt to read,” ii v ). Many metrical specialists no longer understand alliteration as a defining feature of alliterative meter (Cable 1991: 132; Hanna 1995; Yakovlev 2008: 23-4), but Crowley’s view would have a long afterlife in scholarship.

In addition to marking alliterative meter as obsolescent, Crowley anticipates later writers in associating alliterative meter with the genre of political prophecy. In his preface, Crowley disputes the authenticity and interpretation of two passages in Piers Plowman that might be construed as prophecies (“And that which foloweth and geueth it the face of a prophecye is lyke to be a thinge added of some other man than the fyrste autour” and “Loke not vpon this boke therfore, to talke of wonders paste or to come,” ii v ). Crowley titled his edition The Vision of Pierce Plowman , and later commentators would read the poem in this form as well as continuing to read manuscript copies. In engaging Piers Plowman as prophecy, Crowley was part of a sixteenth-century crowd. In his Scriptorum illustrium maioris Bryttanie (1557-59), John Bale noted that Langland “foretold many things prophetically, which we have seen fulfilled in our days” [ propheticè plura prędixit, quę nostris diebus impleri uidimus ] (STC 1296a, 474; translation mine). In a passing mention of Piers Plowman in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham likewise dubbed Langland “a very true Prophet” of the Reformation (STC 20519, 50). And the unnamed author of the Petition directed to Her Most Excellent Maiestie (1591), sometimes identified as the pamphleteer Job Throckmorton, cited Piers Plowman as political prophecy: “ Piers Plowman likewise wrote against the state of Bishops, and prophecied their fall in these wordes” (STC 1522a, 34). These notices join the evidence of the eight extant post-1450 alliterative poems in suggesting the extent to which alliterative meter and political prophecy overlapped in perception and practice after 1450 (Weiskott 2016, forthcoming-a, forthcoming-c).

The generic coloring that attached to the alliterative form by the sixteenth century explains the comments of Crowley, Bale, Puttenham, and the author of the Petition . It also explains the practice of the poets responsible for the six post-1450 alliterative prophecies. Finally, it explains the preservation of these poems. Four of them survive because of their inclusion in the printed Whole Prophesie of Scotland , &c ., issued to celebrate the accession of a Scottish king to the English throne (James VI/I), a key prediction of medieval English political prophecies. The other two, the Ireland Prophecy and the Vision of William Banastre , appear in large fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript anthologies of prophecies and political writings. The prophetic context of these poems suggests another reason to historicize poetic practices and perceptions: this is often the surest method for discovering why individual texts were transmitted and preserved. Taken together, the composition, copying, printing, editing, and interpretation of alliterative poetry after 1450 register the same intensifying typecasting in literary culture.

In comparison with earlier periods of alliterative verse history, the scarcity of (unrhymed) alliterative verse after 1450 caused more significant overlap between the practice and perception of meter. [4] In a process familiar from other chapters of literary and cultural history, in the case of alliterative verse typecasting, marginalization, and scarcity entered into a powerful feedback loop. The result was the death of a millennium-old poetic tradition and, not coincidentally, the cultural promotion of a new one: the pentameter tradition. The last phase of the alliterative tradition was also the first in which the practice of alliterative meter lived up to (or, put differently, was reduced to) a set of rigid cultural preconceptions. Late alliterative verse illustrates how cultural preconceptions can come to stigmatize poetic practices, and, in turn, how poetic practices can come to reinforce cultural preconceptions.

The final 100 years of alliterative verse, then, mark the juncture at which intrinsic and extrinsic modern approaches to alliterative meter most directly coincide. In part, this is due to the wider scope of the conversation about English meters in the sixteenth century, a development examined in greater detail in the conclusion of this essay. At the same time, the conformity of poetic perceptions to poetic practice in the alliterative tradition must itself be recognized as a culturally significant development, one that distinguishes post-1450 alliterative verse from earlier phases of the tradition. A corollary of distinguishing between histories of metrical practice and histories of metrical perception is affirming that, sometimes, the two intersect. And yet, for the alliterative tradition at least, such cooperation between perceptions and practice signaled a narrowing of the metrical imaginary. Meter was able to think less as proto-prosodists were able to think more about it. Post-1450 alliterative verse can be seen to illustrate its own marginalization in ever broader brushstrokes. In line with Prins’s dictum that poetic form is always already mediated, the prosodic typecasting of alliterative verse constituted an important form of mediation interceding between medieval poetic practice and modern ears. However, such typecasting emerged after 1450 as a new (or newly important) form of mediation in the long alliterative tradition.

Conclusion : Literary History and the History of Prosody

At the turn of the seventeenth century and for some time afterwards, alliterative verse was hardly ever read or studied. Medieval studies as a field of historical inquiry got underway in the sixteenth century. However, the focus of the earliest publications was on Old English prose (Graham 2000). Individual manuscript codices of medieval English verse, such as the Junius manuscript of Old English poetry and the Percy Folio of Middle English poetry, would not be mobilized as historical evidence until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After 1700, the story of alliterative verse and the story of alliterative metrics intertwined and reinforced one another, as successive generations of prosodists sought to make sense of the form, history, and cultural meaning of a defunct English meter. Anyone who proposes to say anything about alliterative verse today is necessarily heir to a literary history as well as a history of prosodic study.

A contemporary student of verse whose work particularly reflects the vicissitudes of literary history and the history of prosody (albeit malgré lui ) is the poet-critic James Fenton (Jones 2010: 1009-1011). In the opening of his Introduction to English Poetry (2002), Fenton excludes Old English poetry from consideration on the grounds that “[i]t is somebody else’s poetry” (1). Fenton confides, “I can’t accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare” (1). He goes on to reject Middle English poetry as well, though “[w]ith Chaucer we are much nearer home” (2). Predictably, Fenton’s chronological dividing line between “somebody else’s poetry” and its unstated opposite, ‘our poetry,’ coincides with the English Reformation. Such schematic periodization takes literary history back to the brave new world of Puttenham, who opined in his Arte of English Poesie that “beyond that time [ i.e. , the reigns of Edward III and Richard II] there is litle or nothing worth commendation to be founde written in this arte [ i . e ., verse]” (48).

For Puttenham, the reasons for the irrelevance of pre-1327 English poetry were (explicitly) political, intellectual, legal, linguistic, and (implicitly) racial. He writes of “the late Normane conquest, which had brought into this Realme much alteration both of our langage and lawes, and there withall a certain martiall barbarousnes, whereby the study of all good learning was so much decayd, as long time after no man or very few entended to write in any laudable science” (48). In 1589 this was a powerful new insight into the shape of English literary history. Indeed, Puttenham’s is one of the earliest attempts to constitute English literary history as a discrete field of inquiry. By 2002 Fenton could activate the same discourses of nation, language, and race without identifying them as such, except to remark that “English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins” (1). Moreover, Puttenham’s own milieu has become for Fenton the decisive watershed, further aligning the putatively spasmodic history of English poetry with the consolidation of the discourses on which that history rests.

If the rationale for Fenton’s periodization of English poetry is explicitly linguistic, it is also implicitly metrical: he favorably compares Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde , composed in pentameter, to the alliterative Sir Gawain and the Green Knight . The latter is “baffling and comprehensible by turns” (Fenton 2002: 1), the former “much nearer home, both linguistically and in terms of poetic practice” (2). Fenton’s presentism here echoes an influential Old Historicist narrative that characterized alliterative poetry as a backwater tradition, drowning in the welter of new literary forms in the Age of Chaucer. As this essay has recounted, the alliterative tradition itself transcended such stereotypes, at least before 1450. In the thirteenth century, alliterative meter lost its position as the default English verse form. But this meter endured, and the poets who continued to use it produced some of the most memorable poetry of the medieval centuries. From the seventh to the sixteenth century, alliterative meter does not so much rise or fall as stay put: it plods.

Cursory as they are, Fenton’s remarks illustrate how the discipline of literary study, including prosody, can retrospectively simplify literary history and obscure the cultural stakes of poetic forms. Like Puttenham, Fenton compartmentalizes the poetic past into binaries: Anglo-Saxon and English, local and cosmopolitan, popular and literary, medieval and modern. Insistence on such binaries has ceased to be a feature of literary-critical discourse, yet their force continues to be felt in the organization of research fields and in critical judgments about individual texts or authors. Chaucer, to take the egregium exemplum , continues to occupy a central position in English studies precisely because he is (perceived to be) the most English, cosmopolitan, literary—in a word, modern—medieval British author. But, of course, Chaucer inaugurates a modern literary or linguistic tradition only from the retrospect of later centuries (Butterfield 2009; Cannon 1998: 179-220). This is not to say that modernity and modernization are simply foreign subjects for a medievalist historical poetics—as though there could ever have been a Middle Ages without two somethings to be in the middle of! Rather, study of medieval English verse must continually strive to unthink the inevitability of modern poetic categories while retracing, in many cases, the very histories that created those categories. For this reason, struggling with and against medieval English poetics is a useful exercise for medievalists and modernists alike.

This essay focused on the subset of early English poetry known as alliterative verse. It did so for the same reason that Fenton found Troilus and Criseyde “much nearer home” than Sir Gawain and the Green Knight . Left turns and blind alleys in literary history have alienated modern commentators from the alliterative tradition, with the result that close study of alliterative meter captures the historical distance of medieval English literary culture with particular clarity. However, my emphasis on poetic practice applies more generally to the study of early English poetry. By the fourteenth century, alliterative meter was one of many untheorized English verse forms. Chaucer, for example, was evidently able to compose thousands of lines of pentameter—an English meter he is usually credited with inventing—without ever naming or discussing this new meter. Two centuries earlier, the poets of Poema Morale ( c . 1180) and Ormulum (late twelfth c.) had drawn on Latin models to create what was then a radically new English meter, the septenary. Neither of these poems is intelligible outside the context of the history of medieval Latin writing, including the long tradition of Latin metrical treatises. Yet neither poem offers any commentary on its own metrical form, apart from two vague references in the Dedication of the Ormulum to rime ‘poem; meter’ (Cannon 2004: 93, 96). Although this essay focused on poetry in English, the other language traditions of medieval England (French and Latin, but also Norse and Welsh) each enabled historically significant connections and disjunctures between poetic practice and literary theory. All in all, the case of medieval verse reveals how much larger the history of poetry is than the history of prosodic study in the English tradition.

In conclusion, a word on the methodological implications of the kind of historical poetics modeled in this essay. The disciplinary formation of literary studies is often understood as a vacillation between form and history: an Old Historicism, keyed to political history, coexisted with German-style philology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed by the valorization of the literary text as a self-contained object in the New Criticism, followed by the revaluation of history in the New Historicism and various strands of cultural studies—or so the story goes (more nuanced accounts: Attridge 2008; Liu 1989; Strier 2002). Newer critical approaches to literature synthesize form and history by retracing the shapes of particular historical series, such as the history of the material book or the history of contact between English and other language traditions. In one sense, the present essay adds momentum to the cyclicity of critical history by joining recent calls for a new formalism that would return the focus of literary studies to literary form while affirming the theoretical and ideological critiques of the past forty years (Cohen 2007; Levine 2006; Levinson 2007; Loesberg 1999; Marshall and Buchanan 2011). In another sense, this essay has sought to transcend the formalism/historicism dichotomy by reading poetic form as an important kind of historical practice. One salutary feature of the term ‘historical poetics’ is that it connects form and history inextricably.

The story of early English poetry is neither one of decay and neglect nor of the inevitable triumph of a language or a culture. That this story unfolded for centuries without the help of a movement or a school or a theory, political, intellectual, or literary, suggests the inadequacy of some traditional literary-historical terms of engagement. Specifically, the conversation about the historical contextualization of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poetics, recently reinvigorated by Jackson and Prins and taken up in turn by Culler, Jarvis, Martin, and others, needs to acknowledge the historicity of its subject and its methods. Generalizations about Poetry with a capital ‘P,’ or about the present-day study of its forms and histories, can be sharpened by taking early English poetry into consideration. In this essay, I identified two broad domains for reconstructing what was thinkable in medieval English verse: metrical practice and metrical perception. The key insight afforded by study of alliterative verse history is that practice and perception are separate domains, whose intermittent cooperation should be discovered through theorization and close reading rather than projected from the study of one onto the study of the other. Recognition that modern questions often fail to illuminate medieval meters is the first step toward a more capacious historical poetics. As foil or as precursor, medieval verse can help specify the historicity of modern English meters, modern prosodic metadiscourse, and the contemporary study of both.

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[1] Thanks are due to Marshall Brown, Ian Cornelius, and Bruce Holsinger for commenting on earlier drafts of this essay, and to participants in the Stanford Workshop in Poetics for helpful discussion of a draft of this essay in October 2015.

[2] Like other Early Middle English alliterative poets, Lawman makes extensive use of internal rhyme between half-lines but not end rhyme between long lines.

[3] Old English poetry was laid out as prose. Over the course of the thirteenth century, lineated format became the norm for English poetry, though prose format remained an (increasingly uncommon) option well into the sixteenth century. See Weiskott 2013a: 41-2.

[4] For alliterating stanzaic verse, the overlap between perception and practice was just as significant but located in a different region of literary genre: most late alliterating stanzaic poems are affiliated with the genre of ‘flyting’ or verbal dueling.

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Can Poetry Make a Difference in Our Lives and in the World?

April is National Poetry Month. What role does poetry play in your life?

By Natalie Proulx

How important is poetry in your life? Do you read or write it? Do you ever turn to poems when you are feeling lost or overwhelmed? When you need comfort or direction?

Do you think poetry has the power to make a difference — in our individual lives and in the world?

In the guest essay “ How to Breathe With the Trees, ” Margaret Renkl writes about Ada Limón, who is serving her second term as poet laureate of the United States. Ms. Renkl says that in a new poetry anthology, Ms. Limón makes a case for poetry being able to heal us and the earth itself:

April is National Poetry Month, and it strikes me that no one is better positioned than Ms. Limón to convince Americans to leave off their quarrels and worries, at least for a time, and surrender to the language of poetry. That’s as much because of her public presence as because of her public role as the country’s poet in chief. When Ada Limón tells you that poetry will make you feel better, you believe her. In her nearly weekly travels as poet laureate, Ms. Limón has had a lot of practice delivering this message. “Every time I’m around a group of people, the word that keeps coming up is ‘overwhelmed,’” she said. “It’s so meaningful to lean on poetry right now because it does make you slow down. It does make you breathe.” A poem is built of rests. Each line break, each stanza break and each caesura represents a pause, and in that pause there is room to take a breath. To ponder. To sit, for once in our lives, with mystery. If we can’t find a way to slow down on our own, to take a breath, poems can teach us how. But Ms. Limón isn’t merely an ambassador for how poetry can heal us . She also makes a subtle but powerful case for how poetry can heal the earth itself. At this time of crisis, when worry governs our days, she wants us to look up from our screens and consider our own connection to the earth. To remember how to breathe by spending some time with the trees that breathe with us.

Students, read the entire essay and then tell us:

Does poetry play a role in your life? If so, when do you turn to it most, whether that means reading it, writing it or both? Why? What effect does it have on you?

What do you think about Ms. Limón’s idea that poetry can heal us and the earth? To what extent can poetry make a difference in our lives? What about in our relationship to the earth? Or to the world at large?

Do you think poetry gets the respect and attention it deserves? Why do you think some people might be turned off or intimidated by poetry? How important do you think it is for young people to read and learn about this art form?

Tell us about one of your favorite poems. What thoughts, memories or feelings does it evoke? What does it mean to you?

If you’re not a reader or writer of poetry, is there another form of art or creative expression that you turn to when you’re feeling overwhelmed or lost? If so, what is it and how does it help you? Have you seen it make a difference in the world?

Bonus: Try your hand at the prompt Ms. Limón gave to writers in “You Are Here,” her new anthology of nature poems: Write a poem that “speaks back to the natural world, whatever that means to you.” If you would like, share your poem in the comments.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.

Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.

Natalie Proulx joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2017 after working as an English language arts teacher and curriculum writer. More about Natalie Proulx

Why You Should Read Poetry All Year

To really kickstart your creative thinking, read poems often..

Posted April 23, 2024 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

• We need new ideas and thought combinations to solve daily challenges.

Poetry can help us think differently.

• A poet uses high-level creative thinking to write a poem. The result can spark creative thinking in readers.

Is it just me, or is Poetry Month everywhere this year?

Poet Mary Ruefle had something to say about this:

Every April, since the establishment of National Poetry Month, I receive a call from my local library or high school, asking if I will participate in a reading. How about November? I always ask, and the answer is always the same: People aren’t interested then; April is the month poetry goes public. (from Madness, Rack, and Honey )

While I appreciate the airtime poetry is receiving this month, my mission today is to convince you to care about poems into May and beyond.

Why You Should Care About Poems in May

When was the last time, in the physical world, you saw something that startled your senses? You turned toward the scene as emotion kindled within: awe , surprise, fear , love.

One of my favorite poets, Jane Hirshfield, wrote: “Many good poems have a kind of window-moment in them—they change their direction of gaze in a way that suddenly opens a broadened landscape of meaning and feeling.” (from Ten Windows )

Poems Open Windows in the Mind

A powerful poem ignites a thought-spark, loosening the trend of your thinking from the ruts of conformity and the latest righteous cause downloaded to your brain from the internet.

To write a powerful poem requires solitude, self- denial (of screens), time, and concentration —four ingredients that result in the highest-tier thinking that we call creativity .

Originality infused in the work affects the reader as it sparks new ways of seeing, fresh possibilities, and reinvigorated feelings.

Hirshfield again from Ten Windows : “A good poem is a solvent, a kind of WD-40 for the soul . . . To feel oneself moved creates in itself an increase of freedom.”

Specifically, it increases freedom of thought—freedom from thinking the way others are thinking or from the way we have thought before.

Don't we need new thoughts in our daily lives?

Constantly we are tasked with solving problems:

• how to respond to a surly teen or disgruntled customer
• how to most effectively teach a difficult concept to a classroom of students
• how to think up the latest market-defying innovation to move our business forward

The best way to solve these problems is to make new combinations of thought. Poetry can help us do this.

Why You Might Resist

That said, some people resist poetry because quite a bit of contemporary poetry is so jarring that it shakes the reader too much. Or it’s so obscure that it keeps the reader out and makes you feel dumb for not understanding its very hidden message.

In fact, I went through a long period during which I avoided contemporary poetry because I found the images in many poems so disturbing and depraved that I didn’t figure I needed them in my life. But then I took a deep dive and began to discover many insightful, thought-provoking poets.

Presently, I’m on a quest to collect poetry that stirs thought without the trendy shock-and-awe approach but with failsafe original thinking that probably resulted from a poet's solitude, self-denial (of screens), time, and concentration. I can share a small selection of this poetry with you through this Poetry Guide that includes favorite poetry books for beginners or experts.

Of course, you can always go exploring to find just the right poems to inspire your own thought-shift. No matter how you do it, read more poems.

This post also appears on Sparkitivity . Copyright Sparkitivity, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Ruefle, Mary. (2012). Madness, Rack, and Honey. Seattle: Wave Books.

Hirshfield, Jane. (2017). Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. New York: Knopf.

Kathryn Haydon, MSc , is an innovation strategist, speaker, and author who helps teams and individuals activate and maximize their creative thinking and innovation potential.

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The Study Of Poetry + And his three essays + Contemporary Literature and cultural theory by Pramod k Nayar.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Online poetry writing at school – comparing lower secondary students’ experiences between individual and collaborative poetry writing provisionally accepted.

• 1 University of Helsinki, Finland

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

This study investigates how seventh-grade students experience online collaborative writing, its support in writing poems, and how collaboratively and individually written poems differ. The educational design research method was used in this mixed-methods study, which was conducted in natural classroom settings to investigate students' individual and collaborative poetry writing. The quantitative analysis of questionnaires and qualitative thematic analysis of post-experimental interviews show that the students enjoyed collaborative writing more and found it more accessible than individual writing. They experienced that it supported them in writing better poems and increased their writing confidence. They also appreciated the support of teamwork, although individual writing gave them more liberty to explore various aspects of poetry and express their feelings. From a pedagogical point of view, the students need to be provided with opportunities for collaborative poetry writing to make the writing process easier and more enjoyable. Online collaborative writing supports the process of poetry writing.

Keywords: Digital tool, technology in education, online poetry writing, collaborative writing Online Poetry Writing at School -Comparing Lower Secondary Students' Experiences between Individual and Collaborative Poetry Writing, poetry writing

Received: 02 Feb 2024; Accepted: 22 Apr 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Kangasharju, Ilomäki and Toom. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Mx. Arja Kangasharju, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

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