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Cleanth Brooks And The Formalist Approach To Metaphysical And Moral Values In Literature

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Cleanth Brooks And The Formalist Approach To Metaphysical And Moral Values In Literature

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Content CLEANTH BROOKS AND THE FORMALIST APPROACH TO
METAPHYSICAL AND MORAL VALUES IN LITERATURE
by
Sister Mary Jerome Hart, I.H.M.
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
January 1963
UNIVERSITY O F SO U TH ER N CALIFORNIA
GRADUATE SCHOOL
U N IVER SITY PARK
LOS ANGELES 7. C ALIFO R NIA
This dissertation, written by
Sister Mary Jerome Hart, I.H.M.
under the direction of h.S.Y...Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillm ent of requirements
for the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
............
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chmrman
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. INTRODUCTION ............................... 1
II. KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH IN POETRY............ 33
III. THE ROLE OF BELIEF IN POETRY............. 58
IV. NORMS AND VALUES IN THE JUDGMENT OF POETRY. 86
V. METAPHOR AND IRONY: A METHODOLOGY AND
PERSPECTIVE.................... ... 103
VI. CONCLUSION....................................126
BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................... 134
ill
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The relation of literature to life has been a basic
issue in the critical tradition of the Western world since
the time of Plato and Aristotle. Plato's condemnation of
poets as falsifiers of reality and deceivers of the public
was opposed by Aristotle's justification of them as an
enlightening and therapeutic influence. This disagreement,
rooted primarily in opposing conceptions of the nature of
reality and of man's way of knowing it, is reflected in
the metaphysical and moral orientation of much subsequent
literary theory.
In the earlier periods of English literature, Stephen
Gosson, Sir Philip Sidney, and Samuel Johnson carried on
the debate. In The School of Abuse (1579)* Gosson, like
Plato, condemned literary art, particularly drama, because
he believed it to be a means of corrupting public morals.
Sidney, on the other hand, in An Apology for Poetry (1595)t
1
applauded the poet, who "nothing affirmeth and therefore
never lieth," as a kind of popular philosopher who teaches
the more effectively because he also delights. Two
centuries later, Samuel Johnson continued this tradition,
stating In his Preface to Shakespeare, that the purpose of
poetry Is "to instruct by pleasing." Johnson saw no real
difference between literary criticism and the criticism of
life; moralist and critic are one.
Nineteenth-century England brought two major figures
to the critical scene: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Matthew
Arnold; the former, a positive influence on the Formalist
critics treated in this study; the latter, for the most
part a kind of catalytic antagonist whose precepts
elicited a reactionary response. Coleridge evolved from
the Kantian categories the distinction between the poem
and the work of science, and he insisted that moral con
cern and aesthetic concern are aspects of the single
creative act of the poet--an act reflective of his whole
mind. Poetry and religion have for Coleridge a common
object: "the perfecting, and the pointing out to us the
indefinite improvement of our nature, and fixing our
3
attention on that."! The Formalist critics, attracted by
Coleridge’s theories of imagination and of organic form,
seemed at first to have overlooked his Insistence on the
moral Impact of literature; but later developments reveal
that, like Coleridge, these critics became Increasingly
aware of the metaphysical and moral aspects of literary
art. They attacked, however, what* they considered to be
an extreme interpretation of the moral significance of
literature In the theories of Matthew Arnold and of his
twentieth-century counterpart Irving Babbitt. For both
these men poetry expressed a criticism of life and func
tioned as a surrogate for religion; such a responsibility
the Formalists believed to be too great a burden for
poetry. But their reaction to Arnold and Babbitt was not
entirely negative; they agreed with the former on the
importance of criticism as a discipline, and with the
latter in his distrust of romanticism and In his insistence
that literature be judged by objective standards rooted In
tradition but transcending any particular period.
1,1 Lecture VIII, 1811-12," In I. A. Richards, ed.,
The Portable Coleridge (New York, 1950), p. 397*
4
The complex genesis of modern Formalism includes many
other elements, such as the doctrine of "pure poetry"
evolved from Baudelaire through Mallarm^ and Valery and
modified by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in England. Eliot's
critical background, as described by R. P. Blackmur, is
representative of the Formalist inheritance in general:
It has, for example, a vital relation to all the monu
ments of criticism from Aristotle's Poetics to
Wordsworth's Preface and Coleridge's Blographia. It
is in vital reaction to Arnold and Pater; the fight
with and use of Matthew Arnold is life-long, the fight
with Pater is more with his 'cause' than with his
judgments and is more a foray than a war. Again Eliot's
criticism 'owes' a good deal to George Santayana, Remy
de Gourmont, Irving Babbitt, and Ezra Pound. Still
again, there is the continuous struggle--the honest
wrestling--with the work of I. A. Richards . . . .2
Some additional factors in the ideological background of
Formalism were recently noted by Walter Sutton:
The contextualist emphasis can be understood partly as
a reaction against the sociological preoccupations of
the critics of the 1930's (and against the liberal-
progressive temper of the decade) and partly as the
result of other causes. Such developments in other
fields of knowledge as Gestalt psychology and Ernst
Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms have been drawn
upon for the elaboration of contextualist theory, and
new authorities have been resurrected from the past,
ranging from the American nineteenth century to classi
cal antiquity. Emerson's concern for the symbol and
for the work of art as a microcosm is recognized
2The Lion and the Honeycomb (New York, 1955)> P* 162.
5
as an anticipation of modern ideas about the Gestalt,
and Edgar Allan Poe is seen to have a proper new
critical emphasis in his stress upon the need for
unity of effect and upon the intransitive nature of
the reading experience. 'Longinus,1 the pseudonymous
first century Greek author of 'On the Sublime,' is
revealed as an early prophet of contextualism, anti
cipating by nearly two thousand years Coleridge's
organic theory of form and anticipating also in his
discussion of 'composition,' the twentieth-century
theorist's concept of 'total structure.'3
Prom this heterogeneous background derived the movement
variously known as "Formalist," "Contextualist," or "New"
Criticism. The most significant critical phenomenon of
this century, it has constantly asserted the unique and
self-contained nature of the poetic object, maintaining
that a poem should always be treated as an organic system
of relationships and that the poetic quality should never
be associated with one or more factors separately
considered. The usual Formalist approach to a poem is
inductive and concrete and stresses the importance of
linguistic structure; hence it involves the critic in
close textual analysis.
These characteristics, combined with a refusal to
allow literature the power of moral sanction, have led
•3
"Contextualist Theory and Criticism," Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 19:318* Spring 1961.
6
numerous men of letters to attach the "Ivory-Tower" label
to the New Criticism. As early as 1941, Herbert Muller
described the Formalists as "tending toward a narrow
aestheticism" and, subsequently, as "bristling" at the
mention of intellectual, moral, or social values in litera
ture.^ A few years later Darrell Abel wrote in a similar
vein,
In their view it is reprehenslbly self-indulgent to
evaluate experience, to Interpret, and thereby allow
emotional and subjective standards to determine the
poetic construction.5
By the end of the Forties, Douglgs Bush claimed that a
strange anomaly existed in these critics;
[They] have bemoaned the failure of belief, the loss
of traditional values, the aggressive nihilism of the
scientific positivists, but they themselves have been
doing all they could to create a moral vacuum.6
In the last decade F. W. Bateson accused the Contextualists
of "irresponsibility" and of "abusing their social func
tion," specifically Identifying their position with the
^"The New Criticism in Poetry," Southern Review,
6:813, Spring 1941; Science and Criticism (New Haven,
1943), p. 39-
^"Intellectual Criticism," American Scholar, 12:416,
October 1943*
^"The New Criticism: Some Old-Fashioned Queries,"
PMLA, Proceedings Supplement, 64:21, March 1949*
7
"Ivory Tower of 1'art pour l'art";? and Maxwell Geismar
blamed the New Criticism for keeping our best young minds
"absorbed with their playthings."® In 1958 Nathan Scott
reiterated the "isolationist" charge and analysed the
Formalist emphasis in these terms:
What it [modern criticism] has wanted to insist upon
is the indissoluble unity of form and content in the
work which gives it the kind of autonomy that prevents
its being translated into any other mode of statement.
And this concern has in turn led contemporary theorists
to minimize the controlling effect upon the creative
process of the writer's ideas and beliefs. For it has
been supposed that were any tribute to be paid to these
factors we should be quickly on the way toward reinstat
ing the heresy of didacticism, with its notion that the
literary work is merely a rhetorical communication of
independently formulable ideas.9
According to some writers, the Formalists' indifference to
moral and social values in literature results in a lack of
normative judgments on their part.-*-9 A typical explanation
^"The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,"
Essays in Criticism, 3:22, January 1953-
®"The Higher and Higher Criticism," Nation, 183:410,
November 10, 1956.
^Modern Literature and the Religious Frontier (New
York, 1958), p. 29.
10H. M. McLuhan, "Poetic vs^. Rhetorical Exegesis; the
Case for Leavls against Richards and Empson," Sewanee
Review, 52:266, April 1944; Malcolm Cowley, "American
Scholar Forum I," American Scholar, 20:88, Winter 1950*
8
of this point is that of Roger Laufer:
The consideration of the greatness of the work is
completely lacking in them; doubtless because it
implies the use of a set of values that lie outside
the compass of their quest, self-restricted to purely
aesthetic grounds.H
Although the majority opinion has thus identified
modern Formalism with the abrogation of moral, social, and
evaluative judgments in the study of literature, a few
critics have asserted the presence of a distinct trend in
the opposite direction. An early spokesman for this posi
tion was William Van O'Connor, who wrote in 19^9, "one of
the persistent themes running through the new criticism
12
is the consequences of the decay of religious order."
Bernard Baum also maintained that "cognition and morality"
are the precise concerns of Formalist interpretations.^3
John H. Raleigh goes so far as to term them "lugubriously
moral," adding,
i
"The American 'New Criticism'; An Account and
Appraisal," MeanJin, 16:36, Autumn 1957-
^"A Short View of the New Criticism," College
English, 11:71* November 19^-9•
■'■^’ ’corpus Delicti: Some Letters Mainly Concerned
with the New Criticism," South Atlantic Quarterly, 51:273,
April 1952.
surely no literary criticism, not even Doctor Johnson's,
has uttered the word 'moral' so many times and, while
being so avowedly nondidactic in theory . . . has been
so didactic in practice.1^
To this concern for moral value, both within and without
literature, Irving Howe attributes a related and rather
persistent probing of the problem of belief.such
attributions of moral and metaphysical preoccupations to
the Formalists directly contradict the charges of extreme
aestheticism already noted.
Various reasons have been offered for this inconsist
ent impression conveyed by the New Criticism. One
explanation begins in what William Empson has called "a
sort of party-system among critics; those critics," he
predicted in 1930, "will soon be considered mere shufflers
who are not either only Interested in Truth or only
interested In Beauty . . . ."-*-6 The modern consequences
of the fulfillment of Empson's prophecy have been well
described by Meyer Abrams:
■^"The New Criticism as a Historical Phenomenon,"
Comparative Literature, 11:24, Winter 1959-
■*■5"Modern Criticism in America," Nation, 187:389,
November 22, 1958.
Seven Types of Ambiguity, Meridian Books (New York,
1955), PP. 14-15.
10
The persistently defensive position of criticism, and
its standard procedure of combating charges against
poetry by asserting their contraries, has forced it
into an either-or, all-or-none choice that breeds
dilemmas: either language is scientific or it is pure
ly emotive; either a poem corresponds to the world or
it is a world entirely its own; either poetry has a
moral aim or it is totally beyond judgment of good or
evil; either all our beliefs are relevant to reading
poetry, or all our beliefs must be suspended. What we
obviously need is the ability to make more distinctions
and finer discriminations . . . .17
Those Contextualists whose early approach to poetry was
mainly in terms of the aesthetic, emotional, non-referen-
tial, non-moral theory may quite possibly have begun to
shift in the opposite direction as the result of a renewed
interest in religion and value usually attributed to
contemporary disenchantment with science, and awareness
of the inadequacies of a purely secular society. In
February 1950, the editors of Partisan Review, pointing to
this revival as "one of the most significant tendencies of
our time," said,
There is no doubt that the number of intellectuals
professing religious sympathies, beliefs, or doctrines
is greater now than it was ten or twenty years ago and
that this number is continually increasing or becoming
more articulate .... if the present tendency
■^"Belief and the Suspension of Belief," in Meyer
H. Abrams, ed., Literature and Belief (New York, 1958)*
p. 12.
11
continues, the mid-century years may go down as the
years of conversion and return.18
The number of conversions is not the issue here; for, as
Douglas Bush has explained,
Even if only a small number of writers have returned
to orthodox Christian faith, everyone has felt the same
pressure, and a multitude of more or less intellectual
people have become far more sympathetic toward a reli
gious view of life than sim ople were, say, in
This renewal of religious sensibility would figure
largely in the current evolutionary hypothesis which
interprets the contradictory elements in Formalism in
terms of a consistent theoretical growth. According to
this view, the campaign of the New Critics to center atten
tion on the poem as poem was so successful in the Thirties
and the Forties that their interest was of necessity drawn
to the broader aspects of criticism; namely, the spiritual,
moral, and social relevance of poetry to modern life.2®
C. E. Pulos and John Bradbury believe that this change was
1 f t
Religion and the Intellectuals: A Symposium,"
19"American Literary Criticism: The Contemporary
Scene," Western Humanities Review, 8:90, Spring, 195^.
20Richard J. Foster, The New Romantics (Bloomington,
Indiana, 1962), p. 31*
1925.19
12
the Inevitable result of the Formalists' encounter with
new social forces and expanding fields of knowledge.21
In probing the inconsistency of the New Critics,
Murray Krieger notes in them a tendency to base their
judgments on conflicting philosophical assumptions,22 an
observation supported by Eliseo Vivas's statement that
critics today do not have a clear conception of the theo
retical foundations of their discipline.23 However, to
some writers, a metaphysical uncertainty is preferable to
any commitment to an orthodox ideology because, they claim,
party-line, tendentious criticism usually results from
such an affiliation.2^ On the other hand, there are men
such as Norman Foerster and Helmut Kuhn, who believe that
the meaning a work is discoverable only within a
21The New Critics and the Language of Poetry
(Lincoln, Nebraska, 1958), p. 259; The Fugitives, a
Critical Account (Chapel Hill, 1958), p. 56.
22The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis, 1956),
p. 6.
2^Creatlon and Discovery (New York, 1955 )> P* 192.
2^Irving Howe, "Religion and the Intellectuals,"
Partisan Review, 17:^71* June 1950.
13
framework of metaphysical principles.^5 Theodore Greene
has stated this position as follows:
Yet the critic cannot apply this criterion of
imaginative depth or breadth without an appeal to what
I have entitled a philosophy of life. For no critic
can recognize genuine depth of artistic insight unless
he has had profound experiences of his own, nor can he
appreciate significant breadth of outlook unless his
own outlook is catholic and integrated ....
This does not mean that he should appraise the great
ness of a work of art by reference to his own specific
scale of values or pattern of beliefs .... Yet unless
he has some specific scale of values and some specific
philosophy of life, he cannot hope really to comprehend
any scale of value different from his o w n .26
Any attempt to analyze these various explanations of
the conflicts in Formalist criticism might also take into
account this observation of Irving Singer:
The relationship between the men of action and the men
of thought is always a highly complicated one. Artists
and critics sometimes create or seize upon ideas that
justify their actual behavior and symbolize what they
are trying to do anyhow, and sometimes they redirect
their efforts, consciously or unconsciously, in accord
ance with influential forces in both the material and
the ideological environment.27
25"The Esthetic Judgment and the Ethical Judgment,"in
Ray B. West, Jr., ed., Essays in Modern Literary Criticism
(New York, 1952), p. 215; "On the Indispensability of Meta
physical Principles in Aesthetics," Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, 9:133, December 1950.
26fhe Arts and the Art of Criticism (Princeton, 1940),
p. 471.
2^"The Aesthetic of 'Art for Art's Sake,'" Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 12:343, March 1954.
14
Quite possibly all the explanations of the Incongruities
in Contextualist theory and practice which we have been
citing are plausible. A philosophical uncertainty would
surely have allowed for the ideological evolution which
quite obviously has taken place; and one stage of this
development probably involved the science vs_. poetry,
either-or dilemma; and another stage, the renewal of reli
gious and metaphysical inquiry.
Such a synthesis points the direction of this thesis,
which proposes to trace the evolution of metaphysical and
moral elements in the criticism of the "most forceful and
influential critic that we have" at present--Cleanth
Brooks.
Of all our critics no one has done more toward revolu
tionizing our reading of a poem . . . and no one has
been of greater practical influence.29
Brooks, then, is a particularly appropriate representative
of Formalist criticism, having long been identified as a
"New Critic," a tag, which its originator, John Crowe
p O
John Crowe Ransom, Poems and Essays (New York,
1955), P- 148.
w . Stallman, "The New Criticism," in R. W.
Stallman, ed., Critiques and Essays in Criticism 1920-
1949 (New York, 1949), p. 496.
15
Ransom, has attached to a close textual critic, primarily
a'linguistic one.30 Allen Tate, remarking that "The New
Critics look alike as Mongolians look alike to me; as Mr.
Ransom might look, to the Mongolians, like the late Babe
Ruth," maintains that the New Criticism is a myth and that
the "isolationist" charges which were cited earlier are in
fact explainable only in terms of a reaction against that
myth.31 That this may have been the case is suggested by
such recent studies as Richard Foster's The New Romantics,
which explodes the isolationist hypothesis by demonstrat
ing the presence of humanistic values and of a shift from
a formal-aesthetical to a moral-spiritual approach in I. A.
Richards, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, and Eliseo Vivas.32
Foster, however, all but ignores Brooks, apparently taking
no exception to the opinion expressed in another recent
study that there are "no absolutes, no ontologies, and no
religions" involved in his theory or practice.33 The few
OQ
“* Poems and Essays, p. 103•
3^-Collected Essays (Denver, 1959), pp. 540, 537.
32Pp. 35, 42.
33sradbury, p. 237.
16
published articles which deal specifically with Brooks
likewise maintain that
He stops short of the deeper implications of the poet's
use of language, the philosophical beliefs implicit in
his work, the larger social bearings of his 'drama' . .
The general opinion is that
He is not concerned with the relation of the poem . . .
to human experience (neither biographically to the
experience of the poet, nor psychologically or morally,
to the experience of the reader).35
However, Ransom, his friend and former teacher, notes in
Brooks the growth of characteristics commonly associated
with the religious c r i t i c ; 36 ancj jj. Waggoner describes
him as "coming around" to the "largest questions of meaning
in l i t e r a t u r e ,"37 a pronouncement with which Murray Krieger
also concurs.3®
^ Herbert J. Muller, "The Relative and the Absolute:
An Exchange of Views," [With Cleanth Brooks] Sewanee
Review, 57:362, Summer 1949 •
35Monroe K. Spears, "The Mysterious Urn" (rev. of The
Well Wrought Urn), Western Review, 12:56, Autumn 19^7*
36ppems and Essays, p. 148.
37"The Current Revolt against the New Criticism,"
Criticism, 1:219, Summer 1959-
3^"Recent Criticism, 'Thematics,' and the Existential
Dilemma," The Centennial Review of Arts and Science, 4:32,
Winter I960. This evaluation of Brooks corrects Mr.
Krieger's stand expressed in The New Apologists for Poetry
(1956).
17
This thesis will attempt to show that Brooks has in
fact "come around" and that his commitment to a broader,
humanistic criticism is a reflection of a similar evolution
in Formalism as a whole. In order to relate the theoreti
cal development of the Formalists in general to that of
Brooks, their ideas and judgments will be compared with his
wherever they seem particularly relevant. Included in this
group are I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, John
Crowe Ransom, and R. P. Blackmur; all of whom Brooks early
cited as having influenced him.39 Robert Penn Warren,
because of his common background and co-authorship with
Brooks, is also cited.
To I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot goes the credit for
laying the foundation of Formalist criticism. Richards, it
is generally agreed, was never whole-heartedly a positiv
ist; hence his gradual acceptance of the metaphysical and
cognitive elements in poetry was almost expected. From
the beginning, however, Richards has maintained that "To
set up as a critic is to set up as a Judge of values," and
that
^ Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill,
1939), P- x.
18
the separation of poetic experience from Its place In
life and its ulterior worths involves a definite lop
sidedness, narrowness, and incompleteness . . . .40
The juxtaposition of science and poetry, which is central
to Richards' early thought, had its counterpart in the
coupling of religion and poetry by T. S. Eliot; and in the
interaction between these pairs there arose the question
of belief. To this problem Eliot ultimately evolved a
solution which was subsequently accepted in varying degrees
by most of the Formalist group. Moreover, he has stated
that the philosophical, sociological, and psychological
involvements of modern criticism are a peculiar necessity
of our time:
It is simply that the conditions under which literature
is judged simply and naturally as literature and not
another thing, no longer prevail. For such judgment of
literature to be the normal and natural task of the
critic, a settled society is necessary; a definite and
limited public, in the midst of which there would be a
smaller number of persons of taste and discrimination,
with the same background of education and manners. It
must be a society which believes in itself, a society
in which the difference of religious and political
views is not extreme.4l
^ Principles of Literary Criticism, eleventh edition
(London, 1924), p. 79*
^ On Poetry and Poets (New York, 1957)* P- 221.
19
Purely aesthetic criticism is still valid, according to
Eliot, but only as a warning to the artist to stick to his
job; . .it never was and never can be valid for the
spectator, reader, or auditor."42
Allen Tate, like Eliot, sees in religious humanism
the moral and spiritual condition most favorable to litera
ture; 43 and he holds that all literature has a social,
moral, or religious p u r p o s e .44 The theoretical develop
ments which led Tate to these commitments have been sum
marized as follows:
Through the years, Tate has been forced by the logic of
his position farther and farther beyond his original
commitments into the area of metaphysical speculation.
His theory of literature as 'knowledge,1 annunciated in
Reason in Madness, led to an invocation of myth and
'mythic knowledge1; and from this resort he was induced
to assume a highly subjective 'power within us, the
imaginative power of the revelation of things' as the
source of art's special insights. In his latest Catholic
pronouncements, Tate has invoked 'a higher unity of
truth,' or 'Truth,' which literature must ultimately
reflect, or consent to be regarded as 'only illusion.'
It would appear that Tate's relentless pursuit of a
rational justification of art to which he has dedicated
his life has pressed him finally into supra-rational-
ism.45
^ Selected Essays (New York, 1950), p. 392.
^ Fugitives' Reunion, ed. Rob Roy Purdy (Nashville,
1959), P- 183.
^ Collected Essays, p. 138.
45
Bradbury, p. 110.
20
Tate's early mentor, John Crowe Ransom, has long been
identified as a rational humanist who upholds the applica
tion of moral commonplaces to literature,^ and who more
recently has emphasized the substantive values in poetry.
According to R. P. Blackmur, the critical position of
Ransom is indubitably moving in the direction of epistemol-
h O
ogy and ontology. Blackmur himself frequently discusses
literature in terms of "religious sensibility." Like the
other New Critics, he is acutely aware of the disordered
time in which we live, but his approach to literature is
more often in terms of the unspeakable and transcendental.
He proposes the "religious imagination" as the salutary
synthesis between the extreme intellection of the Human
ists and the extreme intuition of Crocean or Kantian
aesthetics.49 Robert Penn Warren, the last critic to be
46itThe Bases of Criticism," Sewanee Review, 52:559*
Autumn 1944.
47poems and Essays, p. 108.
^®The Lion and the Honeycomb, p. 192.
^ " H u m a n i s m and Symbolic Imagination: Notes on
Re-reading Irving Babbitt," Southern Review, 7:315*
Autumn 1941.
21
included here, studied under Ransom at Vanderbilt, as
did both Tate and Brooks. His critical essays, though
fewer than theirs, clearly sustain a moral-aesthetic
approach, one based on the tension between
a deeply felt morality and the need to see things truth-
fully--especially as they fall short of the standards
such morality prescribes--together with the resolving
of this tension by means of an intellectual irony.50
Allen Tate has described the influence of Ransom on
Warren, Brooks, and himself as combining Kantian aesthetics
with a philosophic dualism, slightly colored by Christian
theology.51 The basic premises of such a position have
been enumerated by Neo-Kantian Theodore Greene:
All that crucially concerns us is the basic presupposi
tion . . . that the artist can, in principle, look at
life in his own distinctly artistic way and achieve more
or less valid insights into nature, man, and God which
he can also, in principle, more or less accurately com
municate to the artistically sensitive and trained
observer. What is here assumed, in short, is not only
that the beauty of art is objective but that the
expressed content of a work of art can also be cogni
tively valid and important. This assumption, if correct,
extends the concept of potentially valid aesthetic
insight far beyond the realm of pure taste for pure
beauty and justifies our regarding the work of art,
^Frederick p. W. McDowell, "Robert Penn Warren's
Criticism," Accent, 15:192, Summer 1955*
^ Collected Essays, p. 556.
22
including its expressed content, as meaningfully objec
tive and as potentially the vehicle of authentic
wisdom.52
This "authentic wisdom" may confirm and deepen man's moral
and spiritual insights; hence the opinion of Alfred North
Whitehead that in this wisdom which reveals "absolute
Truth regarding the Nature of Things" lies the curative
function of art.^3 Another modern philosopher C. I. Lewis
sees moral value in art's acting as a means to the cultiva
tion of taste:
Good taste holds an imperative for the good life; being
that discrimination by which the purer, the more fecund,
and the more durable inherent goods are selected.54
This moral evaluation of art both as wisdom or insight and
as an imperative for the good life is readily discernible
in the theories of Brooks and his fellow critics: first,
in the oft-repeated literature-as-knowledge thesis;
second, in the obvious concern with the decay of culture
and the importance of the Humanities. In order to
^ Moral, Aesthetic, and Religious Insight (New
Brunswick, New Jersey, 1957)* P* 86.
^^Adventures of Ideas (New York, 1933)* p- 350.
5^An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle,
Illinois, 1946), p. 437-
23
encompass these aspects as well as the less explicit
Implications In the moral measure of literature, the
definition of the term moral drawn up by Vincent Buckley
will best serve the purpose of this study. His is an
expansive, adaptable sense of morality, but not necessarily
a relativistic one:
. . . a sense for something that touches, on the one
hand, standards of behavior, and, on the other hand,
depths of understanding: the knowledge of good and
evil as well as decisions on behalf of this or that
course of action. And it would touch on, it would have
bearings on, much that lies between these poles: on
the pieties, the perceptions, and the self-checks,
which are equally a matter of morality and of the affec
tions .55
With this inclusive definition as a guide, we shall
attempt to examine the various ways in which moral
judgments and the philosophical and religious criteria
related to them are involved in the criticism of poetry as
practiced by Cleanth Brooks and to a limited extent by the
other Formalists. In this study, poetry will be used to
represent literature in general in the sense that it
shares with all genres the transformation of experience
into symbolic vision, and for practical reasons best
explained by T. S. Eliot:
^ Poetry and Morality (London, 1959)> P* 17*
24
. . . poetry is the most convenient object of criticism
to have in mind, when talking about criticism, simply
for the reason that its formal qualities lend themselves
most readily to generalization. In poetry, it might
seem that style is everything. This is far from being
true; but the illusion that in poetry we come nearer to
a purely aesthetic experience makes poetry the most con
venient genre of literature to keep in mind when we are
discussing literary criticism itself.56
Although Formalism considers the poem primarily as an
object detached from its author, it cannot disregard the
well-known pronouncement of Henry James:
There is one point at which the moral sense and the
artistic sense lie very close together; that is in the
light of the very obvious truth that the deepest qual
ity of a work will always be the quality of the mind
of the producer.57
Thus, as R. P. Warren points out, in so far as a poem
involves the poet's own values and his view of the world,
it is related, by implication at least, to the world out
side the p o e m .58 This relationship in turn involves the
concept of communication; and because "... there is
always a certain vibrant relation between what is spoken
and the living voice of the poet who speaks," even the
56
On Poetry and Poets, p. 118.
57"The Art of Fiction," in West, ed., p. 49-
-^Selected Essays (New York, 1951 )> P- 203-
25
best reader of poetry will have a sense of someone speak
ing the w o r d s .59 Moreover, the medium of poetry is
language, which by its nature is intended for communica
tion; and if, as Charles Morris maintains, the value
experiences embodied in a work of art are communicable to
those who perceive and interpret its medium,^0 then the
process of interpreting the language of the poem is also
a process of communication and, in the opinion of some,
even of "communion."61
As a consequence of the valuation of experience per
ceived in and through the poem, the reader is bound to
confront the problems of belief and of poetic truth. This
confrontation involves the emotions and the mythic sense
as well as vhe intellect since poetic truth is never purely
proposltional. Walter Ong conceives of the poem as exist
ing "in a context of one presence calling to another," and
•^Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality
(Bloomington, Indiana, 1962), p. 55*
6°"Science, Art, and Technology," Kenyon Review,
1:417, Autumn 1939-
^See Allen Tate, Collected Essays, p. 388: "...
works of literature, from the short lyric to the long
epic, are the recurrent discovery of the human communion
as experience in a definite place and at a definite
time."
26
he, therefore, defines the belief of a poem's audience as
an invitation to the persons involved In composing it
and presenting It to us either to say something worth
our while or to betray our trust in them as persons.62
The response of the poet to this "act of trust" from his
audience is interpreted by Meyer Abrams as follows:
. . . though the poet is not concerned to persuade us
to take up positions outside the poem, it is his con
stant concern to persuade us to concur with the common-
sense and moral positions presupposed by the poem, to
take the serious seriously and the comic comically, and
to acquiesce to the probability of the thoughts, choices,
and actions which are represented to follow from a given
character.^3
Belief, then, becomes dependent on the criterion of inter
nal consistency; in this sense the artist defines value in
terms of a dramatic whole. He presents us with a "symbolic
fiction" of the actual world and displays through the poem
itself the hierarchy of values underlying its structure.
In the opinion of Allen Tate, this act of structuring the
symbolic from the existent reveals more about the quality
and order of a poet's belief than any conscious
^"Voice as a Summons for Belief," in Abrams, ed.,
Literature and Belief, pp. 9h, 102-103.
^"Belief and the Suspension of Belief," p. 17*
^Eliseo Vivas, "Literature as Knowledge," Sewanee
Review, 60:587* Autumn 1952.
27
proposltional statement he might m a k e .^5 ipjie structural
theory thus Interlocks technique with both belief and
value:
Poetry Is a double, a triple, discipline. There Is
a technical, most specifically a linguistic, training,
partly traditional but chiefly self-acquired, a deforma
tion and reorganization of the language. This is also
a spiritual discipline--of confronting disorder in
one's self and in the world; of facing existentially,
as a total human being living in time, the responsibil
ity of vision and choice. The third -discipline, one
might say, is to unite the spiritual revolution and
reconstruction to the linguistic or literary. But this
is not a third stage. With a writer, the linguistic
renaming or renovation and the self-searching and
cosmos-confronting go on concurrently or in rapid
alternation and reciprocity.66
In this structural approach formulated by the Contex-
tualists, the values of poetry inhere in its linguistic
medium. Although I. A. Richards early asserted that poetic
language reflects the mind that employs it, his limitation
of poetic meaning to a purely emotional status personalized
the values and made them relevant only in their psychologi
cal effects. A similarly one-sided theory of the early
Formalists claimed that language functioned syntactically
^"Religion and the Intellectuals," Partisan Review,
17:250-251, March 1950.
^Austin Warren, The Rage for Order (Chicago, 19^8),
p. v.
28
but not referentially. Today, however, their humanistic
emphasis is necessarily accompanied by a broader concep
tion of poetic discourse--one based on the evaluation of
artistic language by such theorists as Charles Morris and
Henry David Aiken:
Since the work of art does designate, and in many cases
denotes the value properties of actual situations,
aesthetic discourse is by no means a mere 'expression
of emotion': value properties are objectively relative
properties of objects and in dealing with them aesthetic
discourse is concerned with the same world with which
science and technology are concerned.67
A sign that is used successfully for the sake of con
templation may also serve to convey information of some
importance to the conduct of life; and if it does happen
to do so there is no reason to suppose that its integrity
as an artistic phenomenon is thereby violated.68
Language both by being and saying enacts the poem and exer
cises its value, but it does so more by implication than
by proposition. Poetry is to a great extent "depth
language," partly creating and partly disclosing "certain
hitherto unknown, unguessed aspects of What I s ;"^9 ana the
^"Science, Art, and Technology," p. 4.
6^"Some Notes Concerning the Aesthetic and the Cogni
tive," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 13:389,
March 1955*
^Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality, p. 50.
29
Formalists' interest in the behavior of words springs from
the conviction
that this behavior, with all its ambiguities, is reflec
tive of the ambiguities of moral existence below the
level of those finally inadequate abstractions which,
through systematic discourse, we normally impose upon
existence.70
The linguistic elements emphasized by Formalism as
the poet's chief means of exploring the "ambiguities of
moral existence" are symbol, metaphor, myth, paradox, and
irony. Symbols are traditionally man's way of transcending
the particular and approaching the universal: "Symbols
awaken individual experience and transmute it into a
spiritual act, into metaphysical comprehension of the
world."71 Metaphor, too, is a medium, an essentially
intuitive one, for implying the deeper meanings of the
human encounter.
The essence of metaphor consists in the nature of the
tension which is maintained among the heterogeneous
elements brought together in one commanding image.72
^Krieger, "Recent Criticism, 'Thematics,' and the
Existential Dilemma," p. 32.
^Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans.
Willard Trask (New York, 1957)> P« 211.
72phllip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain
(Bloomington, Indiana, 195^)* P- 101.
30
Its power of assertion can be as precise and informative
as that of any prose statement. Myth re-aembles metaphor
in being first a matter of perspective and only second of
invention. It is a way of apprehending the world and has
been formally defined as
a complex of stories--some no doubt fact and some fan-
tasy--which for various reasons human beings regard as
a demonstration of the inner meaning of the universe
and of human life.73
Paradox and irony are both tensive devices, necessary ele
ments of the poetic structure if it is to be true to the
contradictory nature of human experience. Paradox centers
chiefly in linguistic execution; irony, in the artistic
vision. Wheelwright lists three types of paradox: paradox
of surface, paradox of depth, and paradox of interplay of
statement and innuendo. To the depth paradox he assigns a
function similar to that of metaphor and myth because it
is concerned with some transcendental, many-sided truth.7^
Stanley Hopper has related poetic irony to Kierkegaard's
thesis that the "confine" between the aesthetic and the
^Alan w. Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity
(New York, 195*0* P* 7*
T^The Burning Fountain, p. 71*
31
ethical stages of life Is the confine of irony: "It
tricks us out of the irresponsibility of the 'aesthetic'
(romantic, unrealistic) stance and reinstates the sense
of moral responsibility."75 irony becomes, In the absence
of governing myths or ontologies, the means of restoring
the theological sense of a fallen world.
Although structural analysis based on linguistic
elements is the essential approach of the New Critics, they
have from the beginning talked of "theme" as governing the
structure of the symbolic language within the poem; and In
practice, as Meyer Abrams points out, this theme looks
suspiciously like the moral or philosophical commonplace
associated with the didactic theory of the Renaissance and
Neo-Classic periods.76 Brooks has certainly employed theme
in approximately this sense, and his concentration on
symbol, metaphor, myth, paradox, and irony is ultimately
related to his conviction that poetry is valuable to the
human endeavor. Consequently, this thesis will include an
examination of these elements in Brooks' methodology as
75"irony--the Pathos of the Middle," Cross-Currents,
12:35* Winter 1962.
76"Belief and the Suspension of Belief," p. 10.
32
well as an analysis of his critical pronouncements regard
ing truth, belief, and moral value In poetry. Such a
study Is intended to demonstrate that Cleanth Brooks is
today an adherent of Formalist Criticism in the integrated
moral-aesthetic sense described in the previous pages and
not, as he is so often reputed to be, in the isolationist,
art-for-art's-sake sense.
To this purpose, Chapter II which discusses statement
idea, language, and form in poetry will provide the back
ground for Brooks' development of a two-fold criterion of
poetic truth: "coherence" and "correspondence." His
solution to the question of belief in poetry as based on
this double standard, and his own personal orthodox
commitment will form the substance of Chapter III. The
material in Chapter IV will reveal Brooks' conviction
that literature reflects a structure of norms in reality
and that criticism should be concerned with these norms
as they are present in the aesthetic and "non-aesthetic"
values of the literary work. Finally, Chapter V will
attempt to show how his methodology--irony and metaphor--
has evolved into a means and a perspective for the realiza
tion of transcendental and valuational elements in poetry.
CHAPTER II
KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH IN POETRY
For the past three decades, the critical career of
Cleanth Brooks has been distinguished above all for a
single-minded devotion to the poem as poem and for a
belief in the unique aesthetic value of literature as
distinct from the value of any religious or social predi
cations it may include. With emphatic approval, he
quotes the well-known declaration of Allen Tate that
"Poetry Is neither religion nor social engineering,"
though Brooks also notes that this statement "can easily
be Interpreted as implying an intolerable disdain for the
world of serious affairs or a cowardly skulking away from
reality itself."1 He had previously acknowledged such an
interpretation of the Formalist position when he declared
that the New Critics are doubly condemned: first for what
■^"Metaphor and the Tradition," in Stanley R. Hopper,
ed., Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Criticism (New
York, 1952), p. 128.
33
34
it is supposed they are doing; namely, "fiddling around
with pretty words--while Manhattan is burning down," and
second for what they allegedly are not doing; that is,
concerning themselves with the crucial problems of their
day. These attacks, he maintained, share several ques
tionable suppositions:
- an unconscious contempt for words
- the realization that all is not well with our culture
[with the consequent belief that the critic can remedy
this situation]
- the misconception that literature can substitute for
religion
- the intentional fallacy or the affective fallacy, or
usually both
- the assumption that all of us can read a work of art
and read it accurately.2
Because the isolationist and escapist charges directed
at the Formalists are based on these false premises, they
are, in Brooks’ opinion, erroneous; in fact, as his criti
cism of Alfred Kazin demonstrates, he finds such allega
tions hardly credible:
Does Mr. Kazin actually believe that his 'New Formalists'
are interested in nonfunctional techniques--stanzaic
patterns, rhyme schemes, alliteration--as absolutes and
in isolation?
^"The Critic and His Text, a Clarification and a
Defense," in Julian Harris, ed., The Humanities (Madison,
1950), pp. 42-44.
35
In protest Brooks strongly asserts "Of course, literature
is related to life . . . . "^ Early in his career, he
claimed that the public, not the poet, was inhabiting an
ivory tower, in that it was "separating its emotional
life— at least that which it is willing to contemplate in
poetry--from the actual world, and most of all from its
intellectual activities . . . . "^ A decade later, he is
still challenging the ivory-tower charge as he reiterates
R. W. Stallman's listing of the Formalists' concerns;
namely, the loss of tradition, of a fixed convention, of
belief, and of a world order. Then he argues,
These phrases tell their own story, and should serve
to put at rest any view that these critics . . . are
actually irresponsible with regard to the world in
which they live and careless of the problems of modern
civilization.5
But if, as Brooks maintains, the Formalists are neither
indifferent nor Irresponsible, they are, he more recently
^"Mr. Kazin's America" (rev. of On Native Grounds),
Sewanee Review, 51:56-57# January 1943*
^Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill, 1939),
p. 68. Hereafter abbreviated as MPT.
^"Metaphor and the Function of Criticism," p. 136;
ref: Stallman. "The New Critics," in R. W. Stallman,
ed., Critiques and Essays in Criticism, 1920-1949 (New
York, 1949)# PP. 488-490.
36
admitted, often contradictory and in need of clarification
. . . we [Formalist critics] do not always speak by the
card, are sometimes slovenly in our logic, and do not
always let our right hands know what our left hands are
doing.6
In view of this acknowledged inconsistency and of his
thirty-year effort to articulate and to clarify his criti
cal position, it is not surprising to find evidence of
change and in most cases, I think, of steady development
in Brooks' conceptions of the religious, moral, and social
functions of literature.
In order to examine his commitments regarding these
functions, it is first necessary to study his ideas on
the nature of poetic statement: on the capacity of poetry
to speak meaningfully of human experience and on the rela
tionship of poetry to truth. Brooks in an early essay
(1935) stated, "... poetic symbols are not true--not
even in the sense in which scientific statements are."7
In the same article, however, he acknowledged that a poem
^"The State of Criticism: A Sampling," Sewanee
Review, 65:495-496, 498, Summer 1957*
7Cf. Richards' concept of poetry as pseudo-statement-
"merely a form of words whose truth or falsity is irrele
vant to the purpose at hand" (Science and Poetry [London,
1926], p. 148).
37
does make statements, but he insists that they must be
integral to the poetic structure and not ’ ’ willfully
asserted” for the sake of emphasizing the subject matter.®
Moreover, that same year in another Journal, he defined
"major poetry" as that "which makes major predications
about life."9 These three concurrent claims were not
totally in agreement; for if poetic language is not to
some extent referentially true, how can it assert or even
state; and how can it make "major predications about
life"?
A similar inconsistency was still apparent a few
years later (1939) In Brooks' first collection of critical
essays. Again he condemned that view of poetry which
assumes that poetic symbols are to stand for ideas,
and naturally true ideas are to be preferred to false.
Under such a theory the goodness of a poem is to a
great extent determined by its truth. This, however,
is to bring poetry into competition with science, which
®"Three Revolutions in Poetry," Southern Review,
1:572, 574, Winter 1935-
9(Rev. of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wine from These
Grapes), Southwest Review, 20:4, Winter 1935*
38
falsifies their relationship. (MPT, p. 45)
Scientific truth, he affirmed, is an indifferent matter in
the poem, incapable of saving the work if present or of
condemning it if absent (MPT, p. 49)* However, it appears
from Brooks' praise of Keats and Coleridge as poets who
"think through their images" and hence integrate statement
into poetic structure, that he did not completely dismiss
propositional truth from the poem at this time.10 Perhaps
the most obvious way to interpret these conflicting aspects
in Brooks' early theory is to realize that his inveighing
against statement in poetry is a reaction against the
didactic approach to literature and that, as it turns out,
Brooks is not so much denying the possibility of all
statement in poetry as condemning that kind of proposition
10At this point Brooks appeared to be following a
line of thought similar to that in an early statement of
Eliot (1930):* "Poetry cannot prove that anything is
true; it can only create a variety of wholes composed of
intellectual and emotional constituents justifying the
emotion by the thought and the thought by the emotion .
. ." ("Poetry and Propaganda," in Morton Dawin Zabel, ed.,
Literary Opinion in America [New York, 1951]> P* 107) •
♦For the sake of comparison, informative footnotes
will be dated. If the source is a book or periodical,
the date will appear with the title and page number. If
it is an essay reprinted in a collection, the original
date of the essay will appear in parenthesis after the
author's name.
39
which is more accurately termed a doctrine or thesis.
By 1947, Brooks made this distinction quite clear.
Though protesting that the poet is neither an expositor
nor a communicator but rather a poletes, a maker,H he
wrote that
. . . a poem does not state ideas but rather tests
ideas. Or, to put the matter in other terms, a poem
does not deal primarily with ideas and events but
rather with the way in which a human being may come
to terms with ideas and events. (WWU, p. 256)^
Having admitted ideas to the poetic realm, Brooks pro
ceeded to set up criteria by which to evaluate them:
If we can see that the assertions made in a poem are
to be taken as part of an organic context, if we can
resist the temptation to deal with them in isolation,
then ive may be willing to go on to deal with the world
view or 'philosophy,1 or 'truth' of the poem as a whole
in terms of its dramatic wholeness: that is, we shall
not neglect the maturity of attitude, the dramatic
tension, the emotional and intellectual coherence in
favor of some statement of theme abstracted from it
by paraphrase. (WWU, pp. 165-166)
^ The Well Wrought Urn, Harvest Book edition (New
York, 1947), pp. 196, 75* Hereafter abbreviated as
WWU.
12Cf. Allen Tate (1936): "Poetry is one test of
ideas; it is ideas tested by experience, by the act of
direct apprehension" (Collected Essays, p. xv); and
Eliot (1930): "... what poetry proves about philosophy
is merely its possibility for being lived" ("Poetry and
Prop.," pp. 105-106).
40
One year later he described this approach in more specific
terms which he admittedly had borrowed from Eliot:
Does the statement seem to be that which the mind of
the reader can accept as coherent, mature, and founded
on the facts of experience? . . . Does the speaker seem
carried away with his emotions? Does he seem to over
simplify the situation? Or does he, on the other hand,
seem to have won to a kind of detachment and objectiv
ity? In other words we are forced to raise the question
as to whether the statement grows properly out of the
context . . . .13
In a subsequent essay, Brooks continued to maintain that
poetry has an Important relation to ideas, but not in the
sense that it is meant to "exemplify" or "produce" them;
rather it involves ideas in the "recalcitrant stuff of
life." And in the presentation and discovery of that
involvement, both the poet and the critic use their minds
in processes not unlike those of discursive thought.
Then in 1957, he affirmed that the quality of an idea
affects the calibre of the work that embodies It:
. . . the power of the idea to excite the poet's awe
is not so easily separated from its ability to elicit
the reader's awe; for to assume that the poet could
have done quite as well with any Idea that appealed to
him is to conclude that Ideas do not matter at all or—
what amounts to the same thing--to assume that the
13
Irony and 'Ironic' Poetry," College English,
9:233-234, February 1948.
l^"My Credo: The Formalist Critic," Kenyon Review,
13:80, Winter 1951-
41
poet Is a kind of god, capable of making his meanings
out of whole cloth.15
The i960 edition of Understanding Poetry places a similar
emphasis on the role of ideas in poetry with the claim
that the devices which heighten the effect of a poem
depend on the detailed working out of the idea.16 This
stress on ideas so conspicuous in Brooks1 theory for the
past twelve years was functioning on the practical level
as early as 1939, when he found the work of Archibald
MacLeish lacking in "dramatic tension" because it did not
display much "intricacy of idea" (MPT, p. 119
-^with W. K. Wimsatt, Literary Criticism: A Short
History (New York, 1957), P* 708. Hereafter abbreviated
as LC. All citations will be taken from Chapters 25-31,
which are more specifically attributed to Brooks; and from
the Epilogue, an obvious summary of critical principles,
which Brooks has designated as part of "what a proper
apology for poetry ought to be" ("The State of Criticism,"
p. 498).
•^Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, third edi
tion (New York, i960), p. 358. Hereafter abbreviated as
UP. Whenever a citation from this edition is also found
in one of the earlier editions (1938, 1950), some notation
of this fact will appear in the text if chronology is
important to the point under discussion.
^In its early stages Formalism generally de-empha-
slzed the importance of ideas in poetry: Tate (1932) held
that the conscious cultivation of ideas in poetry is
dangerous for even the best poets (Collected Essays,
p. 207); Eliot saw ideas merely, as a means of quieting
the reader's mind (The U3e of Poetry and the Use of
42
Although Brooks at present affirms the importance of
Ideas In poetry, like all Formalists he has repeatedly
eschewed the separation of statement from form; in 1942
he wrote,
Form, we need constantly to remind ourselves, is not
a coating applied to the mass of content, though the
very nature of our language constantly tricks us into
speaking as if it were.18
Form, as Brooks defined it in 1944, is "the characteristic
structure of poetry." Such a concept is based on the sup
position "that the way a thing is said determines what is
said," and that poetry is not a "statement of high truth
Criticism [New York, 1933]* P* 151); and Ransom (1941),
as a necessary "structure" upon which to build the
"texture," the essence of the poem ("Criticism as Pure
Speculation," in West, ed., p. 238). Today these men
would in general agree with R. P. Warren (1946) that the
attempt to eliminate ideas from poetry violates the
unity of the experience (Selected Essays, p. 26); for
they have found, like Blackmur (1942), that abstract
ideas are often the critic's primary means of approaching
the concreteness, the "whatness" of art (Language as
Gesture [New York, 1952], p. 110).
■^"Form and Content" (rev. of W. H. Auden, The
Double Man, and J. P. Bishop, Selected Poems), Kenyon
Review, 4:244, Spring 1942.
43
in decorated form.Ml9 "Meaning is form," Brooks wrote in
1951 ("My Credo," p. 72), and in that brief maxim
expressed the essential premise of Contextualist criticism.
Currently, he has expanded the scope of the meaningfulness
embodied in form to include a direct interaction between
poetry and the understanding of human motivation. In
I960 he wrote, "To create a form is to find a way to con
template, and perhaps to comprehend our human urgencies"
(UP, pp. xiii-xiv).20
The basic element effecting this relationship between
the poem and human experience is the principle of unity or
•^'"The New Criticism: A Brief for the Defense,"
American Scholar, 13:294-295* Summer 1944. Cf. Richards:
". . . even very slight changes in the way of saying
anything in poetry change the thing said ..." (Coleridge
on Imagination [London, 1950J, p. 200); and Eliot (1955):
"The notion of appreciation of form without content, or of
content ignoring form, is an illusion . . . for the mean
ing of a poem exists in the words of the poem and in those
words only" (On Poetry and Poets, p. 263)-
20cf. Blackmur (1951): "Technical form is our means
of getting at, of finding, and then making something of,
what we feel the form of life itself is . . ." (Lion and
Honeycomb, p. 268); and Warren: "The form gives man an
image of himself, for it gives him his mode of experienc
ing, a paradigm of inner life ..." ("Knowledge and the
Image of Man," Sewanee Review, 63:192, Spring 1955)*
44
order. As early as 1938, Brooks viewed poetic unity in
terms of an insight into life:
The sense of order and control is the vital act--that
is what in a successful poem confirms us in the faith
that experience itself may be made meaningful. And a
poem is in this sense, an image of our life process--and
in being that an enlightening image of ourselves. (UP,
p. 343)
As he first conceived it in 1939, this unity is essentially
psychological; if logical unity is present in a poem, it
functions chiefly to further a larger "imaginative unity"
(MPT, p. 6 6 ) . By 1947, he had defined this psychological
order as "the unification of attitudes into a hierarchy
subordinated to a total and governing attitude" (WWU,
p. 207)* However, he did concede at this time that pro-
positional truth was also involved:
We can discover, to be sure, propositions which seem to
characterize, more or less accurately, the unifying
attitude. But if we take such propositions to be the
core of the poem, we are contenting ourselves with
reductions and substitutions. (WWU, p. 191)
21
Richards agrees with this psychological definition
of poetic unity and with the relegation of logic to a sub
ordinate role in the poem (Science and Poetry [1926], p.
64). Tate (1938), in an early essay, also contends that
poetry "deals with fundamental conflicts that cannot be
logically resolved ..." (Collected Essays, p. 252). To
day, however, he would be likely to agree with Blackmur
(1933) that poetic unity depends upon the logical coherence
of the ideas used by the poet in organizing experience
(Lang, as Gesture, p. 180).
45
In 1950, though Brooks was still wary of over
emphasizing the role of statement, he no longer relegated
logic to a subordinate place in poetry but simply asserted
that the formal relationships of a poem involve more than
logical unity ("My Credo," p. 72). The next year Brooks
showed, in practice at least, that logical truth was a
decisive factor in his own approach to a poem, as this
unfavorable critique of Milton's "The Passion," Stanza VII,
illustrates:
. . . it is in Stanza VII that the complete collapse
of the poem occurs. The overingenious conceit tries to
accomplish too much and ends in accomplishing nothing.
It does not define the speaker's emotion and merely
calls attention to an empty rhetoric. The poet seems
to be in possession of no solvent for softening the
rock other than his own tears. And although we know
that falling water can and does score stone, the pro
cess requires many years. Yet here the poet would have
us believe that, in the grip of an emotional frenzy so
long sustained and so intense that it binds his hands,
he could be sufficiently at ease to master a trick so
difficult as that of wagging his head to make his fall
ing tears form letters. On the other hand, if line 48
["For sure so well Instructed are my tears,"] is to be
taken literally, the idea is even more difficult to
entertain. A self-animated tear is inconceivable; and
a rational tear capable of being Instructed is--if the
term will admit a comparative--even less conceivable.22
“ ^With John Hardy, Poems of Mr. John Milton (New York,
1951), P. HO.
46
In this case, judgment is made to depend upon the poem's
rational correspondence with human experience as well as
on its inherent structure.
Actually, this logical criterion functioned indirectly
in Brooks' practical criticism as early as 1947- Though at
that time theoretically ignoring the logical aspect of
poetry, he frequently based his argument for irony and
paradox on the necessity of overcoming or removing the
logical contradictions in a poem. His analysis of "Ode
on the Intimations of Immortality" is a case in point.
Noting the contradiction between the realist and the pro
jective philosophies of nature expressed in the poem, he
attempted to show how Wordsworth, by concretizing their
interrelations as well as their differences, reconciles
the doctrines in terms of ironic ambiguity and eliminates
the illogicality from the poem--a desirable accomplishment
(WWU, pp. 124-150).
Brooks has continually maintained that in the
concretizing, the particularizing of abstractions, as in
the ode just mentioned, lies the key to the logical and
psychological organization of the poem. The poet's
approach, he claimed in 1939, is always in terms of the
47
specific (MPT, p. 213)* In 1947* it was this standard of
"concreteness" which governed his evaluation of the "truth-
beauty" equation in Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn":
. . . our specific question is not what did Keats the
man perhaps want to assert here about the relation of
beauty and truth; it is rather: was Keats the poet
able to exemplify that relation in a particular poem?
(WWU, p. 153)
More than a decade later (1951)> he reaffirmed this
criterion of particularity: "... the general and uni
versal are not seized upon by abstraction but got at
through the concrete and particular" ("My Credo,"
p. 72).23 The influence of the Hegelian "concrete uni
versal" is suggested by this statement. The "universal"
operative in this theory is defined by Ransom as an idea
which in its organized combination of parts constitutes a
unique whole (Poems and Essays, p. 163)* Ransom is care
ful to point out that the particularization which the poem
effects is not to be regarded simply as an illustration of
the idea: "An illustration is just one instance, but an
23The Formalists on the whole would agree with Tate
(1930) that abstraction is the death of literature (Col
lected Essays, p. 306). See Eliot, The Sacred Wood
(London, 1948), p. 68; and Blackmur (1930), Language as
Gesture, p. 333-
48
art-object is an individual."2^ In 1951# Brooks singled
out Milton as an example of a poet who possessed this
ability to particularize— this "poetic realism" which
keeps idea inseparable from image. He also applauded
Milton for his logical adherence to the laws of physical
probability even while suggesting the presence of the
spiritual (Poems of Mr. John Milton, pp. 255# 252). Thus
Brooks, by this time, had combined the two standards:
concreteness and logicality; the former implying that the
concepts which words represent and the logical relations
governing these representations are in some degree derived
through the senses from material things; the latter con
firming that even in poetry, language is first and foremost
referential.^5
The World's Body (New York, 1938), p. 204. It Is
Interesting to note Ransom's sense of affinity with Brooks
in literary matters (1952): "If Brooks and I were being
landed on a desert island, I have no doubt that the books
we would severally take along would be the same books, and
chosen in the same order, and we would read them in unison"
(Poems and Essays, p. 158).
25cf. Ransom's description of poetic discourse: "Its
referents may have for us various underlying or substan
tial meanings, but they do not fail to have also their
functional or logical meanings as required of discursive
language" ("Poetry: The Formal Analysis," Kenyon Review,
9:447, Slimmer 1947)#* and see also Richards' statement:
"In most poetry the sense is as Important as anything
49
Brooks admitted as far back as 1941 that poetic
language involves "manifold patterns--logical, grammati
cal, metaphorical."^ Six years later he stated that the
language used by the poet can be a means of apprehending
reality and consequently can imply a philosophy or world
view (WWU, p. 236). He emphasized, moreover, that "...
if we are to deal with poems as poems, we shall have to
show how the attitudes reveal themselves in the poems"
(WWU, p. 225). At the beginning of the Fifties he stressed
the fact that literary works do not "just happen"; rather
they are written "as expressions of particular personali
ties" ("My Credo," p. 74), and represent "an individual's
attempt to deal with a specific problem, poetic and
personal" (UP, p. xiv). In keeping with this growing
emphasis on the referential capacity of poetic language,
else . . . it is the poet's chief instrument to other aims
when it is not itself his aim. His control of our thoughts
is ordinarily his chief means to the control of our feel
ings, and in the Immense majority of instances we miss
nearly everything of value if we misread his sense" (Prac
tical Criticism [London, 1929L P» 191)*
26"The Poem as Organism," in English Institute Annual,
1940 (New York, 1941), p. 32. Cf. Richards: "Language—
and pre-eminently language as it is used in poetry— has not
one but several tasks to perform simultaneously ..."
(Prac. Crlt. [1929], p. 180).
50
Brooks, in 1958# described the linguistic medium of poetry
as "an incarnate symbolism in which sense datum and idea,
concept and valuation, are interfused and where meaning
jostles m e a n i n g ."2? Language viewed in these terms makes
of the poem "a verbal construct" which is
at some level a simulacrum of the world of reality . . .
formed out of words and in accordance with the laws
of the mind. It is a portion of reality as viewed and
valued by a human being. It is rendered coherent
through a perspective of valuing. ("Organic Theory of
Poetry," p. 68)28
In the i960 edition of Understanding Poetry, Brooks and
Warren relate this value perspective to the mood of the
poem:
A mood implies a certain attitude toward the world,
and may shade over imperceptibly into thought, into
general statement, into whole systems of philosophy.
(UP, p. 79)29
^"Implications of an Organic Theory of Poetry,"
[1958] in Abrams, ed., p. 66.
p O
Cf. Richards: "For the motives which shape a poem
spring from the roots of the mind. The poet's style is
the direct outcome of the way in which his interests are
organized" (Science and Poetry [1926], p. 44); and Warren
(1947): "A poem defines an attitude, a basic view, which
may have many applications" (Selected Essays, p. 132).
2^Tate (1935 )> similarly, sees a probable relation
ship between the metrical system used by a poet and his
world view (Collected Essays, p. 240).
51
Mood, of course, is the result of the poet's choice and
arrangement of words; hence the burden of a perspective or
world view, even in this case, rests essentially with the
linguistic structure of the poem. A typical instance of
Brooks' practical evaluation of poetry in terms of its
world view can be found as early as 19^1, when he lamented
the absence of substantial "Intellectual fabric" in the
poems of A. E. Housman and attributed this weakness to
the fact that Housman "had no ambitious or even passion
ately held world view to set up."30
The poem then emerges from Brooks' theory as an
imaginatively conceived linguistic unity embodying a
perspective of value. Consequently the critic's respon
sibility is to uncover, to reveal the value of the literary
work in these terms. The critical process, being more
intellectual than intuitive, directly Involves the
philosophical commitment of the critic; for on his concep
tion of the ultimate character of reality depends his
evaluation of the poet's organization of experience as
seen in the poem. In fact, as Brooks points out, a
•^"The Whole of Housman" (rev. of Collected Poems),
Kenyon Review, 3:105-106, Winter 19^1.
52
critic's whole theory of poetics stems from his meta
physical insight (LC, p. 738
In Brooks' own practice a growing dependence upon
metaphysical presuppositions has been quite evident. His
analysis in 19^7 of the ironic qualities in William Butler
Yeats' "Among School Children/' and "Sailing to Byzantium"
was based on a view of the human situation involving a
belief in the reality of the supernatural as well as of
the natural (WWU, , p. 189)* More recently, his interpreta
tion of the effect of Adam's sin as depicted in Paradise
Lost included a short discourse on his own ideas about
self-consciousness:
Yet if the 'knowledge' that Adam gains Is only
self-conscious, how can Milton have God say that Adam
has now become like 'us' in coming to know both good
and evil? Is God, then, self-conscious and not inno
cent? I am prepared to answer yes, that God is self-
conscious, but that self-consciousness as applied to
God does not carry the implications that self-
consciousness must carry for a limited being. As
31
Cf. Ransom: "... the value of art is defined
really, if sometimes only half-consciously, as a conse
quence of the sort of metaphysic to which the valuer
holds" ("The Pragmatics of Art," Kenyon Review, 2:87,
Winter 19^0). It is Interesting to note that those
critics who claim to espouse no metaphysical system as
such usually are drawn to lament its absence, as do
Blackmur (1936) (Lang, as Gesture, p. 81) and Empson
(Seven Types [1930], p. 279) even while upholding the
standard of detachment.
53
perfect omniscience--as creator and not creature--as
a limitless being endlessly contemplating his own
virtues, God is self-conscious indeed.32
Certainly, structural unity is not the only measure at
work in the above evaluation; nor is this use of logical
and theological criteria unexpected in view of recent
statements by Brooks. While still affirming that the
truth of poetry is a truth of "coherence" (LC, p. 7^8,
1957 )> he has of late questioned the adequacy of such a
standard: "Must there not also be a truth of correspond
ence between the view incorporated in a poem and the
reality of human experience?" ("Organic Theory of Poetry,"
p. 65)33 To evaluate poetry in terms of this "corres
pondence" involves the application of broad general prin
ciples concerned with man's nature and responsibility.
Because of their generality, Brooks maintains that these
3^"Eve's Awakening," in Essays in Honor of Walter
Clyde Curry (Nashville, 195^ )> P> 296.
33cf. Ransom: "The image presented by the imagina
tion ordinarily means to be true .... It is probably
true in the commonest sense of true: verifiable; based
on observation" (World's Body [1938], p. 156); and
Blackmur (1935): "... the meaning of a poem . . . must
invariably depend on this order of facts, the facts about
the meanings of the elements aside from their final mean
ing in combination" (Language as Gesture, p. 396).
54
principles would still leave poetic truth available to
many people whose explicit beliefs are widely different.
To illustrate the more general nature of poetic truth as
compared with propositional truth, he draws an analogy
from the relationship of natural theology to revelation:
Like natural theology, poetry is more humble in its
claim and proposes to found itself on the common domain
of human experience. (One should, of course, add that,
again like natural theology, the 'truth' of poetry may
be quite compatible with a truth of far more specific
and more imperious claims, a truth which goes beyond it
and completes poetic truth.) ("Organic Theory of
Poetry," p. 77)
Truth in this broadly referential sense and as a concomi
tant of man's moral encounter has come to be for Brooks
the necessary ingredient of any really serious litera
ture. 34 And the poet's job, as he now conceives it is
"to tell the truth" (Fugitives' Reunion, p. 58).
The aesthetic implications of such a stand have been
explained by Whitehead:
Beauty is the internal conformation of the various
items of experience with each other, for the produc
tion of maximum effectiveness. Beauty thus concerns
the inter-relations of the various components of
Reality, and also the inter-relations of the various
34'»Regionalism in American Literature," Journal of
Southern History, 26:43, February i960.
55
components of Appearance, and also the relations of
Appearance to Reality.
When Appearance has to Reality, In some Important
direct sense, a truth-relation, there Is security
about the Beauty attained, that Is to say, a pledge
for the future. (Adv. of Ideas, pp. 341, 343)
Such presuppositions appear basic to Brooks' critical posi
tion over the last decade. Having pointed out the undesir
ability of attempting to separate knowledge from value in
the formulation of a literary theory (LC, p. 630), he has
declared with Warren:
Poetry gives us knowledge. It is a knowledge of
ourselves in relation to the world of experience, and
to the world considered, not statistically, but in
terms of human purposes and values. (UP, p. xiii)
However, no theory of composition, as Brooks sees it,
has adequately solved this problem of the aesthetic and
the true (Fugitives' Reunion, p. 218). But three decades
of theorizing about this relationship have led Brooks to
move considerably beyond his early position which pro
posed a negative connection between poem and idea. He has
progressively made way for ideas in literature, viewing
them first as the "stuff" from which poems are made and
then as statements to be verified contextually in terms
of both the poem and experience. Finally, he has asserted
that the quality of an idea affects the value of the poem.
56
While stressing more and more the importance of ideas in
literary art, Brooks is careful to warn against the
separation of statement from form, and he makes formal
unity the measure of the poet's success in organizing and
evaluating experience. This unity, in Brooks' early
pronouncements, is solely imaginative and psychological,
but gradually the logical dimension is included too. As
abstraction, the logical element is explored and concre
tized in the poem by means of language; and, according to
Brooks, the language of a poem is referential and can in
Itself imply a particular way of apprehending reality.
The critic cannot ignore this fact and must bring his own
concept of reality to bear in judging the poem as a
unified, linguistic symbol of experience. In thus relat
ing the poet's medium and the critic's measurement on a
metaphysical basis, Brooks has come to see in poetry a
broad kind of truth--a correspondence with a common
conception of human experience and the nature of man.
He admits that this approach raises the problem of belief
since it involves the danger of limiting "good" poetry to
that which flatters one's personal views. But he feels
this risk is preferable to having poetry win its
57
independence "at the terrible price of having detached
itself from reality" ("Organic Theory of Poetry," p. 65)*
In applied criticism, Brooks began early to practice
what he would only much later propose in theory. Perhaps
this is the natural and valid way for literary theory to
develop: to look first at the work and to respond to it,
and subsequently after much looking and many responses,
to analyse the how and why of both the work and one's
reaction.
CHAPTER III
THE ROLE OP BELIEF IN POETRY
The relationship of belief to literature, a perennial
problem for men of letters, has lately become a more vital
issue for Cleanth Brooks. His recognition of a "truth of
correspondence" in poetry and of cognitive value in the
language of the poem make the evaluation of a literary
work generally dependent on belief of some kind. The
question of belief in poetry, aptly termed a "trap" by
one critic,^ is one of the most frustrating questions in
criticism; so much so that RenS Wellek would exclude it
from the business of the critic as "a purely empirical
problem of the reader's psychology" which is not
susceptible of a theoretical solution.2 In regard to
1Allen Tate, "Moral Action in Art," in Robert
Richman, ed., The Arts at Mid-Century (New York, 1959),
p. 47-
2"The Criticism of T. S. Eliot," Sewanee Review, 64:
417, Slimmer 1956.
58
59
this problem, Brooks, like most of the Formalists, began
by denying the relevance of belief to either the creation
or the enjoyment of a poem; but he has gradually come to
admit that certain broad and general aspects of belief may
be the basis for a critic's appreciation or lack of it in
his actual encounter with the work.
In 1939* with the publication of his first volume of
critical essays, Brooks stated that the poet, whatever his
beliefs, must not depend Illegitimately upon his readers'
emotional allegiance to them (MPT, p. 53)- In The Well
Wrought Urn (19^7)> he again asserted that the reader must
not be asked to give up his own meanings and beliefs In
order to adopt those of the poet; the reader must be pre
pared, however, to suppress his convictions and prejudices
to the extent that he is able to comprehend the meanings
of the words as the poet Intends them and to see how these
meanings are made to function in the total context (p.
253)* Brooks at this period mirrored the opinions of the
two twentieth-century critics who had most concerned
themselves with this problem of belief. He cited
approvingly the opinion of I. A. Richards that "the
question of belief or disbelief, in the intellectual
60
sense, never arises when we are reading well," and inter
preted the phrase "reading well" to mean that the reader
is willing to allow his various human interests to be
subordinated to the total poetic experience (WWU, p. 253)*
He also supported Eliot's early stand which denied that
one's understanding or appreciation of a poem could be in
any way increased if one concurred with the beliefs
expressed in it (WWtf, pp. 254-255)* By 194-9, Brooks
thought of poetry as taking the reader "beyond the abstract
creed into the very matrix out of which and from which our
creeds are abstracted."3 in other words, belief as such
should be so thoroughly integrated in the poetic experi
ence that the question is no longer one of belief but of
participation.^
o
Irony as a Principle of Structure," in Zabel, ed.,
Literary Opinion in America, p. 740.
^Blackmur (1935) describes a similar relationship
between belief and poetic structure: "Then the doctrines
do not matter, since they are taken only for what they
are worth . . . as guides and props, as aids to naviga
tion. What does matter is the experience, the life
represented and the value discovered, and both dramatized
or enacted under the banner of doctrine.
We either discount, absorb, or dominate the doctrine for
the sake of the life that goes with it, for the sake of
what is formed in the progressive act of thinking" (Lang.
as Gesture, pp. 374-375)*
61
In the beginning, however, Brooks' practical criticism
did not always support his early theoretical claims about
the irrelevance of belief. Most often it was his use of
’ ’theme" as a means of approaching the poem which led him
"outside" the work to discuss the poet's views and convic
tions. His critique of Eliot's The Waste Land in 1939 is
a case in point. He commences by saying that it is best
to approach this poem "frankly on the basis of theme" (MPT,
p. 136), subsequently describing that theme as "the
rehabilitation of a system of beliefs, known but now
discredited" (p. 171). Christian material is the center
of the poem, according to Brooks; but this matter is never
dealt with directly. Eliot is seen as "a strategist trying
to win acceptance from a hostile audience," or more
accurately as a poet whose artistic "integrity" enables
him to present his theme "concretely and dramatically"
and to avoid the pitfalls of the propagandist (MPT,
pp. 171-172). The adverbs concretely and dramatically
suggest that Eliot achieved a thorough integration of
belief into poetry resulting in the structural "coherence"
which Brooks' early theory demanded. But the question
arises: Did not Brooks have to go outside the poetic
structure in order to make this judgment? For in order
to determine to what purpose and with what success the
integration of belief had been realized, he had to examine
and evaluate the nature of the belief itself and hence to
measure "coherence" to some extent in terms of "corres
pondence." Although this dependence between the two
criteria is detectable from the beginning in Brooks'
practical criticism, it only gradually received his
theoretical endorsement.
By the end of the Forties, he was beginning to
acknowledge the relationship between theme and the poet1s
belief which had been Implied in his analysis of The Waste
Land ("Irony as Principle," p. 730). At this time he
equated theme with "an insight, rooted in and growing
out of concrete experience, many-sided, three dimen
sional" (p. 7^0). Theme, then, becomes a bridge between
the poem as concretely realized and the evaluation of
human experience which preceded its realization. In the
later editions of Understanding Poetry (1950, I960), this
connection is stated directly: "The theme of a poem . . .
amounts to a comment on human values, an interpretation of
life" (p. 3^2); and the claim Is made that by defining the
63
theme, one obtains a fuller understanding of the entire
poem (p. 46). Comments in the 1959 edition of Understand
ing Fiction attach a similar import to theme in the short
story and the novel, adding that without a theme, there
is no framework, no unity, and no meaning in a literary
work.5
This definition of theme in terms of insight and
evaluation naturally raises the question of how a reader
can appreciate a work built around a theme which he cannot
accept. Since 1938, Brooks and Warren have been meeting
that query with a statement such as this:
Indeed, no attitude or interpretation will invali
date a poem, if it is an attitude or interpretation
that can conceivably be held by a serious and intelli
gent person in the dramatic situation stated or implied
in the poem. (UP, p. 342)
In regard to both poetry and fiction, they have maintained
from the beginning that the reader's approach to attitudes
differing from his own resembles his relationships of
sympathy, understanding, and even empathy with acquain
tances whose ideas and values differ from his own (UP,
p. 342). He tries, in a sense, at least "to recognize the
^Brooks and Warren (New York, 1959)> PP* 273-274.
Hereafter abbreviated as UP.
64
logic by which a theme unfolds" even in a work that at
first glance seems antipathetic to him (UF, p. 276). In
the last edition of Understanding Fiction (1959)# the
authors concede, however, that there will be times when
this empathetlc approach will not work, when the human
import of a literary piece will fail to reach us because
the writer's apprehension of reality differs radically
from our own:
We must simply recognize that some writers and some
stories offend us at too deep a level. They embody some
attitude toward life, some set of values, which denies
our own very basis of life. Sometimes, we simply may
not be able to find the common ground .... (p. 276)
In taking this stand, Brooks and Warren have arrived
at a position comparable to that of Eliot, who demands
that the doctrine or view of life embodied in a poem be
one which the reader can accept as "coherent, mature, and
founded on the facts of experience."6 And similarly,
Richards has recently proclaimed "congruence— the mature
^The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)#
p. 96. Eliot (l932) thinks that the reader probably
derives more pleasure from a poem when he shares the
beliefs of the poet; but he asserts that the reader can
also enjoy poetry that embodies beliefs with which he
differs much as he enjoys mastering other men's
philosophical systems (Selected Essays, p. 231).
65
judgment's sense of how things could and could not be" as
the criterion by which to evaluate the "non-scientiflc"
world of poetry.7 It appears that all these critics share
common criteria for evaluating poetry in regard to belief;
namely, structural, or dramatic, coherence and truth of
correspondence as determined by the mature reader.
For Brooks the full recognition of the standard of
"correspondence"--the measuring of the poetic statement
against the mature mind's concept of reality--has been
somewhat delayed and erratic, possibly because of an
enduring effort on his part to equate the second standard
of "coherence" primarily with the dramatic organization of
a poem. This dramatic approach is suitable for all
literary forms to the extent that they are all some kind
of utterance. Brooks and Warren stated the case for the
^"Religion and the Intellectuals," Partisan Review,
17:144, February 1950* Richards, while admitting that
in serious poetry independence from all belief is not an
easy matter (Science and Poetry [1926], p. 86), originally
claimed that one could exercise emotional belief in a
poem even when Intellectual assent was impossible; but
he added that for some people, background and education
make such a separation unlikely (Prac. Crlt. [1929]>
pp. 277-278).
66
dramatic nature of poetry In 1938:
. . . every poem implies a speaker of the poem, either
the poet writing in his own person or someone into
whose mouth the poem is put, and . . . the poem repre
sents the reaction of such a person to a situation, a
scene, or an idea. (UP, p. 20)
In 1957 Brooks further elaborated on the dramatic nature
of literature in terms of Francis Fergusson's definition
of action as "the focus or aim of psychic life from which
events . . . result." According to Brooks, every literary
work is about psychic life in some sense; "and the brief
est lyric, if it is not an aimless farrago, has a focus or
aim." So too a lyric poem has at least one character,
that of the implied speaker, as well as a kind of plot--
"an arrangement of psychic incidents, with a development,
at least of mood" (LC, p. 691). At this time Brooks
reiterated the argument, originally voiced in The Well
Wrought Urn (19^-7 )> that a poem regarded as a little drama
is less likely to be forced to yield an abstract statement
and more apt to be viewed as action or as a statement
about action. The dramatic mode overcomes abstraction by
concretizing "the conflicts between rival attitudes, the
ironic qualifications, and the various stages of the
67
didactic" in the poem (LC, p. 674).®
In this sense, the dramatic conception of literature,
at least when applied to a single-voice form such as the
lyric, appears to conquer the exigencies of belief by
centering the critical measurement in a "coherent and
powerful structure of attitudes" (WWU, p. 251). But, as
Brooks himself admitted, there exists even in the lyric
a definite "focus" or "aim." Consequently, this criterion
of "coherence" is not as self-sufficient as it first
appears; for the critic's conception of the coherence and
the power of a poem depend in turn upon his belief in his
experience of the work and in the ideas which he feels
motivate the whole poetic structure and give it its
q
Ransom speaks repeatedly of this relationship
between poetry and drama; he maintains, "Drama is a good
symbol for poetry, but it is really something closer than
a symbol. Poetry is not literally drama; at least it
does not have to be, and usually it is not specific
drama, being a form of expression far freer and subtler.
But historically and logically it looks like a derivative
of drama. It maintains faithfully certain dramatic
features. The poet does not speak in his own but in an
assumed character, and not in the actual but in an assumed
situation, and the first thing we do as readers of poetry
is to determine precisely what character and what situation
are assumed. In this examination lies the possibility of
critical understanding and at the same time of the illusion
and the enjoyment" (The World's Body [1938], p. 254).
68
peculiar "focus." This partial dependence of "coherence"
upon "correspondence," though certainly Implied in Brooks1
early treatment of theme and statement in poetry, was not
explicitly confirmed in his theory until 1958* At this
time, he stated that coherence in a literary work "depends
upon our belief in the plausibility of certain actions and
reactions, responses and valuations" ("Organic Theory of
Poetry," p. 71)•
Judging from his applied criticism, one is inclined
to suspect that Brooks has only in the last few years
really thought through and fully accepted this principle
of interaction between "coherence" and "correspondence."
For, as recently as 1952, he was still moving from one
criterion to the other as if each were completely separate;
an approach which his commentary on these last lines of
Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" illustrates:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Brooks considered this exclamation "dramatically moti
vated" and in terms of the situation depicted in the poem
69
"understandable." By these standards he credited the poem
with "coherence." But then he shifted immediately to the
standard of "correspondence," questioning whether in view
of Arnold's over-all perspective the speaker in the poem is
entitled to his belief in the value of love:
For if science had knocked out religion, had not science
also disposed of romantic love? If the geologist had
removed the basis of traditional religion, was not the
biologist standing ready to reduce the love affair to
the biological exercise of a pair of mammals .... And
if, on the other hand, the biological account of love-
making did leave the spiritual love intact, then had the
geologist really destroyed the public values which
Arnold bewailed as having been lost? ("Metaphor and
Criticism," p. 129)
In spite of this lack of "correspondence," Brooks had
interpreted the poem as dramatically "coherent," thus
ignoring the interdependence of the two factors which he
more recently proclaimed.
On the other hand, Brooks' evaluation in 1958 of the
work of Tennessee Williams is based essentially upon his
recognition of the dependence of "coherence" on a degree
of "correspondence," and upon his awareness of the kind of
judgment which results from too great an emphasis on either
one.
The characters created by Tennessee Williams . . . I
often find to be quite incredible. Ostensibly they
live in our twentieth-century world and hold views that
70
are familiar to many of us, but I have great difficulty
in believing in some of their actions. For example, in
The Rose Tattoo, I simply find it impossible to believe
that Serafina delle Hose would say some of the things
she does say or do some of the things that she is made
to do. And even when I can credit a certain action of
hers as possible, I cannot connect it with the actions
that precede and follow it. To me the play is funda
mentally incoherent, though I can understand how audi
ences that are hungry for immediate and sensational
theatricality may be quite willing to waive all consider
ations of dramatic probability, or how they may argue
that the actions, implausible though they may seem, are
really true, since the play must be sociologically
sound. Here the argument shifts from truth of coher
ence to truth of correspondence with a vengeance. The
play becomes for such auditors, and not without an
encouraging nudge from Mr. Williams, a rubberneck bus
tour through the depraved provinces. What cannot be
validated artistically is to be validated by an appeal
to the psychiatrist or to the sociologist. ("Organic
Theory of Poetry," pp. 72-73)
Such criticism readily exemplifies Brooks' interpretation
of the characteristic "sins" of the artist--"exploitation
of the sentimental, the sensational, the monstrous, the
clinical and pornographic"--as violations of coherence
("Organic Theory of Poetry," p. 71)* And this interpreta
tion in turn implies that the roots of the aesthetic
sense, like those of the moral sense, lie in something
common to all men and significant of their native endow
ment. Indeed, Brooks admitted as much when he said at
this time:
71
If man in his essential humanity does not exist, and
if his unchanging fundamental oneness does not trans
cend the innumerable differences that set apart
individual men and men of various cultures and periods
of history, then I do not think that we can talk about
poetry at all. ("Organic Theory of Poetry," p. 70)
Although Brooks asserts that this concept of "fundamental
oneness" in humanity Involves not so much a common set of
beliefs as a set of general human responses ("Organic
Theory of Poetry," p. 70), it is obvious that a person's
responses are to a great extent the result of his commit
ment to certain beliefs and values.^ Brooks acknowledged
this relationship, perhaps unconsciously, as far back as
19^9, when he characterized the successful man of letters
as one who effects a synthesis between his intellectual
and his artistic positions, and when he described "the
clearest proof of the fragmented quality of our culture"
as the discrepancy between "praising a man for brilliant
literary qualities" and at the same time "damning him for
talking nonsense about history, society, or philosophy."
g
Eliot (19^)/ in regard to a universal concept of
humanity, stated that if everyone were agreed upon the
nature of the world and of man's place in it, if they had
a common conception of "wisdom" and of the "good life,"
there would be no need to talk separately of aesthetic and
of moral judgments; for the two would be united in a
single critical valuation (On Poetry and Poets, p. 212).
72
In line with this opinion, he points approvingly to Allen
Tate as one for whom a "coherent metaphysics" has provided
both "strength" and "wholeness" in criticism.-1 -® Tate in
turn has stated that in the absence of a moral-metaphysical
orientation, criticism is impossible.11 That Brooks, like
Tate, relies upon such an orientation in the judgment of
poetry is best demonstrated by two evaluations from a 195^
essay concerning Paradise Lost: the first discards an
interpretation of Adam's conscious happiness on the grounds
that "theologically" it is "nonsense"; the second views
his decision to share Eve's sin and its consequences as
unselfish in appearance only, because in so deciding, Adam
^®"The Limits of Poetry" (rev. of Tate, On the Limits
of Poetry), Hudson Review, 2:129, Spring 19^9*
11(1931): "If a young mind is incapable of moral
philosophy, a mind without moral philosophy is incapable
of understanding poetry. For poetry, of all the arts,
demands a serenity of view and a settled temper of the
mind and most of all the power to detach one's own needs
from the experience set forth in the poem. A moral sense
so organized sets limits to human nature and is content
to observe them. But if the reader lack this moral
sense, the poem will be only a body of abstractions
either useful or irrelevant to the body of abstractions
already forming, but of uncertain direction, in the
reader's mind" (Collected Essays, pp. 342-3^-3) •
73
chose his own private world in preference to the divine
community--a choice which Brooks deems essentially self-
centered ("Eve's Awakening," pp. 291, 294).
Concurrent with this use of "non-llterary" criteria
in his criticism of the last decade, Brooks' metaphysical
and moral commitment takes on a more specific character.
As early as 1951> Brooks had high commendation for William
Faulkner because his presentation and Interpretation of
"mere facts" revealed a true conception and understanding
of man's nature; specifically, a fundamentally orthodox
view involving "the old terms of original sin, grace, and
expiation."Fundamentally orthodox" aptly describes
Brooks' religious commitment. In 1952 he suggested that
it was not accidental that many of his fellow Formalists
"are communicants of the church, or sympathetic with
orthodox religion." However, he was quick to observe that
"the rehabilitation of religion is not a necessary
concomitant" of the Formalist position ("Metaphor and
Function," p. 131)* Five years later Brooks voiced a
further claim in support of orthodox Christianity when he
12,1 Absalom, Absalom: The Definition of Innocence,"
Sewanee Review, 59:554, Autumn 1951-
74
declared, with W. K. Wimsatt,
. . . the kind of literary theory which seems to us
to emerge the most plausibly from the long history of
the debates Is far more difficult to orient within any
of the Platonic or Gnostic ideal world views, or with
in the Manichean full dualism and strife of principles,
than precisely within the vision of suffering, the
optimism, the mystery which are embraced in the religi
ous dogma of the Incarnation. (LC, p. 746)
The advantages of the Incarnational perspective in litera
ture include not only a recognition and explanation of
human ambivalence and an allowance for the supra-rational
and mysterious but also the positing of an objective sys
tem of values. Such a system, Brooks and Wimsatt consider
imperative for any evaluative judgment:
Theories of sheer affectivity and subjective valuing
have suffered the paradox of promoting not enthusiasm
for value but distance, detachment, cooling, neutrality.
The sterner metaphysical, cognitive theories, talking
about real right and wrong, real beauty and ugliness,
are the theories which actually sustain value and make
responses to value possible. For response cannot feed
Indefinitely on itself. (LC, pp. 739-740)
Furthermore, Brooks maintains, subjective theories of
value inhibit literature because they remove the possibil
ity of conflict by making "all the cards in the deck . . .
wild" (LC, p. 708).
It would seem that Brooks' adherence to orthodoxy
and to Its accompanying value system stems in good part
75
from his conviction that the religious vision sustains a
sense of the immediacy and reality of evil in the world
and consequently preserves the essence of human conflict
which is at the heart of literature. In 1957 Brooks
characterized the literary conflict as essentially ethi
cal— a confrontation of man with himself or between good
and evil within him:
Even if the conflict is externally so simple as a man
against a flood or a forest fire, the poetic conflict
is what happens inside the man fighting or the man
observing the man fighting. (LC, p. 745)
Ethical conflict by its very nature presupposes the
presence of evil; hence Brooks and Wimsatt conclude that
"The literary spirit flourishes in evil and couldn't get
along without it" (LC, p. 7^)*^ However, they are care
ful to note that no responsible theorist could ever call
evil itself, or conflict, a desirable thing. On the other
hand, they are certain that confronting the divisive
elements of life, "facing up to the human predicament,"
TO
Blackmur (1935) likewise states that character,
motivation, and human purpose cannot be presented in
literature "except in terms of good and evil ..."
(Lang, as Gesture, p. 163)* And Tate affirms that "With
out an awareness of evil we lose the idea of the central
ity of literature" ("Orthodoxy and the Standard of
Literature," New Republic, 128:24, January 5> 1953)*
76
constitutes "a desirable and mature state of soul and the
right model and source of a mature poetic art'1 (LC, p.
743). It is precisely this kind of confrontation which
Brooks recently attributed to the writer of religious
conviction, describing him as one for whom the presence
of evil is "something to be personally accepted or
rejected" rather than explained away in terms of environ
ment or numerous neuroses ("Regionalism in Amer. Lit.,"
p . “i)-14
Such a concept has always been a part of Brooks'
critical theory. As early as 1939 he wrote approvingly
of Eliot's commendation of Baudelaire for challenging the
"cheery automatism of the modern world" and for perceiving
that what distinguishes man from the beasts is "the
knowledge of Good and Evil" (MPT, pp. 137-138). By 1958
Brooks was directing similar praise to William Butler
Yeats, who, in his estimation, resembled the French
14
Supporting this stand, Tate argues that the great
virtue of a religious synthesis is "its successful repre
sentation of the problem of evil ..." ("The Fallacy of'
Humanism," in C. H. Grattan, ed., The Critique of Humanism
[New York, 1930], p. 161). In a similar vein, Eliot claims
that human struggles which are governed by "spiritual
sanctions" mark the moment when men are most "real" and
provide the most fortuitous situations for artistic crea
tivity and revelation (After Strange Gods [1934], p. 46).
77
symbolists in the ability to use "tension and conflict"
in art. As evidence of "a real working dualism" in Yeats'
work, he cites a passage in which Yeats asserts that all
his "masterful images" began in
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old Kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
(Quoted in LC, p. 606)
Brooks' dualistic interpretation of these lines as typical
of Yeats is substantiated by a prose statement from the
Irish poet's "Hodos Chameliontos," in which he says of
Dante and Villon,
. . . had they lacked their Vision of Evil, had they
cherished any species of optimism, they could but have
found a false beauty .... They and their sort alone
earn contemplation, for it is only when the intellect
has wrought the whole of life to drama, to crisis, that
we may live for contemplation, and yet keep our inten
sity. (Quoted in MPT, p. 201)
For his own poetic theory, Brooks has taken Yeats' concep
tion of duality and strife, and involved it in a conflict
of its own with a force for unity "coming from the direc
tion of general aesthetics, 'beauty,' and beyond that the
philosophy of order, being, and the unity of God" (LC,
p. 7^5).
78
The confrontation of life's ambivalence which Brooks
finds at the heart of literature is most readily discovered
in tragedy; for the tragic hero is involved in action
entailing the ultimate risk, and his consciousness is "a
realm where such concepts as 'ought,' 'value,' and 'beauty'
are continuously meaningful . . . ."•*•5 a result he is
to some degree responsible for his downfall and involved
in guilt. Tragedy, then, is not for those "whose bent of
mind would reduce the fact of evil into something else or
resolve it into some larger whole." On the contrary, the
sense of enduring evil, "of the presence and the mystery
of human suffering" is basic to the tragic m o d e . l 6 it is
precisely the fact that tragedy does not provide "an easy
way out" that prompts Brooks and Heilman to look to tragic
literature for "symbols of permanent value."17
■^william G. McCollom, Tragedy (New York, 1957),
p. 28.
■^Richard W. Sewall, The Vision of Tragedy (New
Haven, 1959), PP» 5-6.
^^Understanding Drama (New York, 19^5), P* 79* No
effort will be made in this section of the paper to set
up a strict chronological development of Brooks' treat
ment of tragedy since the ethical aspects of the genre as
discussed here have received consistent interpretation
throughout his career.
79
Brooks has consistently asserted that the values and
the conflicts involved in tragedy are related to the tragic
poet as well as to the protagonist. In one instance he
referred to ancient drama to illustrate his point:
Consider Greek tragedy for a moment. It had grown out
of religious rites, and the author had his allegiance
to the moral order; justice had to be maintained by the
punishment of the protagonist. But the protagonist was
still linked to the author by the closest ties of sym
pathy. The protagonist had therefore to be so developed
as to appear to the audience as both hero and criminal.
Even Greek tragedy, therefore, called for the dramatist
to sympathize with, and yet concur In the destruction
of, his hero--to sympathize and yet detach himself from
his sympathies. (MPT, pp. 206-207)
Because of the demand for sympathy inherent in its form,
tragedy conveys a sense of the artist's personal involve
ment which is not nearly so evident in other types of
literature. Moreover, as Brooks has pointed out, the
members of the poet's audience also are subject to this
lack of detachment as they experience the conflict between
their desire to condemn the hero for breaking the estab
lished moral law and their impulse to sympathize with him
in his struggle (MPT, p. 205
1 f t
Cf. Warren (19^2): "... the determination of
good or evil is not a 'given' In tragedy, it is something
to be earned In the process, and even the tragic villain
must be 'loved.'" (Selected Essays, p. 27).
80
Tragedy, as Brooks conceived it, involves an over-all
ordering of experience which is evaluative in essence,
and an empathetic relationship between hero and audience
which necessitates their sharing, in some degree at least,
a common moral code.- * -9 Hence Brooks and Heilman dis
tinguish the world of tragedy from that of comedy by the
presence in the former of "moral absolutes . . . of an
underlying moral structure that cannot be tampered with"
(UP, p. 79)* This element of unchanging moral values
combined with a responsible hero; i.e., one who is free
to accept or to reject the code, implies a philosophical
commitment to the objective nature of the good and to the
existence of universals such as justice and loyalty which
constitute that good. Herein lies the philosophical basis
of tragedy and of Brooks' definition of the tragic con
flict in terms of "universal moral issues" (UP, gloss.,
p. 44). Quite often the philosopher and the tragic poet
•^Greek tragedy is the obvious example here since
as Eliot (1927) points out in regard to the Greeks, "Their
morals are a matter of feeling trained for generations,
they are hereditary and religious, just as their dramatic
forms themselves are the development of their early
liturgies. Their ethics of thought are one with their
ethics of behavior" (Selected Essays, p. 57)-
81
are both concerned with the paradoxical nature of human
experience; both seek to denominate their world by explor
ing the traditional metaphysical problems as to what kind
of world man inhabits and what criteria govern his con
duct. 20 in the last edition of Understanding Fiction
(1959 )f Brooks and Warren affirm this relationship between
poet and philosopher by suggesting that in a way every
literary work represents "the author's efforts to make
sense of his world" since his effort to write his poem or
story "is closely parallel to our effort to make sense of
our own process of daily living" (p. 527)*
It is this "ethically problematic and tensional"
aspect of tragedy which interests Brooks (LC, p. 750), and
which figures eminently in much of his practice, both early
and late. His criticism of Panic by Archibald MacLeish is
20In regard to the common effort of philosopher and
poet, Eliot writes, "Without doubt, the effort of the
philosopher proper, the man who is trying to deal with
ideas in themselves, and the effort of the poet, who may
be trying to realize ideas, cannot be carried on at the
same time. But this is not to deny that poetry can be in
some sense philosophic. The poet can deal with philosophic
Ideas, not as a matter for argument, but as a matter for
inspection .... poetry can be penetrated by a philosoph
ic idea, It can deal with this idea when it has reached
the point of immediate acceptance, when it has become
almost a physical modification" (Sacred Wood [1920], pp.
162-163).
82
an early example of his application of tragic theory.
Brooks points out that the protagonist McGafferty makes
no commitment to an Issue Involving the tragic effect:
A consideration of the dramatic situation Is reveal
ing. McGafferty’s position Is almost precisely that of
a man whose expensive car breaks down. He raises the
hood and does some tinkering with the carburetor. But
he does not really understand the engine and cannot
repair it. There Is first mere annoyance, then a dawn
ing knowledge of the true state of affairs, then a sort
of despair. The situation is basically comic, and
merely to make the issues more serious is not enough
to turn it into tragedy.
Intensifying the conflict, in Brooks' opinion, would only
result in sentimentality. McGafferty1s death does not
depend upon hubris, but upon "a private and irrelevant
pride," which makes his fall "therefore meaningless in
the tragic sense" (MPT, pp. 120-121). An interesting
contrast to this rather simple, direct handling of tragic
theory is the more complex analysis of William Faulkner's
Absalom, Absalom! published twelve years later in 1951-
Here the tragic situation as interpreted by Brooks is a
paradoxical equation of innocence with guilt. Sutpen, the
central character, is described by Brooks as the typically
"innocent" modern man: "He is rationalistic, scientific,
not traditional, not religious, not even superstitious."
However, Sutpen does have a moral code of sorts; it is a
83
naive conception of morality as a kind of recipe which
involves no more than the right Ingredients put together
in the proper way to obtain guaranteed results. The basic
ingredient of the recipe in Sutpen's case was personal
justice. In his single-minded pursuit of this quality,
Brooks sees the cause of both the tragic action and
Sutpen1s failure to lose his innocence and thus achieve
the tragic insight. In spite of this enduring innocence,
or blindness, Brooks terms Absalom, Absaloml a tragedy.
Faulkner, he explains, divides the tragic action so that
the narrator, and with him the reader, discovers in
Sutpen1s children the "fearful knowledge bought with
suffering," and, consequently, by a kind of refraction
discovers in Sutpen himself a type of grandeur.
His innocence resembles that of Oedipus (who like him
had been corrupted by success and who put his confi
dence in his own shrewdness). His courage resembles
that of Macbeth, and like Macbeth he plays out the
string to the very end.
Thus Brooks credits Faulkner with making a "modern man"
into a character of heroic proportions, and he believes
that Faulkner has succeeded in investing Sutpen's down
fall with something like tragic dignity. However, he
notes that although the moral sense might be lacking in
Sutpen* it had of necessity to be present in his creator
if the tragic effect were ever to be achieved (Sewanee
Review, pp. 543-558). It is the kind of "insight and
whole-mindedness" which enables Faulkner, or any writer,
to create tragedy that Brooks thinks is contained to some
degree in all great poetry2;i---an insight which is based
primarily on a belief in man as a free agent, possessing
a common human inheritance with the rest of men and living
in a world governed by an ascertainable moral code.
Thus Brooks has to a great degree repudiated his
original assertion that beliefs do not affect the
appreciation of poetry. And though he still maintains
that the poet and his audience need not share beliefs of
the more specific and narrow sort, he does hold that
certain broad assumptions about the nature of man and
his world are a necessary meeting ground for both poet
and critic. However, Brooks does not want poetry to be
evaluated directly in terms of belief. He still insists
upon the formalist standard of structural coherence, but
21
"Literary Criticism," in English Institute Annual,
1946 (New York, 1947), P- 151-
85
he makes it, in turn, partially dependent upon the
criterion of "truth of correspondence," as measured by
the "mature" reader's conception of reality. In Brooks'
case, this conception, as revealed in his recent theory
and practice, upholds a traditionally Christian world
view as the most favorable framework for serious litera
ture, in that it allows for the intuitive, accounts for
the presence of evil, and presupposes an objective system
of values. Into such a framework, Brooks' growing con
cern with the human conflict and the values involved
therein, and his enduring interest In the tragic vision
seem to fit very well.
CHAPTER IV
NORMS AND VALUES IN THE JUDGMENT OF POETRY
Cleanth Brooks has to date acknowledged poetry to be
both referential statement and evaluative judgment, and he
has characterized the poetic conflict as primarily ethical.
Working from this conception of literature, he has to some
extent incorporated criteria of factual truth and of meta
physical belief into the act of criticism. The criteria
of truth and of belief when brought to bear on the ethical
element in the literary conflict automatically raise the
issue of the moral value involved in a work and of the
necessity for the critic's making a normative judgment in
regard to it.
"Normative judgments," Brooks stated in 19^7, "touch
the heart of the matter" in criticism (WWU, p. xi); and he
traced the contemporary ineffectiveness of humane letters
generally to the fact that teachers in the Humanities
"have more and more ceased to raise normative questions,
86
87
have refrained from evaluation" (WWU, p. 235)* Two years
later Brooks deplored the attempts of some critics "to
drive a wedge between close reading of the text and evalua
tion of the work." He pointed out at this time that
extra-literary standards will of necessity figure in the
critical judgment; however, he argued for clearly marked
boundaries between the various aspects of criticism even
while affirming the need for exchange across these
boundaries.-*- Like many of the Formalists, Brooks took
alarm at the narrowness of scope and the lack of illumina
tion which were becoming associated with the Contextualist
approach; and in 1953 he supported the editorial statement
of Monroe Spears which read,
The point has been made, the lesson learned, and we
have plenty of critics able to do good formal analysis.
We need now, in addition, a consciously impure criticism
Modern Criticism," in Stallman, ed., Critiques and
Essays [194-9]> P- xxi. Cf. Eliot (1928): "You can never
draw the line between aesthetic criticism and moral and
social criticism .... The best you can do is to accept
these conditions and know what you are doing when you do
it" (Selected Essays, p. 42); and Blackmur (1935):
"Since criticism is not autonomous . . . it cannot avoid
constantly discovering within itself a purpose or pur
poses ulterior in the good sense. The danger is in not
knowing what is ulterior and what is not ..." (Lang.
as Gesture, p. 380).
88
which . . . will Interpret literature In relation to
the rest of man's concerns . . . .2
This call for a broader, more humanistic criticism Is
indicative of similar proposals by Eliot and Tate.3 Like
these writers, Brooks has come to see the critic as a
whole man with personal enthusiasms and interests ("My
Credo," p. 77), and not, as he apparently once did, as a
kind of analytic technician who brings no emotional or
A
intellectual presuppositions to the judgment of the poem.
In fact, one of Brooks' more recent essays described the
personal predisposition which governs his own approach to
a poem and revealed thereby his particular value orienta
tion :
^Sewanee Review, Autumn 1952, quoted in Brooks, "A
Note on the Limits of 'History' and the Limits of 'Criti
cism,'" Sewanee Review, 61:134, Winter 1953*
^Cf. Eliot (1935): "Literary criticism should be
completed from a definite ethical and theological stand
point .... The 'greatness1 of literature cannot be
determined solely by literary standards; though we must
remember that whether it is literature or not can be
determined only by literary standards" (Selected Essays,
P- 343) J and Tate (1952): "His [the man of letters]
critical responsibility is . . . the recreation and the
application of literary standards, which in order to be
effectively literary, must be more than literary" (Col
lected Essays, p. 390).
^"The Reading of Modern Poetry," American Review, 8:
438, February 1937*
89
Values, If not rooted in, are at least accompanied
by, the expression of emotion--hence the ease with
which we tend to Identify poetry with the expression
of emotion. But I prefer to stress the aspect of value.
Poetry Is distinctly man-centered in that it represents
experience seen in the perspective of human values.
This, it seems to me, is the grain of truth in Winters's
argument that every poem makes a moral judgment, though
I believe that he is more heavy-handed than it is wise
to be. I see no need of collapsing the ethical and the
aesthetic realms. ("Organic Theory of Poetry," pp. 69-
70)
Apparently he agrees with Winters on the nature of the
artistic process as a moral evaluation of experience but
finds Winters' one to one equation of structure and moral
judgment an over-simplification, allowing little or no
room for connotative implication and linguistic indirec
tion (LC, p. 673)-
This wariness of over-simplifying, if not over
emphasizing, the relationship between literature and
morality is a key, I believe, to reconciling Brooks'
apparent incongruities regarding this whole issue. Thus,
though he places both critic and poet within a moral
framework by admitting that "... any act of judgment,
including that of aesthetic judgment, has a moral
aspect" (WWU, p. 239) and that literature "needs a world
of moral choice" ("Regionalism in Amer. Lit.," p. 37), he,
nevertheless, insists that the specific relationship of
90
literature to morals is, practically speaking, impossible
to trace (UP, p. 48).^ The inability to specify precisely
the nature of the moral implications in literature, though
an actual fact, is also a type of defence which enables
Brooks to avoid appearing overly didactic even while
affirming the presence of such values. This "both-and"
outlook is typically expressed by the following comment:
Poetry is self-validating in that it fulfills some
human need which cannot otherwise be fulfilled. But
this value can never exist in Isolation. What the rela
tion is between this intrinsic value and other values
is a most vexed and delicate question .... Perhaps
it can never be settled. Perhaps it is the fundamental
kind of question that must be lived through, over and
over again. (UP, p. xxiv)
As might be expected in view of the foregoing passage, this
fundamental relationship between literature and morality is
developed by Brooks in two different directions. One line
of thought attributes to poetry an increasingly moral
function; the other, qualifies and narrows the nature of
5cf. Eliot: "... poetry as certainly has something
to do with morals, and with religion, and even with
politics perhaps, though we cannot say what" (The Sacred
Wood [1920], p. x); and Tate (1954): "What we are con
fronted with in a work of literature . . . is human
action translated into being— morals moving toward meta
physics" ("Moral Action in Art," p. 45).
91
that function.
The initial evidence of the first, or moral, approach
appeared in 1945 * when Brooks and Heilman termed the
literary work "a commentary on life," possessing the
ability "to heighten observation, change attitudes, and
widen understanding" (UP, gloss., p. 45)* Then in 1949
Brooks adopted as his own the belief of Wilbur Urban that
poetry is first and foremost man-centered and that "For
the poet . . . the individual is always the centre and
bearer of values, and his function, as poet, is to reveal
them" (quoted in WWU, p. 264). At this time he also began
to speak of a kind of "wisdom" which results from the
"coming to terms with situations" effected in the poem
(WWU, p. 258).^ Then 1949 brought the declaration that
one of the "uses" of poetry is "to make us better
citizens" ("Irony as Principle," p. 740). This moral
improvement is the indirect result of the wisdom, the
insight, gained by the reader in experiencing the poem--a
^This "wisdom," according to Eliot (1955)> Is to be
gained from all great poems, even those based on reli
gious or philosophical principles with which we disagree
(On Poetry and Poets, p. 263)*
92
process which Brooks and Warren only recently (1959)
described in moral terms. A successful work of literature,
they claim,
may have enlarged our sympathies . . . so that we may
now more readily regard other people with charity and
humility. Or it may have given us a liberating sense
of the comedy of experience .... (UP, p. 82)7
Such a conception of the moral significance of poetry
places the poem on the threshold of moral action and
choice and yet refrains from assigning it the actual power
7Cf. Richards: "Culture, religion, instruction in
some special senses, softening of the passions, and
furtherance of good causes may be directly concerned in
our judgments of the poetic values of experiences"
(Princ. of Lit. Crlt. [1924], p. 74); and Eliot: "It
[poetry] may effect revolutions in sensibilities . . .
may help to break up the conventional modes of perception
and valuation .... It may make us . . . more aware of
the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum
of our being to which we rarely penetrate ..." (Use
of Poetry and Criticism [19351> P« 155); and Ransom
(1952): "The social effect of art, when art is satirical,
is destructive of evil, and cleansing, and that is
salutary. When it is affirmative and the artist loves
his representations, the effect Is tonic. It fortifies
the faith. And there can hardly be a doubt that in
this sense the artist supplies experience which is
confirmatory, and he is one of the powerful moral influ
ences" (Poems and Essays, p. 112).
93
g
of moral sanction.
It Is the desire to emphasize this threshold posi
tion of poetry In regard to ethical demands and sanctions
that prompted, I think, the development of Brooks' second
line of thought concerning moral value in literature; name
ly, his continued warnings against any effort to follow
Matthew Arnold in his substitution of poetry for religion.
As Brooks defined it, religion is "that system of beliefs
(unsusceptible of scientific proof) which affords sanctions
for morals.And it is this capacity for motivating, for
justifying, the "good" act which he denies to poetry
("Metaphor and Function," p. 135)* He has repeatedly
asserted that literature Is not a remedy for moral
deterioration, that there are "no special Ills which
poetry is to cure" (WWU, p. 209). Critics cannot save
Q
Cf. Tate (1951): "If poetry makes us more conscious
of the complexity and meaning of our experience, It may
have an eventual effect upon action, even political
action" (Collected Essays, p. 396); and Warren (1955):
". . . the evocation, confrontation, and definition of
our deepest life [effected in the poem] .... prepare
for the moment of action, of creation, in our world of
contingency" ("Knowledge and the Image of Man," p. 192).
9"Poetry and Political Faith" (rev. of Stephen
Spender, The Destructive Element), Poetry, 50:283,
August 1937*
94
our culture, he argues, by becoming moralists and social
engineers and thereby converting poetry into some kind of
ersatz religion ("The Critic and His Text," p. 42).
"Literature is not a surrogate for religion" ("My Credo,"
p. 72); it cannot save us ("Note on the Limits," p. 135)*
Thus Brooks finds himself theoretically in the position
of limiting the moral impact of literature even as he
affirms it.
In an effort to demonstrate and define the degree of
limitation involved in his approach to this problem, he
has developed a concept of literature as moral "diagnosis"
in contrast to Arnold's concept of "remedy." As early as
1947 he pointed out that the poet explores the motivation
and the result of moral choice rather than prescribing or
defining them. Poetry, he claimed, is diagnostic and not
remedial because it "eventuates not in a course of action,
but in contemplation" ("Literary Criticism," p. 151)*
He is careful to suggest, however, that these categories
are not totally unrelated since ". . .a good diagnosis is
always the basis of any remedy" (Fugitives' Reunion,
p. 218). Brooks' most thorough explanation of his diagnos
tic theory appeared in 1958:
95
Poetry does yield knowledge of the human, but it
tends to give diagnoses rather than remedies. It may
be useful to man's moral health, for an adequate
remedy will probably depend upon a sound diagnosis.
But there may be more than one remedy, and in any case
a remedy involves an overt action whereas a diagnosis
is still close to pure contemplation, which is the
proper realm of art.
A poem focuses itself on a concrete situation and
does not issue in an ethical generalization. The evalua
tion is there, but to borrow a term from the archaelo-
gists, it is there in situ and can no more easily than
the quick-to-crumble artifact be removed by a process
of abstraction. At least one must be gentle and cauti
ous .
William Butler Yeats is more nearly right than
Matthew Arnold in holding that poetry is a revelation
of life rather than a criticism of life, though one is
willing to concede that any revelation implies an evalua
tion and thus a potential criticism. ("Organic Theory
of Poetry," p. 75)
It is the refraction of reality through human responses
which effects the revelation in the poem--a manifestation
which Brooks describes as "primarily a revelation of our
selves" ("Organic Theory of Poetry," p. 76);10 and he
discusses the ethical aspects of this revelation more
concretely in reference to Shakespeare's Antony and
Cf. Richards: "Poetry is thus our best evidence
as to how other men feel about things; and as we read it,
we discover not so much how life seems to another, as
how it is for ourselves" (Science and Poetry [1926],
p. 51); and Blackmur (19^6): "The arts do not supply
assent or conviction, any more than they supply character
or sex, but they show and illumine the actual experience
of them" (Lion and Honeycomb, p. 220).
96
Cleopatra:
The experience of the play certainly has a relation
to our notions of ethics. It will test our ethical
notions. It will probably deepen our sympathies and
at the same time deepen our sense of man's responsi
bilities as a moral agent. But the play does not pre
tend to be an eloquent presentation of the proper
ethical principle or the argument for a particular
choice: rather it carries us deep into the crucial
experience which conditions any choice. ("Organic
Theory of Poetry," pp. 74-75)
This interpretation of the ethical facet of literature
credits the poem with the power to explore moral choice
and human motivation and thereby convey an insight which
weighs the reader's moral commitment with that presupposed
by the poem. Such an Insight can lead to a better under
standing of the responsibility and the propensities of
mankind generally; but understanding, and even sympathy,
need not involve proscribing or approving a specific
action or remedy for the situation explored in the poem.
Thus, though literature, as Brooks now views it, may
increase one's sensitivity to the religious and moral
^Cf. Ransom: "... I wonder if art does not
register a disaffection with all practice. If It does
not oppose something in advance; it seems at any rate
to record the transaction afterwards In the strangest
manner. It takes us back into the concretion from which
action has already delivered us" ("Art and the Human
Economy," Kenyon Review, 7:684, Autumn 1945).
97
aspects of human existence, it neither teaches a religious
doctrine nor promotes a moral code as Matthew Arnold would
have had it do.
In addition to this distinctly ethical significance
in literature, Brooks sees in poetry a means of reaffirm
ing the importance and value of sense experience; for
example, Understanding Poetry (1950) contains this state
ment :
Poetry can put us back in touch with the freshness of
things--it restores our originally unprejudiced life
of the senses. We may even go so far as to say that
poetry starts there. (p. 77)
Then in 1957* lest their growing concern with the meta
physical and moral aspects of literature be interpreted
as an abrogation of sensory values, Brooks and Wimsatt
declared,
As we move into the inner moral and spiritual experi
ence of man in search of our most clearly absolute,
our most securely universal, concepts of value, it may
seem that we leave behind, abandon to an uncertain and
merely academic fate, the values, pleasant or unpleasant,
which in a more superficial scheme we might assign to
such external phenomena as the colors red and blue.
Neither the poet nor the theorist, however, is in a
good position to leave these behind. If there were
nobody else at all--no metaphysician, moralist, or
theologian--who cared to speak in defence of sensory
values--yet the poet, in his indirect and obscure way,
would have to go on confessing them, and his theorist
would have to think about them. For they contribute
the symbolic, the external, the phenomenological
98
language by which the poet speaks about the Inner and
deeper realities of value. And If they did not con
stitute at least an inter-subjectively universal and
reliable set of values, they could not be used as
signs in the poet's communication. Most likely it is
not necessary for the theorist of poetry to decide the
nice metaphysical question as to the locus of each
sensory value--ln object or in subject. Perhaps the
very question Is illusory. 7lC, p. 739)
This conception of sensory experience as a kind of symbol
system required for poetic communication on the linguistic
level reaffirms, in turn, the value of poetry as a
developer of taste. For the cultivation of the senses
which taste presupposes should ultimately result in a
greater sensitivity to all poetic values, whatever their
nature.12
Another "use" which Brooks attributes to both poetry
and criticism is the preservation of the integrity of
language. In 1950 he proposed that men of letters could
do the most to improve the state of modern civilization
by keeping open the lines of communication with the
realm of values; by re-establishing, in a language
fast breaking down into abstract formula or else Into
gobbledygook, the capacity to communicate values, by
-^1. A. Richards relates taste directly to moral
values; he claims, "Bad taste and crude responses . . . .
are actually a root evil from which other defects
follow" (Prlnc. of Lit. Crit., p. 62).
99
exercising to health the now half-atrophied faculties
by which man apprehends value.13
Linguistic integrity is in this sense a key to all the
values associated with literature since upon the use of
words depends the communication of whatever significance
a work may have, as well as the particular perspective it
embodies.
For words introduce a special kind of valuing 'subject,'
the subject who not only responds to values with emo
tions or feelings but formulates and utters (if only
to himself) his awareness of both value and response
.... by the very fact of utterance a person values
in a special way. (LC, p. 737)
Besides its role as an exerciser and guardian of
language, poetry also acts, according to Brooks, as a
13"The Quick and the Dead: A Comment on Humanistic
Studies," in Julian Harris, ed., The Humanities, p. 6.
Following in all probability the lead of Ezra Pound
(193^)> who stated that if men too long neglect language,
"their children will find themselves begging and their
offspring betrayed" (Literary Essays of Ezra Pound [London
195^L P* 77)> both Eliot and Tate relate this linguistic
integrity to the improvement of culture and of society at
large: Eliot (19^5) maintaining that "unless we have
those few men who combine an exceptional sensibility with
an exceptional power over words, our own ability, not
merely to express, but even to feel any but the crudest
emotions, will degenerate" (On Poetry and Poets, p. 10);
and Tate (19^-9) assigning to the man of letters the task
of attending to the health of society "through literature-
that is, he must be constantly aware of the condition of
language in his age" (Collected Essays, p. 535)*
100
counterforce to the dehumanization which constantly
threatens a mechanized society. In 1950 he stated that
the purpose of literature is "to balance our society's
emphasis on machinery and techniques with a powerful
counteremphasis on ends and values" ("The Quick and the
Dead," p. 6). And in I960 his commitment to a "serious
literature," one which presents a world of moral choice,
was related to the need for a deterrent to "the world of
faceless anonymity and complacent conformity [that] in
some measure threatens us all ..." ("Regionalism in
Amer. Lit.," p. 41).
All these values--moral, aesthetic, linguistic, and
social--are dependent upon the poet's selection and
arrangement of material for their realization within the
poem. In this sense, then, order is itself a basic value
in poetry; for as Brooks and Warren pointed out in 1950*
In the final analysis, until the poem can be read as
a poem we cannot discuss any of its values with confi
dence. The moral attitudes it embodies are, for
instance, as deeply involved in the technical ordering
of the poem as they are in any statement the poem may
make. In fact, they are more deeply involved in the
101
technical ordering. (UP, pp. xxiv-xxv)1^
When this ordering Is all that it should be, aesthetic
distance, Brooks maintains, is successfully realized,
with the result that the poem is both ethically signifi
cant and universally meaningful because it has been
liberated from the personal and accidental emotions of
the poet.- * - 5 Order, then, is the right relationship between
the ethical and the aesthetic; and Brooks believes that
when properly viewed this ordering demonstrates that there
need be no conflict between the two elements of the poet
and the priest in the character of the artist (Poems of
John Milton, p. 263)-
It is apparent that Brooks’ theorizing within the
last ten or twelve years has led to a conception of poetry
1 Cf. Eliot: "For It Is ultimately the function of
art, in imposing a credible order upon ordinary reality,
and thereby eliciting some perception of an order ill
reality, to bring us to a condition of serenity, still
ness, and reconciliation ..." (Poetry and Drama
[Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1951], PP* 43-44); and Blackmur
(1951): "It is the actual behavior of things that willy-
nilly gets into poetry, and what poetry does to behavior
is to give it some sort of order, good for the time, or
the life, of the poem" (Lang, as Gesture, p. 192).
■^"The Doric Delicacy," Sewanee Review, 56:414,
Summer 1948.
102
as a repository of multiple values. Whether the value
entailed be moral insight, aesthetic pleasure, linguis
tic integrity, or social betterment, or a combination
of these, in the end they are all in one sense "moral"
values; for, as C. I. Lewis explains, "... whatever is
justly valued calls to be realized or maintained, and
holds some imperative for conduct" (Knowledge and Valua
tion, p. 438).
Brooks, then, has joined his fellow Formalists in
removing the poem from the strictly Contextualistic
framework, and he is at present interpreting the literary
work as a vehicle of communication and evaluation as well
as of expression. He has based his literary theory
generally upon his belief in a structure of norms within
reality and in the ability of poetry to reflect and to
reveal that structure. While this revelation has
necessarily an evaluative aspect, it is, in Brooks'
opinion, more diagnostic than prescriptive. By so con
ceiving the poet's exploration of the human conflict,
Brooks manages, in theory at least, to give literature
moral significance and yet to avoid overburdening it with
what he considers the moral sanction proper to religion.
CHAPTER V
METAPHOR AND IRONY: A METHODOLOGY
AND PERSPECTIVE
Commitment to a literary theory which affirms the
role of belief and of moral value in poetry finds the man
of letters confronting once again the traditional form-
content dichotomy. In an effort to deal with this divi
sion, Cleanth Brooks has interpreted the Contextualist
ideal of organic form as a tensional union of making with
seeing and saying--a union realized through language,
particularly figurative language. Consequently, the
methodological lnstruments--metaphor, with its concomi
tants, symbol and myth; and irony, with its verbal
manifestation, paradox--which he considers essential to
poetry are conceived primarily as a means of theoretically
sustaining the organic unity of a work.
The ultimate advantage of the theory of irony and
metaphor is that it is a theory that involves both
103
104
poetic content and poetic 'form1 and demands the
interdependence of these two. (LC, p. 747)
Preoccupation with the metaphoric vision has been
outstandingly characteristic of Brooks' approach to poetry,
so much so that his friend and fellow critic John Crowe
Ransom has asserted,
For Brooks the poem exists in metaphor. The rest of it
he does not particularly remark. He goes straight to
the metaphors, thinking that it is they which work the
miracle that is poetry .... (Poems and Essays,
p. 148)
In one of his earliest essays (1935 )> Brooks predicted
that metaphor would play a major role in the evolution of
modern poetic theory:
. . . we are witnessing a radical change in the whole
conception of the function and fittingness of metaphor,
and with It, a revolution in the conception of poetry.
("Three Revolutions," p. 152)
By 1951 he was describing literature as "ultimately
metaphoric and symbolic" ("My Credo," p. 72); and in
1957 he declared that
. . . metaphor Is not only in a broad sense the prin
ciple of all poetry, but it is also inevitable in
practical criticism and will be active there in pro
portion as criticism moves beyond the historical report
or the academic exercise. (LC, p. 750)
Brooks, in the course of his theoretical development,
has defined various ways in which metaphor may function.
105
His earlier statements (1939) make metaphoric language the
key to the communication of the poet's attitude (MPT,
p. 28). And since attitudes are ordinarily based upon
evaluative judgments, it is not surprising that at this
time he also sees in metaphor a means of exploring the
moral encounter:
. . . it is through the production of energetic meta
phor . . . that the poet attempts to break through the
pattern of 'abstract experience' and give man a picture
of himself as man. Hence his preoccupation with time
and mortality and 'specific moral problems.' (MPT,
pp. 101-102)
Metaphor which gives man a picture of himself as man seems
oriented primarily toward realizing the criterion of "cor
respondence" as basic to that of "coherence." However,
Brooks' concurrent applied criticism suggests no such
relationship but rather implies that metaphor is a means
of realizing "coherence" alone. For example, Brooks sees
Robert Frost's failure to employ vital metaphor as causing
a lack of structural tension and dramatic integrity in his
poetry, but no mention is made of the effect of Frost's
technique upon his vision of man (MPT, p. 113)- Many more
years of theory and practice were necessary before Brooks
would be ready to relate metaphor explicitly to the
interaction existing between "correspondence" and
106
"coherence."
By 19^9 Brooks, working from the assumption that
"Words open out into larger symbolizations at all
levels ..." ("Modern Criticism," p. xix), began to
speak of metaphor as the poet's bridge to the universal:
"The poet can legitimately step out into the universal
only by going through the narrow door of the particular"
("Irony as Principle," p. 729)* This relationship was
stated more explicitly in 1957* when Brooks and Wimsatt
described metaphor as a combination of "the element of
necessity or universality . . . with that other element
of concreteness or specificity" (LC, p. 7^9).^ Metaphor,
as they conceived it, is the only verbal structure capable
of uniting history and philosophy:
We can have our universals In the full conceptualized
discourse of science and philosophy. We can have spe
cific detail lavishly in the newspapers and in the
records of trials and revelations of psychiatric cases.
■^Cf. Tate (1951): "All reading Is translation, even
in the native tongue; for translation may be described as
the tact of mediation between universals and particulars
in the complex of metaphor" (Collected Essays, p. 48l);
and Ransom (1955): "[Metaphor is] the way of Imagination
in giving objective or Concrete existence to the homeless
moral Universal .... it gives us the sense of nature
accepting the Universal readily into Its infinite system,
and lending to it what metaphysical sanction is possible"
(Poems and Essays, pp. 180-181).
107
But it is only in metaphor, and hence it is par excel
lence in poetry, that we encounter the most radically
and relevantly fused union of the detail and the uni
versal idea. (LC, p. 749)
This union of the metaphysical with the metaphoric tends
to dominate Brooks' theorizing throughout the last decade,
and in fact metaphor takes on even broader relationships
p
with belief and morality.
First of all, Brooks asserted that his organic con
ception of metaphor could scarcely be acceptable to anyone
who held no metaphysical beliefs:
No critics of positivist persuasion, as far as I know,
see metaphor as anything more, finally, than a pleas
ing or delightful or rhetorically effective mode of
expression. I think it is impossible, indeed, for a
thoroughgoing positivist to take a position other than
this. ("Metaphor and the Function of Criticism,"
P. 134)3
Ransom (1952) having noted Brooks' tendency to
evaluate a poem in terms of one dominating figure having
"philosophical or religious implications," offers this
comment: "Brooks's method, however, is a homiletic one
if I am not mistaken. In my boyhood I heard many a sermon
preached where a preacher unpacked the whole burden of his
theology from a single figurative phrase of Scripture
i taken out of context. Brooks heard them too" (Poems and
Essays, p. 14-9).
3This comment throws an interesting light upon the
claims by Arthur Mizener and by Manuel Bilsky that
Richards' theory of metaphor is inconsistent with his
professed positivism because It seems to presuppose some
108
Furthermore, he maintained, It is no accident that Hulme
and the critics who concur with him in making metaphor the
essence of poetry "have gone on either to avow an orthodox
| religious position, or else to affirm the possibility and
necessity for metaphysics as a science." On the same
occasion metaphor was described as the poet's essential
' instrument for apprehending and discovering truth and,
; hence, as a most appropriate approach to the presence of
|
j belief in literature ("Metaphor and Function," pp. 133“
j 13^).^ So, too, the poet's probing of the problem of
evil is made to center upon this figure:
. . . if verbal art has to take up the mixed business
of good and evil, its most likely way of success and
its peculiar way is a mixed way. And this means . . .
sort of metaphysical belief in an ultimate referent ;
! ("Recent Criticism," Southern Review, 5'-395j Autumn 1939; i
! and "I. A. Richards' Theory of Metaphor," Modern Philology, :
I 50:137, August 1952). j
' A i
^Richards concerning the belief involved through
metaphor asks, "... what is it that we might believe in
it? Is it the tenor or the vehicle or their joint presen- '
tation; or is it 'that tenor and vehicle are thus and thus
related there'? Or is the belief required no more than a
! readiness to feel and will and live, in certain respects,
I in accordance with the resultant meaning In so far as we
i apprehend that meaning--or rather in so far as that mean-
I ing apprehends, grasps, or takes control of us" (Philos.
1 of Rhet. [1936], p. 134)?
109
the oblique glance, the vertical unification of the
metaphoric smile. (LC, p. 746)
Metaphor, when viewed in Brooks' terms, becomes a
means of arriving at and of communicating insight—
emotional, intellectual, and moral (UP, p. 555)-^ A
typical application of the insight theory is this commen
tary on Ezra Pound's well-known metaphor, "The apparition
of these faces in the crowd;/ Petals on a wet, black
bough," which reads,
Even in this most unlikely place [the metro], we catch
a glimpse of something beautiful, fresh, and pure, and
in that momentary lift of the heart, sense an inter
pretation potentially applicable to a great deal of
experience. (UP, p. 90)
Brooks has ascribed "the most fruitful modern criticism"
to the "rediscovery and recovery of metaphor" ("Metaphor
and Function," p. 133)* And it is no wonder, since it is
ultimately to this figure that he turns for the most prob
able resolution of the aesthetic vs_. non-aesthetic
conflict.
The grand problem for the theorist would appear to
be how to evade these temptations [to reduce the work
c :
JCf. Ransom's ascribing to metaphor, the perspective
which uncovers "the grain which will maintain our lives"
("The Understanding of Fiction," Kenyon Review, 12:214,
Spring 1950).
110
either to sensory values or to conceptualized ethical
and religious values] or, perhaps better, how to
embrace them both and thus have a double or paradoxi
cal theory. His best chance to do this . . . is found
in the curious fact of metaphor, which is a combination
of concreteness and significance, a reconciliation or
simultaneous embodiment of diverse emotive pulls, a
way of facing and even asserting something serious
while at the same time declining the didactic gambit
which nature is always pushing forward--both to artist
and to theorist. (LC, pp. 752-753
Such a claim makes metaphor the means of insuring poetic
statement against distortion as a doctrine or thesis, and
at the same time of concretely structuring that statement
in terms of both "correspondence" and "coherence."
A similar role has been given by Brooks to the
related figure of symbol, which he and Warren have defined
as "a metaphor from which the first term has been
omitted" (UP, p. 556).7 His early essays describe
symbolism as the poet’s attempt "to communicate feelings
with such subtlety and detail as to preserve all their
^Richards attributes even greater significance to
metaphor, calling it "the greatest thing of all . . .
because it is a command of life" (Philos, of Rhet. [1936],
P. 95).
^Ransom also sees symbol as "some kind of metaphor,
inducing the image of a foreign object" ("The Inorganic
Muse," Kenyon Review, 5:298, Spring 19^-3).
Ill
shades and nuances."® This conception of symbol as the
vehicle of complex utterance appeared again five years
later when Brooks saw In the symbolist poet one who
"refuses to sacrifice the subtlety and complexity of his
vision of reality" (MPT, p. 59)* At this time, too, he
considered the effective use of symbol a guarantee of
aesthetic distance:
. . . the poet explores experience by separating his
symbols from a personal allegiance to his own ego, and
while infusing them with an active vitality, allows
them to work out in accordance with their own logic and
to develop in a life of their own. Milton's Lucifer is
such a symbol. (MPT, p. 216)
Although this early description of symbol as separated
from the poet's ego and as possessing a logic of its own
seemed to relate it chiefly to non-logical, intuitive
expression, a concurrent essay (1939) on Yeats applauded
as well the use of symbol to concretize logical abstrac
tion and ethical generalizations:
. . . Yeats has confidence in his symbols; the concrete
and the abstract, thought and feeling, coincide. The
poet refuses to define the moralization except in terms
of the specific symbols and the specific situation
given. (MPT, pp. 181-182)
®"A Note on Symbol and Conceit," American Review,
3:206, April 1934.
112
There is further evidence that at this time Brooks had
begun to think that symbol, like metaphor, could serve
to define moral and transcendental suppositions and, thus,
to realize in a concrete manner truth of correspondence
as found in a poem.9 His interpretation of the central
symbol in the last of Tate's "Sonnets of the Blood" is a
case in point:
If the blood is a symbol of the nonrational, con
crete stuff of man which resists abstract classifica
tion, by the same token it symbolizes man's capacity
to be more than an abstract, and therefore signifies
man's capacity for sin. In an age of abstract
experience sin is meaningless. (MPT, pp. 103-104)
The ethical significance of symbol which this passage
implies became an established fact in Brooks' theory in
1949. At that time he made symbol the basis for sustaining
^Some Formalists have specifically emphasized the
transcendental element in symbol; for example, Ransom
(1959): "Perhaps the truth is that a bold symbolism, if
and when it really stirs the soul and casts a new light
over life, is one of the varieties of religious experi
ence, though an apocalyptic one, not orthodox" ("Symbol
ism: American Style," in Richman, ed., The Arts at Mid-
Century, p. 50); and Tate (1951): "The symbolic imagina
tion conducts an action through analogy, of the human to
the divine, of the natural to the supernatural, of the low
to the high, of time to eternity" (Collected Essays,
p. 412); and Blackmur (1948): "[Symbolic techniques are]
those forces that operate in the arts which are greater
than ourselves and come from beyond ourselves" (Lion and
Honeycomb, pp. 210-211).
113
and Implementing theme ("Irony as Principle," p. 740);
and theme, as previously discussed, is in Brooks' way of
thinking an interpretation of life, a comment on human
values.It is this conception of symbol which appears
to function in his well-known essay on Macbeth, "The Naked
Babe and the Cloak of Manliness." For Brooks saw in the
clothed daggers and the naked babe an evaluation of experi
ence in terms of "mechanism and life--instrument and end--
death and birth--that which should be left bare and clean
and that which should be clothed and warm." These two
symbols, he claimed, enabled Shakespeare to present multi
ple aspects of the moral conflict involved in humanity's
efforts to clothe itself with the robes of either honor
or hypocrisy (WWU, p. 49).
Such a view of symbol as a sign pointing to a kind
of broad, universal meaning may appear to border on
allegory, but Brooks and Hardy in 1951 offered this
■'■^Cf. Warren (1946): ". . .a symbol implies a body
of ideas which may be said to be fused in it. This means
that the symbol itself may be developed into a discursive
sequence as we intellectually explore its potential . .
. . a symbol may be the condensation of several themes
and not a sign for one" (Selected Essays, p. 218).
114
explanation of the difference between the two:
In philosophical allegory, Ideally conceived, tangible
objects and relationships among them merely represent,
according to a somewhat arbitrary scheme, abstract
entities, ideas, and relationships. The visible,
whether object or action, has no particular and immedi
ate significance in itself. In symbolism, on the
other hand, object and action have their own tangible
meaning, subject to the laws of physical reality, as
well as a content of intangible significance suggested
by the tangible. (Poems of Mr. John Milton, p. 250)
Symbol thus becomes a significant and concrete objectifi
cation with referential meaning plus emotive and evaluative
inference--a means of embodying specifically and coherent
ly various kinds of insight.H Such a concept of symbol
supplies the framework within which Brooks and Warren
discuss the basic symbolism of Robert Bridges' "Nightin
gales. "
Cf. Blackmur (1942): "A symbol, I take it, is
what we use to express meaningfulness in a permanent way
which cannot be expressed in direct words or formulas of
words with any completeness; a symbol is a cumulus of
meaning which, once established, attracts further meaning
to it until, overloaded, it collapses" (Lang, as Gesture,
p. 16); and Warren (1946): "A symbol involves an idea
(or ideas) as part of its potential, but it also involves
the special complex of feelings associated with that idea,
the attitude toward the idea. The symbol affirms the
unity of mind in the welter of experience; it is a device
for making the welter of experience manageable for the
mind--graspable. It represents a focus of being and is
not a mere sign, a 'picture-language'" (Selected Essays,
p. 218).
115
The poet makes the nightingales serve as a symbol
to express his idea. He has developed the implications
of the image so that it is unnecessary for him to argue
his point; we seize on it in seizing on the Image
itself. The poet is not merely describing his own
pleasure in the song of the nightingales, or merely
trying to make the reader who has no acquaintance with
nightingales appreciate the poem fully; he is, instead,
using the image of the nightingale to make us respond,
emotionally and intellectually, to an interpretation of
human experience. (UP, p. 102)
In conjunction with his emphasis on symbol and meta
phor, Brooks has displayed a marked interest In myth; all
three, he believed, share a common mode of apprehending
reality ("Metaphor and Function," p. 13^). More of an
issue in the early essays than in the later ones, myth
figures particularly in his discussions of William Butler
Yeats. Brooks believed that Yeats, in working out the
system expressed in A Vision and underlying much of his
poetry, created for himself a myth--"an instrument for,
as well as a symbol of, the poet's reintegration of per
sonality" (MPT, pp. 176, 200). At this point (1939)>
Brooks seems to have viewed the function of myth in the
psychological terms of Richards, to whom he occasionally
refers in the essays on Yeats.12 However, Brooks'
12Cf. Richards: "Through such mythologies our will
is collected, our powers unified, our growth controlled.
Through them the infinitely divergent strayings of our
116
conception of the mythic operation Involved, as Richards’
did not, an acknowledged metaphysical purpose. Thus, he
saw in Yeats' personal mythology "an attempt to make a
coherent formulation of the natural and the supernatural,"
and thereby to establish a system possessing "the authority
and meaning of religion" (MPT, pp. 175-176).13
In so identifying myth with a world-view or philosophy,
Brooks was facing once again the questions of truth and of
belief in poetry. He asserted in his early career that
myth though not "scientifically" true was "imaginatively"
true, and he insisted that it "intermeshes with reality"
(MPT, p. 202). A later discussion of "Ode on a Grecian
beings are brought into 'balance or reconciliation'"
(Coleridge on Imagination [193^J, PP- 171-172).
■^Eliot found Yeats' system "not a world of spiritual
significance, not a world of real Good and Evil, of holi
ness and sin, but a highly sophisticated lower mythology
summoned, like a physician, to supply the fading pulse of
poetry with some transient stimulant ..." (After Strange
Gods [193^J, P* 50). Tate saw in Yeats' self-conscious
efforts to create a myth "a strategic retreat of naturalism
to a plane where the idea of transcendence could be enter
tained as a pleasant rhetorical diversion" ("Religion and
the Intellectuals," Partisan Review, 17:253* March 1950).
Blackmur (1936) interprets Yeats' system simply as an
organizing structure for his poetry— a framework which
provides "an adequate mechanics of meaning and value"
(Lang, as Gesture, p. 80).
117
Urn" described myth as "a valid perception into reality"
and denied that it was "irrelevant make-belief" (WWU,
p. 164).^ However, he did admit in 1951 that "...
there are myths which are made cogent and plausible and
myths which remain absurd and silly ..." and that even
the plausible myths if over-literalized become absurd. It
is this tendency to over-literalization that causes Brooks
to reject C. S. Lewis' interpretation of Paradise Lost] on
the other hand, he will not accept Basil Willey's evalua
tion of the poem because the latter critic gives no
credence to the myth of Adam and Eve's prelapsarian happi
ness and also denies Milton's belief in it.^-5 Brooks'
Judgment in this case appears highly subjective. Appar
ently he holds that myths are true in some sense and must
be believed to some extent, but more than this he has been
unable to specify except in terms of the evaluation of a
■^In this matter of belief in myth, Blackmur (1935)
distinguished between the "literal" believer who sees his
myths "as supernatural archetypes of reality," and the
"imaginative" believer who looks to myths "for the mean
ing there is in their changing application" (Lang, as
Gesture, pp. 172-173).
•*-5"Milton and Critical Re-Estimates," PMLA, 66:1053-
1054, December 1951.
118
particular work.
In 1952 Brooks continued to affirm the element of
truth In myth, associating It with Insight:
The great myths are not fairy tales, that is, mere
fanciful elaborations of principles, which might other
wise be abstractly stated. The great myths, on the
contrary, like the successful metaphors in a good poem,
embody unique insights and are inexhaustible, not
susceptible to being reduced to paraphrase. ("Meta
phor and Function," pp. 13^-135)
This interpretation of myth as insight appeared in two dif
ferent pieces of Brooks' criticism, both on Milton, in the
early Fifties. In the first, he again compared myth to
metaphor in that it must be rooted in experience and at
the same time must suggest the unknown, the ineffable
("Milton and Re-Estimates," p. 1053)* In the second, he
presented Paradise Lost as "a brilliant example of the
mythical method" which revealed a profound insight into
the perennial human conflict ("Eve's Awakening," p. 298).
By 1957, Brooks appeared considerably less concerned
with myth than in former years. Perhaps the reason for
this apparent decline in interest lay in the opinion,
which he shared with Wimsatt, that myth and ritual were
beginning to occupy too great a place in criticism and as
a result were threatening the objectivity of poetry (LC,
119
p. 733)- At any rate he was now somewhat skeptical of
Yeats' system, finding it "a dictionary of public and semi
personal symbols--a kind of logbook" rather than a
genuine myth, which is never, he claimed, as fully
systematized or deliberate as Yeats' structure is (LC,
*i C
p. 720). Neither this new skepticism toward Yeats nor
the fear that myth is being overemphasized in criticism
has prevented Brooks and Wimsatt from reasserting the
significance of mythic systems as "patterns of action and
of large action," involving "a stress on what is important
about poetry in a large and public way, what can give it
religious and social dignity and didactic claims" (LC,
p. 734). Thus myth, like metaphor and symbol, has become
for Brooks an instrument of metaphysical insight and
moral exploration, as well as a means of organizing
experience into a coherent whole.
In addition to studying the poem through symbolic
techniques, Brooks regularly places each work in a focus
of irony and paradox. Irony, as he first defined it in
^Cf. Tate (1930): ". . .a myth should be in
conviction immediate, direct, overwhelming ..." (Col
lected Essays, p. 306).
120
1935* Is "a qualifying recognition of the negative aspects
of experience," and necessary for all great poetry.^
Even more than a "recognition," it is for the poet a
"coming to terms with those elements of experience which
conflict with what he desires or approves— with the ugly,
the negative, the evil." Consequently, a writer, such as
Edna St. Vincent Millay, who fails to see and to present
the complication and tragic dimension of human error is
considered by Brooks as necessarily an inferior poet.1®
This concept of irony as a means of recognizing and
dealing with the duality in the human situation is sus
tained throughout Brooks' theoretical development. In
1945 he claimed, with Heilman, that "the core of
Shakespeare's ironic insight comes to this: that man
irf"The Modern Southern Poet, " Virginia Quarterly
Review, 11:316-317> April 1935-
•^(Rev. of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wine from These
Grapes), Southwest Review, 20:3-4, Winter 1935* Cf.
Warren (1942): "The saint proves his vision by stepping
cheerfully into the fires. The poet, somewhat less
spectacularly, proves his vision by submitting it to the
fires of irony--to the drama of his structure--in the
hopes that the fires will refine it. In other words, the
poet wishes to indicate that his vision has been earned,
that it can survive reference to the complexities and
contradictions of experience. And irony is one such
device of reference" (Selected Essays, pp. 28-29)-
121
must choose and yet that choice can never be a wholly
satisfactory one" (UP, p. 387)* So, also, the Ironic
dialogue between Millamant and Mirabel in The Way of the
World is interpreted as indicative of the couple's aware
ness of life's complexity (UP, p. 450). A statement in
The Well Wrought Urn (1947) described irony as "our most
general term for indicating the recognition of incongrui
ties" (p. 209); and ten years later an almost identical
definition appeared (LC, p. 674). In terms of Brooks' own
"orthodox" world-view, irony can be said to represent an
awareness of the wound of Original Sin combined with a
belief in the wound's ultimately being healed. This
latter conviction is especially necessary to prevent what
Brooks and Wimsatt have described as a distortion of the
Ironical mode resulting in a Manlchean view of reality
(LC, p. 746).
Another function which Brooks ascribes to irony is
that of qualifying the core of meaning in a poem (MPT,
p. 49). Irony is the "obvious warping or modification
of a statement by the context" ("Irony and 'Ironic'
Poetry," p. 232). In this sense, it serves to remind the
poet of the multiple aspects governing every human
122
situation and, hence, to lessen his tendency to take
sides and to propagandize in his art (MPT, p. 133)*
Moreover, according to Brooks, this act of ironic quali
fication is particularly effective in communicating the
poet's attitude (MPT, p. 36). Nor is his attitude,
because ironically conveyed, to be thought "one of care
lessness or cynicism or moral slovenliness." On the con
trary, the poet's use of irony may be indicative of
humility, of "his sense of the limitations of the human
mind and of the complexity of experience" (LC, p. 674).^
Recently Brooks also described irony as a defence
against sentimentality and as evidence of the mature
.judgment upon which, as was previously noted, he bases
both the making and the Judging of a literary work:
Irony is an awareness of the limits of response, an
tinderstatlng of response, a refusal to make exaggera
tions. Sentimentality, as we have said, is the
exaggeration of response. This sounds as if irony
were a kind of automatic salvation from sentimentality,
but things are not that easy and simple. Irony can
become a mere mannerism, a mere mechanical juggling of
opposites and contrasts. To judge the acceptable
limits of response for any situation we must come back,
on the other hand, to our own common-sense experience
l^Cf. Tate (1931): "Irony is the visible, partic
ular, and objective instance of humility" (Collected
Essays, p. 3^6).
123
of the world, and on the other hand, to the context
In the poem or other literary work that we are dis
cussing. (UP, pp. 396-397)
The common-sense experience of the world and the context
in the poem are phrases which relate the effective ironic
vision directly to Brooks' dual criterion of poetic truth:
"correspondence" and "coherence." For Brooks, then, the
ironic mode, in conjunction with the metaphoric, con
stitutes a theoretical solution to the conflict between
content and form as traditionally defined. It is this
belief which led him to declare, with Wimsatt, that
The 20th-century neo-classic irony of poetic inclusive
ness . . . has had a strongly emotive and at times moral
accent. There is a direct concern with human affairs
and human values here (human 'interests'), good and
evil, pleasure and pain .... it seems to us that the
recent ironists have put a hard problem very compelling-
ly. (LC, p. 742)
The ironic vision, Brooks has continued to claim, is
most frequently communicated verbally in the poem by the
language of paradox. Since the poet must work chiefly "by
contradiction and qualification," paradox is particularly
necessary for him (WWU, pp. 3, 9)* "Indeed," Brooks
wrote, "almost any Insight Important enough to warrant a
great poem apparently has to be stated in such terms"
(WWU, p. 18). He and Warren, In their analysis of Andrew
124
Marvell's "The Definition of Love," found that paradox
is especially effective for two functions of irony: first,
for conveying the "qualification" of the poet's attitude;
second, for making an apparently illogical statement take
on "the weight of reasoned truth." Moreover, they also
attribute to paradox the power, in common with Brooks'
other methodological instruments, to communicate insight
(UP, pp. 297-299)- Such a view stems from Brooks' convic
tion that access to "Beautie, Truth, and Raritie" is
dependent upon one's acceptance of "the paradox of the
imagination itself" (WWU, p. 21).
The paradox of the imagination refers, I think, to
man's enduring effort to reach the transcendent through
the material, the particular, the here and now. Certainly
this is the orientation which Brooks' methodology has
acquired over the years. Metaphor, chiefly, at first, a
psychological instrument for concretizing the abstract,
has now become for Brooks a means of apprehending truth,
of exploring belief, of unifying the aesthetic and so-
called "non-aesthetlc" factors in a single vision. Symbol,
too, is no longer a simple expression of complexity; it
also shares with the metaphoric mode the power of insight;
125
and with theme, the capacity to suggest an evaluation of
experience. Myth, originally conceived as a psychological
structure for the reintegration of personality, serves
now to reaffirm those aspects of literature which give It
religious and social significance. Lastly, irony and
paradox continue to convey the difficulty, the complexity,
the dignity of the human conflict.
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION
It is a generally accepted opinion that the criticism
of any age reflects those things which the age demands.
Cleanth Brooks, in a relatively recent (1958) attempt to
describe the demands of the modern critical period, called
it the "Age of Arnold" ("Organic Theory of Poetry," p. 79)-
No tone of disparagement accompanied this label as might
well have been the case ten or fifteen years earlier.
For, today, Brooks has more in common with Arnold and the
general humanist approach to literature, though he is far
from accepting any specific identification of poetry with
religion as Arnold Intended.
Because he has been, of all the New Critics, the most
persistent in trying to uphold the value of literature as
independent of scientific, philosophic, and religious con
cerns, his adopting of the broader, so-called "non-liter-
ary" criteria of criticism signifies in a sense the end of
126
127
the strictly Formalist orientation in modern critical
movements. R. S. Crane's charge of materialistic monism,1
if ever entirely true of Brooks, is certainly true no
longer; for Brooks has joined the ranks of the other
"converted" Formalists--Eliot, Ransom, Blackmur, Tate,
and Warren--in looking to literature for a type of knowl
edge and for moral insight and cultural values.
Of course, as Brooks himself pointed out, the
Formalist critics have as a group always shown an intense
concern for moral and social issues ("Metaphor and Func
tion," p. 131), but this was at first considered an
interest entirely unrelated to the judgment of literature.
Their new orientation is not so much, I think, the result
of any drastic about-face in relating their aesthetic and
"non-aesthetic" interests, as it is simply an acknowledge
ment that the separation of literary values from human
values was only theoretically possible in the first place,
that the poet is indeed "a man speaking to men" and hence
the intrinsic value of his art is rooted in human
1"Cleanth Brooks: or, The Bankruptcy of Critical
Monism," Modern Philology, 45:226-245, May 19^8.
128
experience.
Brooks' own evolution toward this position began with
his recognition of the referential nature of poetic
language and of its capacity to embody a specific appre
hension of reality. His early and short-lived reluctance
to acknowledge this conception of poetic statement was a
basic reaction against didactic criticism and the concept
of the literary artist "as a kind of super-advertising
man--a specialist at arousing sympathetic emotions for
the propositions which he elects to present" ("Metaphor
and Function," p. 130). This wariness of didacticism is
an enduring aspect of Brooks' critical theory. Thus,
while granting to poetry a kind of general truth to human
nature— a "truth of correspondence," he adds this warning*
The kind of truth that poetry gives will rarely
satisfy the propagandist, the man with a cause, the
perfervid moralist, or anyone concerned with a burning
issue. ("Organic Theory of Poetry," p. 76)
Similarly, even after stating that the poet and his
audience must share certain beliefs of a general nature,
Brooks, in his caution to avoid judging a poem directly
in terms of its statement, often seemed to over-emphasize
the norm of structural, or dramatic, "coherence" as the
means of validating belief in poetry. And although he has
129
ultimately insisted that this coherence is partially
dependent on the mature reader's belief in the experience
of the poem, in its "truth of correspondence," he has not
always been careful to make this relationship clear in
either his theory or practice.
In approaching values in literature, particularly
ethical values, Brooks displays a similar uneasiness
lest his theories be interpreted in a strictly didactic
sense and literature be burdened with the moral responsi
bility which he feels Is properly that of religion. Thus,
even while affirming that poetry does involve moral
judgments and that it can communicate insight and can
make us better citizens, he qualifies this commitment in
several ways. First, he Insists that the moral judgment
made in the poem is impossible to trace exactly since It
does not exist in a one-to-one relationship with tech
nique or structure. A similar restraint marks his classi
fication of the moral wisdom of literature as "diagnostic"
rather than "remedial," in the sense that a poem explores
the nature of human action rather than prescribes or
sanctions it. Moreover, Brooks insists that whatever
improvement poetry may effect in us, Is achieved only
130
Indirectly through large human Insights and the general
affirmation of non-materlalistic values. Lastly, his
growing affirmation of the various cultural and moral
values in literature has always been closely paralleled
by repeated warnings that poetry is neither a substitute
religion nor a sociological cure-all. This effort of
Brooks to preserve the autonomy of literary art without
divorcing it from the realm of human values has caused him
at times to appear to contradict himself. But his state
ments are not so much contradictions as qualifications
intended to emphasize the fact that whatever values are
contained in a poem are the result of all its elements and
not of any one factor, particularly not of content or
moral statement per se.
The determination to protect the structural integrity
of the poem, to insist that its values are realized
totally in terms of a combination of ideas, tone, imagery,
rhythm, etc., has led Brooks to weight the methodological
instruments of poetry--metaphor and irony--rather heavily
on the side of insight and evaluation. And since metaphor
and irony are essentially instruments of mixed vision,
they not only offer the poet a vehicle of insight and
131
exploration; they also serve because of their inherent
ambiguity to qualify the very moral sentiment which they
have helped create. It is to this restraining aspect of
the metaphoric and Ironic modes that Brooks and Wimsatt
look to protect poetry from distortion as a persuasive
moral incentive:
For if we say poetry is to talk of beauty and love
(and yet not aim at exciting erotic emotion or even
an emotion of Platonic esteem) and if it is to talk of
anger and murder (and yet not aim at arousing anger
and indignation)— then it may be that the poetic way
of dealing with these emotions will not be any kind of
intensification, compounding, or magnification, or any
direct assault upon the affections at all. Something
Indirect, mixed, reconciling, tensional might well be
the strategem, the devious technique by which a poet
indulged in all kinds of talk about love and anger and
even in something like 'expressions' of these emotions,
without aiming at their incitement or even uttering
anything that essentially Involves their Incitement.
(LC, p. 741)
Brooks' methodological Instruments--metaphor, symbol,
myth, irony, and paradox--today have taken on a double
role: first, they sustain his original ideal of struc
tural coherence by Integrating "truth of correspondence"
within the poem, thus insuring it against any direct
equation with Its paraphrasable content; second, they are
the primary vehicles for the metaphysical and moral
insights to be found in a poem. This is a heavy burden
132
to place on methodology, and Brooks' critical practice
frequently shows It to be an Impossible one. All critical
approaches have their limitations, however; and some of
their inconsistencies, I suspect, are only apparent and
could be resolved were it not for the elusive nature of
critical vocabulary. Moreover, as Brooks himself points
out, there is bound to be some discrepancy between
critical theory and practice since "... the principles
of criticism define the area of relevance of literary
criticism; they do not constitute a method for carrying
out that criticism" ("My Credo," p. 72).
Both method and principle have led Brooks today to
join the other New Critics in their return to what is for
most of them a religiously oriented humanism, in which
The common ground, expressed or implied, is that a
work of literature is to be apprehended for its inher
ent and terminal values; but that, in so far as it
represents human beings and human experiences, it
involves assumptions and beliefs and sympathies with
which a large measure of concurrence is indispensable
for the reading of literature as literature and not
another thing.2
2Meyer Abrams, ed., "Foreward," in Literature and
Belief, p. x.
133
Brooks, by being the last of his group to profess such a
stand, has in a sense officially ended the era of the New
Criticism as a strictly Formalist movement. The critical
circle, which he was chosen to represent in this study,
is once again complete; but its principle of unity is no
longer the insistence on the ontological nature of the
literary work; it is rather an emphasis on the presence
of religious, moral, and cultural values in the aesthetic
experience of literature.
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
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Jenkins, Iredell. Art and the Human Enterprise.
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Johnson, A. H. "Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in the Philo
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Kenner, Hugh. "Eliot's Moral Dialectic/' Hudson Review,
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_. The New Apologists for Poetry.
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_. "Recent Criticism, 'Thematics,1 and the
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Kuhn, Helmut. "On the Indlspensabllity of Metaphysical
Principles in Aesthetics," Journal of Aesthetic and
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and Appraisal," MeanJin, 16:33-41, Autumn 1957-
Lebowitz, Martin. "On Tradition, Belief, and Culture,"
Journal of Philosophy, 40:100-105, January 7, 1943.
Lecky, Eleazer. "Ideas of 'Order' in Modern Literary
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Summer-Fall, 1959*
Lewis, Clarence Irving. An Analysis of Knowledge and
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________________. Our Social Inheritance. Bloomington,
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"Literature and the Professors; a Symposium," Southern
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________________. The Responsibility of the Artist. New
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McCollom, William G. Tragedy. New York, 1957.
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Accent, 15:173-196, Summer 1955*
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1961.
McKeon, Richard. "The Philosophical Basis of Art and
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University of Kansas City Review, 22:309-316,
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McLuhan, H. M. "Poetic vs_. Rhetorical Exegesis; the Case
for Leavis against Richards and Empson," Sewanee
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Muller, Herbert J. "The New Criticism in Poetry,"
Southern Review, 6:811-839, Spring 1941.
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________________. "A Short View of the New Criticism,"
College English, 11:63-71, November 1949*
Olson, Elder. "Recent Literary Criticism," Modern
Philology, 40:275-283, February 1943-
Ong, Walter J. "The Jinee in the Well-Wrought Urn,"
Essays in Criticism, 4:309-320, July 1954.
________________. "The Meaning of the 'New Criticism,'"
in W. S. Knickerbocker, ed., Twentieth Century
English. New York, 1946.
Osterle, J. A. "Art and the Moral Order," Integrity,
3:10-18, January 1949*
Oxenhandler, N. "Ontological Criticism in America and
France," Modern Language Review, 55:17-23, January
I960.
Pauly, Herta. "The Autonomy of Art: Fact or Norm?"
Journal of Philosophy, 55:902-903, October 9, 1958.
Pearce, Roy Harvey. "'Pure Criticism' and the History of
Ideas," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
7:122-132, December 1948.
Pottle, Frederick. "The New Critics and the Historical
Method," Yale Review, 43:14-23, Autumn 1953*
Pritchard, John Paul. Criticism in America. Norman,
Oklahoma, 1956.
Pulos, C. E. The New Critics and the Language of Poetry.
Lincoln, Nebraska, 1958. (University of Nebraska
Studies, New Series, No. 19*)
143
Purdy, Rob Roy, ed. Fugitives' Reunion. Nashville, 1959*
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Journal of Philosophy, 44:393-407, July 17, 1947*
Raleigh, John H. "The New Criticism as a Historical
Phenomenon," Comparative Literature, 11:21-28,
Winter 1959-
Reinhardt, K. F. "Ethics in Art and Literature," New
Scholasticism, 10:30-38, January 1936.
"Religion and the Intellectuals: A Symposium," Partisan
Review, 17:103-142, February 1950; 17:215-256,
March 1950; 17:313-339, April 1950; 17:456-483,
May-June 1950.
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1959-
Roellinger, F. "Two Theories of Poetry as Knowledge,"
Southern Review, 7:690-705, Spring 1942.
Savage, D. S. "Criticism and Orthodoxy," Poetry, 64:279-
288, August 1944.
Scott, Nathan A. Modern Literature and the Religious
Frontier. New York, 1958.
Sesonske, Alexander. "Truth in Art," Journal of Philo
sophy, 53:345-354, May 1956.
Sewall, Richard W. The Vision of Tragedy. New Haven,
1959-
Shumaker, Wayne. "The Condition of Critical Judgment,"
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 9:21-30,
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Singer, Irving. "The Aesthetics of 'Art for Art's Sake,'"
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 12:343-359,
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144
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Review, 47:552-558* October-December 1939*
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cism 1920-1949. New York, 1949-
________________. "New Criticism," New York Times Book
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26:142-145, Spring 1951.
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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 13:467-476,
June 1953*
Stovall, Floyd, ed. The Development of American
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Straumann, Heinrich. "Between Literary Criticism and
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1955.
________________. "Cross-Currents in Contemporary American
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Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 17:219-229,
December 1959-
________________. "Contextualist Theory and Criticism as
a Social Act," Journal of Aesthetics and Art
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Quarterly, 53:363-371* July 1954.
Thorpe, C. D. and N. E. Nelson. "Criticism in the
Twentieth Century: A Bird's-Eye View," English
Journal, 36:165-173* April 1947-
145
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Sewanee Review, 52:537-555* Autumn 1944.
Vivas, Eliseo. "Contextualism Reconsidered," Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 18:222-240, December
1959-
________________. Creation and Discovery: Essays in
Criticism and Aesthetics. New York, 1955.
"Literature as Knowledge," Sewanee Review,
60:561-592, Autumn 1952.
"A Semantics for Humanists," Sewanee
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Waggoner, Hyatt Howe. "The Current Revolt against the
New Criticism," Criticism, 1:211-225, Summer 1959*
The Heel of Elohim: Science and Values
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Warren, Austin. "The 'New Humanism' Twenty Years After,"
Modern Age, 3:81-87* Winter 1958-1959*
________________. The Rage for Order. Chicago, 1948.
Watson, George. "A Modern Literary Heresy," Listener,
60:595-596, October 16, 1958.
Watts, Alan W. Myth and Ritual in Christianity. New
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Philosophical Review, 61:59-65, January 1952.
Wellek, Rene. "The Criticism of T. S. Eliot," Sewanee
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_____________. "The Main Trends of Twentieth-Century
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________________. "Truth, Beauty, and American Criticism,
University of Kansas City Review, 14:137-148, Winter
1947.
Wheelwright, Philip. "Aesthetic Surface and Mythic Depth
Sewanee Review, 65:278-293, Spring 1957*
________________. The Burning Fountain: A Study in the
Language of Symbolism. Bloomington, Indiana, 1954.
________________. Metaphor and Reality. Bloomington,
Indiana, 1962.
________________. "A Semantics for Humanists," Sewanee
Review, 63:307-317, Spring 1955*
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures in Ideas. New York,
1933.
Wilson, John. Language and Christian Belief. New York,
1958.
Wimsatt, W. K. "Criticism Today: A Report from America,
Essays in Criticism, 6:1-26, January 1956.
________________. "Poetry and Morals, a Relation
Reargued," Thought, 23:281-299, June 1948.
________________. "The Structure of the 'Concrete Uni
versal' in Literature," PMLA, 62:262-280, March 1947
Winters, Yvor. The Anatomy of Nonsense. New York, 1943-
________________. In Defense of Reason. New York, 1947-
________________. "Problems for the Modern Critic of
Literature," Hudson Review, 9:325-386, Autumn 1956.
Zabel, Morton Dawin. Literary Opinion in America. New
York, 1951-
Cleanth Brooks
147
Books:
Modern Poetry and the Tradition. Chapel Hill, 1939*
The Well Wrought Urn: Studies In the Structure of Poetry.
New York, 1947*
Books Co-Authored:
With Robert Heilman. Understanding Drama. New York, 1946.
With Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Fiction, revised
edition. New York, 1959*
With Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry: An
Anthology for College Students, revised edition.
New York, I960.
With W. K. Wlmsatt. Literary Criticism: A Short History.
New York, 1957*
Books Edited:
With John E. Hardy. Poems of Mr. John Milton. New York,
1951.
With T. S. Purser and Robert Penn Warren. An Approach to
Literature, third edition. New York, 1952.
Tragic Themes in Western Literature. New Haven, 1955*
Essays in Periodicals and Books:
"A Poet on Poetry" (rev. of A. E. Housman, The Name and
Nature of Poetry), Southwest Review, 19:25-26,
Autumn 1933*
148
"Eliot's Harvard Lectures" (rev. of The Use of Poetry),
Southwest Review, 19:1-2, Winter 1934.
"A Note on Symbol and Conceit," American Review, 3:201-211,
April 1934.
"The Modern Southern Poet," Virginia Quarterly Review,
11:305-320, April 1935-
"Three Revolutions in Poetry," Southern Review: 1:151-163,
Summer 1935; 1:328-338, Autumn 1935; 1:568-583,
Winter 1935-
Rev. of Coleridge on Imagination, New Republic, 85:26-27,
November 13, 1935*
Rev. of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wine from These Grapes,
Southwest Review, 20:1-5, Winter 1935*
Rev. of R. P. T. Coffin, Red Sky in the Morning, American
Oxonian, 23:168-171, July 1936.
"The Reading of Modern Poetry," American Review, 8:435-
449, February 1937*
"Poetry and Political Faith" (rev. of Stephen Spender,
The Destructive Element), Poetry, 50:280-284,
August 1937*
"The Wasteland: An Analysis," Southern Review, 3:106-136,
Summer 1937*
"The Vision of William Butler Yeats," Southern Review,
4:116-142, Summer 1938.
Rev. of The Family Reunion, Partisan Review, 6:114-116,
Summer 1939*
"What Does Modern Poetry Communicate?" American Prefaces,
6:18-27, Autumn 1940.
"Literature and the Professors: History versus Criti
cism," Kenyon Review, 2:403-412, Autumn 1940.
149
"The Whole of Housman" (rev. of Collected Poems), Kenyon
Review, 3:105-109, Winter 1941.
"The Poem as Organism," In The English Institute Annual,
1940. New York, 1941.
"Form and Content" (rev. of W. H. Auden, The Double Man
and J. P. Bishop, Selected Poems), Kenyon Review,
4:244-247, Spring 1942.
"The Language of Paradox," in Allen Tate, ed., The
Language of Poetry. New York, 1942.
"Mr. Kazin's America" (rev. of On Native Grounds), Sewanee
Review, 51:52-61, January 1943-
"The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor: A Re-examination,"
Sewanee Review, 51:505-524, October 1943*
"History without Footnotes," Sewanee Review, 52:89-101,
January 1944.
"Cantankerous and Other Critics" (rev. of H. W. Wells,
The American Way of Poetry; T. K. Whipple, Study out
the Land; Yvor Winters, The Anatomy of Nonsense),
Kenyon Review, 6:282-288, Spring 1944.
"The New Criticism: A Brief for the Defense," American
Scholar, 13:285-295, Summer 1944.
"Shakespeare as Symbolist Poet," Yale Review, 34:642-665,
June 1945*
Rev. of Allen Tate, The Winter Sea, Poetry, 66:324-329,
September 1945*
"The New Criticism and Scholarship," in W. S. Knicker
bocker, ed., Twentieth Century English. New York,
1946.
"Literary Criticism," in The English Institute Essays,
1946. New York, 1947-
"The Intimations of the Ode," Kenyon Review, 8:80-102,
Winter 1946.
150
"Criticism and Literary History/' Sewanee Review, 55:199-
222, Spring 1947-
"Poets as Historians" (rev. of H. Gregory and M.
Zaturenska, A History of American Poetry, 1900-1940),
Sewanee Review, 55:470-477, Summer 1947*
"Irony and 'Ironic' Poetry," College English, 9:231-237,
February 1948.
"The Doric Delicacy," Sewanee Review, 56:402-415, Summer
1948.
"Modern Criticism," in R. W. Stallman, ed., Critiques
and Essays in Criticism 1920-1949. New York, 1949*
"The Limits of Poetry" (rev. of Tate, On the Limits of
Poetry), Hudson Review, 2:127-133* May 1949*
"The Relative and the Absolute: An Exchange of Views"
(with H. J. Muller), Sewanee Review, 57:357-377,
Summer 1949*
"The Critic and His Text: A Clarification and a
Defense," in Julian Harris, ed., The Humanities.
Madison, Wisconsin, 1950.
"The Quick and the Dead: A Comment on Humanistic Studies,"
in Julian Harris, ed., The Humanities. Madison,
Wisconsin, 1950.
"Irony as a Principle of Structure," in Morton D. Zabel,
ed., Literary Opinion in America. New York, 1951*
"My Credo: The Formalist Critic," Kenyon Review, 13:72-
81, Winter 1951*
"Milton and the New Criticism," Sewanee Review, 59:1-22,
Winter 1951*
"Absalom, Absalom: The Definition of Innocence," Sewanee
Review, 59:543-558, Autumn 1951*
"Milton and Critical Re-Estimates," PMLA, 66:1045-1054,
December 1951*
151
"Metaphor and the Function of Criticism," In Stanley R.
Hopper, ed., Spiritual Problems In Contemporary
Literature. New York, 1952 (Harper Torchbook, 1957).
"A Note on the Limits of 'History' and the Limits of
'Criticism,'" Sewanee Review, 61:129-135, Winter
1953-
"Eve's Awakening," in Essays In Honor of Walter Clyde
Curry. Nashville, 1954.
"Primitivism In 'The Sound and the Fury,'" in English
Institute Essays, 1953. New York, 1954.
"The State of Criticism: A Sampling," Sewanee Review,
65:484-498, Summer 1957*
"Implications of an Organic Theory of Poetry," in Meyer
H. Abrams, ed., Literature and Belief, English
Institute Essays 1957* New York, 1958.
"Regionalism in American Literature," Journal of Southern
History, 26:35-43, February I960.
Articles about Brooks:
Bush, Douglas. "Marvell's Horatian Ode (as Interpreted
by Cleanth Brooks)," Sewanee Review, 60:363-376,
July 1952.
Crane, Ronald S. "Cleanth Brooks: or, The Bankruptcy of
Critical Monism," Modern Philology, 45:226-245, May,
1948.
Empson, William. "The Darling in the Urn" (rev. of The
Well Wrought Urn), Sewanee Review, 55:691-699*
Winter 1947*
Hartung, Charles V. "A 'Tough-Minded' Critic--Cleanth
Brooks," University of Kansas City Review, 18:181-
189, Spring 1952.
Hecht, Roger. "Paradox and Cleanth Brooks," Bard Review,
2:47-51, September 1947-
152
Hardy, John E. "The Achievement of Cleanth Brooks,"
Hopkins Review, 6:148-161, Spring-Slimmer 1953*
Pearce, Roy H. "'Pure' Criticism and the History of
Ideas," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,
7:122-132, December 1948.
Ransom, John Crowe. Rev. of Modern Poetry and the Tradi
tion , Kenyon Review, 2:247-251, Spring 1940.
Spears, Monroe K. "The Mysterious Urn," Western Review,
12:54-58, Autumn 1947-
Stallman, Robert W. "Cleanth Brooks: A Checklist,"
University of Kansas City Review, 14:317-324,
Summer 1948.
Stauffer, Donald. Rev. of The Well Wrought Urn, Modern
Language Notes, 62:426-429, June 1947-
Strauss, A. B. "The Poetic Theory of Cleanth Brooks,"
Centenary Review, 1:10-22, 1949-
Tate, Allen. "Understanding Modern Poetry" (rev. of
Modern Poetry and the Tradition), English Journal,
19:263-274, April 1940.
Associated Critics
R. P. Blackmur:
The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation. New
York, 1935-
The Expense of Greatness. New York, 1940.
Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry. New York, 1952.
The Lion and the Honeycomb. New York, 1955-
153
"The Language of Silence: A Citation," Sewanee Review,
63:382-404, Summer 1955-
"The Substance That Prevails," Kenyon Review, 17:94-110,
Winter 1955*
Annl Mlrabiles, 1921-1925. New York, 1956.
"The Great Grasp of Unreason," Hudson Review, 9:488-503*
Winter 1956-1957*
"Ara Coeli and Campidoglio," Kenyon Review, 20:337-361,
Summer 1958.
"Logos in the Catacomb: The Role of the Intellectual,"
Kenyon Review, 21:1-22, Winter 1959-
"San Giovanni In Venere: Allen Tate as Man of Letters,"
Sewanee Review, 67:614-631* Pall 1959*
"Poetics for Infatuation," Kenyon Review, 23:647-670,
Fall 1961.
T. S. Eliot:
The Sacred Wood. London, 1920.
For Lancelot Andrewes. London, 1928.
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. London, 1933*
After Strange Gods. New York, 1934.
Essays Ancient and Modern. London, 1936.
From Poe to Valery; Notes towards the Definition of
Culture. New York, 1949*
Selected Essays, New edition. New York, 1950.
Poetry and Drama. New York, 1951.
On Poetry and Poets. London, 1957*
154
John Crowe Ransom:
The World's Body. New York, 1938.
"Yeats and His Symbols," Kenyon Review, 1:309-322, Summer
1939.
"The Pragmatics of Art," Kenyon Review, 2:76-87, Winter
1940.
"Ubiquitous Moralists," Kenyon Review, 3:95-100, Winter
1941.
The New Criticism. Norfolk, 1941.
"The Inorganic Muses," Kenyon Review, 5:278-300, Spring
1943-
"Positive and Near-Positive Aesthetics," Kenyon Review,
5:443-447, summer 1943-
"The Bases of Criticism," Sewanee Review, 52:556-571*
Autumn 1944.
"Art Needs a Little Separating," Kenyon Review, 6:114-122,
Winter 1944.
"Art and the Human Economy," Kenyon Review, 7:683-688,
Autumn 1945*
"Poetry: The Formal Analysis," Kenyon Review, 9:436-456,
Summer 1947.
"Poetry: The Final Cause," Kenyon Review, 9:640-658,
Autumn 1947-
"The Understanding of Fiction," Kenyon Review, 12:189-218,
Spring 1950.
"William Wordsworth: Notes toward an Understanding of His
Poetry," Kenyon Review, 12:498-519* Summer 1950.
(editor) The Kenyon Critics. New York, 1951-
155
"The Poetry of 1900-1950/’ Kenyon Review, 13:445-454,
Summer 1951*
"An Age of Criticism," New Republic, 126:18-19* March 31*
1952.
"Symbolism: American Style," New Republic, 129:18-20,
November 2, 1953*
Poems and Essays. New York, 1955*
"Thomas Hardy's Poems," Kenyon Review, 22:169-193, Spring
I960.
I. A. Richards:
With C. K. Ogden and James Wood. The Foundations of
Aesthetics. London, 1922.
With C. K. Ogden. The Meaning of Meaning. London, 1923*
Principles of Literary Criticism. London, 1924. Appen
dices 1926.
Science and Poetry. London, 1926.
Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment.
London, 1929*
Coleridge on Imagination. London, 1934.
The Philosophy of Rhetoric. New York, 1936.
Speculative Instruments. Chicago, 1955*
"Coleridge: The Vulnerable Poet," Yale Review, 48:491-
504, Summer 1959*
"Poetry as an Instrument of Research," Listener, 62:443-
44, September 17* 1959-
"Poetic Process and Literary Analysis," in Thomas Sebeok,
ed., Style in Language. New York, i960.
156
Allen Tate:
Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas. New York, 1936.
Reason In Madness: Critical Essays. New York, 1941.
On the Limits of Poetry: Selected Essays, 1928-1948. New
York, 1948.
"Orthodoxy and the Standard of Literature," New Republic,
128:24-25, January 5, 1953-
The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays.
Chicago, 1953-
"Moral Action in Art," in Robert Rlchman, ed., The Arts
at Mid-Century. New York, 1954.
The Man of Letters in the Modern World. New York, 1955-
"Reflections on American Poetry: 1900-1950," Sewanee
Review, 64:59-70, Winter 1956.
Collected Essays. Denver, 1959*
Robert Penn Warren:
"Editorial," Southern Review, 7:iv, vi, vii, x, xii,
Autumn 1941.
"Knowledge and the Image of Man," Sewanee Review, 63:182-
193, Spring 1955-
Selected Essays. New York, 1958.

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Creator Hart, Mary Jerome (author)

Core Title Cleanth Brooks And The Formalist Approach To Metaphysical And Moral Values In Literature

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Lecky, Eleazer (committee chair), Arnold, Aerol (committee member), Hadley, Paul E. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-285413

Unique identifier UC11358935

Identifier 6305053.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-285413 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 6305053.pdf

Dmrecord 285413

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hart, Mary Jerome

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA