"Aesthetics" and The Rise of Lyric in The Eighteenth Century

Rice University
"Aesthetics" and the Rise of Lyric in the Eighteenth Century Author(s): Douglas Lane Patey Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 33, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1993), pp. 587-608 Published by: Rice University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/451015 . Accessed: 10/09/2013 21:37
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SEL 33 (1993) ISSN 0039-3657
"Aesthetics"and the Rise of Lyric in the Eighteenth Century

DOUGLAS LANE PATEY
In the literary theory of the eighteenth century we habitually confront two opposed views of poetry and in particular of what a succession of critics identifies as the oldest and most "poetical" kind of poetry: lyric. Both are views that an older literary history taught us to associate more with the nineteenth century than the eighteenth, or at best only with-to use the term popularized in the 1920s-the "preromantic" strain in later eighteenth-century literature. On the one hand, the eighteenth century celebrates itself as the great age of lyric, an age that has revived and even managed to improve upon lyric forms seldom practiced since antiquity. On the other, it argues that as a form of verbal activity poetry-and lyric in particular-has become culturally outmoded, displaced by more advanced, "philosophical" uses of mind. It is this conflict I wish to examine: to say something about its historical roots, and in particular about the ways in which eighteenth-century British critics themselves used and misused their awareness of the conflict, especially in relation to the lyric, to rewrite the literary history of their own period. And I will argue that if we are to make sense of the revisionary literary history practiced in mid-century Britain by such writers as Joseph Warton, Richard Hurd, and Thomas Gray, we need to look precisely where they would suggest the poet not look either for poetic models or poetic theory: to France, and in particular to the debates over poetry initiated in France by the so-called Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. Finally, I would like to show some of these theoretical
Douglas Lane Patey, Professor of English at Smith College, is the author of Probabilityand Literary Form:Philosophic Theoryand Literary Practice in the Augustan Age (1984), and is now completing a book on the novels of Evelyn Waugh.
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quarrels at work in changes in British lyric practice from midcentury onward. First, the eighteenth century's own view of itself as the lyric age. From the time of Cowley, Augustan poets had understood the "greater ode" to be one of the great inventions of the age; Dryden himself thought Alexander's Feast his greatest poem, and recommended to a youngJohn Dennis that he "cultivate this kind of Ode," which "looks like a vast Tract of Land newly discover'd" (one whose many new settlers are pioneers).1 It is possible to see the irregular Pindaric, with its succession of diverse stanzas, as the Restoration's answer to the Renaissance sonnet sequence; in any case, by 1700 "ode" had come to mean "Pindaric ode," and Cowley is ranked with Shakespeare as a poetic "inventor."2 His and others' practice of both greater and lesser odes-of those "Lyric Poems" which, Joseph Trapp wrote in 1713, are "of all Kinds of Poetry, the most Poetical"3-initiated that outpouring of musical odes, birthday odes, biographical odes, and satirical odes which we now remember best for its failures and excesses-for poems like John Hughes's 1702 "The House of Nassau. A Pindaric Ode," with its appalling invocation: Here pause my Muse! and wind up higher The strings of my Pindaric lyre. And we should note for future reference that, as Charles Gildon testified in 1718, "the Lyric" was "a Poem in which . . . the Ladies have excell'd": not just in the lesser ode, but also the greater, as practiced by Lady Mary Chudleigh, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and Anne Finch.4 It was only in the 1740s, long after Congreve's essay correcting notions of the irregularity of Pindar's lyric measures and after irregular odes had become so tiresome that some poets rewrote their Pindarics into couplets (as John Dyer did his Grongar Hill in 1726), that we begin to hear in England general complaints about the condition of lyric, a view most famously voiced by Joseph Warton in his 1756 Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope. Warton frames the complaint in terms of the debate between Ancients and Moderns: "The moderns have, perhaps, practised no species of poetry with so little success, and with such indisputable inferiority to the ancients, as the ODE."5 I shall return to Warton's arguments, and in particular to his most influential of all eighteenth-century identifications of lyric as the truest poetry. What is important to realize now is that for the rest of the century Warton provided an object of attack for critic after critic defending modern lyric
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critics like John Ogilvie, who argues in his accomplishment-for 1762 "Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients" that Pindar and Anacreon have been excelled, and so should not serve as standards for imitation, or simply for those like the young Hester Salisbury, who cites modern examples against Warton in her "Irregular Ode in Praise of the English Poets" (1759). We too often take Wordsworth at his word when, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he explains that he has selected Gray's sonnet on West as an example of the previous age's poetic blunders simply because of what he sees as Gray's faults. By 1800 forty years of readers (despite sporadic dissent) had deemed Gray the greatest lyrist of the English tradition, perhaps of the world; for Wordsworth to take Gray to task was a demonstration of the highest poetic ambition. As early as 1759 Adam Smith had written that "Gray joins to the sublimity of Milton the elegance and harmony of Pope; and nothing is wanting to render him, perhaps, the first poet in the English language, but to have written a little more." After Johnson's Life of Gray the testimonials grow even warmer: forJohn Pinkerton in 1785, "Gray is the first and greatest of modern lyric writers; nay, I will venture to say, of all lyric writers, his works tho few . . . uniting the perfections of every lyric poet, both of present and former times." For all these critics, Gray was only the foremost of a number of great recent lyrists: in 1794, Richard Alves controverts Warton by ending his chapter "Of English Lyric Poets" in his Sketches of a History of Literature, a survey of elegists and odists from the Wartons, Akenside, Shenstone, and Collins through Mason, Beattie, and especially Gray: "I have insisted upon this kind of writers, as no species of poetry is more worthy of notice, and, in no age whatsoever, was lyric poetry cultivated to more advantage." In 1800 Nathan Drake again takes Warton to task, placing Gray's Bard "without any exception ... at the head of lyric poetry"; Drake goes so far as to draw up the contents for an anthology of the greatest English lyrics, divided into "sublime," "pathetic," "descriptive," and "amatory odes." Of the 104 poems Drake lists, only six were written by poets before Milton, that is, before the age that most eighteenth-century critics recognized as their own.6 It is precisely in this age of self-proclaimed lyrism that we also hear that poetry has become an outmoded form of discourse-that it has been displaced by philosophy in our cultural progress, and so can no longer, as Hegel says in his Aesthetic, "serve our highest need." When Thomas Love Peacock made this case in his essay on the "Four Ages of Poetry" (1820) he was in fact only providing an elegant summary of six decades of speculation by philosophical
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historians, especially Scots, from Thomas Blackwell and Adam Ferguson to Dugald Stewart. In 1779 that great Scots compendium, the Encyclopedia Britannica, could take it as common knowledge that "poetry has been cultivated with most success in the earliest stages of society"; such views had been current in Britain since the 1750s, and in the '60s inspired treatises such as William Duffs Essay on Original Genius (1767), written, according to its "Advertisement," "to show that the early and uncultivated periods of society are peculiarly favourable to the display of original Poetic Genius, and that that quality will seldom appear in a very high degree in cultivated life."7 Some critics, such as John Brown, simply mourn poetry's decline; others like Joseph Priestley celebrate the march of reason and refinement, arguing that past ages have provided the world with enough poetry already.8 Most, however, find a balance between social and intellectual progress and artistic deterioration, and mark that balance in verbal formulations such as the one Richard Hurd made famous in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762): "What we have gotten by this revolution, you will say, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of fine fabling."9 But for all, it is lyric poetry that suffers most from cultural advance. James Macpherson writes in 1768, in his Critical Dissertation on ... the Antient Caledonians: "Poetry is the triumphant voice of joy or the broken sighs of sorrow and melancholy. The extremes of these passions are the most violent in the earliest stages of society before the faculties of the human mind are regulated by advanced civilization, and the feelings of the heart are strong: and strong feelings always produce the sublimity of expression we call poetry." In his Philosophical Dictionary of 1771 Voltaire argues that the "ode," the oldest and least philosophical of literary forms, has least meaning for the modern world and so prophesies that it will be the first to die out entirely.10 To understand how two such divergent views of poetryespecially lyric poetry-could coexist, we need first to understand that the later eighteenth-century British histories of poetic eclipse are themselves not original: they originate not in Scotland but in France, among the party of the Moderns in the famous Quarrel. It was here, for instance, that the Abbe Trublet had argued in his essay "De la poesie et des poetes" (1754): "As reason is perfected, judgment will more and more be preferred to imagination, and, consequently, poets will be less and less appreciated. The first writers, it is said, were poets. I can well believe it; they could hardly be anything else. The last writers will be philosophers." (Again: "It is said that in verse the images have more value than
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the thoughts. So much the worse for verse; for this is an excellent proof of its inferiority to prose.")1' Trublet in fact comes late in the French Quarrel: he is preceded by such fellow-Moderns (called of the "esprit de by their enemies geomentres, proponents geometrie") as Houdar de la Motte, the Abbe Terrasson, and the Abbe de Pons (who had argued in 1738 against that chief of Ancients, Madame Dacier: "L'art de vers est un art frivole").'2 Among their allies the geometres could count the young Montesquieu, who wrote in the Lettres persanes (1721): "Here are the Poets. . . that is, those authors whose business it is to shackle common sense, and to load down the reason with trimmings, just as women used to be buried beneath their ornaments and Here are the Lyric Poets, whom I especially despise, jewels.... and who have made of their art a melodious nonsense."'3 Behind all these critics stand their teachers, the architects of the Modern position in France: Perrault and especially Fontenelle. Historians of English literature have customarily examined that literature in a European context only at the beginning and end of the eighteenth century; we look to French criticism in understanding the early Augustans, German for the late. A.F.B. Clark's classic Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England (1925), for instance, devoted only a scant 18 of its 530 pages to "Other French Critics": those writing after Boileau, Bouhours, and Rapin, such as the Abbe Du Bos, Charles Batteux, and Remond de Saint-Mard. We stop looking to the French Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns after we have used them to explicate Swift and Pope. But eighteenth-century English writers continued as much as ever to read and learn from their French counterparts: few French works of criticism are so often echoed in Britain as Batteux's Les Beaux-Arts reduits a un meme principe (1746)-in its careful anatomy of prose genres, and especially its remarks on "la poesie lyrique"and few English critics made such careful use of French sources as Joseph Warton. What Warton does in the Essay on Pope is first of all to borrow French critical concepts and terms to build his case about Pope-even his characterization of Pope as the "Poet of Reason" is borrowed from Voltaire's much-publicized reception speech of 1746 to the French Academy, in which Boileau is "le poete de la raison"-and second to treat Pope (as Voltaire had Boileau) as a "Modern" poet, that is, to use against him language and arguments first devised in France by proponents of the Ancient cause for use against the poetry and criticism of the geometres.'4 We have perhaps been blind to Warton's sources because of the Essay's participation in mid-century British nationalism, with its characterization of French literary tradition as dogmatically
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antilyrical. "[GJoodsense and judgment were [Pope's] characteristic excellencies, rather thanfancy and invention.... This turn of mind led him to admire French models; he studied Boileau attentively; formed himself upon him, as Milton formed himself upon the Grecian and Italian sons of Fancy" (2:402). This characterization of French literary culture was of course not new, but it took on renewed vigor in the heavily charged political atmosphere of the 1740s, and quickly hardened into that revisionary literary history which treated writers from the Restoration through Pope as traveling along a French cul-de-sac (having succeeded by dextrous historical sleight-of-hand in plucking Paradise Lost out of the Restoration).'5John Upton's account of 1746 is typical: "'Twere to be wished that with our restored king [Charles II], some of that taste of literature had been restored which we enjoyed in the days of Queen Elizabeth. But when we brought home our frenchified king, we did then, and have to this day, continued to bring from France our models."'6 This literary history became endemic to mid-century British lyric practice, as for instance Thomas Gray's Pindaric Progress of Poesy (1757) traces the progress of the poetical spirit-in effect, the spirit of lyric poetry-from Greece to Italy to England, pointedly omitting any stops in France. And I would suggest that this literary history has deflected our attention not only from British use of French critical sources, but also from the importance for British mid-century lyric poets such as Akenside and Warton of a model closer to their own time than their national heroes Spenser and Milton: Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1671-1741), commonly regarded on the Continent as the greatest lyric poet of the age, and one whose odes of the 1710s and '20s often sound like the mid-century British allegorical ode. It is tempting to speculate that Warton deliberately covered his tracks in the Essay to mask the irony of turning to France for the tools with which to criticize French influence in English literature; this is after all the same Joseph Warton who, we now know, included several of his own lyrics in the 1748 collection he assembled of Poems supposedly by his father, Thomas Warton the elder, in order to suggest a longer native and familial genealogy for his own kind of verse than in fact existed.'7 But if its many references to d'Alembert, Du Bos, Caylus, Fenelon, Fontenelle, Marmontel, La Motte, Perrault, and Voltaire were not enough, the very critical vocabulary of Warton's Essay betrays its inspiration. Favorite terms such as "enthusiasm" and "imagery," though of course not new to English criticism, had recently been the subjects of intense scrutiny and attempts at definition in France, particularly in relation to lyric. For a host of early eighteenth-century French
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critics, enthusiasme, defined by La Motte as une imagination echaufee, naturally issues in a poetry of images, a carefully analyzed term which had come to include a whole range of features from isolated figures to full-scale descriptions. All poetry partakes of such features, but most of all does lyric: according to Remond de Saint-Mard, for instance, though other poetic kinds can detail actions, this resource is denied to lyric; "mais en recompense l'Ode est le triomphe du Sublime des Images."'8 This sort of criticism informs such judgments as Warton's placement of Alexander's Feast "at the head of modern lyric compositions" on the basis of "the beauty and force of its images" and his verdict on the poems of the geometre La Motte (here Warton echoes a host of French evaluations): "The Odes of la Motte, though so highly praised by Sanadon, and by Fontenelle, are fuller of delicate sentiment, and philosophical reflection, than of imagery, figures, and poetry" (1:50, 66). Warton's treatment of Pope's "correctness" echoes earlier French accounts of poetry's recent excessive cultivation of "precision." And Warton's famous test of poetical merit, for which he was so abused by later critics such as Percival Stockdale'9-that a great poem, when reduced to prose, does not lose its "imagery" and "fire"-had itself emerged as a chief point of contention in the French quarrel between Ancients and Moderns as Fenelon and Montesquieu produced poems in prose, and La Motte even attempted prose lyric in "La Libre eloquence: ode en prose." But nowhere perhaps is Warton's debt to France clearer than in the Essay's most famous passage, in its Dedication to Edward Young, justifying his placement of Pope in the second rank of poets (along with "Fontenelle and La Motte"): "We do not, it should seem, sufficiently attend to the difference there is betwixt a MAN OF WIT, a MAN OF SENSE, and a TRUE POET. Donne and Swift were undoubtedly men of wit, and men of sense; but what traces have they left of PURE POETRY?" (l:ii). The phrase "pure poetry," used here for the first time in English, quickly caught on and came to be identified with lyric. In 1769 Hurd contrasts "the greater and what may be called pure poetry" with "the humbler sorts of poetry, chiefly satiric and ethic," and in his notes to Horace finds that "Poetry, pure Poetry, is the proper language of Passion."20Mrs. Barbauld divides "the different species of Poetry" into "two comprehensive classes": the first includes epic, dramatic, and didactic verse, all of which treat of external matters, whereas The other class consists of what may be called pure Poetry, or Poetry in the abstract. It is conversant with an imaginary
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world, peopled with beings of its own creation. It deals in splendid imagery, bold fiction, and allegorical personages. It is necessarily obscure to a certain degree; because [it has] to do chiefly with ideas generated within the mind.... All that is properly Lyric Poetry is of this kind.2' Warton did not however coin the phrase "pure poetry"; he borrowed it from its inventor Charles Batteux, who had introduced it in 1746 in Les Beaux-Arts reduits at un meme principe in an effort to and distinguish forms he thought closest to prose-didactic narrative poems-from those more "purely" poetic genres that eschew both action and day-to-day social and "historical" realities.22 Even the revisionist story of recent literary history told by Warton and other mid-century English critics is profoundly informed, I would suggest, by earlier French accounts of that nation's recent past, and in particular its decline from the great age of Louis XIV (who stands to early eighteenth-century French criticism rather in the position Elizabeth I does to Hurd and the Wartons). Let me here take just one French text for comparison, Remond de Saint-Mard's Reflexions sur la poesie en general, first published in 1729 and then expanded in 1734 by the addition of three chapters on "The Birth, Progress, and Decadence of Taste" in France, chapters which in fact owe a great deal to Madame Dacier's Des causes de la corruption du gout (1714). Like his fellow Ancients-and like so many British critics later in the century-Remond develops an elaborate parallel between the courses of ancient and recent history, showing that in both a period of poised cultural balance ("reconciliation") and so also of artistic efflorescence was followed by another of imbalance and artistic "dryness" (secheresse).Under Louis XIV France enjoyed an age of empire, freedom, and natural plain-dealing (now replaced by artifice, disguise, and an "esprit de manege"); as a result, in both the culture at large and in individuals, France then enjoyed as well a poised balance of "reason" and "imagination": "Tout y etoit mesure sans etre froid, & l'Imagination sembloit etre devenue l'Interprete de la Raison." But there emerged the philosophy of Descartes, with its "contempt for the ancients" and its "esprit de Geometrie,"its unyielding "irethode."In the hands of later writersRemond cites as chief villains Fontenelle and La Motte-balance was lost: mankind came to be treated as "substances absolument pensantes, des Esprits purs" and throughout the arts "reason" and "correctness" came to the fore: "nous immolons tout a une Raison severe, & fiers de nos sacrifices, nous disons que nous avons de la precision." A few great poets like Jean-Baptiste Rousseau remain,
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but most suffer the sense of having come too late-"venus trop tard"-in cultural history.23 In all this, Remond could be Thomas Warton in his History of English Poetry celebrating the age of Elizabeth as one of "feeling and unrestrained by custom," of "civilized undisguised superstition," a period of poised balance like that enjoyed in ancient Athens which made possible the highest literary achievement; or he could be Richard Hurd celebrating the same age as one that "had not yet been controlled by the prosaic genius of philosophy and logic." We even find in France the origins of British talk of "what we have lost. . . what we have gained": for Remond, "ce que nous avons perdu en Gout, nous l'avons gagne en Exactitude."24 What difference does it make that we can trace mid-century British critical propensities, including the paradoxical evaluation of lyric, to France? The exercise helps us to understand what is wrong with the idea of "preromanticism"; but more than this, it was in the French context, in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, that the two sides of our paradox about poetry first came to be defined. Here, in the course of the Quarrel, the "arts" and the "sciences" were first reconceived in their modern senses; as the term and concept of "art," and hence also of poetry, suffered a radical redefinition, it became inevitable both that "pure poetry," "poetry in the abstract," would come to be identified with lyric, and that the cultural value of such poetry would come into question. And just as we recognize the Quarrel to be one of the cornerstones of Augustan thought, we should recognize the paradoxical valuation of lyric not as a "preromantic" strain in an otherwise classic eighteenth century, but rather as an instability at the heart of the Augustan literary enterprise itself. To make this point we must step back a moment to examine the initial phases of the Quarrel and what was at stake there: essentially, a redefinition of disciplines-a remapping of the intellectual terraincomprised especially in its reinterpretation of the division between the "arts" and the "sciences." The French Quarrel had begun as a debate about the relative merits in all fields of ancient accomplishments and those of the "modern" (postmedieval) world, especially France under Louis XIV. Thus Charles Perrault surveys all fields in his massive Parallele des anciens et des modernes en ce qui concerne les arts et les sciences (1688-96), finding that in all except sculpture-"the simplest and most limited of all the arts"-there has been progress. For Perrault, time is the parent of politeness and good taste as of natural
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knowledge; not only in natural philosophy but also in poetry, eloquence, and ethics has the seventeenth century outdone the ancients, for these activities depend like natural philosophy on justness of reasoning as well as on detailed knowledge of human nature, both of which have been perfectionnes in the century of Descartes. If, Perrault argued, it is the task of the highest poetry, especially epic, to convey wisdom in all fields, then it is absurd now to claim Homer's greatness: Homer would have been a better poet had he lived in Louis's enlightened age.25 Perrault's was an extreme Modernist statement; much more typical is Fontenelle's "Digression sur les anciens et les modernes" (1688), the essay that Sir William Temple was to attempt to refute, thereby bringing the Battle of the Books to England. In an argument that was to become standard in the century to follow, Fontenelle divides the palm of victory, by dividing disciplines according to how they progress: in some fields, first efforts may be the best; in others, progress is inevitably slower and-once an adequate method is in place-cumulative: If the moderns are to be able to improve continually on the ancients, the fields in which they are working must be of a kind which allows progress. Eloquence and poetry require only a certain number of rather narrow ideas as compared with other arts, and they depend for their effect primarily upon the liveliness of the imagination. Now mankind could easily amass in a few centuries a small number of ideas, and liveliness of imagination has no need of a long sequence of experiences nor many rules before it reaches the furthest perfection of which it is capable. But physics, medicine, mathematics are composed of numberless ideas and depend upon precision of thought which improves with extreme slowness, yet is always improving.... It is obvious that all this is endless and that the last physicists or mathematicians will naturally have to be the ablest.26 Fontenelle's new division of knowledge is immediately taken up in England: in 1694, William Wotton writes in his massive survey of progress throughout the disciplines, his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, on what was to be the main point of contention between him and William Temple: [Of kinds of knowledge] there are two sorts: One, of those wherein the gravest part of those Learned Men who have compared Ancient and Modern Performances, either give up
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the Cause to the Ancients quite, or think, at least, that the Moderns have not gone beyond them. The other of those, where the Advocates for the Moderns think the Case so clear on their Side, that they wonder how any Man can dispute it with them. Poesie, Oratory, Architecture, Painting, and Statuary, are of the First Sort: Natural History, Physiology, and Mathematicks, with all their Dependencies, are of the
second.27
Divisions of knowledge such as this are in fact new in the seventeenth century. The first group of fields would soon come explicitly to be called the "arts," the second, the "sciences"; Fontenelle and his followers have transformed traditional distinctions between poetry (or rhetoric) and philosophy into what will by the time of Wordsworth and Coleridge be called the opposition of "poetry" and "science."28 Since antiquity the term "art" had meant a practical activity of making (as opposed to central to the term's "science") and-equally contemplative of done according to rules. But as a making meaning-a procedure (in particular the of the "rules" or "method" Quarrel, byproduct new method of Descartes and his followers) becomes the defining property of disciplines such as mathematics and physics, rather than of "art." "Science" had always suggested in its most technical the "science" in question were geometry or usage-whether theology-knowledge organized in a certain rational fashion; in the aftermath of Cartesianism, this organization came to be that of "method": disciplines came to be known as "sciences" according to whether they were pursued according to such method. We can see the completion of this redivision of knowledge by looking ahead to a work such as William Hazlitt's fragment of 1814, "Why the Arts are not Progressive?" Hazlitt writes: the complaint. . . that the arts do not attain that progressive degree of perfection which might reasonably be expected from them, proceeds on a false notion, for the analogy appealed to in support of the regular advances of art to higher degrees of excellence, totally fails; it applies to science,
not to art.
. .
. What is mechanical,
reducible
to rule, or
capable of demonstration, is progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: what is not mechanical or definite, but depends on genius, taste, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary or retrograde.29 Thus in the seventeenth-century Quarrel of Ancient and Modern, it was the new understanding of what were to be called
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the sciences that provided the motive force in what I have called the "modern" division of the arts and the sciences (a division from which we "post-moderns" are of course now moving away). The arts-those fields that the seventeenth century was just beginning to group together in a new way, and to which the eighteenth, in an attempt to theorize them after the initial division of disciplines had been made, was to give the new name of the "aesthetic"-were in effect what was left over in the new partition. The concept of the "aesthetic," in other words, emerges as a byproduct of the seventeenth century's redefinition of science-just as eighteenthcentury attempts to define what it will call "literary art" or "poetry" characteristically do so by treating it as a deviation from the already understood norm of prose. In the words of Robert Lowth, "Reason speaks literally, the passions poetically."30 The new division of knowledge was at first distinctly the property of the Moderns; it was a major project of such Ancients as Pope and Swift to point up its shortcomings.31 But as we all know, the Moderns "won" the Battle, with the result that their division became our heritage. In 1712 Joseph Addison outlines in the Spectator the "pleasures of the imagination," as distinct from those rooted in sense, of "understanding" or "judgment"-pleasures especially the sense of vision-and in 1719 his French disciple Du Bos, in the Reflexions critiques sur la poesie et la peinture, uses Addison's theory to construct a theory of all the "beaux-arts," arts which take as their end pleasure, derived through sensory images and the passions, rather than instruction, which is left to "les sciences." In 1735, Alexander Baumgarten, a reader of both Addison and Du Bos, coins the new term "aesthetic" (in opposition to "logic") to name the territory staked out by the "arts" in the new division of disciplines. The story of the consolidation of the new category of the aesthetic is familiar from the history of philosophy; what I mean to stress here is first that it is a late theorization of positions worked out in the Quarrel of Ancient and Modern, and second that it entailed both sides of our paradox about poetry. On the one hand, the new "aesthetic" conception of art transformed definitions of "literature," and especially poetry, so that lyric became, as Coleridge was to say, "that which in its very essence is poetical";32 on the other, it drained poetry of what had been understood to be many of its intellective functions, resulting in its cultural devaluation. We are all familiar with late-eighteenthcentury critics, such asJohann Bergk, who argue, "The function of polite literature is not to increase our knowledge, for this it would share with the sciences, but to cultivate our taste"; in fact this
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position is implicit from the first in the Moderns' new division of knowledge.33 Already when Perrault and Fontenelle classed poetry under the heading of "imagination," they were calling upon a faculty whose meaning had changed since Bacon's time: imagination had lost what in the Renaissance had been its major intellective functions, especially its connection with judgment; the understanding alone now performs those tasks. Hence Fontenelle's dismissive treatment of the arts in his Digression: just as Wotton would identify the sciences as the realm of knowledge, the arts as that of opinion, with the Fontenelle contrasts the "tricks of eloquence" dependability of la physique, "liveliness" with "precision"; poetry and eloquence, he writes, "are not very important in themselves"but may once have had a political function, eloquence "Poetry .. .was good for nothing, as it has always been under all kinds of regimes; that failing is of the essence of poetry."34 I would like, finally, to sketch some of the pressures the new theory of art, and so of poetry, exerted in practice on the paradigmatically "poetic" genre of lyric, pressures that we see becoming dominant at mid-century, with the collapse of the Ancient cause. We might summarize these changes as expressions of a new account of the discontinuity between aesthetic and other experience. It had been a central position of the Ancients to stress the continuity of poetry with knowledge and social practice: for the poet of Boileau's Art po6tique, "IIfaut savoir encore et converser et vivre."35 In their different ways, Swift and Pope press the same view. But the new theory of art stressed, to quote Warton again, the "difference there is, betwixt a MAN OF WIT, a MAN OF SENSE, and a TRUE POET": "the most solid observations on human life, expressed with the utmost elegance and brevity, are MORALITY, and not POETRY" (1:ii). And just as the new aesthetic excludes such materials from the highest poetry, it trains readers not to expect them: we read for instance in Du Bos's Reflexions: "Les gens de metier sont les seuls qui se fassent une etude de la lecture des Poetes. On ne les lit plus, nous l'avons deja dit, que pour s'occuper plus agreablement, des qu'on est sorti du College, & non pas comme on lit les Historiens & les Philosophes, c'est a dire, pour apprendre."36 Du Bos here sounds the death-knell of the old ideal of the doctus poeta and of praise of poetry for the useful knowledge it memorializes and imparts: after the death of Pope, only self-conscious conservatives such as Johnson's Imlac produce the old lists of all the fields of knowledge the poet's "comprehensive soul" must master.37
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Instead we find the new gesture-from Thomas Warton's "A Farewell to Poetly" (1748) to Coleridge's "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement" (1795)-of the lyrist who says he must give up poetry in order to rejoin the historical world of social practice. Warton explains in his "Farewell" why he must leave "the Muse" for "Virtue," give up lyric to pursue "the Moral Melody," "beyond the Strains / Of Attic Harp": My serious soul these Woods and Walks disdains Where my Youth rov'd: A loftier Task demands My sober Hours, . . . Not to smooth The tuneful Cadence of a polisht Line, But harmonize my soul, while Coleridge explains he "was constrained" to quit his "delicious solitude," with its "feelings all too delicate for use": I therefore go, and join head, heart, and hand, Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight Of Science, Freedom, and the Truth in Christ. In both cases, lyric is figured in the language of pastoral retirement, and the decision to abandon lyric solitude for the world of action is framed according to the rhetorical pattern previous poets had established for speaking of their desire to ascend in the traditional generic hierarchy from pastoral to epic: when poetry equals lyric, the ascent to epic action means abandoning poetry altogether.38 As Batteux is the first to make explicit, whereas all other literary forms take actions as their object, lyric, "the most perfect kind of poem," "is wholly consecrated to feeling"-"c'est sa matiere, son objet essentiel"; lyric is what happens when actions stops, and the poet restricts himself to "la seule situation de l'ame." As a result, it excludes both reflection and historical detail (in Joseph Warton's paraphrase, "Lyric poetry, especially, should not be minutely historical").39 Lyric thus becomes a mechanism of escape from the
secular world: Edward Young says in his Conjectures on Original
Composition (1759): "To men of letters and leisure, [original is not only a noble amusement, but a sweet composition] refuge; ... it opens a back-door out of the bustle of this busy and idle world, into a delicious garden." In the next century, an anonymous reviewer of Crabbe's poetry will make the point more starkly: "To talk of binding down poetry to dry representations of the world as it is, seems idle; because it is precisely in order to escape from the world as it is that we fly to poetry. We turn to it,
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not that we may see and feel what we see and feel in our daily experience, but ... that we may take a shelter from the realities of life in the paradise of fancy." As William Hazlitt would say in reviewing Coleridge's Biographia, "We would not, with Plato, absolutely banish poets from the commonwealth; but we really think they should meddle as little with its practical administration as may be. They live in an ideal world of their own; and it would be well, if they were confined to it."40 Soame Jenyns recognizes all this in his splendid parody of contemporary lyric practice, entitled simply "An Ode" (1780). Jenyns supplies in his Preface what had become sinceJohnson and Goldsmith a familiar criticism of the new ode's imagistic excess: Just and lively pictures are the very essence of an ode, as well as of an auction-room, whether there are any proper places to hang them in or not; and such there are in the narrow compass of this little piece, of every thing that is great and beautiful in nature; of the morning rising from the ocean; of the Sun, the Moon, and the planetary system; of a giant and a hermit; of woods, rocks, and mountains, and the seasons of the revolving year: and in all these, the transitions so sudden and unexpected, so void of all apparent art, yet not without much that is quite invisible; the thoughts are so sublime, so distant from all vulgar ideas or common sense, that the judicious reader will scarcely find in it a single deviation from the severest laws of just criticism.4' Jenyns makes clear his sense of such lyric as an evasion of nature: the poem begins with a parody of Gray's Bard: "I'll combat Nature, interrupt her course, / And baffle all her stated laws by force." Jenyns also understands the politics of poetic solitude: the "Ode" concludes: Hail, Liberty, fair goddess of this isle! Deign on my verses, and on me, to smile; Like them, unfettered by the bonds of sense, Permit us to enjoy life's transient dream, To live, and write, without the least pretence To method, order, meaning, plan, or scheme; And shield us safe beneath thy guardian wings, From law, religion, ministers, and kings. Lyric has become the favored vehicle for a new vision of selfhood not as informed or constituted by social role-by one's place in the
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hierarchical structure of nature and society-but as autonomous, as may be seen by comparing nearly any late Augustan lyric with any earlier one. With the new, lyricized theory of poetry comes as well, as I have suggested, new accounts of how poetry is to be composed and especially how it is to be read. Typically in eighteenth-century poetry speakers serve as models for readers, establishing the point of view from which their verses are to be read. The mid-century lyrist, as John Sitter has explained in our best guide to date to these poems of escape, "asks to be overpowered-'transported,' 'led,' 'hurried,' even 'drowned'-by Fancy."42 Correlatively, critics elaborate new accounts of reading as an essentially passive process. Lyric escape includes escape from conscious volitional cognition: from the will. For Edward Young, "As what comes from the writer's heart reaches ours; so what comes from his head sets our brains at work, and our hearts at ease. It makes a circle of thoughtful critics, not of distressed patients; and a passive audience is what" the highest poetry requires.43 Such accounts of passive poetic experience are perhaps to be expected in the context of theories which understood taste itself to be a receptive faculty-in Goldsmith's phrase, "a capacity of receiving pleasure"; they become most marked among associationist theories of taste. Thus for instance Coleridge's youthful favorite Archibald Alison explains in his Essays on Taste (1790) that in all experiences of taste, "no labour of thought, or habits of attention are required": objects of taste "lead [the mind] insensibly along, in a kind of bewitching reverie," a "powerless state of reverie, when we are carried on by our conceptions, not guiding them." Just as poets "abandon themselves to the emotions which . . . scenes may happen to inspire," we readers of poetry must "yield ourselves up to the emotion which [the] composition demands," "relax the severity of attention, and yield to the relation of resembling thought." (It is such late Augustan accounts of passive poetic response that Wordsworth will attack in the next century in an effort to reconstitute an activist account of literary reading.)44 More generally, much in later eighteenth-century British associationist theories of literature constitutes an extension to all poetry of characterizations given by earlier critics (especially French) specifically of lyric: the distinctively associationist account of literary unity as a "unity of expression" or "sentiment," for instance, had already been outlined by Batteux as the lyric's "unite de sentiment."45 Finally, as formulations such as these suggest, there is also a politics of gender in the new poetic. What the age called "the
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poetical character" now comes to be thought genuinely to fit women-but because it has been made to exclude erudition and participation in practical affairs. With the Augustan redefinition of imagination and conception of poetry as a balance of judgment and fancy had come as well a new, gendered understanding of the Earlier Augustan faculties at play in poetic composition. formulations follow Pope's allegory in the Essay on Criticism of judgment and wit or fancy as "man and wife," kept in the best poems in hierarchical balance. But lyric-the ode, with its abrupt transitions, its real or seeming lack of "method"-had always been a partial exception to this rule; and as we have heard, it was a favorite form for early Augustan women writers. Edward Young's early "Discourse of Lyric Poetry" (1728) makes the age's understanding of its critical terminology painfully clear: Judgment, indeed, that masculine power of the mind, in Ode, as in all compositions, should bear the supreme sway; and a beautiful imagination, as its mistress, should be subdued to its dominion. Hence, and hence only, can proceed the fairest offspring of the human mind. But then, in Ode, there is this difference from other kinds of poetry,-that there the imagination, like a very beautiful mistress, is indulged in the appearance of domineering, though the judgment, like an artful lover, in reality carries its point; and the less it is suspected of it, it shows the more masterly conduct, and deserves the greater commendation. With less lumbering gallantry, Remond had spoken of the balanced faculties of the previous age as having produced a poetry expressive of "des Esprits males sans durete, delicats sans affeterie, precis sans secheresse."46 But critics such as Joseph Warton revise this hierarchy, with the result that, as Sitter has put it, "in the middle years of the century the ideal poem and the ideal woman grow increasingly alike."47 And in contemporary criticism the analogy carries over with surprising explicitness to writers and readers as well. Thus in the chapters "Of the Varieties of Intellectual Character" with which he concludes his Eleutents of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (17921827), Dugald Stewart produces with seeming unconsciousness, in contiguous chapters on "The Poet" and "The Sexes," nearly identical characterizations of (1) women, (2) children, and (3) poets, understood as including all those who give themselves to "the culture of the arts which are addressed to the imagination."
All three groups share a "preternaturally great . . . nervous
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irritability," "a peculiarly strong sympathy with the feelings of others," "peculiar quickness and facility of association," "proneness to superstition," and "unmanly desire of praise." In all this they differ from "those who cultivate the abstract sciences," as the mathematician and the man of affairs differ from the poet.48 Ancient poetry, Hugh Blair assures us, was "manly," whereas modern lyric-partakes of an "effeminate" modern-especially delicacy. It is in this context that we should understand Wordsworth's program in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: part and parcel of Wordsworth's own understanding of his project to recreate active readers is an effort to remasculinize poetry (as shortly thereafter Scott was to seek to remasculinize the novel). We can hear as much in his account of poetry as the voice of "a man speaking to men," in what he calls the "manliness" of his "style"and perhaps also in those schoolmasterish letters he wrote to his women readers.49 Something of the same purpose may even have motivated Thomas Gray in his attempt to reunify lyric and epic features in poems such as The Bard-a poem which, he wrote, because of its "learning," "no woman" would be able to
understand.50
Gray's flirtation with epic-and the peculiar obtuseness of a poem such as The Bard-call to mind those later critics, like Coleridge, Henry Crabb Robinson, and John Stuart Mill, who will explicitly oppose epic and lyric, the narrative and the expressive, the objective and the subjective.5' These are oppositions, as I have said, that we associate with early nineteenth-century criticism; but they are all implicit from the start in the polemics of the Moderns in the famous Quarrel-in which theories of the ode were crucialand so in that important product of the Quarrel, the "aesthetic" theory of art. That theory forces an identification of "true" poetry with lyric, complicating and eventually helping to fragment the poised hierarchical balance of the just and the lively, judgment and fancy, the probable and the marvelous, with which Augustan poetic theory began. Continuing adherence to the new division of knowledge meant as well that nineteenth-century efforts like Coleridge's to theorize a reunification of faculties would fail, and that the need to provide defenses of poetry would be immensely greater in 1800 than in 1700.
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NOTES John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham: 'John Dryden, The Letters of Duke Univ. Press, 1942), p. 72. 2See G.N. Shuster, The English Ode from Milton to Keats (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1940), chap. 1. 3Joseph Trapp, Lectureson Poetry (1711-19; Eng. trans. London, 1742), p. 203; cf. John Norris on "the Pindaric way; which is the highest and most significant kind of writing in verse" (A Collection of Miscellanies: Consisting of Poems, Essays, Discoursesand Letters [London, 1717], p. 6). Poetry, 2 vols. (London, 1718), 1:172. 4Charles Gildon, The CompleteArt of Hence perhaps also Johnson's comment in his Life of Cowley: "all the boys and girls caught the pleasing fashion, and they could do nothing else but write like Pindar" (Lives of the EnglishPoets, ed. G. B. Hill, 6 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905], 1:48). Pope, 2 vols. (1756 and 5Joseph Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of 1782; London, 1806), 1:62 (subsequent references to this work appear parenthetically in text). 6Adam Smith, Theoryof Moral Sentiments,ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 123-24; Robert Heron John Pinkerton], Lettersof Literature(London, 1785), p. 131; Richard Alves, Sketchesof a History of Literature (Edinburgh, 1794), p. 252; Nathan Drake, Literary Hours, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Sudbury, 1800), 2:75, 80-94. 7G.W.F. Hegel, in Werke, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970-71), 13:24; EncyclopediaBritannica, s.v. "Ossian"; William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767), Advertisement. 8John Brown, The Historyof the Rise and Progressof Poetry,throughits Several Species(Newcastle, 1764);Joseph Priestley, Lectureson Historyand GeneralPolicy (London, 1826), p. 408 ("more [poems] are hardly desirable. Few people have leisure to read, much less read with care, or to study, all that is really excellent of this kind of the productions of the last age"). 9Richard Hurd, Works,8 vols. (London, 1811), 4:350. Cf. Thomas Warton: "What have we gained by this revolution? It may be answered, much good sense, good taste, and good criticism. But in the meantime we have lost..." (History of English Poetry, 4 vols. [London, 1774-90], 2:463). '?JamesMacpherson, CriticalDissertationon the Origin, Antiquities,Language, Government,Manners, and Religion of the Antient Caledonians (Dublin, 1768), p. 182; Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (1771), s.v. "Exageration." "Nicholas-Charles-Joseph Trublet, Essais sur divers sujets de litterature et de morale, 4 vols. (Paris, 1760), 4:215, 245. '2Jean-Francois de Pons, Dissertationsurle poemeepique, contrela doctrine de M.D., in Oeuvres(Paris, 1738), p. 143. "'Baron de Montesquieu, Lettrespersanes, No. 137, in Oeuvrescompletesde Montesquieu, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1758), 1:275-76. Joseph Warton, Essay, 2:403 and (quoting Voltaire) l:vi-vii. '5On the process by which, among mid-eighteenth-century critics, Paradise Lost ceased to be a Restoration, and became a Renaissance poem, see my "The Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon," MLS 18, 1 (Winter 1988): 17-37, 2728. Part of this historical revisionism was a generic reclassification of Milton's poem not as epic but as a kind of lyric: as Henry Crabb Robinson would write, "What lives in the hearts of readers from the works of Milton is not the epic poem. Milton's story has merit unquestionably; but it is rather a lyric than an ed. Thomas Sadler, epic narrative" (Diaries, Reminiscences,and Correspondence, 4 vols. [Boston, 1898], 1:301).
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'6John Upton, Critical Observationson Shakespeare(London, 1746), p. 15. '7See David Fairer, "The Poems of Thomas Warton the Elder?", RES n.s. 26, 103-104 (August-November 1975): 287-300, 395-406, and Arthur H. Scouten, "The Warton Forgeries and the Concept of Preromanticism in English Literature," Etudes anglaises 40, 4 (October-December 1987): 43447. '8Antoine Houdar de la Motte, "Discours sur la poesie en general et sur l'ode en particulier," Odes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1713), 1:36 (the phrase is taken up by Du Bos and Batteux); Toussaint Remond de Saint-Mard, Rflexions sur la poesie en general (La Haye, 1734), p. 212. The classic work on "images," much reprinted, was Cesar Chesnau Du Marsais's Des Tropes (1730); the term was characteristically interpreted in light of Addison's teaching, so that, for instance, Vauvernargues writes in 1746, "I call imagination the gift of conceiving things in a figurative manner, and of representing thoughts by images" (Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvernargues, Connaissance de I'esprit humain, in Oeuvres, ed. Gilbert [Paris, 1857], p. 6), while for Batteux "Imagination is an aptitude for conceiving objects in the form of material images" (Cours de belles-lettresdistribuepar exercises, 4 vols. [Paris, 174748], 1:67). '9Percival Stockdale, An Inquiry into the Nature, and Genuine Laws of Poetry (London, 1778). 20Hurd, entry in commonplace book, quoted in Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism,vol. 1: The Later EighteenthCentury(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), p. 130; Works, 1:104. 21AnnaLaetitia Barbauld, Preface, The Poetical Worksof Mr. William Collins (London, 1797), pp. iii-v. 22Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts: "II y a des fictions poetiques qui se montrent avec l'habit simple de la prose: tels sont les Romans & tout ce qui est dans leur genre. Il y a de meme des matieres vraies, qui paroissent revetues & parees de tous les charmes de l'harmonie poetique: tels sont les Poemes didactiques & historiques. Mais ces fictions en prose & ces histoires en vers, ne sont ni pure Prose ni Poesie pure: c'est un melange des deux natures" (Paris, 1773), pp. 72-73). In Pure Poetry: Studies in French Poetic Theory and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), D.J. Mossop finds this passage to be the first use by any critic of the phrase "pure poetry" (p. 32). "Remond de Saint Mard, Reflexionssur la poesie, pp. 302-10. 24Thomas Warton, History, 1:30; 4:328; Hurd, "On the Age of Queen Elizabeth," Works, 3:210-11; Remond, Reflexions, p. 343. 25CharlesPerrault, Parallele des anciens et des modernesen ce qui concerne les arts et les sciences, 2nd edn., 4 vols. (Paris, 1692-96), 1:183; 2:29-31; 3:98. 26Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle, "Digression," trans. John Hughes, 1719, in Scott Elledge and Donald Schier, eds., The Continental Model [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970], p. 362, altered. 27WilliamWotton, Reflectionsupon Ancient and Modern Learning (London, 1694), p. 19 (Gildon draws a similar division in his Miscellaneous Letters and Essays of the same year, as will Addison in the Spectator, no. 160). 28Wordsworth,Preface to LyricalBallads, ProseWorksof William Wordsworth, ed. WJ.B Owen andJ.W. Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1:14041; Coleridge, Lectures 1808-1819 on Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes, vol. 2 of The CollectedWorks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), 1:217 ("Poetry is not the proper Antithesis to Prose; but to Science"). 2William Hazlitt, "Why the Arts are not Progressive?-A Fragment," in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1960), 4:160-64, 160.
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30Robert Lowth, Lectureson the SacredPoetry of the Hebrews(1753), quoted in Norman Maclean (who also makes the point about poetry as a deviation from the norm of prose), "From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century," in R.S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 408-60, 417. 3'I have made this case about Swift and Pope in "Swift's Satire on 'Science' and the Structure of Gulliver's Travels,"ELH58, 4 (Winter 1991): 809-39, and "The Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon." 32S.T.Coleridge, Lectures 1808-1819 on Literature, p. 118. zu Lesen (Jena, 1799), p. 176. 33Johann Bergk, Die Kunst, Buicher 34Bernard de Fontenelle, "Digression," pp. 359-64. 35 Que les vers ne soient pas votre eternel emploi Cultivez vos amis, soyez homme de foi: C'est peu d'etre agreable et charmant dans un livre, Il faut savoir encore et converser et vivre. Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, L 'Artpoetique, 4:221-24, in Oeuvres,ed. GeorgesMongredien (Paris: Garnier, 1961), p. 186. 36JeanBaptiste Du Bos, Reflexions,7th edn., 3 vols. (Paris, 1770), pt. 1, sect. 23, 1:303. 3'By 1800, Wordsworth's poet is an aristocrat not of learning but of "more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness. . . than are supposed to be common among mankind" (Prose, 1:138), while forJohn Stuart Mill, "Great poets are often proverbially ignorant of life" ("What is Poetry?", in Mill's Essays on Literature and Society, ed. J.B. Schneewind [New York: Macmillan, 1965], p. 106). 38Thomas Warton the Elder, Poems (London, 1748), p. 220; Coleridge, "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement," lines 60-62, in Poetical Works,ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 108. 39Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts,ch. 13, pp. 316, 323, 326, and Principes de la litterature(5th edn., 4 vols. [Paris, 1775]), 3:237 ("La naivete [de la lyrique] n'exclut que ce qui est trop pense, trop reflechi, ou qui n'a qu'une secheresse historique"); Warton, Essay on Pope, 1:374. Batteux distinguishes lyric from other forms in language that presages Wordsworth's 1800 Preface: in other genres, "les sentimens suivent les idees; au lieu que dans les airs, ce sont les idees qui suivent les sentimens" (Principes,3:238; cf. Wordsworth: "the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling" [Prose, 1:128]). 40EdwardYoung, The Complete Works,Poetry and Prose, 2 vols. (London, 1834), 2:550; Anon., QuarterlyReview 4 (1810): 282; William Hazlitt, Edinburgh Review 28 (August 1817). Arguing that "Reason and imagination are both excellent things, but their provinces ought to be kept a little more distinct than they are at present," Hazlitt remarks of poets, "they make strange work of matters of fact; and, if they were allowed to act in public affairs, would soon turn the world upside down. They indulge only in their own flattering dreams, . . . caring as little for 'history and particular fact' as for general reasoning." 41InAlexander Chalmers, The Worksof the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, 20 vols. (London, 1810), 17:620-22. For Goldsmith's view of contemporary lyric as "a combination of luxuriant images without plot or connection; a string of epithets" in which "gaudy images pass before [the] imagination like the figures in a dream," leaving the "reason . . . fast asleep," see CollectedWorksof Oliver Goldsmith,ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford:
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Clarendon Press, 1966), 4:46; 2:388. 4John Sitter, LiteraryLoneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), p. 121. 3Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition(1759), in Works2:574-
75.
"Oliver Goldsmith, CollectedWorks, 1:308; Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (Edinburgh, 1790), pp. 14, 42, 86, 12. For Wordsworth, see especially the "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface": "TASTE... is a metaphor, taken from a passive sense of the human body, and transferred to things which are in their essence not passive,-to intellectual acts and operations"(Prose, 3:81). 4Batteux, Principes, 3:231-32; on associationist theories of unity, see Ralph Cohen, "Association of Ideas and Poetic Unity," PQ 36, 4 (October 1957): 465-74. 46EdwardYoung, Works, 1:416; Remond de Saint Mard, Reflexions, p. 343. 47JohnSitter, LiteraryLoneliness, p. 123. 8Dugald Stewart, The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. Sir William Hamilton, 10 vols. (Edinburgh, 1854), 4:22245. 4Wordsworth, Prose, 1:138, 146; on the "feminization of literature" in the second half of the eighteenth century, see David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), chap. 6. 50Thomas Gray, Correspondence, ed. P. Toynbee and L. Whibley, rev. H.W. Starr, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:416; 2:478. Gray's attempt in The Bard to join epic (narrative) with lyric-an effort foretold in the first stanza of The Progressof Poesy, in Gray's topographical figuring of the generic hierarchy-was noted in the eighteenth century: see for instance William Jackson, The Four Ages;Togetherwith Essayson Various Subjects(London, 1798), p. 218: "The conducting of the story is altogether epic." 51ForColeridge and Crabb Robinson's oppositions of the objectivity of epic with the subjectivity of lyric, see M.H. Abrams, The Mirrorand the Lamp (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), p. 242. (Abrams traces the opposition to late eighteenth-century German criticism); according to Mill, "an epic poem ... in so far as it is epic (i.e., narrative) ... is not poetry at all" ("What is Poetry?", p. 113).

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Rice University

SEL 33 (1993) ISSN 0039-3657

"Aesthetics"and the Rise of Lyric in the Eighteenth Century

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