Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The English Poetic Mind
    The English Poetic Mind
    The English Poetic Mind
    Ebook217 pages3 hours

    The English Poetic Mind

    By Charles Williams

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The English Poetic Mind" by Charles Williams. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigiCat
    Release dateAug 16, 2022
    ISBN8596547185178
    The English Poetic Mind
    Author

    Charles Williams

    Charles Williams (1886–1945) was a British author and longtime editor at Oxford University Press. He was one of the three most prominent members of the literary group known as the Inklings—the other two being C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Williams wrote poetry, drama, biography, literary criticism, and more, but is best known for his novels, which explored the primal conflict between good and evil. T. S. Eliot, who wrote an introduction to Williams’s All Hallows’ Eve, praised the author’s “profound insight into . . . the heights of Heaven and the depths of Hell, which provides both the immediate thrill, and the permanent message of his novels,” and Time magazine called him “one of the most gifted and influential Christian writers England has produced this century.”

    Read more from Charles Williams

    Related to The English Poetic Mind

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How The Sonnet Turns

      May 1, 2020

      This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, on January 10, 2010, at the winter residency. My thanks to The American Poetry Review for their graceful and gracious assistance in the adaptation

      30 min read

    • Article

      The Poetry Of Perseverance

      Aug 15, 2018

      The Poetry Of Perseverance
      11 min read

    • Article

      What Kind of Angel: On Percy Shelley

      Nov 21, 2022

      Shelley saw himself as a conduit for the electricity of the universe. The post What Kind of Angel: On Percy Shelley appeared first on The Millions.

      15 min read

    • Article

      A History And Theory Of The Line In English Language Poetry

      Jul 1, 2022

      For me, and for generations of US readers before me, poetry has been defined by the appearance of the line break on the page, that ragged righthand margin signaling that something is at work in the arrangement of the words on paper beyond mere transc

      59 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems by Geoffrey Hill

      Dec 15, 2018

      62. Why such irony in re the mystical context when a graph of even the most commonplace exchange would appear perplexed; when we drop out from the plainest statement in the posture of a bat? So, decide to make something of that, the style to resemble

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Poet’s Craft

      Jan 1, 2020

      To begin with a definition: A poem is a text structurally constrained by the repetition of any language element(s). The continuum of poetic constraint is extensive, stretching from operations that a reader will find completely imperceptible to overwh

      9 min read

    • Article

      VAGRANT & VULNERABLE

      Aug 16, 2017

      VAGRANT & VULNERABLE
      11 min read

    • Article

      In The Middle Of Even This: Poetry

      Jan 1, 2020

      To be brought from the bright schoolyard into the house:to stand by her bed like an animal stunned in the pen:against the grid of the quilt, her hand seemsstitched to the cuff of its sleeve—although he wantsmost urgently the hand to stroke his head,a

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Song Starts In My Body

      Nov 1, 2022

      I wanted to see her body. I’m aware it sounds strange, even lurid. What I wanted was to see her read her poetry, and her body reading it. Something about Rukeyser’s writing made me feel that she was at home in her flesh, and I wanted to see her lovin

      21 min read

    • Article

      The Volta

      Mar 1, 2024

      One characteristic element of a sonnet is the turn, or to use the Italian word, volta. The typical definition holds that: In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the

      14 min read

    • Article

      Long Exposure

      Feb 6, 2020

      Long Exposure
      4 min read

    • Article

      I, Me, My

      Aug 28, 2022

      I, Me, My
      4 min read

    • Article

      Walkabout

      Sep 1, 2019

      Walking Backwards: Poems 1966–2016 by John Koethe. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, $40.00 cloth. A BOOK of poems by definition poses a paradox. Unless it contains a unified and intentional epic, any collection of lyric poems comprises a series of e

      8 min read

    • Article

      On Punks

      Mar 1, 2022

      Until the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, the deadliest mass shooting by a single person in US history occurred in the middle of the night of June 12, 2016 in an Orlando nightclub, Pulse. 49 lives were lost and countless affected, including those of us read

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Shoals of Prose

      Nov 29, 2024

      The Shoals of Prose
      11 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: Winter 2023

      Jan 12, 2023

      Nick Ripatrazone spotlights the best poetry collections of Q1. The post Must-Read Poetry: Winter 2023 appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Siren’s Call

      Dec 3, 2020

      The Siren’s Call
      4 min read

    • Article

      Romance Is Literature

      Aug 16, 2024

      Romance Is Literature
      4 min read

    • Article

      Romance Is Literature

      Aug 17, 2024

      Romance Is Literature
      4 min read

    • Article

      Grandeur Of The Unimportant

      Jul 1, 2018

      APZ Books The reasons a contemporary American poet might consider writing political poetry these days are too many to name. I would include the government’s attempt to silence dissent in the media, in the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA

      13 min read

    • Article

      A Pleasure to Read You

      Dec 3, 2018

      A Pleasure to Read You
      10 min read

    • Article

      Alive In The Ice And Fire

      Nov 1, 2018

      A Conversation August, 2018 SUSAN STEWART As I read your books, including If You Have to Go, I am struck, as I’m sure any reader would be, by their existential immediacy. You write in time as you undergo time, taking up especially the unfolding of ev

      17 min read

    • Article

      Anyone Will Tell You

      Sep 1, 2020

      APZ Books Anyone Will Tell You by Wendy Chin-Tanner Paperback, 76 pages, $15.95 Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019 “Don’t look away. Look straight at everything. Look it all in the eye, good and bad,” said Henry Miller. This form of courage, in poetry as we

      6 min read

    • Article

      “Cinnamon. Eyeshadow. Dove.”

      Nov 1, 2021

      The work of Jean Valentine taught me that the word “eyeshadow” could belong in a poem. Before I read her work, I had only seen that word in advertisements and fashion magazines. But far from describing surface femininity or sexiness, “eyeshadow” was

      21 min read

    • Article

      On Bob Hicok’s Water Look Away

      Jan 1, 2024

      Books Water Look Away by Bob Hicok Copper Canyon, 2023 112 pp., $18.00 (paperback) In Bob Hicok’s 2023 poetry collection, Water Look Away, the poet does anything but. The collection opens with “Welcome Home,” in which a husband finds his wife in the

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The English Poetic Mind

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The English Poetic Mind - Charles Williams

      Charles Williams

      The English Poetic Mind

      EAN 8596547185178

      DigiCat, 2022

      Contact: [email protected]

      Table of Contents

      PREFACE

      She stood in tears amid the alien corn

      Those heathen ranks to see;

      To Sextus naught spake he.

      II ‘THE GROWTH OF A POET’S MIND’

      speak of them as Powers

      through the turnings intricate of verse

      powerful in all sentiments of grief

      Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows

      Imagination—here the Power so called

      III THE CYCLE OF SHAKESPEARE

      I

      II

      III

      IV

      V

      VI

      VII

      IV MILTON

      I

      O Father, O Supreme of heavenly Thrones,

      Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs,

      II

      As that Theban monster that proposed

      V WORDSWORTH

      sea-beast, that on a shelf

      to typify the utmost we can know

      VI THE CRISIS IN LESSER POETS

      Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

      Though the dull brain perplexes and retards

      From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees,

      Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze

      But the majestic River floated on,

      And faint the city gleams;

      Spring the great streams.

      VII CONCLUSION

      No hungry generations tread thee down;

      In ancient days by emperor and clown

      Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

      Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

      As ’tis for object strange and high;

      Upon Impossibility—

      I ask no more.

      APPENDIX CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS

      PREFACE

      Table of Contents

      The following essays are based on two convictions: (1) that Troilus and Cressida is of a great deal more importance in a study of Shakespeare than has generally been allowed, (2) that the central crisis of Troilus is in direct poetic relation to the culminating crisis in Wordsworth’s account of his own history in the Prelude. From these convictions I went on to consider whether that crisis had any parallels in the work of the other English poets, and whether it might, not unreasonably, be related to the Satan of Milton, compared with the Nightingale of Keats, and contrasted with the Lancelot of Tennyson. Upon this subject it would have been possible to write a book either of five hundred or of two hundred pages; I chose two hundred with equal reluctance and decision.

      I have called it the English Poetic Mind rather than the English Poetic Genius, because the word genius, in that context, might be supposed to have reference rather to ‘English’ than to ‘Poetic’; to allude to the feelings which (as Sir Arthur Quiller Couch has suggested) should be aroused in us when we stand by the tomb of the Black Prince in Canterbury Cathedral rather than to those which are aroused by the reading of Henry V. With the patriotism of Shakespeare and Milton and the rest I have nothing to do; only with their poetry. But to omit the geographical limitation altogether would have been too bold; the present title sounds more like the tentative suggestion which the book is meant to offer.

      Even so, all the English poets are not here: Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden, for example. I can only plead that two hundred pages are better than five hundred, and that to do more than is here done would have meant the five hundred: it would have had to be a full volume with notes and appendices and longer quotations and digressions and defences and explanations all complete. Aristotle on tragedy and De Quincey on power and Coleridge on poetry and everybody on Shakespeare and almost everybody on Keats would have had to come in. To the general critical intelligence of our own times I owe of course a profound debt, poorly as this study may seem to pay any of it; to the critical authority of the past a proper obedience. But on the central question of Troilus I am not conscious of owing any particular debt at all. Something of the possibility I tried to put into verse in my Myth of Shakespeare; it is here defined in prose.

      Of one fact I am a little proud. The suggestions made here are quite unexclusive. Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth may have been moved by any personal cause or aiming at any moral or metaphysical purpose conceivable—it does not matter, I have been concerned with the poetry only as it exists, and with its interrelation. Even the prose statements which the poets themselves made about their poetry are omitted. Criticism has done so much to illuminate the poets, and yet it seems, with a few exceptions, both of the past and the present, still not sufficiently to relate the poets to the poets, to explain poetry by poetry. Yet in the end what other criterion have we? Wordsworth’s poetry is vii likely to explain Shakespeare’s poetry much better than we can, because poetry is a thing sui generis. It explains itself by existing. There has been a great deal too much talking of what the poets mean. They also are mortal; they also express themselves badly sometimes; they also sometimes fail to discover quite finally the exact scope of their desire. We can enjoy ourselves talking about them, of course; the multitudinous printed chat of generations lies behind and around us. But criticism—is it being stupid to say that in the end the poets themselves must do that also for us? We know so little unless they tell us; we feel as they direct us; we are disordered and astray unless they govern us. Poetry is a good game—let us take it lightly. But it is also ‘liberty and power’—let us take it seriously. Ad maiorem poetarum gloriam—there is but one ascription more worthy than that, and in the tradition of Christendom it was amid a cloud of songs as well as of seraphs that the Divine Word accepted incarnation.

      C. W.

      I

      A NOTE ON GREAT POETRY

      Table of Contents

      The word ‘poetry’ is generally used in one of two senses. It either means the whole mass of amusing and delightful stuff written in verse, or it is restricted to those greater lines, stanzas, or poems which are comparatively rare even in the work of the great poets. There is no certain method of deciding on these last, except by personal experience (which is not quite reliable) or by authority—the judgement of sensitive readers over many years. There is no way of discovering how the thing is done, nor exactly how a great line produces its effect. But it is to some extent possible to see what the difference is between the lesser kind of verse and the greater.

      Wordsworth in the Prelude (1, 149-57), defines three things as necessary for the writing of poetry. They are (i) ‘the vital soul’, (ii) ‘general truths’, (iii) ‘external things—Forms, images’. With these possessions in himself he feels prepared for his own ‘arduous work’. The distinction exists for the reader as well. The third necessity (‘aids Of less regard’) is an obvious part of most poetry: it includes metaphors, similes, comparisons; even the story, and the persons in narrative or dramatic verse or the hypothetical speaker, the individual poet, in lyric. These things are ‘needful to build up a poet’s praise’, and at their most exquisite they play an important part in the whole. But the greatest poetry can exist without them. ‘A rose-red city, half as old as Time’ is a lovely line. It stops at being that.

      ‘General truths’—‘subordinate helpers of the living mind’—on the other hand, though more important, are less reliable aids: for they have a way of pretending to be the living mind, the ‘vital soul’ itself. Some of the poets—Longfellow, Tennyson, Wordsworth himself—appear occasionally to have thought they were writing poetry when they were merely communicating general truths, or what appeared to them to be so. The Excursion, as opposed to the Prelude, gives examples of this; although even the Excursion, if a reader will only accept the conditions it postulates, as he is ready to accept the plot of King Lear, may turn out to be a better poem than is often supposed. Perhaps, however, such a couplet as Hamlet’s yields the best example of general truths, which, adequately expressed, delight us almost as much by rational as by poetic strength—

      Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,

      Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

      But what then is the ‘vital soul’, without which the forms and images and general truths lack something? It is ‘genius’; it is ‘poetry’. But that takes us no farther. It cannot be merely the relation of labials and gutturals, or the play of stresses and pauses. These are, in another shape, the ‘forms and images’. It cannot be the diction—however exact or unexpected; that is but a general truth. All such things are ‘subordinate helpers of the living mind’, which must itself use them for its own purpose. What does that mind do in Hyperion which it does not do in Horatius? why is Pope a greater poet than Prior or Praed?

      Poetry, one way or another, is ‘about’ human experience; there is nothing else that it can be about. But to whatever particular human experience it alludes, it is not that experience. Love poetry is poetry, not love; patriotic poetry is poetry, not patriotism; religious poetry is poetry, not religion. But good poetry does something more than allude to its subject; it is related to it, and it relates us to it.

      Through the sad heart of Ruth when, sick for home,

      She stood in tears amid the alien corn:

      Table of Contents

      those lines relate us to an experience of exile. They awake in us a sense of exile; more accurately, a realization of our own capacity for enduring exile.

      Let this immortal life, where’er it comes,

      Walk in a cloud of loves and martyrdoms;

      that awakes in us—not certainly love and sacrifice, or love and sacrifice would be easier things than they seem to be. But it does awake a sense that we are capable of love and sacrifice. It reminds us of a certain experience, and by its style it awakes a certain faculty for that experience. We are told of a thing; we are made to feel as if that thing were possible to us; and we are so made to feel it—whatever the thing may be, joy or despair or what not—that our knowledge is an intense satisfaction to us; and this knowledge and this satisfaction are for some period of time complete and final; and this knowledge, satisfaction, and finality are all conveyed through the medium of words, the concord of which is itself a delight to the senses. This sensuous apprehension of our satisfied capacities for some experience or other is poetry of the finest kind.

      Lesser verse does not do so much. It may remind us that we have some capacity or other, but it does not communicate a delighted sense of it, nor therefore can it join that sense to the equally delighted sense of words. The Armada is, in its way, an exciting and pleasing piece of writing. But it does not arouse in us a sense of our capacity for staunch patriotism; it excites by reminding us that there is a capacity for staunch patriotism.

      Bolingbroke in Richard II talks very beautifully about exile. But we are much more inclined to think as we read, ‘That is how I should like to talk if I were ever exiled’; we are reminded of our capacity for beautifully expressing our grief at exile rather than of our capacity for suffering exile—that is with Ruth more than with Bolingbroke. Horatius confronting Lars Porsena, FitzJames confronting Roderick Dhu, do not convey a sense of man’s capacity for heroism; they at most remind us that man has a capacity for heroism.

      Round turned he, as not deigning

      Those heathen ranks to see;

      Table of Contents

      Naught spake he to Lars Porsena,

      To Sextus naught spake he.

      Table of Contents

      How jolly to behave like that! The pretence of such behaviour is agreeably invoked by those admirable lines. For they are, in their degree, admirable; it is another, and a moral, question how far we allow them to deceive us: they do not try to. They thrill us, and thrills are good, only one cannot live by thrills. But

      So spake the Seraph Abdiel, faithful found,

      Among the faithless faithful only he;

      Among innumerable false unmoved,

      Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified.

      It would not be so easy to behave like that. Our capacity for heroism is stirred—or at least our desire for, our recognition of, that capacity. But can we desire or recognize something of which we are entirely incapable? ‘Hadst thou not found me, thou couldst not be seeking me’, said Christ to one of the mystics; and the same thing is true of the faculties awakened by poetry.

      Certainly this awakening, this communication, is rather a result than a motive. Tolstoy declared that art existed wherever there was a conscious communication of emotion. Tolstoy was a great man and a great novelist; but we must not stress that admirable definition as if the poet primarily, in the very definition of his work, demanded an audience. If it is so, then our sensation that the great things of poetry exist purely and simply in their own right, and independently of man, is false. It may be; sensations are doubtful things and prove nothing unless we choose that they shall. But, putting that choice aside, it is surely true that the chief impulse of a poet is, not to communicate a thing to others, but to shape a thing, to make an immortality for its own sake. He often writes from other motives, no doubt; Pope probably wished to communicate his emotions about Addison, and Shelley his about the death of Keats. But did Keats really want first of all to communicate his emotions about a Nightingale? or Shakespeare his about Macbeth? Did Shakespeare primarily want to make us feel what a murderer’s heart was like? It is inconceivable; he primarily wanted that heart to be.

      Certainly if no one, no one ever, reads a poet, if no one cares for him, he may leave off writing. But that is the weakness of his nature, as Milton said. Fame is ‘the last infirmity of noble mind’. Infirmity. But a poet might be content to communicate anonymously? Even so, he wants his work to produce a social effect. Does the poet, qua poet, care whether his work has a social effect? Incredibile; nec crediderim nisi Tolstoy—and not even then.

      But, leaving this dispute and returning to the nature of poetry, we come to a further division. If it is true that the minor poets describe heroism or love or exile or what not, and the major poets arouse in us an actual sense of our own faculties for heroism and love and exile, what of the greatest? If the Marlowes are greater than the Macaulays, why are the Miltons greater still? What is it that makes us instinctively introduce the idea of relative values?

      In so far as the poets can be hierarchized, it can only be done by two classifications (i) quantity, (ii) quality. The smallest poet who has written one good line—say, Dean Burgon, with his ‘rose-red city’—is, so far, equal to any other poet who has written a good line—even Shakespeare. He arouses in us a capacity of enjoying a particular picture, by placing a picture before us which we do actually enjoy. It is delightful to have such a thing in our minds—and that is that. We are obliged—deeply obliged—by the Dean, but if he can only provide us with one picture whereas some other poet can provide us with twenty, we must regard the second poet as more important for us; unless we have a peculiar passion for rose-red cities.

      But quality is more important, and the question of quality very soon becomes a question of complexity. Of the development of that poetic complexity this book is meant to be a small consideration, and there is no need to forestall it here. The rose-red city becomes inhabited by human emotions, and its poetry disappears under the stress of theirs. In turn the single poignant utterances give place to lines which sum up states of involved experience. Such lines may in themselves appear to draw nearer to or to pass farther from the complexity which they describe. But either way they are aware of it, whether in increase or decrease. The decrease is a decrease from something that has been. Neither increase nor decrease is better than the other; they are merely two poetic methods of dealing with very profound and almost universal apprehensions of our faculties of experience. ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile’ is a very great and complex line; it has two worlds of experience in it; it calls up the whole idea of, the whole of our capacity for, felicity only to meet it with

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1