Sri Aurobindo. Sketch of the Progress of Poetry from Thomson to Wordsworth // Early Cultural Writings (1890-1910)

Sri Aurobindo

Early Cultural Writings

(1890 — 1910)

Part Two. On Literature
On Poetry and Literature

Sketch of the Progress of Poetry from Thomson to Wordsworth

The Age of transition from the poetry of Pope to that of Wordsworth begins strictly speaking with Thomson. This transition was not an orderly and consistent development, but consisted of different groups of poets or sometimes even single poets each of whom made a departure in some particular direction which was not followed up by his or their successors. The poetry of the time has the appearance of a number of loose and disconnected threads abruptly broken off in the middle. It was only in the period from 1798 to 1830 that these threads were gathered together and a definite, consistent tendency imparted to poetry. It was an age of tentatives and for the most part of failures. Meanwhile the main current of verse up till 1798 followed the direction given it by Pope only slightly modified by the greater and more original writers.

These different groups of writers may be thus divided. (1) The school of natural description and elegiac moralising, consisting of Thomson, Dyer, Green, Young and other inferior writers. (2) The school of Miltonic Hellenists, begun by Warton and consisting besides of Gray, Collins, Akenside and a number of followers. (3) The school of Johnson, Goldsmith and Churchill, who continued the eighteenth-century style tho’ some of them tried to infuse it with emotion, directness and¹ greater simplicity. To this school belong the minor writers who formed the main current of verse during the time; of whom Erasmus Darwin and Gifford are the only notable ones. (4) The school of country life and the simpler feelings, consisting of Cowper and Crabbe. (5) The school of romantic poets and restorers of mediaevalism, consisting of Chatterton, Macpherson and Percy. (6) The Scotch lyric poets of whom Ferguson and Burns are the head. (7) William Blake standing by himself as a romantic, mystical and lyric poet. Besides these there are two writers who cannot be classed, Smart and Beattie. Last come the first nineteenth-century poets, who published their earliest work in 1798 – 1800, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Landor and Campbell.

School of Natural Description

The first to break away from Pope were Thomson and Dyer. The original departures made by their school were as follows. (1) In subject-matter an almost exclusive devotion of their poetry to the description of natural objects and natural scenery. In dealing with human emotion or human life they are generally even more incapable than the Pope school. There is beside a tendency to force poetry to the service of the most unpoetical subjects, Armstrong writing in verse of the Art of Medicine, Dyer of Agriculture and Thomson of jail reform. On the other hand Satire is less practised or even abandoned. (2) In language, the discarding of the idea of wit as the basis of poetry; there is no straining for wit and cleverness, but its place is taken by a pseudo-Miltonic eloquence or an attempt at Miltonic imaginativeness. The influence of Milton is paramount in these writers. (3) In metre an almost entire abandonment of the heroic couplet and the return to old metres, especially blank verse, the Spenserian stanza and the octosyllabic couplet as used by the later Elizabethans. The main influences of this school on future poetry are (1st) the habit of describing Nature for its own sake (2) the Thomsonian form of blank verse which was afterwards adopted by Cowper and Wordsworth and improved by Shelley (3) the use of the Spenserian stanza in narrative poetry (4) the sense for antiquity and for the picturesque as regards ruins (5) the habit of moralising on subjects of general human interest as opposed to those which concern towns and highly civilized society only.

The Thomsonian school however broke off suddenly about the middle of the century and was replaced by the school of Gray.

An² attempt is made to reintroduce emotion and a more general appeal to all humanity, in the form of elegiac moralizing³ on the subjects of death and decay, as shown in Dyer’s Ruins of Rome and Young’s Night Thoughts.

School of Gray

There are considerable differences between Gray, Collins and Akenside, who are the chief representatives of the school, but they all resemble each other in certain main tendencies. The general aim of all seems to have been to return to the Miltonic style of writing while preserving the regularity and correctness of the eighteenth-century style. They attempted in other words to substitute the true classical style of writing for the pseudoclassical. By classical poetry is meant verse which with entire correctness and perfection of form, i.e. of metre and language and a careful observance of restraint, i.e.⁴ to say avoidance of that extravagance and excess which injure the work of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, unites a high imagination and deep emotion. This is the character of Milton’s poetry, which is based upon Greek and Latin models. Pope and his school aimed at correctness and restraint without high imagination and deep emotion; their poetry is therefore not really classical. Gray, Collins and Akenside endeavoured by study of Milton and the Greek writers to recover the true classical style. They were however all greatly hampered by the traditions of eighteenth-century poetry and none of them quite succeeded.

Besides this similarity in general aim, there are several particular resemblances. 1st in metre. They all avoided the heroic couplet. Collins’ Persian Eclogues, the work of his youth, and a few of Gray’s fragments are in this metre, but in their mature and accomplished work it is not represented. Akenside wrote either in blank verse or in lyrical metres. Secondly Gray and Collins are the restorers of the English lyric; since the reign of Charles II no one had written any even decently good lyrics, if a few of Gay’s and Prior’s are excepted, until this school appeared. The only form of lyric however which the three writers tried were Odes, which is the most stately and the least lyrical of lyrical forms; i.e. the true lyrical stanza is always short and simple so as to express particular emotion freely and naturally; the stanza of an Ode is long and elaborate and expresses properly high and broad, not intense emotion⁵. This restriction to the statelier lyrical forms partly results from the attempt at classical dignity. But the Augustan tradition of smooth and regular verse has also hampered the writers; the cadences are not managed with sufficient subtlety and the infinitely varied and flexible verse of Shakespeare and Milton has remained beyond their reach. Their verse at its best is on the second plane, not on the first; it shows however a great advance in freedom and variety on that of the Augustans.

2d in language. The aim of all three is at an elevated style of language, a diction more or less Miltonic. Here again none of them are successful. Akenside’s elevation is mainly rhetorical, rarely, at his best, as in the Hymn to the Naiads, it is poetical; there he almost catches something of the true Miltonic tone; Gray’s is marked by nobleness, strength, much real sublimity, but he is often betrayed into rhetoric tho’ even then more vigorous than Akenside’s and the Augustan love of epigram and antithesis often spoil his work; Collins’ elevation tho’ free from these faults is usually wanting in power. There is to some extent in Collins and still more in Gray a tendency to what the eighteenth century thought noble language, to the avoidance of simple and common words and phrases as below the dignity of poetry.

On⁶ the other hand their language is mainly imaginative and not drily intellectual like Augustan⁷ language.

3d in subject-matter. It was in this that there was the farthest departure from the eighteenth century. All the poets have a tendency to dwell on rural life and rural scenes; all turn away from town life. Both Gray and Collins, so far as they deal with Nature, deal with it in a really poetical manner, but unlike the Thomsonian school, they have not described Nature for the sake of describing it but only in connection with the thoughts or feelings suggested by it. The one exception to this is Collins’ Ode to Evening. There is also an attempt to reintroduce the supernatural into poetry. This is partly done by carrying the eighteenth-century habit of personification to an almost ridiculous extreme, but more successfully by dwelling like Milton on the images of Greek mythology, as in the Hymn to the Naiads, or Gray’s earlier poems, especially the Progress of Poesy; also by dwelling on the ideas of the Celtic romantic fancy, such as ghosts, fairies, spirits as in Gray’s Bard and Collins’ Ode or of Norwegian mythology as in Gray’s translations from the Norse. This impulse towards the supernatural is extremely marked in Gray and finds its way even into his humorous poems; and tho’⁸ less prominent in Collins, it was sufficient to offend Johnson, the chief critic of the Pope school, who especially animadverts on it in his life of Collins and his remarks on Gray’s sister Odes. Again they tried to deal with human emotion but there also they were hampered by the Augustan tradition. They deal with it rather in an abstract than a direct manner; Collins’ Ode on the Passions is the main instance of this abstract handling of emotion which is peculiar to the school. In the same spirit they dealt with high and general feelings, especially the love of Liberty, which inspires Collins’ Ode to Liberty, Gray’s Bard and Progress of Poesy, and much of Akenside’s writing. It is noticeable that Collins was a republican, Akenside had republican sympathies and Gray was a pronounced Whig. Over the personal emotions Collins and Akenside had no mastery, and Gray only shows it occasionally as in the Elegy and then only over the most general of all of them, the love of life and the melancholy feelings attending death.

(4) In spirit, the school departed from the critical, didactic and satiric tendency of eighteenth-century poetry; so far as their poetry teaches or criticises it is with some exceptions in the indirect, incidental and emotional manner proper to poetry. Even Akenside who wrote on a philosophical theme aimed at teaching poetically, tho’ he did not succeed. Their poetry is inspired not by intellect and reason, but by imagination and feeling. On the other hand it must be noticed that their ideas and sentiments are always obvious and on the surface like those of the Pope school and the feeling that inspires their poetry, tho’ not false, is not very deep; Collins and Akenside are extremely cold compared with poets of other periods and Gray is rather enthusiastic or at his best sublime than impassioned.

It⁹ was perhaps partly as a result of this that none of these poets was able to write much or to write long poems; Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination is the only exception and that is a failure.

(5) It was in the influences which governed their poetry that this school departed most radically from Pope. They rejected French influence altogether and were little influenced by the inferior Latin poets; they were above all things Hellenists, lovers and followers of Greek literature; the English poet who influenced them most was Milton whom Johnson considers to be rough in his verse and language; Gray even declared the diction of Shakespeare to be the true poetic diction. Besides this they opened new fields of interest. Collins took an interest [in] late mediaeval history and literature and Gray was the first Englishman of eminence who studied the Norse language or interested himself in Welsh literature or was a competent and appreciative critic of Gothic architecture.

The Thomsonian school had a little but only a little influence on that of Gray. The Elegy carries to its highest point of perfection the vein of elegiac moralising started by Young and Dyer, Collins’ Ode to Evening is a study of Nature as faithful but more sympathetic and imaginative than Thomson’s descriptions; and his Ode on Popular Superstitions¹⁰ recalls several passages in the Seasons; but this is practically all.

The influences of Gray’s school on future poetry consist mainly in (1) the first attempt to handle Nature in a new poetic fashion afterwards perfected by Wordsworth, (2) the reintroduction of the supernatural influencing all subsequent writers but mainly Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, (3) the introduction of Hellenism into poetry, carried out by Keats and Shelley and (4) the restoration of the lyric and especially the Ode form, which became a favourite one in the early nineteenth century and of the general subjects suited to the Ode form.

Later Augustan School

The Gray school exhausted itself almost as quickly as the Thomsonian school. It was followed by a reaction in favour of the eighteenth-century ideal. This movement had been already anticipated by Johnson who wrote contemporaneously with Gray and even with Thomson. It was now taken up by Goldsmith, carried on by Churchill and culminated in Erasmus Darwin.

Johnson and Goldsmith returned to the ideals of Pope, they violently opposed and disparaged Gray, they kept to the use of the heroic couplet and conventional language, to the narrowness of culture and to the exclusion of all that does not square with or proceed from the reason and intellect; their characteristics are broadly the same as the Pope school’s, but there is a difference which shows that the dryness of this school could no longer satisfy the mind. In Johnson at least in his Vanity of Wishes¹¹ there is a far deeper and wider tone of thought and feeling and a far greater sincerity; tho’ the style is so different, the tone is almost the same as that of Gray’s Elegy; in fact in tone and subject-matter it belongs to the same type of elegiac moralizing¹² as the Elegy and the Night Thoughts. Goldsmith carried this departure in tone from Pope yet farther; he wrote what were professedly didactic poems, but instead of teaching by satirical portraits [and] epigrammatic maxims, he tried to do it by touching the feelings and drawing portraits full of humour rather than wit, of natural truth and pathos rather than cleverness and eloquence. While not touching subjects of general appeal like Johnson and Gray, he goes more widely afield than Pope, dealing with foreign countries in the Traveller, with the rural life of an Irish village in the Deserted Village. [There is a sort of natural lyrical power in Goldsmith which is always breaking through the restraints of the mechanical metre and style he chose to adopt.]¹³ Churchill reverted to Pope far more than either Goldsmith or Johnson; he is purely satirical and has neither Goldsmith’s feeling and sweetness nor Johnson’s depth and strength; he is hardly a poet at all, but he also helped the disintegration of the eighteenth-century style by a complete abandonment of Pope’s elaborate and rhetorical art, which he attempted to replace by a rude and direct vigour. Lastly Erasmus Darwin took the exact model of Pope’s style, not only the metre and language but the very construction and balance of his sentences and reduced this and the didactic spirit to absurdity by trying to invest with poetical pomp of style and imagery a treatise on botany. This school may be considered as an attempt in various directions to make the eighteenth-century style compatible with the new impulses in poetry, the impulses towards sincerity on the one hand and sublimity on the other. In the poetry of Darwin this attempt finally breaks down. No poet of eminence except Byron afterwards attempted the style. Besides these four writers however there was a crowd of versifiers, of whom only Gifford need be named, who went on making feeble copies of Pope right into the nineteenth century.