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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2024
It will have been noticed that the title of my paper is a timid one; even, it may be thought, excessively so. There are two reasons for this; and the first, which would alone, in my opinion, be a sufficient one, is that the questions raised by the phrase ‘Poetry and Belief’ are difficult ones, intimately involved in all discussion of the nature and function of poetry, and ones which have become especially problematic in our century. It is, I think, true enough to say that in the form in which they particularly concern us as Catholics, these questions begin to emerge fully with Matthew Arnold: they at any rate reach explicitness and are given very serious attention in the work of Dr I. A. Richards and Mr T. S. Eliot; without clear agreement being arrived at by those two critics—the most influential and, by and large, the most arresting and convincing critical theorists of our time.
If further reason for my timidity be thought necessary I shall only add that it is warranted by the way in which this paper has come about—and this I offer too as a declaration that what follows makes claim neither to scholarly exhaustiveness nor to formal completeness. I shall, in fact, be putting before you some questions rather than presenting you with any answers.
I have brought together five poems or passages from poems: and these you now have before you. They certainly raise the question of the place, the effect, of Belief (as we must understand it here), and show a significant variety, possibly a sufficient variety, of ways in which it may be raised.
1 In its present form this paper (which was originally given at a ‘Literary Weekend’ at Spode House, Hawkesyard Priory) has been enlarged by footnotes incorporating additional points or clarifications originally held in reserve for the subsequent discussion. They are now added whether they did nor did not arise in the discussion.
2 Catholic belief, of course, but in so far as it is Belief and not something else consequent on Belief (say, a familiarity with a certain ritual or a range of symbolism); not in so far as it is Catholic.
3 Certainly worth examining would be Swinburne’s ‘Before a Crucifix’, Clough‘s ‘Easter Day–Naples, 1849’, Baudelaire’s ‘Le Reniement de Saint Pierre’, part of ‘In Memoriam’; and in connection with effects of detail merely consequent on Belief (v. previous footnote), much imagery in Francis Thompson’s ‘Orient Ode’ and Hopkins’s ‘Wreck of the Deutschland’.
4 In this and in subsequent quotations an asterisk signifies my italics.
5 Its statements being what Richards calls ‘pseudo-statements’ as opposed to scientific verifiable ones. See later.
6 In the world of literary criticism, that is.
7 This is not the non sequitur it may seem. It is in the absence of concreteness, objectification, realization, that emotionalism readily flows in. Here the essential concreteness is in the theological or partisan assertion: for the unconvinced it is ineffectual, for the convinced it is already formed, or ‘stock’ (to use Richards‘s word).
8 Reproduced by kind permission of the author from Soldiers Bathing, by F. T. Prince (The Fortune Press, 1954).
9 See Note 7 and Section III.
10 And in connection with which the interest attached to our knowing that such-and-such a great man, of known personality and character, etc., thought and felt it, cannot exist. This poem is used with the permission of Mr J. S. Cunningham, its author.
11 Performance is different again: and the actor has his technique interposed between himself and his performance.
12 Though not the question of morality. (And see also Note 2.)
13 In ‘you will believe in Dante’s theology exactly as you believe in the physical reality of his journey’—which lets in ‘pseudo-statements’ for the beliefs incorporated as for the ‘fiction’ of the journey and thereby contradicts his dislike of the ‘pseudo-statement’ theory. The crucial confusion lies behind the merely verbal identity of ‘believe in’ (Dante’s theology) with ‘believe in’ (the reality of the journey).
14 Specimens (a) and (e) show that where the belief is what the poem is fashioned to real ‘intellectual belief’ is challenged.
15 There is, of course, a distinction necessary between fact and fiction, but entailing neither what Dr Richards fears nor what he proposes.
16 This has two bearings: (a) If ‘non-Catholic’ poetry is not ipso facto unacceptable, ‘Catholic’ poetry is not ipso facto acceptable; (b) If(as I think my specimens demonstrate), even though the material of a poem is intellectual material, the experience is peculiarly an emotional one, then the nature of the emotional activity must be the primary object of scrutiny; and this, of course, leaves our criticism rooted in morals after all, but morals more delicately, subtly, obliquely operative than in the familiar more or less unadapted application of the Creed and a few Commandments. Such scrutiny, however, will at all points be a matter for the whole of our sensibility and judgment, will at all points be responsible to our whole nature.
17 The view here expressed is derived from my own impressions of my own reading experience; but it will be evident that the view involves a theory of poetry and of language in no way novel: see, for instance, R. G. Collingwood’s Philosophy of Art, with the principles of which it is in considerable agreement, I believe. See, too, M. Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism (1930) and Creative Art and Intuition (1953). For a critique of Richards as a Positivist, and of influential trends in Semiotics, see Mr Allen Tate’s ‘Literature as Knowledge’ (1941) in his The Man of Letters in the Modern World (1955).
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