Eliot's main target in 'The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism' is Matthew Arnold's view (echoed by I. A. Richards) that poetry ought to be a substitute for religious faith. To summarise crudely, Eliot seems to offer two main arguments against Arnold. Firstly, following Jacques Maritain, he claims that Arnold's attitude leads one to expect too much from poetry, engendering arrogance in the poet, and mystical extravagance in the poetry, instead of classical restraint. Second, he thinks Arnold fails to consider that religious poetry is at its best when it has a background in a genuine, stable religion (like Eliot's Church of England). Such a background not only provides a proper religious context for any spiritual nourishment the poetry provides, but also gives the religious poet more room to focus on the formal excellence of his poetry. In sum Eliot claims that Arnold's view leads to bad poetry, and bad religion.
Though I find Eliot's overall case to be powerful, these explicit arguments seem to me rather weak. On the issue of formal excellence, one can respond by pointing out that even if Arnoldian poetry is at risk of tending toward extravagance, this surely leaves open the possibility of good Arnoldian poets who write formally excellent verse with the appropriate restraint. Indeed, one of the cornerstones of the post-Eliot critical defence of romanticism is that the romantics were good Arnoldian poets - avant la lettre - in precisely this sense. On the issue of spiritual nourishment, on the other hand, Eliot simply begs the question against the Arnoldian, who is interested in a substitute for religious faith precisely because he no longer wants to be embedded in a Church of any kind. Arnoldian poetry may indeed be the worse, in nutritional terms, for operating in a spiritual void, but for most of us that void is one from which there is no escape.
No comments:
Post a Comment