Tell Me What You Really Think

James Reeves published A Short History of English Poetry in 1961, and boy is it fun to read, if you like nastiness, especially that unique nastiness about poetry that only a practicing poet can muster. In today’s academic literary criticism, filling the pristine pages of selective journals, interpretation is the aim, and that aim takes lexical priority over evaluation—if, indeed, any evaluation is offered at all. For Reeves, it’s the delicious opposite. He tells us what’s bad and he tells us what’s good, and rarely bothers with what the poems mean.

Fast forward to chapter 10. The discussion of Romanticism starts off with a bang, a rare moment of adulation: William Blake

was a poet of the purest inspiration, at once a man and a visionary. There is about his best lyrics a rightness of tone and feeling, an inevitability of rhythm and language which give them a kind of authenticity, even authority, that we accept without question.

This judgment itself, we are to accept without question. Indeed the whole book is a display of what you can get away with, if you are free to assert and not defend.

Reeves isn’t done with Blake’s importance:

There are times in the history of society when accepted ideas and forms have become rigid and stale, and when the only possibility of new growth lies in the capacity of gifted individuals to renew the contact between the human mind and the primary sources of experience.

Rigid and stale, that’s surely right, but come on, does the human mind ever lose contact with the primary sources of experience? Aren’t those sources impinging on all of us at every moment, yea even on me right now, as I type away?

Wordsworth and Coleridge also come in for praise, but fainter praise—Reeves admits that they “transformed English poetry”; and Coleridge, we are told, “was at no time a great technical innovator, but he had a superb ear.” Nothing like the praise reserved for Blake. It’s much the same with Shelley and Keats.

And it’s at this point that the awesome negativity comes full to the fore. Regarding Byron,

It is doubtful if even his most fervent admirer today would accord him a fraction of the praise lavished on him during the last ten years of his short life.

His poetry is

the sort of intoxicating stuff which easily persuades immature or undiscriminating minds that they are enjoying fine poetry.

O ye undiscriminating minds! Of Elizabeth Barrett (Browning) Reeves writes, with off-putting and sexist condescension,

It is difficult to see what [Robert] Browning or the larger reading public saw in Miss Barrett’s undistinguished verse.

Matthew Arnold

had neither great originality nor great creative strength; his imagery is not forceful and his technical accomplishment is uneven.

And regarding Tennyson,

After reading, say, Enoch Arden or Tithonus, one feels like asking what all the fuss is about. A great deal of technical mastery has been called into play for the illustration or demonstration of an idea or a truth which seems comparatively trite or unimpressive.

Tennyson is using a language that is neither the speech of his day nor any other recognisable idiom, but a hotch-potch of vaguely impressive phrases.

Most damningly,

Tennyson never surprises us.

Reader, Tennyson’s “Ulysses” may be the greatest dramatic monologue ever written.

What about that other pillar of Victorian verse, Robert Browning? Well, Reeves does not think his only defect was admiring his future-wife’s poems. Indeed, “we”

care nothing for Browning’s metaphysics, his ethics, his aesthetics. We find his psychology superficial, his history amateurish.

At least we have Swinburne? Here Reeves really winds it up:

In Swinburne we have Romanticism gone to seed: instead of sincerely felt emotion, there is a whipping-up of spurious passion; instead of a picturesque but concrete diction enriched by objective personal observation, there is a sort of frothy exuberance of words and rhythm for their own sake, the language encrusted with archaism and alliteration, the rhythm breathless and unremitting.

I admit to also hating the “encrusted archaism” of Victorian verse, all those “thee”s and “thou”s that departed actual human speech generations earlier, but are kept on life-support in this hermetic tradition. But, not content with some decent points, Reeves twists the knife deeper:

Whenever [in times to come] an interest is shown in the rhetorical resources of the English language, as nearly as possible emptied of all intellectual substance, there may be a revival of Swinburne’s popularity.

Of course I am an American, and prepared to survey the decline of British verse with a certain disinterestedness. On this side of the water, in this then-bold and expanding nation, 19th century poetry must have showed more signs of life? But Reeves himself was British, so don’t hold your breath for a shift in tone:

Too often [Edgar Allen Poe’s] work is vulgarised by tinkling rhymes and jingling rhythms.

It is very easy to be exasperated by the noisy egotism of Whitman’s free verse, and by its aggressive flouting of literary decorum.

Insulting Whitman! The Patriots will reach for their guns. (I admit to not loving Whitman myself, though not because I prefer my decorum unflouted.)

At this point the reader may wonder whether Reeves even likes poetry. Was verse in the 19th century really such a spotty affair? Could it be, instead, that there is something off with Reeves’ judgements of taste? I think the answer is a bit of both. The taste side of the equation is complicated. There’s good taste, and there’s bad taste, but not all good taste is the same. Reeves does correctly identify the two best poets of the later 19th century, the two we have most to learn from today: Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Emily Dickinson. And maybe a poet needs to hate most of what came before, and to have a taste in poetry oblique to anyone else’s, in order to justify writing more of the stuff. The “anxiety of Influence” and all that. I am not unsusceptible to this mood myself.

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See also: Winters Wields his Cudgel.