00035--What is a Tragedy? What are the characteristics of a good tragedy? Historical formation of Tragedy. What are the elements of a Tragedy? How does Aristotle define aTragedy?

                        

The term is broadly applied to literary, and especially to dramatic, representations of serious actions which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist (the chief character).

More precise and detailed discussions of the tragic form properly begin—although they should not end—with Aristotle's classic analysis in the Poetics (fourth century B.C.). Aristotle based his theory on induction from the only examples available to him, the tragedies of Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

In the subsequent two thousand years and more, many new and artistically effective types of serious plots ending in a catastrophe have been developed—types that Aristotle had no way of foreseeing. The many attempts to stretch Aristotle's analysis to apply to later tragic forms serve merely to blur his critical categories and to obscure important differences among diverse types of plays, all of which have proved to be dramatically effective. When flexibly managed, however, Aristotle's discussions apply in some part to many tragic plots, and his analytic concepts serve as a suggestive starting point for identifying the differentiae of various non-Aristotelian modes of tragic construction.

 

Aristotle defined tragedy as "the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself," in the medium of poetic language and in the manner of dramatic rather than of narrative presentation, involving "incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such emotions." Precisely how to interpret Aristotle's catharsis—which in Greek signifies "purgation," or "purification," or both—is much disputed. On two matters, however, a number of commentators agree. Aristotle in the first place sets out to account for the undeniable, though remarkable, fact that many tragic representations of suffering and defeat leave an audience feeling not depressed, but relieved, or even exalted. In the second place, Aristotle uses this distinctive effect on the reader, which he calls "the pleasure of pity and fear," as the basic way to distinguish the tragic from comic or other forms, and he regards the dramatist's aim to produce this effect in the highest degree as the principle that determines the choice and moral qualities of a tragic protagonist and the organization of the tragic plot.

Accordingly, Aristotle says that the tragic hero will most effectively evoke both our pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both; and also that this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is "better than we are," in the sense that he is of higher than ordinary moral worth. Such a man is exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of his mistaken choice of an action, to which he is led by his hamartia—his "error of judgment" or, as it is often though less literally translated, his tragic flaw. (One common form of hamartia in Greek tragedies was hubris, that "pride" or overweening self-confidence which leads a protagonist to disregard a divine warning or to violate an important moral law.) The tragic hero, like Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, moves us to pity because, since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves; but he moves us also to fear, because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and fallible selves. Aristotle grounds his analysis of "the very structure and incidents of the play" on the same principle; the plot, he says, which will most effectively evoke "tragic pity and fear" is one in which the events develop through complication to a catastrophe in which there occurs (often by an anagnorisis, or discovery of facts hitherto unknown to the hero) a sudden peripeteia, or reversal in his fortune from happiness to disaster.

Authors in the Middle Ages lacked direct knowledge either of classical tragedies or of Aristotle's Poetics. Medieval tragedies are simply the story of a person of high status who, whether deservedly or not, is brought from prosperity to wretchedness by an unpredictable turn of the wheel of fortune. The short narratives in "The Monk's Tale" of The Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth century) are all, in Chaucer's own term, "tragedies" of this kind. With the Elizabethan era came both the beginning and the acme of dramatic tragedy in England. The tragedies of this period owed much to the native religious drama, the miracle and morality plays, which had developed independently of classical influence, but with a crucial contribution from the Roman writer Seneca (first century), whose dramas got to be widely known earlier than those of the Greek tragedians.

Senecan tragedy was written to be recited rather than acted; but to English playwrights, who thought that these tragedies had been intended for the stage, they provided the model for an organized five-act play with a complex plot and an elaborately formal style of dialogue. Senecan drama, in the Elizabethan Age, had two main lines of development. One of these consisted of academic tragedies written in close imitation of the Senecan model, including the use of a chorus, and usually constructed according to the rules of the three unities, which had been elaborated by Italian critics of the sixteenth century; the earliest English example was Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton's Gorboduc (1562). The other and much more important development was written for the popular stage, and is called the revenge tragedy, or (in its most sensational form) the tragedy of blood. This type of play derived from Seneca's favorite materials of murder, revenge, ghosts, mutilation, and carnage, but while Seneca had relegated such matters to long reports of offstage actions by messengers, the Elizabethan writers usually represented them on stage to satisfy the appetite of the contemporary audience for violence and horror. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1586) established this popular form; its subject is a murder and the quest for vengeance, and it includes a ghost, insanity, suicide, a play-within-a-play, sensational incidents, and a gruesomely bloody ending. Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (c. 1592) and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (c. 1590) are in this mode; and from this lively but unlikely prototype came one of the greatest of tragedies, Hamlet, as well as John Webster's fine horror plays of 1612-13, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil.

Many major tragedies in the brief flowering time between 1585 and 1625, by Marlowe, Shakespeare, George Chapman, Webster, Sir Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger, deviate radically from the Aristotelian norm. Shakespeare's Othello is one of the few plays which accords closely with Aristotle's basic concepts of the tragic hero and plot. The hero of Macbeth, however, is not a good man who commits a tragic error, but an ambitious man who knowingly turns great gifts to evil purposes and therefore, although he retains something of our sympathy by his courage and selfinsight, deserves his destruction at the hands of his morally superior antagonists.

Shakespeare's Richard III presents first the success, then the ruin, of a protagonist who is thoroughly malign, yet arouses in us a reluctant admiration by his intelligence and imaginative power and by the shameless candor with which he glories in his ambition and malice. Most Shakespearean tragedies, like Elizabethan tragedies generally, also depart from Aristotle's paradigm by introducing humorous characters, incidents, or scenes, called comic relief which were in various ways and degrees made relevant to the tragic plot. There developed also in this age the mixed mode called tragicomedy, a popular non-Aristotelian form which produced a number of artistic successes. And later in the seventeenth century the Restoration Period produced the curious genre, a cross between epic and tragedy, called heroic tragedy.

Until the close of the seventeenth century almost all tragedies were written in verse and had as protagonists men of high rank whose fate affected the fortunes of a state. A few minor Elizabethan tragedies, such as A Yorkshire Tragedy (of uncertain authorship), had as the chief character a man of the lower class, but it remained for eighteenth-century writers to popularize the bourgeois or domestic tragedy, which was written in prose and presented a protagonist from the middle or lower social ranks who suffers a commonplace or domestic disaster. George Lillo's The London Merchant: or, The History of George Barnwell (1731), about a merchant's apprentice who succumbs to a heartless courtesan and comes to a bad end by robbing his employer and murdering his uncle, is still read, at least in college courses.

Since that time most successful tragedies have been in prose and represent middle-class, or occasionally even working-class, heroes and heroines. The great and highly influential Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote in the latter nineteenth century tragedies in prose, many of which (such as A Dolls House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People) revolve around an issue of general social or political significance. One of the more notable modern tragedies, Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman (1949), relies for its tragic seriousness on the degree to which Willy Loman, in his bewildered defeat by life, is representative of the ordinary man whose aspirations reflect the false values of a commercial society; the effect on the audience is one of compassionate understanding rather than of tragic pity and terror. The protagonists of some recent tragedies are not heroic but antiheroic, in that they manifest a character that is at an extreme from the dignity and courage of the protagonists in traditional dramas while in some recent works, tragic effects involve elements that were once specific to the genre of farce.

Tragedy since World War I has also been innovative in other ways, including experimentation with new versions of ancient types. Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), for example, is an adaptation of Aeschylus' Oresteia, with the locale shifted from Greece to New England, the poetry altered to rather flat prose, and the tragedy of fate converted into a tragedy of the psychological compulsions of a family trapped in a tangle of Freudian complexes . T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935) is tragic drama which, like Greek tragedy, is written in verse and has a chorus, but also incorporates elements of two early Christian forms, the medieval miracle play (dealing with the martyrdom of a saint) and the medieval morality play. A recent tendency, especially in the critics associated with the new historicism, has been to interpret traditional tragedies primarily in political terms, as incorporating in the problems and catastrophe of the tragic individual an indirect representation of contemporary social or ideological dilemmas and crises.

00004--Catharsis, Aristotle

Catharsis is the the effect of' purgation' or 'purification' achieved by tragic drama, according to Aristotle's argument in his Poetics. Aristotle wrote that a TRAGEDY should succeed 'in arousing pity and fear in such a way as to accomplish a catharsis of such emotions'. There has been much dispute about his meaning, but Aristotle seems to be rejecting Plato's hostile view of poetry as an unhealthy emotional stimulant. His metaphor of emotional cleansing has been read as a solution to the puzzle of audiences' pleasure or relief in witnessing the disturbing events enacted in tragedies. Another interpretation is that it is the PROTAGONIST'S guilt that is purged, rather than the audience's feeling of terror. Adjective: cathartic.

Precisely how to interpret Aristotle's catharsis—which in Greek signifies "purgation," or "purification," or both—is much disputed. On two matters, however, a number of commentators agree. Aristotle in the first place sets out to account for the undeniable, though remarkable, fact that many tragic representations of suffering and defeat leave an audience feeling not depressed, but relieved, or even exalted. In the second place, Aristotle uses this distinctive effect on the reader, which he calls "the pleasure of pity and fear," as the basic way to distinguish the tragic from comic or other forms, and he regards the dramatist's aim to produce this effect in the highest degree as the principle that determines the choice and moral qualities of a tragic protagonist and the organization of the tragic plot. 

Accordingly, Aristotle says that the tragic hero will most effectively evoke both our pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both; and also that this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is "better than we are," in the sense that he is of higher than ordinary moral worth. Such a man is exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of his mistaken choice of an action, to which he is led by his hamartia—his "error of judgment" or, as it is often though less literally translated, his tragic flaw. (One common form of hamartia in Greek tragedies was hubris, that "pride" or overweening self-confidence which leads a protagonist to disregard a divine warning or to violate an important moral law.) 

The tragic hero, like Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, moves us to pity because, since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves; but he moves us also to fear, because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and fallible selves. Aristotle grounds his analysis of "the very structure and incidents of the play" on the same principle; the plot, he says, which will most effectively evoke "tragic pity and fear" is one in which the events develop through complication to a catastrophe in which there occurs (often by an anagnorisis, or discovery of facts hitherto unknown to the hero) a sudden peripeteia, or reversal in his fortune from happiness to disaster.

01601--antagonist

Antagonist is the most prominent of the characters who oppose the protagonist or hero(ine) in a dramatic or narrative work. The antagonist is often a villain seeking to frustrate a heroine or hero; but in those works in which the protagonist is represented as evil, the antagonist will often be a virtuous or sympathetic character, as Macduff is in Macbeth.

00517--The Summary of the Plays by Tennessee Williams

                              

   The Summary of the Plays by Tennessee Williams

Plays	Summary
A Street Car Named Desire	Is concerned with the effect of hypocritical sophistication leading to perversion and abnormality.  Blanche the protagonist of the play suffers from sexual maladjustment on account of the deep intellectual pretensions of the deep South in America.  Sex takes the form of perversion.
The Summer and Smoke	Deals with unsuccessful love affair.  Alma is the central character of the play whose sexual maladjustment arises from defective social and moral conditioning. Alma seeks love in spiritual form, John on the other hand is a sex profligate.  The play presents a conflict between passion and morality in which the force of passion is overwhelming and the hold of morality is shaken.  The play stresses that love and sex are inseparable.
The Rose Tattoo	Is concerned with a widow, who is leading a life of seclusion after the death of her husband.  The play points out that false air of morality is too weak a force to control or repress the force of sexual passion.  Sexuality suppressed reawakens with double force if and when the hold of morality gets weak.  Here force of sexual passion gains domination.
Kingdom of Earth	Presents a true picture of earthly kingdom where personal satisfaction is more important than anything else.  Spiritual satisfaction alone and effort to achieve it leads nowhere.  Chicken is the most articulate spokesman of sexual fulfilment.  To him sex  is the possible path, it is everything.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof	Dramatizes the feeling of loneliness of the members of a family imprisoned in the midst of untold richness by greed, envy and crippling self-deception.  It portrays the deterioration of a young aristocrat; because of some mysterious disgust for mendacity who wants the oblivion that will bring peace.  The characters Maggie and Brick are deeply troubled people.
Sweet Bird of Youth	Is concerned with the feeling of loneliness caused by disappointment and failure in life.  Chance Wayne and Princess Heavenly are the central characters of the play.  Boss Finely, the domineering father of the Princess stands in the way of their happiness.  But the only way through which she can forget her problems is through the act of love-making.  Love making is the only “dependable distraction”.
The Milk Train Does not Stop Here	Depicts the pain and misery of lonely, isolated and sex starved people who strive to escape painful life with the help of pills, drugs and morphine injections.
Period of Adjustment	Williams pursues his old theories with regard to the problem of idealism in conflict with reality, of sex and love, of loneliness and crying need of communication, of age and hurt pride and malignant effect of money.  Williams sincerely desires to help people rid themselves of the puritan repressions that in his view accounted for so much in his own tormented history.

01567--anagnorisis

Anagnorisis  (plural -ises) is the Greek word for 'recognition' or 'discovery', used by Aristotle in his Poetics to denote the turning point in a drama at which a character (usually the protagonist) recognizes the true state of affairs, having previously been in error or ignorance. The classic instance is Oedipus' recognition, in Oedipus Tyrannus, that he himself has killed his own father Laius, married his mother Jocasta, and brought the plague upon Thebes. The anagnorisis is usually combined with the play's peripeteia or reversal of fortunes, in comedy as in tragedy. Similarly, the plots of many novels involve crucial anagnorises, e.g. Pip's discovery, in Great Expectations, that Magwitch rather than Miss Havisham has been his secret benefactor. 

01673--bovarysme

Bovarysme is a disposition towards escapist day dreaming in which one imagines oneself as a heroine or hero of a  romance and refuses to acknowledge everyday realities. This condition (a later version of Don Quixote's madness) can be found in fictional characters before Emma Bovary, the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary (1857), gave it her name: for example, Catherine Morland in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) makes similar confusions between fiction and reality. Novelists have often exposed bovarysme to ironic analysis, thus warning against the delusive enchantments of the romance tradition.

00009—Hamartia, Hubris and Catharsis—Aristotle

Hamartia, Hubris and Catharsis—Aristotle

Aristotle lays down the general rule that characters in a tragedy should be good but not extremely good.  The hero of a tragedy is a human being of average stature.  He must not be a perfect character but he must have inherent nobility in him.  He is never mean or deliberately villainous.  His fall must be the consequences of a basic flaw(weakness) in character which Aristotle calls ‘Hamartia’. 

The ideal tragic hero is a man who stands between the two extremes.  He is not eminently good or just, though he is inclined to the side of goodness.  He brings, misfortune abut  himself as a result of his own actions for which he alone is responsible.  One common form of Hamartia in Greek tragedies was ‘Hubris’, that is pride or over-weaning self confidence which leads a protagonist to  disregard a divine warning or to violate an important moral law.  The misfortunes are always out of proportion to his faults.  The deserved punishment for an evil deed has no pathos in it.  The undeserved suffering of a virtuous person is revolting.  The sufferings of a person which are out of proportion for committing an error of judgement arouses pity and fear in the audience.  Those who witness the tragedy will guard themselves against such error in real life. 

According to Aristotle a tragedy should contain “incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such emotions.”  Catharsis in Greek signifies “purgation”.  Many tragic representations of suffering and defeat leave an audience feeling not depressed but relieved or even exalted.    

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00007--Characteristics of an Ideal Tragic Hero according to Aristotle

The characteristics of an Ideal Tragic Hero according to Aristotle  are :

a) He must be an eminent man.

b) He must be a good man (should be neither immoral nor vicious).

c) His character must be appropriate to his station in his life.

d) He must possess a likeness to human nature.

e) He must be consistent even in his inconsistency.

The ideal tragic hero, according to Aristotle, should be, in the first place a man of eminence.  The actions of an eminent man would be 'serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude,' as required by Aristotle.  Further, the hero should not only be eminent but also a good man, though not absolutely virtuous.  The sufferings, fall and death of an absolutely virtuous man would generate feelings of disgust rather than those of 'terror and compassion' which must be the real production of a tragic play.

Aristotle says that the tragic hero will most effectively evoke both our pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both; and also that this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is "better than we are," in the sense that he is of higher than ordinary moral worth. Such a man is exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of his mistaken choice of an action, to which he is led by his hamartia—his "error of judgment" or, as it is often though less literally translated, his tragic flaw. (One common form of hamartia in Greek tragedies was hubris, that "pride" or overweening self-confidence which leads a protagonist to disregard a divine warning or to violate an important moral law.) The tragic hero, like Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, moves us to pity because, since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves; but he moves us also to fear, because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and fallible selves. Aristotle grounds his analysis of "the very structure and incidents of the play" on the same principle; the plot, he says, which will most effectively evoke "tragic pity and fear" is one in which the events develop through complication to a catastrophe in which there occurs (often by an anagnorisis, or discovery of facts hitherto unknown to the hero) a sudden peripeteia, or reversal in his fortune from happiness to disaster.  

His character must be appropriate to his station in his life which means that his character is the result of his social and cultural background.  He must also possess a likeness to human nature; he shouldn't behave like gods, which will not create a feeling of sympathy in the mind of the viewer when the hero suffers tragedy, and the very purpose of the tragedy will be at risk.    he must also possess likeness to human nature.  He should have the weakness that we do generally have apart from the fine qualities he possess as a hero. He must have consistency. He must be consistent even in his INCONSISTENCY.

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01599--Angry Young Men

Angry Young Men is a term applied by journalists in the 1950s to the authors and protagonists of some contemporary novels and plays that seemed to sound a note of protest or resentment against the values of the British middle class. The most striking example of the angry young man was Jimmy Porter, the ranting protagonist of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1956). 

01702--catharsis

Catharsis, the effect of'purgation' or 'purification' achieved by tragic drama, according to Aristotle's argument in his Poetics (4th century BCE). Aristotle wrote that a tragedy should succeed 'in arousing pity and fear in such a way as to accomplish a catharsis of such emotions'. There has been much dispute about his meaning, but Aristotle seems to be rejecting Plato's hostile view of poetry as an unhealthy emotional stimulant. His metaphor of emotional cleansing has been read as a solution to the puzzle of audiences' pleasure or relief in witnessing the disturbing events enacted in tragedies. Another interpretation is that it is the protagonist's guilt that is purged, rather than the audience's feeling of terror. Adjective: cathartic.

00242-- 'Night of the Scorpion' by Nissim Ezekiel.[English literature free notes]

 "Night of the scorpion" is a brilliant narrative poem.  The protagonist might be  the poet himself or a narrator who is the creation of his imagination.  The mother is  stung by a scorpion on a rainy night.  The mother is the most prominent figure in  an Indian home.  So all the attention is focused on her.  They are simple and good and believe in the efficiency of prayer.  They believe that prayer can ward off the evil influence.  They are a set of superstitious people.  They search for the scorpion but in vain.  

They believe that if the scorpion moves, its poison in the victim will also move and spread all over.  The words they speak to console the woman are also related to their superstitious beliefs.  Her suffering is caused by the sins she committed in the previous birth.  Her endurance will reduce the effect of her sins in the previous birth and it will also make her life happy in the next birth. 

 The good and evil in the world has to be balanced and therefore her endurance of pain will reduce the amount of evil.  This also reminds us of the peasants' belief in rebirth. They are illiterate, ignorant and superstitious and they do not know anything other than turn into ritualistic practices and incantations.

The narrator's father presents before us a striking contrast.  He tries modern scientific treatments.  He applies powder, herbs and hybrids.   He does not interfere with what the peasants do.  He does not object to the curses and blessings.  He is quite perturbed and tries every possible remedies.  Finally he pours some paraffin in the affected area and applies a match to it expecting the poison to burn off.  Even when he does this a holy man goes on performing his rites to remove the effect of poison with an incantation.  The scientific remedies tried by the father become as ineffective as the rituals and the incantations of the peasants and that of the holy man.  After twenty hours the pain subsides and the woman speaks.

 

The last part of the poem upholds the dignity of the Indian motherhood.   The mother's comment:  "Thank God the scorpion picked on me  and spread my children" is typical of an Indian mother.  She is relieved to find 

that the scorpion let her children alone and thanks God for it.  The entire poem may be taken as a tribute to the incomparable love of a mother.  The mother's malady  causes considerable disturbance not only to the members of the family but to the whole neighbourhood.  All are anxious to alleviate her pain.  Different attempts are made by different people.  All these go to prove that the poem is woven around the theme of reverence to the mother.

           

"Night of the scorpion" is typically an Indian poem by a typical Indian poet whose interest in the Indian soil and its ordinary human events of day-to-day Indian life is superb.  A good many Indians are illiterate and are blindly superstitious.  But they are simple, loving and lovable.  They attempt to save the victim by doing whatever they can.  But they do not succeed.  The father who is not superstitious and is educated tries his own scientific ways; he too, does not succeed.  There is the holy man who performs his rites with incantation.  He also fails to find a cure.  Finally the cue comes by itself.  This can be taken as a proof for the belief in 'fate'; everything in a man's life is pre-destined and man has no role in changing it.

           

The poem is interpreted as a symbolic juxtaposition of darkness and light. The night, the scorpion, the poison and the suffering represent darkness.   The incessant rain stands for hope and regeneration.  Candles, lanterns,  neighbours and ultimately the recovery of the mother represent light.   The poem can also be thought of as symbolic of Good and Evil too.

00574--Vocabulary test-3

Match column A with B

A	B
1. pristine	a. acquire
2. procrastinate	b. fertile
3. procure	c. pen name
4. profundity	d. nearness
5. profusion	e. unspoiled
6. prolific	f. subdue
7. protagonist	g. predicament
8. provocative	h. main character
9. proximity	i. postpone
10. pseudonym	j. abundance
11. quandary	k. stimulating
12. quell	l. depth
13. querulous	m. pursuit
14. quest	n. teasing
15. quizzical	o. complaining

1. e

2. i

3. a

4. l

5. j

6. b

7. h

8. k

9. d

10. c

11. g

12. f

13. o

14. m

15. n

01701--catastrophe

Catastrophe is the final resolution or denouement of the plot in a tragedy, usually involving the death of the protagonist.

00191--Tradition And Individual Talent by T.S.Eliot

Tradition and the Individual Talent

                                           T.S. Eliot

I

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition"; at mo.st, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of so-and-so is "traditional" or even "too traditional." Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to. English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.

 Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are ''more critical" than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to. insist, when we praise a poet, upon tho.se aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the mo.st individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality mo.st vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ''tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lo.st in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value-a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: It appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.

To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe-the mind of his own country-a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind-is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draftsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show.

Someone said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my program for the metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulfur dioxide.

II

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus3 of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of,"personality," not being necessarily more interesting, or having "more to say," but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulfurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which "came," which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet's mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark. For it is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the process of transmutation of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality:

I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light-or darkness-of these observations:

And now methinks I could e'en chide myself

For doting on her beauty, though her death

Shall be revenged after no common action.

Does the silkworm expend her yellow labors

For thee? For thee does she undo herself?

Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships

For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?

Why does yon fellow falsify highways,

And put his life between the judge's lips,

To refine such a thing-keeps horse and men

To beat their valors for her? . . .

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or fiat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquility" is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected," and they finally unite in an atmosphere

which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be 'Conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal”.  Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

III

This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few- know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach his impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious; not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

                                       The End