Poetry or religion

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Poetry or Religion? by John S. Reist, Jr.

18 T HE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Spri ng 1998

Poetry or Religion?Text, Tact, and Tactic in MatthewArnold’s Literary Critical Method

John S. Reist, Jr.

In the initial two paragraphs of Matthew

Arnold’s essay, “The Study of Poetry,”there lies a theory which continues, on amore overtly religious and metaphysicallevel, the idea which Shelley espoused in hisA D efense of Poetry , that “Poets are theunacknowledged legislators of the world”(359). Arnold’s point in his essay is that,due to the breakdown of dogma and theloss of evidence for the supernatural whichoccurred through the rise of modern sci-ence and the Darwinian theory and expli-cation of evolution, Shelley’s role of thepoet will more and more come to be ac-knowledged. Poetry will now provide theconsolation and inspiration, the sense of purpose and the guarantee of values thatreligion had previously embodied. Arnoldstates: “More and more mankind will dis-cover that we have to turn to poetry tointerpret life for us, to console us, to sustainus. Without poetry, our science will ap-pear incomplete; and most of what nowpasses with us for religion and philosophywill be replaced by poetry” (1927:76-77).

Thus, Arnold imagined for poetry ahigher, or at least a different, place in thescheme of things than had heretofore beenconceived. Poetry now becomes a surro-gate religion, a “criticism of life.” It is frompoetry, rather than from revealed dogmaor traditions of the church that all other

spheres of l ife—science, politics, econom-

ics, and morality—will gain their mean-ing. Concerning science and literature,Arnold says, in his famous debate withHuxley: “And for the generality of menthere will be found, I say, to arise, when theyhave duly taken in the proposition thattheir ancestor was ‘a hairy quadraped fur-nished with a tail and pointed ears, prob-ably aboreal in his habits,’ there will befound to arise an invincible desire to relatethis proposition to the sense in us for beauty.But this the men of science wil l not do for us,and will hardly even profess to do”(1924:107-08).

This “sense in us for beauty” is whatArnold calls in another place, “a pursuit of total perfection” by means of gett ing toknow, on all matters which most concernus, “the best which has been thought andsaid in the world. . .” (1900:xi). This perfec-tion neither science, politics, nor evendogma can give us, for these are all machin-ery which are mistaken by most English-men for the thing itself.

As a result of this “pursuit of total perfec-tion,” Arnold developed a critical methodbased largely on his ideal of culture, beauty,and right conduct. Northrup Frye de-clares: “We see that Arnold is trying to

John S. Reist, Jr. is professor of Christianity andLiterature at Hi llsdale College.




THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Spri ng 1998 19

create a new scriptural canon out of poetryto serve as a guide for those social principleswhich he wants culture to take over fromreligion” (22). Thus Arnold looks for ele-ments of high seriousness and sincerity inliterary works, and seldom examines anindividual work as a whole, or in itself. Asa consequence, he dismisses Chaucer on theone hand, and accepts Dante on the other.However, he makes such distinctions bycull ing “touchstones” from various worksand rarely does formal, or textual criti cismof any depth or to any extent. Thus, hiscriticism is at best “ cultural” ; and, at worst,he misreads certain texts because he wishes

them to reflect the “tact” or “ sinceri ty” of anineteenth-century gentleman who is asmuch lamenting the breakup of Westernculture during the last century as he is ex-amining specific works of art in toto and in situ . He was a harbinger and prophet of contemporary “ readerly” criti cism andthus our examination of his method andachievement will help us to understandcontemporary critical movements andproblems.

My aim here is an exposition and evalu-

ation of Arnold’s critical method, not inorder to show that it i s worthless, (which isobviously untrue), but only to show thatbecause he confused the disciplines of poet-ics and literary criticism with moral andcultural philosophy, he never did come toa ful l understanding of any parti cular workof art.

The problem of Arnold’s methodology isfundamental; and it arises because he hardlyever examines the whole work of art beforehim, nor does he examine any work of art inthe light of the philosophical mi lieu in whichit was wri tten. He thinks, rather, that thecritic should call poetry to service in thename of a higher order of being: “Weshould conceive of poetry worthily, andmore highly than it has been the custom to

conceive of it. We should conceive of it ascapable of higher uses, and called to higherdestinies than those in general men haveassigned to it hitherto” (1927:76). ToArnold, it does not seem to matter if the“higher use” originates in a mentality orZeitgeist alien to that of the work of art; aslong as we have in mind a “sense for the best”we shall be able to distinguish between po-etry and any other thing; “. . . constantly inreading poetry a sense for the best, thereally excellent, and of the strength and joyto be drawn from it, should be present inour minds and should govern our estimateof what we read” (1927:79).

Now, Arnold reali zes the pitfalls involvedin the exegesis of any text, and he attemptsto guard against these by erecting twohermeneutical fences: the historical fallacyand the personal fallacy. The historicalinvolves focusing on the environment of the poet; works of art “ . . . may count to ushistorically. The course of a nation’s lan-guage, thought, and poetry, is profoundlyinteresting; and by regarding a poet’s workas a stage in this course of development wemay easily bring ourselves to make it of

more importance than it really is, we maycome to use a language of qui te exaggeratedpraise in criticizing it; in short, to over-rateit” (1927:79). The personal fallacy occurswhen “Our personal affini ti es , liking, orcircumstances, have great power to swayour estimate of this or that poet’s work, andto make us attach more importance to it as poetry than in itself it really possesses, be-cause to us it is, or has been, of high impor-tance. Here also, we over-rate the object of our interest and apply to it a language of praise which is quite exaggerated” (1927:79,Italics mine).

However, there are actually three waysthat a poet or poem may count: “A poet orpoem may count to us historically, theymay count to us on grounds personal toourselves, and they may count to us really ”





(1927:79, Italics mine).It is poetry that “really” counts which

Arnold is concerned to apprehend. How-ever, his suggestion as to how to recognize“real” poetry is really what makes suchpoetry qua poetry unavailable. When he isarguing for an intelligent critical approachto texts, he is really contending for the“crit ical intell igence,” the “man of taste,” orthe “Hellenist.” For instance, in that justlyfamous portion of the latter part of “TheStudy of Poetry,” (which reveals how well-read and deeply steeped Arnold is in “ cul-ture”), we see the kind of criticism he wishesto do; and even though he has warned us

that our “personal affinities” may preventus from apprehending the poem “ as po-etry,” he himself focuses on the culturalcriti c, or audience, and not on the work of art i tself. Thus, he can freely refer to suchvarious kinds of poetry as that of Dante,Shakespeare, Burns, Homer, Milton, andChaucer; and he finds in all of them what hecalls “ the poeti c quali ty” : “The specimens Ihave quoted differ widely from one an-other, but they have in common this: thepossession of the very highest poetic qual-

ity” (1927:86).Yet, the “poeti c quali ty” (and we have

yet to discuss the ambiguity of thi s term inArnold’s thinking) is discoverable only“. . . if we have tact” (1927:86). It is signifi-cant that, before he concludes that singlelines or passages have the “poetic quality,”he carefully states twice that i t i s the “tact-ful” or sensitive person who will recognizethis quality.

. . . i f we have any tact we shall f ind them, whenwe have lodged them well in our minds, aninfallible touchstone for detecting the presenceor absence of high poetic quality, and also thedegree of this quali ty, in all other poetry whichwe may place beside them. . . . These few lines,i f we have tact and can use them, are enougheven of themselves to keep clear and sound our

judgments about poetry, to save us from falla-cious estimates of it, to conduct us to a realestimate (1927:84-85, 86, Italics mine).

Who is thi s “ tactful” person? It is evidentthat he or she is the guardian or monitor of culture, of “sweetness and light.” Arnoldbelieves that when this critic comes to thetext, he or she will be able to discover,because of their predisposition to do so,that enigmatic quali ty of “ real” poetry. The“poetic quali ty” does not, therefore, ari sefrom the work of art . Arnold’s final under-standing of poetry does not clearly involvea poetic judgment, then, because he neverreally examines a poem; that is, the entirepoem, the totality of parts, the work as“product.” Rather, he isolates “ touch-stones,” single lines which speak to him of a

higher truth and a higher seriousness, andinvests them with the poetic quality. In hisargument that true poetry wil l possess “highseriousness,” he is referring to Aristotle,who states, “Hence poetry is somethingmore philosophic and of graver importthan history, since its statements are of thenature rather of universals, whereas thoseof history are singulars” (353). However,what Arnold overlooks is that immediatelybefore Aristotle’s famous statement thatart is more philosophical than history, he

(Aristotle) states: “The truth is that, just asin the other imitative arts one imitation isalways of one thing, so in poetry the story,as an imitation of action, must representone action, a complete whole, with its sev-eral incidents so closely connected that the tr ansposal or withdrawal of any one of themwil l disjoin and dislocate the whole” (352-53). (Italics mine) Thus, Arnold’s appealto Aristotle’s doctrine of “high seriousness”loses its power, for it ignores his view thatseriousness or truth in poetry arises from aunified aesthetic whole, “with its severalincidents so closely connected that thetransposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole.”Arnold’s “touchstone” method does pre-cisely what Aristotle argues one should notdo; it withdraws lines, or sections, or parts





from larger wholes and thereby divests theentire work of these key lines, while at thesame time, it suggests that these separatedparts may be understood without theircontext in the complete poem. Ironically,Arnold also does the same thing withAristotle’s statement about the philosophi-cal seriousness of art; he separatesAristotle’s concept of seriousness from hiscontention that such seriousness is embod-ied in a complete whole.

Critics as various as Samuel T. Coleridgeand Rudolph Bultmann also have assertedand argued that literary criticism must

analyze the specific qualities of each text.Coleridge states:Our genuine admiration of a great poet is acontinuous under-current of feeling; it is every-where present, but seldom anywhere as a sepa-rate excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm,that i t would scarcely be more diff icult to pusha stone out from the pyramids with the barehand, than to alter a word, or the posit ion of aword, in Milton or Shakespeare, (in their mostimportant works at least) without making theauthor say something else, or something worse,than he does say (23).

Later on, speaking of Shakespeare in par-ticular, he declares: “ . . . the consummate

judgment of Shakespeare, not only in thegeneral construction, but in all the detail , of his dramas impressed me with greater won-der, than even the might of his genius, or thedepth of his philosophy” (34). RudolphBultmann contends:

It belongs to the histori cal method, of course,that a text is interpreted in accordance with therules of grammar and the meaning of words.And closely connected with this, historicalexegesis also has to inquire about the individualstyle of the text. The sayings of Jesus in thesynoptics, for example, have a different stylefrom the Johannine ones. But with this thereis also given another problem with which exege-sis is required to deal. Paying attention to themeaning of words, to grammar, and to style

soon leads to the observation that every textspeaks in the language of its time and of itshistorical sett ing (291).

Astonishing as it is for a critic who wasalso a great poet himself, Arnold ignoresthe fact that Dante’s “In his wil l is ourpeace,” and Milton’s “And courage neverto submit or yield/And what is else not to beovercome,” have the whole weight of theentire work behind them, and simply can-not be easily or arbitrarily compared withHomer, Chaucer, et al . without distortingtheir meaning. Arnold’s method is limitednot only because it brings a preconstructedidea of the poetic quali ty to the text; it is also

fragmentary, in that it culls out parts fromwholes and therefore does injustice to boththe part and the whole. It is not at allobvious or clear that The Chanson de Roland , The I li ad , and The Divine Com- edy —each in its entirety—will yield thesame kind of “high seriousness” whichArnold thinks nineteenth-century Englandneeds and which he therefore insists that“really excellent” poetry must have. Andeven if such works do possess “high serious-ness,” that is to be discovered from the

entire work, not from isolated parts.Arnold, then, falls into the pit of the “per-sonal fallacy” which he was so careful toguard against, even though he states thevalue of going to the work of art itself: “Itis much better to have recourse simply toconcrete examples;—to take specimens of poetry of the high, the very highest quality,and to say: The characters of a high qualityof poetry are what is expressed there ”(1927:87).

Yet, because he brings to the work of arthis “poetic quali ty,” his “tact,” his recourseto the text must be fragmentary. He is thuslimited to singling out “touchstones” toil lustrate his part icular cultural sensit ivity,and to that degree he disables himself as acritic who asks poetic questions.

It naturally follows, then, that Arnold’s





definition of his methodology, which helabels disinterestedness , would concern therules of the critic’s mind, rather than theprinciples of the work, the unity of thepoem, the power of the imitation, or thetotality of the parts of a whole. “The rulemay be given in one word— disinterestedness . And how is it to be disinterestedness ?By keeping aloof from practice; by reso-lutely following the law of its own nature,which is to be a free play of the mind on allsubjects which i t touches. . . to know the bestthat is known and thought in the world,and by in its turn, making this known, tocreate a current of true and fresh ideas”

(1927:34-35).With this governing principle, it is nosurprise that, even though Arnold statesagain and again that the goal of criticism is“to see the object as in itself i t really is”(1927:21), he can sift various kinds of worksthrough his sieve of taste or tact, and saveonly the nuggets which reinforce this taste.The “object as it really is” actually is the“taste” of Arnold’s aristocratic mentalityof the nineteenth century; thus, for Arnoldthe critic’s preeminent tact predetermines

his critical tactic.

It remains to examine exactly what Arnoldmeans by the aforementioned “poetic qual-ity.” Many of Arnold’s terms are neveraccurately defined. For example, such adefinition of greatness as “ . . . a spiritualcondition worthy to excite love, interest,and admiration” (1909:115) is quite nebu-lous. Indeed, T. S. Eliot has seen as one of Arnold’s most irri tating failings, his “vague-ness of definition” (383). His lack of preci-sion becomes most clearly evident when hespeaks of God as “ the Eternal not ourselvesmaking for r ighteousness” (1892:349). Eliotaptly remarks that Arnold’s concept of God“comes exactly to the same thi ng” asSpencer’s use of the term “ unknowable” forGod (386). For example, Arnold states

that “ . . . for supreme poetical success moreis required than the powerful applicationof ideas to life; it must be an applicationunder the conditions fixed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty” (1927:102).And we ask, “ What are these laws? Fromwhence do they come? How do they resultin the poeti c quali ty? What, in short , is thepoetic quality?”

The poetic quality is “high seriousness.”Arnold states, “Those laws fix as an essentialcondition, in the poet’s treatment of suchmatters as are here in question, high seri-ousness;—the high seriousness which comesfrom absolute sincerity” (1927:102-03). This

high seriousness is to be achieved in confor-mity to certain laws as Arnold states themin the following: “In poetry, however, thecriti cism of life has to be made conformablyto the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.Truth and seriousness of substance andmatter, feli city and perfection of diction and manner , as these are exhibited in the bestpoets, are what consti tutes a criticism of li femade in conformity with the laws of poetictruth and poetic beauty” (1964:1283, Ital-ics mine).

If poetic techniques, such as diction andmanner by which subject and matter arerendered, are important phenomena, it isdisappointing that Arnold rarely under-takes the serious and formidable work of attending to the entire work of art beforehim, to show us how truth and seriousnessactually ari se from the work. If Arnoldignores reading the whole work of the artistwho made it according to certain artisticprinciples, and which therefore has its prin-ciple mode of being as an aesthetic compo-sition, how then does he find the “poeticquali ty”? If it is not by looking at the workof art per se and in toto that we ascertain thatit is poetry, where does one look? Theanswer is that the “poeti c quali ty” is not“found” at all; it does not arise from thework; it is not a knowledge of a universal





through some complete and particularimitation of a serious action; it is not evendiscernible in Arnold’s poetical criticism,theoretical or practical, at all . To find it,one must go to his theory of culture—aculture in which the man or woman of “ tact” wil l make judgments in his or hercritical “tactic.” Arnold wishes to ask bywhat means a critic might be enabled tocreate a cultural intelligence or moral vi-sion which will produce the kind of art inwhich he (Arnold) is really interested.Speaking of the role of the cri tical power, hestates: “ . . . thus, it tends, at last, to make anintellectual situation of which the creative

power can profi tably avail i tself” (1927:24).Arnold’s attitude toward Chaucer is aprime example of the limitation of hismethod. Chaucer’s poetical power is “real”(1927:90). It has “divine fluidity of move-ment,” a “ large, free, simple, clear yet kindlyview of life,” and a diction of “ lovely charm”(1927:91-92). However, “Chaucer is notone of the great classics” because he lacks“high seriousness” (1927:93). Arnold comesto this astonishing misjudgment simplybecause his “ touchstone” method does not

require him to look at the whole of The Canterbur y Tales . It i s beyond the compassof this paper to argue the fundamentalunity of The Canterbur y Tales , yet it hasbeen cogently argued by several critics.Ralph Baldwin states: “The ending is asneatly calculated as the beginning. Eventhe conventional metaphor, the spring-time, has fostered one conspicuous, sym-bolic tree, the tree of Penitence, whose rootsthrust through and whose branches over-spread the world of the Canterbury pil-grims” (49). In addition, Donald Howardargues convincingly and at great lengththat, although The Canterbury Tales is in-complete, it is a unified, carefully plannedwork with the metaphor of the pilgrimagegiving it an appropriate beginning, a sus-tained continuity, and final fulfil lment. His

judgment is that “ . . . it is unfinished butcomplete” (1).

Arnold saw only the ornamental embel-lishments or earthy playfulness of Chaucerand although he concluded that there in-deed was God’s foysoun (he is agreeing withDryden here), he also negatively concludedthat there was no “high seriousness.” His

judgment, then, is a moral judgment andnot a poetic one. And this, finally, is Arnold’sbasic limitation as a literary critic; that is,he does not ask poetic or artistic questionswhich have to do with the “making” orstructure of various works of art. Rather,he asks, as a brooding, plangent, cultural

analyst of a nineteenth-century Englandwhose gentlemanly religious tradition iscrumbling, whether anything can save us.And he finds that poetry can, but only apoetry of “ touchstones,” of i llustrations of the enduring values which he as a moralistwishes to preserve.

One should not criticize Arnold’s moralsense in a paper on poetic method; indeed,there is an almost unassailable heroic stat-ure to his position as morali st. One should,

however, point out the palpable confusionof poetry and religion in his thinking as aliterary critic, for he blurs the distinctionbetween art and religion. He states (and Iquote it again for its signal importance):“More and more mankind wil l discoverthat we have to turn to poetry to interpretlife for us, to console us, to sustain us.Without poetry, our science will appearincomplete; and most of what now passeswith us for religion and philosophy will bereplaced by poetry” (1927:76-77).

Arnold collapses artistic questions intoquestions about “ li fe”; indeed, poetry is“crit icism of life.” He robes his worldviewin whatever “ touchstones” he may find ashis capacious memory rambles over thehistory of literature. Thus, he became amoralist in his poetic criticism. He identi -





fied religion and culture: “Religion, thegreatest and most important of the effortsby which the human race has manifested itsimpulse to perfect itself—religion, thatvoice of the deepest human experience. . . .[R]eligion comes to a conclusion identicalwith that which culture likewise reaches, . .”(1909:10). And he then set up poetry as thearbiter over the whole of life, seekingthereby to fill the vacuum in man’s reli-gious nature and environment with po-etry; and by doing so, he thought he wasproviding the nineteenth century and thefuture with a superior cri tical norm, whichwas beyond the inroads that science or

positivism could make on religion. Arnoldcontended that the virtue of poetry is itsinsight and wisdom which is above the va-garies of the historical, diurnal ebb andflow of the “Sea of Faith” ; “poetry,” he says,“attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea isthe fact” (1927:76); religion had material-ized itself in the fact which is now failing itbecause of the devastation that science andevolution had wrought on Christiandogma. By elevating itself to the idea, po-etry perpetually endures, no matter what

values may be displaced by the historicalflotsam and jetsam of events, persons, sci-entific discoveries, or cultural ideologies. Itthus becomes a consoling norm througheach passing generation and provides a stayagainst random historical existence.

That poetry has a primary value andfunction in society is obvious; by its imagi-native and mimetic ordering of the spray of contingency called experience, it providesa seizure of life, a representation of life,which at its best provokes reflection aboutthe basic issues and questions of humanity.However, Arnold was preoccupied withthe moral vision, the “high seriousness” orlack thereof, which he saw in VictorianEngland. His willingness to commit so muchof his time and energy as Inspector of Schools shows how important he regarded

the cultural condition of nineteenth-cen-tury England. Yet his concern for “ tact” or“sinceri ty” became a li abil ity for his crit icalwork, for i t hindered him from asking for-mal or aesthetic questions about litera-ture. That a man whose own poetry revealsthat he knew what a poem is as a formalstructure, as an imaginative composition,should also overlook such poetic questionsin his li terary cri ti cism is one of the abidingironies of nineteenth-century poetics andcriticism, for Arnold tended to blur thedistinction between poetry and religion,between culture and art, between the poemand the reader wi th “tact.” Cleanth Brooks

has suggested: “If Arnold’s muddling of distinctions has got us into our trouble, thecriti cs most aware of the muddlement willbe precisely the cri tics one would expect tohave a renewed sense of the importance of the distinctions which Arnold confused,and the critics who feel the necessity of reviving and maintaining these distinc-tions” (131).

Arnold’s method hermeneutically sealedhis sensibil ity from what is essential to l iter-ary criticism—a focus on the text, and the

whole text, with all of its touchstones. Thedistinction between the text as composi-tion and the tact of the critic is fundamen-tal; and the current need is for a hermeneu-ti c that goes “beyond formali sm,” beyondthe excesses of the New Critics who cameafter Arnold, without relapsing intoArnold’s mistake. Geoffrey Hartman hasput it superbly: “What is needed for literarystudy is a hundred percent of formalismand a hundred percent of critical intuition. . . . There are many ways to transcendformalism, but the worst is not to studyform” (56). What is required is a moreresponsible treatment of the text by cri ti cswho neither confuse their taste and sensi-bility with the values which arise from thework to be criticized (as contemporaryreader-response interpreters are prone to





do), nor insist, as the autotelic critics did,that a work of art has no important culturalsource or moral effect.

A critical tactic will be most tactful whenit is employed by critics who enable us toexperience the work of art as deeply andfully as possible. Such criti cs will not denythe hermeneutical circle in which all of usare caught; but, by admitting their ownvalues with which they approach the text,they will consciously strive to enable us tosee the text i tself. They will strive to makethe text as fully available as possible to usprecisely because it is so difficult to do so.And then, as much as possible, the effect wi ll

be that of the text, not of the critic using thetext to preach Marxism, to propagate sex-ism, or to promote “high seriousness” of whatever kind. The highest seriousness isthe work of explication of the text; the truecritic is the servant, not the creator of thetext.

Jacques Maritain has stated: “Poetry(like metaphysics) i s spiritual nourishment;but of a savor which has been created and isinsufficient. There is but one eternal nour-ishment. Unhappy you who think your-

selves ambi tious, and who whet your appe-ti tes for anything less than the three DivinePersons and the humanity of Christ. It i s amortal error to expect from poetry thesupersubstantial nourishment of man”(1962a:132); and he has also contendedthat each work of art possesses a recta rat io factibilium , the right arrangement, pro-portion, and order (1962b:9). Text, there-fore, is prior to tact; the tact and tactic of asensitive reader wi ll insist on this with “ highseriousness.” Otherwise, poetry will be-come confused with politics, psychology,or culture; or worse yet—as in Arnold’scase—poetry will be misused as a surrogatefor religion.

References

Aristotle. “Poetics.” The Pocket Ar istot le. Ed.Justin D. Kaplan. Transl. Ingram Bywater. NewYork: The Washington Square Press, 1966. 340-379. Arnold, Matthew. “Byron.” Engli sh Prose of the Vi ctori an Era. Ed. Charles Harrold and Wil-liam D. Templeman. New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1964. 1276-1288; Culture and Anarchy .New York: The MacMillan Company, 1909; Lit- erat ure and Dogma . London: MacMillan &Company, 1892; M atthew Arnold Prose and Po- etry . Ed. Archibald L. Bouton. New York: CharlesScribner’s and Sons, 1927. Baldwin, Ralph. “TheUnity of The Canterbury Tales .” Chaucer Cri ti -

cism . Ed. Richard J. Schoeck and Jerome Taylor.Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,1960. 14-51. Brooks, Cleanth. “Metaphor andthe Function of Criticism.” Spir it ual Problems in Contemporary Literature . Ed. Stanley R. Hopper.New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957. 127-137.Bultmann, Rudolph. “Is Exegesis Without Pre-suppositions Possible?” Existence and Fait h . Ed.and Transl. Schubert Ogden. New York: Merid-ian Books, Inc., 1960. 289-296. Coleridge, SamuelT. Biographia Lit erari a . Ed. James Engell and W.Jackson Bate. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1983. PMLA 93 (1978): 240-247. Eliot, T. S.“Arnold and Pater.” Selected Essays . New York:Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1950. 382-393.Frye, Northrup. Anatomy of Cri ti cism: Four Essays . Princeton: Princeton University Press,1957. Hartman, Geoffrey H. Beyond Formalism .New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Kelman,

John. Prophets of Yesterday And T heir M essage for Today . Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1924. Maritain, Jacques. Art and Scholasti cism .New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1962; Fron- ti ers Of Poetr y . New York: Charles Scribner’sSons, 1962. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “ A Defense of Poetry.” The Harvard Classics . Vol. 27. Ed.Charles W. Eliot. New York: P. F. Collier & Son,1930. 329-359.

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Poetry or religion