Inspiration and Effort

The Critic's Development

A true critic of poetry passes through three stages of development. He begins by a conscious exercise of the analytic mind upon his experience of a poem. He takes his impression to pieces, classifies his reactions, studies the structure from the outside and considers both the matter and the form inasmuch as they are communicated to him across a gulf of strangeness: his criticism is the result of his mind's evaluation, as regards both significance and technique, of the relation established between two separate ends, the poem and himself.

By constant practice he discovers a few points of contact with the poem, through which he visions the founts of the poet's inspiration and now and then a sudden sense of the living waters themselves awakes in him. It is not only an impression, a vivid response to a communicated experience: it is rather an entry into the poet's own creative act, a self-identification with the poem. The analytic mind has led somehow into the very life-throb of the work.

At this state the critic becomes more and more absorbed into the poem as a self-sufficient entity, an entity which says what it alone can say and therefore rules out anything else to be said about it. The critic loses his own voice and stops being a critic: a load of the inexpressible bears him down. All that is worth saying in respect of the poem is felt to be the poem's own words. The critic is no longer the critic but, through the poem, the poet whose say is the work he has created.

This state of incapable dumbness is most necessary if the critic is to hope for an interpretation of the poem not as a communicated thing but in its own posture of being. When this state is no longer a wonderful novelty but becomes a settled delight, the intellect which was in abeyance at the start reappears on the scene and co-exists with the joy — of identity; it is now not an enemy of that identity, a foreign

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power excluded by it: it is now something with which that identity can have relations, something which it can illumine, something which it can use as a mode of expressing itself in suggestive and interpretative terms. Of course, the poem, qua poem, cannot be any other expression than itself; yet, while its existence is unique, its essence can be caught in the language of a different plane provided this language is sufficiently plastic to that uniqueness and moulds its own terms in living answer to those of poetry.

Once the plasticity and the moulding are there, the intellect can deploy itself in analytic study without any outsideness spoiling or even limiting it. Now the critic's analysis never lays the knife to the living tissue of vision, never wounds what it dissects. The intellect now does not bring its own piercing gleam to lay bare the composition of the poet's work, the meanings and the rhythms within it. Rather, the poem gives the intellect its own light and, infused with that light, the intellect acquires insight. The critic turns upon the work not a knife but a flood of X-rays. The structure, both psychological and technical, of the poem stands revealed without being hurt by the analytic process. This is the climax of criticism.

It rarely is sustained without some sinking here and there. But when the sinking is very little we have a disclosure of the poem in a manner native to the intellect yet without any intellectual intrusion upon the mystery and the magic. The mystery and the magic are not translated so much as transposed into intellect.

But this kind of criticism is to be distinguished from what goes by the name of "creative criticism". In the latter the writer builds up from his own inspiration a response to the inspiration of the poem: it is a subjective splendour which tells us more about the critic than about the poem. The criticism we have in mind builds from the inspiration of the poem itself: it is objective in the sense that the critic is busy not with the splendour of his own feeling and vision but with that of the feeling and vision put by the poet in his work. He

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is not "faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion": the fashion of his faithfulness is caught from the commanding beauty of Cynara: he is faithful as she would want him to be, as the line and quiver and lustre of her being would hold him in their living net of loveliness.

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