The Uses of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism

Question 1

What are these lectures compiled from?

Answer 1

The 1932-33 Norton Lectures at Harvard University

Question 2

Introduction: What are the two questions poetic criticism seeks to address?

Answer 2

1. What is poetry? (What desire it satisfies, what use it is, why it is read, etc.)
2. Is this a good poem?

A critic is only worth reading if she has asked, and imperfectly answered, these two questions.

Question 3

Introduction: Which of the two required critical questions is most important?

Answer 3

Neither can ever give a fully satisfactory answer, but if you don’t trust someone’s taste, you won’t trust their analysis.

However, you can think someone has good taste and not totally agree with their analysis.

Question 4

Introduction: What argument does Eliot make about changes in poetry over time?

Answer 4

That the circumstances of literature can never be separated from the circumstances of life and social change.

Question 5

Introduction: What is Eliot’s stated aim for this series of lectures that he lays out in the introduction?

Answer 5

To examine the history of criticism as “a process of readjustment between poetry and the world in which it was produced. “

Question 6

Introduction: What are the three periods in the Development of Taste (for poetry)?

Answer 6

1. Childhood, during which most people are fond of poetry, though have no particular taste
2. Adolescence, during which certain poets strike us emotionally and personally. We care about the poetry for how it relates to ourselves, and not it on its own.
3. When we cease to identify with the poets, and our critical facilities awaken

Question 7

Wordsworth and Coleridge: With what work of Coleridge’s poetry does Eliot most closely connect with his Biographia Litteraria? Why?

Answer 7

Dejection: An Ode

Eliot speaks of Coleridge’s being visited and then abandoned by the Muse; the author of the Biographia “is already a ruined man.”

Question 8

Wordsworth and Coleridge: What difference does Eliot point to between “Preface” and Biographia Litteraria?

Answer 8

One was written when Wordsworth while at the height of his powers, the other when Coleridge’s Muse was long gone.

Question 9

Wordsworth and Coleridge: What idea of Coleridge’s does Eliot treat in this essay?

Answer 9

His doctrine of imagination and fancy

Question 10

Wordsworth and Coleridge: What idea from Preface to Lyrical Ballads is Eliot primarily concerned?

Answer 10

Their new theory of poetic diction

Question 11

Wordsworth and Coleridge: What is Eliot’s main point about “Preface”?

Answer 11

That Wordsworth’s revolutionary interest in diction was social in nature, and informed by the circumstances of the time. (He doesn’t say so, but presumably French Revolution?)

Question 12

Wordsworth and Coleridge: What does Eliot think of Coleridge’s distinction between imagination and fancy?

Answer 12

That is doesn’t quite make sense

Question 13

Wordsworth and Coleridge: Where, according to Eliot, does the best of Coleridge’s criticism come in?

Answer 13

When he is drawing from his own experience to describe the imaginative process

Question 14

Wordsworth and Coleridge: Of the two, whose criticism does Eliot think “better”?

Answer 14

Wordsworth

Question 15

Wordsworth and Coleridge: To what earlier critics does Eliot say Wordsworth and Coleridge are breaking away from?

Answer 15

Dryden and Johnson

Question 16

Wordsworth and Coleridge: With what contemporary critic does Eliot disagree, and what point does he contest?

Answer 16

Herbert Read; On there being no notable English poetry between Shakespeare and Wordsworth. (No Milton? No Blake?)

Question 17

Shelley and Keats: What complaints does Eliot have about Shelley?

Answer 17

He finds him altogether too “adolescent.” In addition, his sensibilities are offended by the number of causes Shelley tries to promote in his poetry (vegetarianism, etc.).

Question 18

Shelley and Keats: To whose views on poetry does Eliot think Shelley’s are similar?

Answer 18

Wordsworth’s; he thinks that many of their ideas are similar, especially about the “use” of poetry, but that Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry” is weaker than “Preface.”

Question 19

Shelley and Keats: What is Shelley’s contribution to criticism, despite his faults?

Answer 19

Though Wordsworth’s ideas about Poetry’s uses were similar to Shelley’s, Shelley is the first to make the explicit connection between poetry and events of his own time, drawing attention to the fact that they “throw light upon one another.”

Question 20

Shelley and Keats: What is Eliot’s ultimate opinion on whether we can separate the poet from his beliefs?

Answer 20

They cannot be separated, but if we can accept the views expressed in the poem as coherent and mature, we can still enjoy the poetry even without agreeing with the poet.

Question 21

Shelley and Keats: What does Eliot have to say about Keats?

Answer 21

That his Letters evidence genius, and he thinks about poetry very different from Shelley. His criticism is of a different kind, based on intuition and not made public.

Question 22

Shelley and Keats: What main distinction does Eliot draw between Shelley and Keats?

Answer 22

While Shelley tries to put poetry to a number of social uses, Keats is interested only in its “highest use” (which isn’t specifically defined, but presumably philosophic and as works of art).

Question 23

The Modern Mind: What opinions characterize the modern mind?

Answer 23

“Beyond a belief that poetry does something of importance, or has something of importance to do, there does not seem to be much agreement.”

Question 24

The Modern Mind: What special point does Eliot make about authors and readers?

Answer 24

That a reader’s interpretation of a poem is as important as an author’s intentions, and that over time often the poet just becomes another reader of his work.

Question 25

The Modern Mind: What is a criticism Eliot makes of I.A. Richards?

Answer 25

He takes issues with five points that Richards lays out for evaluating a poem. He doesn’t believe that any one method of interpretation will work for everyone.

Question 26

The Modern Mind: What is Eliot’s main point in this chapter?

Answer 26

That there may very well be a “common element” to various poetry and the demand for it, but efforts to define this element are limited by the limitations of the critics and their times. It is only later (in history) that these limitations and motivations will become clear.

Question 27

Conclusion: What does Eliot think the best medium for the social “usefulness” of poetry is? Why?

Answer 27

Theatre; It is the best way to convey poetry to not just a large audience, but a large group of people collectively.

Question 28

Conclusion: What might the varied taste of the “present” time (1930s) be a sign of , according to Eliot?

Answer 28

Social disintegration

Question 29

Conclusion: What is the gist of Eliot’s conclusion?

Answer 29

That poetry is not defined by its uses, and that defining it in some ways goes against what it is - native, instinctive, rhythmic. He emphasizes again that poetry and criticism is informed by its times, and that that influence is not often apparent until time has gone by.

Question 30

What critical approach does this anticipate?

Answer 30

New Historicism

A form of literary theory whose goal is to understand intellectual history through literature, and literature through its cultural context, which follows the 1950s field of history of ideas and refers to itself as a form of “Cultural Poetics”