poetry to something "small and ignominious." Both critics have little difficulty in pointing out the fundamental weaknesses in the positivist position. Their experience as poets enables them to show how much of poetry is left unexplained by theories which ignore the knowledge aspect of poetry. They make common cause in affirming, not only that poetry has first claim upon the intellect rather than feeling, but that poetry is not less than knowledge itself.

In exposing the positivists' scientific pretensions and revealing the folly of their perverse refusal to acknowledge the importance to poetry of the very faculties that permit them to do, however badly, their own thinking, Mr. Tate and Mr. Ransom have performed an invaluable service for contemporary criticism. In this respect alone, their essays are priceless. But in answering the positivists, who try to prove so little, perhaps they try to prove too much. Their doing so may not result in any great harm. Since Mr. Richards succeeded, many years ago, in persuading us to think of poetry as a kind of mental and emotional therapeutic, we might do worse than be persuaded, for a while at least, that poetry is knowledge, if only to remove the bad effects of the former persuasion. Eventually, however, we should probably be forced to find some other alternative. It is easy to imagine Mr. Tate's dismay were we to read the poets of the nineteenth century in the belief that they provide "the only complete, and thus the most responsible versions of our experience"; or Mr. Ransom's consternation were we to accept *Prometheus Unbound* as a true "cognitive discourse." Eventually it would not require another Plato to prove to us that poetry is not knowledge after all, or that, as knowledge, it is so inferior to the sciences and philosophy that we need not bother

about it at all. The wheel would come full circle, and it would continue to go around and around were we to find no way out of this dilemma of poetry as knowledge or feeling. Of course, there is a way out, as it is the purpose of this essay to show. But first it will be necessary to examine in some detail these two theories of knowledge, in order to reveal the embarrassment of poetry when it finds itself committed to competition with science and philosophy, and to demonstrate the need of an alternative that will not betray poetry once more to its detractors.

I)-S C

Perhaps it is unfair to look for a thorough exposition of the theory of poetry as knowledge in Mr. Tate's essays. He disclaims the act of the "systematic literary critic" and advises the reader to find only the "consistency of a point of view." Moreover, he warns that this point of view "cannot be communicated at the level of the procedure and the program," nor is it to be made available to "persons whose assumptions about life come out of positivism." Mr. Ransom, incidentally, finds this policy "too luxurious" for his blood. Despite such disavowal, Mr. Tate states his point of view in terms that should cause no difficulties of communication even for a positivist. "It is my contention here," he says, "that the high forms of literature offer us the only complete, and thus the most responsible versions of our experience." The qualification *high* is to be noted, for it is repeated in the definition of the function of criticism as that of maintaining and demonstrating the "special, unique, and complete knowledge which the great forms of literature afford us." Why does Mr. Tate feel the necessity for this qualification? Can it be that only the "high" and "great" forms afford this "special, unique, and complete knowledge," and that the

lesser forms have some other function? Unless all poetry, major or minor,
has a common genus, it is not properly named. If knowledge is not the
genus of all poetry, then it must be the differentia of the higher forms,
whose genus, we observe, has not been named. The use of these qualifying
terms suggests a reluctance on Mr. Tate's part --a sound reluctance, of
course-- to include under knowledge that vast body of lesser forms to
which he himself would be the last to deny the name of poetry, but for
which a theory of poetry as knowledge cannot provide.

Another difficulty arises if we ask for a definition of this special
knowledge that poetry is said to afford. Here is the answer: "By knowledge
I mean that unique and formed intelligence of the world of which man alone
is capable." Now in the essay from which this definition is quoted, Mr.
Tate discusses the critical theory of David Daiches, which he cites as an
example of the positivist heresy and calls the Doctrine of Relevance. It
is described as follows:

The Doctrine of Relevance is very simple. It means that
the subject-matter of a literary work must not be isolated in
terms of form; it must be tested (on an analogy to scientific
techniques) by observation of the world that it "represents."
Are the scene, the action, the relations of the character in
a novel, in some verifiable sense true? It is an old question.

Mr. Tate takes some pains to show the error of this doctrine. But is not
the theory of literature as knowledge but another form of the same doctrine?
Can a literature that affords a "unique and informed intelligence of the
world" possibly be "isolated in terms of form"? An intelligence of the world
is of something outside the poem to which the poem must in some sense refer.
Such intelligence need not be verifiable in the positivist sense, but it
must be verifiable by reference to some standard of verifiability, if not
observation, then self-evident principles of reason. The difficulty is, of

course, that in the former case poetry tends to become science, and in
the latter, philosophy.

It would be naive to assume that Mr. Tate does not realize this difficulty. From the point of view of this analysis, his second essay, "Literature as Knowledge," is essentially an attempt to surmount it. This essay, a longer, more difficult and much more elaborate attack on positivism than the first, begins with a brief discussion of Matthew Arnold's theory of poetry that tempts, and, I think, merits, a digression at this point. Mr. Tate's analysis is designed to show that Arnold gave the case for poetry away to the scientist. It is perhaps beside the point to remark that Bacon, Hobbes, and hosts of others had done so long before Arnold had the chance. It is more relevant to observe that Mr. Tate finds fault with the critic who promised that "more and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us ... without poetry, our science will appear incomplete." On such points, at least, a theory of poetry as knowledge would seem to have much in common with Arnold; but Mr. Tate acknowledges no spiritual relation in Arnold. He prefers to smoke out definite positivist tendencies, summing up Arnold's attitude in the following words:

> Religion had yielded to the "fact" of science, but poetry on a positive scientific base could take over the work of religion, and its future was "immense." The "fact" had undermined religion, but it could support poetry.

I take this to be a rather free paraphrase of the well known passage from Arnold's introductory essay in *The Hundred Greatest Men*, afterwards incorporated in his Introduction to Ward's *English Poets*. It is impossible to find any words in that passage to justify the description "poetry on a positive scientific base," for any sentence to the effect that positive

being the famous definition of tragedy in Aristotle's *Poetics*. Commenting on this definition in Aristotle's *Theory of Poetry and Fine Art*, Butcher remarks:

> According to his [Aristotle's] general theory of Aesthetics as a branch of Art, its end ought to be the purely objective end of realizing the *eidos* in concrete form. But in dealing with particular arts, such as poetry and music, he assumes a subjective end consisting in a certain pleasurable emotion. There is here a formal contradiction from which there appears no escape.

But Professor Mortimer J. Adler, in *Art and Prudence*, suggests that there is no "formal contradiction" here. He distinguishes between the formal cause (imitation) and the final cause (purgation), between the intrinsic nature of tragedy and its extrinsic purpose. Moreover:

> There is no conflict between the nature of a thing and the ends it can serve, no conflict between ... the intrinsic and extrinsic aspects of a work of art; not only no conflict, but there is nothing which must not be considered both ways.

In other words, there need not be a dilemma of "Intellect-or-Feeling," as Mr. Tate describes it, if we understand the senses in which poetry is both.

If Mr. Tate insists on this "dilemma" it may be because it enables him to follow Mr. Richards' way out of it. The way is indicated rather vaguely: poetry becomes, through Imagination, "the completest mode of utterance." The knowledge it gives is neither scientific fact nor psychic projection:

> It is neither the world of verifiable science nor a projection of ourselves; yet it is *complete*. And because it is complete knowledge we may, I think, claim for it a unique kind of responsibility, and see in it at times an irresponsibility equally distinct.

This complete and independent knowledge is not of the experimental but of the "experienced" order, and that is to say, according to Mr. Tate,

of the "mythical" order. And myths, according to Mr. Richards' definition,
of which Mr. Tate approves, are the "hard realities of life" projected,
symbolically recognized, co-ordinated, and accepted. Without them "man is
only a cruel animal without a soul ... a congeries of possibilities without
order and aim." We are left to assume that man with his myths --with the
knowledge, that is, afforded by poetry-- is a humane animal with a
soul,¹ able to bring order and aim to his "congeries of possibilities."

Perhaps Mr. Tate will not permit us to assume that man is an animal, for
he omits the important adjective "other" from an otherwise accurate
quotation of Mr. Richards' statement that language is "the instrument
of all our distinctively human development, of everything in which we
go beyond the other animals."

That man would be less humane without poetry few would deny; but that
poetry will bring order and aim into an otherwise disorderly and aimless
existence may be doubted: on this point there is little to be added to
Discourse Eight of Newman's *Idea of a University*. I conclude that Mr.
Tate follows Mr. Richards in making this extraordinary commitment for
poetry because he feels that there is no other way in which to answer
the positivists.

## II

In *The New Criticism*, Mr. Ransom traverses much of the ground
covered by Mr. Tate in the two essays reviewed above, and comes to
similar conclusions. He develops in great detail an intellectualist
criticism of Mr. Richards' early work in order to show the error, in
his opinion, of "using the psychological affective vocabulary in the
hope of making literary judgments in terms of the feelings, emotions,
and attitudes of poems instead of in terms of their objects." He is

much more sympathetic than Mr. Tate in his approach to the aesthetic of
Mr. Morris who, indeed, almost meets Mr. Ransom's qualifications for the
ideal "ontological critic." Mr. Morris' theory of the aesthetic sign as
"icon," or image, is at first promising, and even exciting. But when Mr.
Morris begins to discuss the "value-properties" of the "icon," and tends
to consider them as mainly affective in nature, Mr. Ransom abandons the
theory and, in fundamental agreement with Mr. Tate, finds that "the
aesthetic project has turned out very small and ignominious in Mr. Morris'
hands." In short, he is disappointed when his ontological critic fails
to conclude that poetry is knowledge.

Mr. Ransom is more specific than Mr. Tate in his definition of poetic
knowledge, and he is much more inclined to answer the positivists in their
own terms. The knowledge he postulates is not "complete" and "independent"
in Mr. Tate's sense; it is "a true cognition, bound by the obligations of
valid reference." Scientific knowledge is compact of abstract structures
that cannot reveal the real nature, the true "body" of the world; but the
knowledge of poetry is concrete, particular: it restores the "body" missed
by the abstractions of science. Already it occurs to us to ask whether
common sense does not make us sufficiently aware of objects. Surely poetry
must be a poor substitute for what our senses tell us much more immediately.
In Mr. Ransom's theory it is as if we were so transported by the abstractions
of science that we require something to restore in us an awareness of the
world in which we live. Those who find that mere everyday experience suffices
to keep them aware of the world's body will not need the knowledge of
poetry to sustain them: stubbing their toes will seem much more effective.
But such impatience should not prevent our hearing out the rest of this
interesting theory.

10

For Mr. Ransom the poem is at once a complex of meaning and a complex of sound, the former consisting in a logical structure and a meaningful texture, the latter in a meter-structure and a musical texture. And there is an over-all structure-texture relation between the whole of meaning and the whole of sound. The logical structure is, of course, the argument, idea, thesis of the poem. It can be stated abstractly and in that form it is analogous to scientific discourse. In the poem, however, it is not so stated because meter and imagination compel importations of various sorts of "irrelevancies," and these make up the meaning-texture of the poem. The importations are the differentia between poetry and prose: they afford the knowledge, the "realistic cognitions" that only poetry contains. "Poetry, with its attention to texture," says Mr. Ransom, "will always undertake to tell more truth about the world of its discourse than science cares to tell, or for its limited purpose needs to tell."

It is much easier for Mr. Ransom to illustrate the various types of irrelevancy imported by meter and imagination than it is for him to show that the importations are knowledge. There is here, as I shall show below, a definite hiatus in the argument that seriously endangers the validity of the whole theory. His analysis of the first twelve lines of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" reveals many inconsistencies to an approach that insists on having "English Humber's side" after a foregoing "Indian Ganges' side," and "Vaster than empires and slower" instead of "Vaster than empires and more slow." Such an analysis is of value as a check on the lazy assumption that poetry is all-inspired rather than, for the most part, deliberately made; it makes us aware of the craftsmanship of the poem. But does it account for all, or even a great part, of the concreteness of poetry?

11

According to Mr. Ransom,

When Marvell is persuaded by the rhyme-consideration to invest
the Humber with a tide, or to furnish his abstract calendar with
specifications about the Flood, and the conversion of the Jews,
he does not make these additions reluctantly. On the contrary,
he knows that the brilliance of the poetry depends on the shock,
accompanied at once by the realism or the naturalness, of its
powerful particularity.

If Marvell is aware of the desirability of "powerful particularity" why
should he need to be "persuaded by the rhyme-consideration"? Common sense
suggests that the particularity-consideration might come first, and that
the rhyme-consideration could yield an abstraction as well as a particularity.
This seems all the more likely when the particularity is not quite so
irrelevant and indeterminate as Mr. Ransom would have us believe. "Refuse
brings out of the rhyming dictionary the *Jews*," he says, "which it will
tax the poet's invention to supply with a context." On the preceding page,
however, Mr. Ransom *gives* this very good reading of the first line of the
poem, "Had we but world enough, and time":

It is a violent condensation meaning, I think, "the whole history
of the world before us," and combining with the supposal of their
having the time to live through it; *it supports the historical
references which follow*. (Italics are mine)

The "historical references" are not, then, indeterminate with reference to
the logical structure, and it would not be unreasonable to suppose that
the argument, demanding "eras," suggested those marked by the Flood and
the conversion of the Jews. If Mr. Ransom were to exercise the same ingenuity
upon the logical consequences of argument as he does upon his "irrelevancies"
of texture, I suspect that he could show that local detail is a result of
argument as well as of meter and imagination.

The whole theory is slippery and paradoxical. How does it happen that
diffuse, irrelevant, and indeterminate particularity in poetry does not
strike us as bad poetry, especially when we feel that the poet's invention

is constantly being taxed to supply rhythm and rhyme with a context?

This seems to be Mr. Ransom's answer:

> When the poet investigates the suitability of a rhyme-word for his discourse, he tries the imaginative contexts in which it could figure; but the success is the same when he tries many new phrases, proposed in the interests of rhythm, for their suitability, though his imagination has to do without the sharp stimuli of the rhyme-words. And by suitability I mean the propriety which consists in their denoting the particularity which really belongs to the logical object. In this way what is irrelevant for one kind of discourse becomes the content for another kind, and presently the new kind stands up firmly if we have the courage to stand by it.

The italics are mine; they raise the question of how the particularity can be indeterminate and also belong to the logical object. We are forced to assume a double standard: what is irrelevant in one kind of discourse is not irrelevant in another. Perhaps this is a way of saying that the relevance of scientific discourse is logical while that of poetry is suggestive, associative, or imaginative, but I am not sure that Mr. Ransom would agree to the translation, for as we shall see below, he criticizes Mr. Richards' concept of a "music of ideas" from the point of view of the necessity for "intellectual coherence."

There are many other aspects of Mr. Ransom's theory that merit discussion, but space permits the consideration of only one or two of the most important remaining ones. It is not clear whether the "realistic cognitions" of poetry reside in the particularities of texture alone, or in the whole of the compromise between structure and texture. The former tends to be the case, I think, for we are told that the value of poetry consists in its ability to recover "the denser and more refractory world which we know loosely through our perceptions and memories." The diffuseness, irrelevance, and indeterminateness --that is to say, the texture-- "testify" to the same elements in the constitution of the world that we are undertaking to know. Thus the structure would seem to exist for the sake of the cognitions implicit in the texture, and we have,

I think, all but a reversal of Aristotle's famous dictum that poetry represents the universal through the particular. To the extent that structure exists for the sake of texture in his theory, Mr. Ransom seems to be saying that poetry represents the particular through the universal, but it would come even closer to his meaning to say that he holds that poetry expresses the particular through the particular.²

²His essay on "The Mimetic Principle" in *The World's Body* also tends to confirm this conclusion.

He would leave the universals to science. Despite the fact that science bases its abstract structures upon an empirical observation of particulars, Mr. Ransom looks somewhat askance at its "perfect and transparent generalities," and points out that "the world nowhere presents actual fields of content composed of these scientific aspects." The actual world is "concrete and insubordinate; and it is in this respect that poetry makes its representations of the world as an alternative to the docile and virtuous world that science pictures."

This aspect of the theory raises two interesting questions. How do we know that the particulars of poetry correspond to those of the world? And can the representation of particulars be called knowledge? Granted the doubtful assumption that poetry is diffuse and indeterminate, and that reality is so, it does not necessarily follow that the diffuseness of the one *represents* that of the other. It seems extraordinary that the way in which the poet happens to solve his structure-texture problem should happen to correspond to the constitution of the world; perhaps there is a pre-disposed harmony between them. As for the second question, I think that Mr. Ransom is offering us an imitation theory of knowledge. He is

14

inclined to reject abstract structures as unlike reality, and to accept
indeterminate particulars as like it. Such a view would limit knowledge
to one kind of cognition: individual propositions about particulars.
Mr. Ransom recognizes the inadequacy of this view when he finds it in
the early speculations of Mr. Richards, who once chided us for having
"so built into our nervous systems a demand for intellectual coherence,
even in poetry, that we find a difficulty in doing without it." Of this,
Mr. Ransom properly remarks: "I do not know how we can have built into
our nervous systems this intellectual interest, if it was not native
there." And when Mr. Richards likens T. S. Eliot's poetry to a "music
of ideas" that somehow brings about "a coherent whole of feeling and
attitude," Mr. Ransom replies: "I think we shall never know whether or
not music produces in us a coherent whole of feeling and attitude unless
we have the wit to perceive its intellectual coherence." In these remarks
Mr. Ransom insists on an intellectual coherence that would, I believe,
be a coherence of particulars, a logical structure embracing general
as well as particular propositions, and he is not concerned over whether
or not the intellectual coherence imitates reality.

There is, finally, an important passage in Mr. Ransom's discourse
in which he definitely assigns a knowledge priority to abstract structure
over texture. He is taking exception to Eliot's theory of poetry and belief
in the essay on Dante. "If Dante's beliefs cannot be accepted by his
reader," says Mr. Ransom, "it is the worse for Dante with that reader,
not a matter of indifference as Mr. Eliot has argued. If Shelley's
argument is foolish, it makes his poetry foolish." He then adds that,
of course, "other considerations" would enter in: "the provisions of texture,
and not only the speculative structures; the propriety of structural-

textural relations." But if a foolish argument makes the poetry foolish,
it is hard to see why the other considerations enter at all; and it
would seem that the realistic cognitions --the diffuseness and indeter-
minateness of texture-- depend upon the abstract cognitions of structure,
upon the validity of those "perfect and transparent generalities" that
the world nowhere presents to us. Here Mr. Ransom is definitely saying
that particularity and concreteness are not enough; they must cohere in
some sort of structural whole. Poetry becomes philosophy or science in
concrete form. And the knowledge it gives through particularity is after
all not very different from or independent of a philosophic or scientific
world-view. The attempt to assign an independent knowledge function to
poetry breaks down.

III

In the dialogue from which the quotation at the beginning of this
essay was taken, it will be recalled that Socrates argues that poetry
can give little or no knowledge of reality because it imitates it at
second or third remove. Aristotle's *Poetics*, as many commentators have
pointed out, is an answer to this argument. To condemn poetry because it
does not give us knowledge of reality is, according to Aristotle, to mis-
conceive its nature as imitation, and its proper end. Now the modern is not
exactly parallel to the ancient controversy, but an examination of the
differences between them is enlightening. The positivists may be said to be
Aristotelian to the extent that they look to some end for poetry other than
that of knowledge; their emphasis on the affective response also finds
some support in Aristotle. On the other hand, they are very un-Aristotelian
when they imply that the poem is not an object of knowledge. Mr. Tate and

Mr. Ransom remind us of Plato in their assumption that, if poetry has
any value at all, it must be knowledge. Unlike Plato, they conclude that
it has this value. They are Aristotelian in their assumption of a rational
intellect and in their insistence upon the intellectual aspect of poetry.
And they are confronted with Aristotle's problem: to answer the charge
that poetry is not knowledge. Their answer, as I have tried to show, is
unsatisfactory.

Here I should like to intrude upon my discussion of an ancient
parallel by citing an observation from a modern critic, Mr. Kenneth Burke,
who points out, in his *Philosophy of Literary Form*, that answers "are not
the primary pointers of direction in a conceptual writer's work," and that
"the point about which the differences in critical schools pivot is not
in answers, but in questions." The observation is of some importance for
critics who develop their theories by discussing the theories and practices
of other critics. For questions, as Mr. Burke says, "automatically select
the field of controversy," and thus "automatically deflect the attention
from other possible fields of controversy." In the case at hand, the
positivists, by raising questions about the knowledge-value of poetry,
have deflected attention from other possible values. In effect, they
have selected the field of battle and have provoked Mr. Tate and Mr.
Ransom to meet them there, despite the fact that they are much more
vulnerable to attack in other places. And this brings us back to the
ancient parallel.

Aristotle does not permit Plato's question as to the knowledge- value
of poetry to deflect attention from the possibility that the proper end

of poetry might not be knowledge at all. For Plato, poetry, philosophy,
and science are all imitations with the common end of knowledge, the
latter two being superior because closer to the reality they imitate. But
for Aristotle, philosophy and science are not imitative in the sense that
poetry is, and the difference between them is one of kind rather than
degree. According to Professor Adler in his commentary on the *Poetics* in
*Art and Prudence*, the difference can be explained as follows. In science
and philosophy, while there is a similitude between knowledge and object,
it is not sensible. "Our knowledge is in a relation of similitude to
reality," says Professor Adler, "but it is not a knowledge of this relation.
It is a knowledge of reality." In poetry, however, the similitude between
the imitation and its object is sensible and is known. If this were not
the case, we would not be able to recognize one thing as an imitation
of another.³ Indeed this recognition, according to Aristotle, is the

³Mr. Morris seems unwilling to admit that the similitude is known. "The artist," he says, "often draws attention to the sign-vehicle in such a way as to prevent the interpreter from merely reacting to it as an object and not a sign ..." Mr. Tate asks: "If the preventive factor is inherent in the work of art, why did not the birds refrain from trying to eat the grapes in Zeuxis's picture? The citizens of Athens did not mistake the sign-vehicle for an object. Why? Because they knew the difference." Mr. Morris and others might not accept the legend about Zeuxis's picture. Aristotle would say, of course, that the difference is both inherent in the work of art (as imitation) and known by the spectator.

direct cause of the contemplative pleasure that poetry affords. Poetry,
then, is imitation and not knowledge; philosophy and science are knowledge
and not imitations. From the point of view of this essay, and in the light
of the foregoing discussion, it is important to observe that the poem is
an *object*, without necessarily being at once a *medium*, of knowledge.
The poem is an object to be known because it is a part of that which is;

of the distinction between realism and romanticism. In terms of the definition, "realism and romanticism are extremes of emphasis either upon the similarity to nature involved in imitation, or upon the difference from nature that must be present." Both are equally art. "Though the misguided intention of the realistic author be to perpetrate a counterfeit of life, the audience is never wholly deceived. They know it is literature and not life. The only confusion they might conceivably suffer is to think they were reading history rather than fiction... At the other extreme, the most fantastic fiction would not be intelligible even as fiction, did it not bear the clear marks of similarity to things as they are."

When clearly understood, the definition of imitation makes unnecessary the esoteric doctrine of creative imagination proposed by Coleridge and accepted by Mr. Richards and Mr. Tate. The function of imagination in imitation is no different from its general psychological function as the representative faculty. Butcher gives the following account of it, based on the *De Anima*:

> It is more than the receptivity of sense, it is on the border-line between sense and thought. It is treated as an image-forming faculty, by which we can recall at will pictures previously presented to the mind and may even accomplish some of the processes of thought. It represents subjectively all the particular concrete objects perceived by the external senses. From the "phantasms" or representations of the imagination the intellect abstracts its ideas or universal concepts. Without the imagination the intellect cannot work through lack of matter.

Imitation does not then require the postulation of a faculty that "fuses together the things of thought and sense, and forms a new world of its own, recombining and transmuting the materials of experience." According to Butcher, "this work is for Aristotle the result of the spontaneous and necessary union of intellect and sense."

Of that pleasure which Aristotle finds to be the final cause of poetry, much has been said that need not be repeated here. It is only necessary to emphasize that it is not a simple response of impulse, feeling, and attitude. It presupposes contemplation, a free and independent activity of the mind. In *Art and Scholasticism*, Maritain describes it as a joy, "not of the simple

act of knowing, of possessing knowledge, of having truth. It is a
joy overflowing from such an act, when the object upon which it is
brought to bear is well proportioned to the mind." (The italics are
mine.) The end of poetry is not knowledge, for the knowledge it contains
is not unique, it does not require poetry for its expression. It is
easy to see why poetry is mistaken for knowledge. "The contemplation
of what is perfect in art," says Butcher, "is an elevated delight
similar in quality to the glow of speculative thought. Each is a
moment of joy complete in itself, and belongs to the ideal sphere of supreme
human happiness."

Aristotle's answer to Plato shows us that the dilemma of poetry as
"Intellect-or-Feeling" is un genuine. It shows us how the poem engages
intellect and feeling at once, so that we need not sacrifice poetry to
either. It shows us that poetry is not less valuable to man than philosophy
and science, although it is imitation and its proper end is not knowledge,
but a delight in the mind. It shows us how the positivists can be answered
without exalting poetry as philosophy or religion, and how Mr. Tate and
Mr. Ransom can be answered without reducing it to emotion and attitude.
We need not fear that poetry becomes something small and ignominious when
its end is acknowledged to be a delight in the mind rather than "the
complete knowledge of man's experience." For such delight does not proceed
from a crude sublimation of frustrated "real" interests, nor from an
adjustment and resolution of excited impulses. It proceeds, as Maritain
has said, "from the perfection with which the work expresses or manifests
form ... it proceeds from the truth of imitation as a manifestation of
a form ... There the joy of imitation in art is brought to bear. And it
is that which gives art its universal value."