FORM AND CONTENT
35
It is an axiom of literary criticism that an incomplete fuswn produces
an unsuccessful work. Overemphasis on content makes for didac_ticism, and
overemphasis on
form
gives preciosity. The two are interpenetrating,
mutually affective elements. This relation presents a significant illustra–
tion of dialectical unity.
The fact that a literary work presents a single impact, and the
lrnowled:ge that no artist sets out to combiue his form and content suggests
that an underlying
vision
or
sensibility
is the agent of selection and percep–
tion. The writer's grasp of intellectual and emotional currents and his
feeling for prose and poetic forms as instruments which have already
expressed some phases of these currents constitute a single quality. A
literary work is an organic whole like a man's personality or some vivid
experience. Just as the personality is the complete impression which a
man makes, so the sensibility of a poem is its total effect. The
feel
of the
idiom, the metaphor, the conception, and the way all hang together-this
is the sensibility. The sensibility of any single work is of a piece with
the entire sensibility of the writer in his complete work. And the similarity
of style, theme and image in the works of any literary period sh0ws that
the sensibility of a writer is a shoot from the pervading sensibility of his
environment. When we remark that Eliot has been influenced by French
symbolism, we really mean that his work shows a similar sense of language,
mood and theme. The finished proquct is the sensibility of the poem,
but the sensibility of the writer conditions the sensibility of each one of his
works, in that it dictates his perception,, choice of theme, quality of style,
and susceptibility to some kinds of literary influence rather than others.
Today, when a writer casts his lot with revolution, his revolutionary pur–
poses and associations shape his sensibility toward proletarian literature.
Only the requirements of abstraction in analysis could separate, for ex–
ample, W. H. Auden's break with his class, his sense of bourgeois frustra–
tion and brutality, his hope in communism, his nimble satirical thrusts,
his clipt, buoyant verse, from each other.
The apex of the question is reached when it is asked whether all
these elements or analogous ones in other writers must all appear together,
or whether some can ·be assimilated while others are discarded:
i11
it3 most
mciSIVe and relevant form the question reads-does content determine
form? In their Auden texture these elements are all peculiar to Auden's
poetry; when assimilation or carryover takes place, some variant is used
and a new quality emerges. And in any specific work, in one sense the
content does determine the form, because the writer's sense of his content
is part of his complete system of perception which generates his form. It
is just as true, however, to say that the form determines the content.
Nevertheless, it is only after contact with completed works that we are
