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PARTISAN REVIEW
that we can feel it as alive and present.
If,
for example, you try
to make Shakespeare literally contemJJoraneous you make him
monstrous. He is contemporaneous only if we know how much a
man of his own age he was; he is relevant only if we see his dif–
ference. Or take a poet closer to us in actual time: Wordsworth's
Immortality Ode is acceptable to us only when it is known to have
been written at a certain past moment.
If
it had appeared much
later than it did, if it were offered to us now as a contemporary
work, I think we would not admire it. The same is true of
The
Prelude
which of all works of the romantic movement is closest to
our present interest. In the pastness of these works lies the assur–
ance of their validity and relevance.
The question is always arising: what is the real poem? Is
it
the poem we now perceive? Is it the poem the author intended?
Is it the poem the author intended and his first readers read? Well,
it seems to me that it is all these things, depending on the state of
our knowledge. But in addition the poem is the poem as it has
become an historical fact. That makes it a poem we can never
wholly understand-other things, of course, make it that-and the
mystery, the fenced-off area of the poem, is one of its aesthetic
factors. We cannot know in its first existence the past that engen–
dered us: full fathom five our father lies and of his bones are
coral made; if nothing of him fades, it has certainly suffered a
sea-change. The sea-nymphs that hourly ring his knell are sound–
ing the tone of time.
To suppose that we can think like men of another time is as
much of an illusion as to suppose that we can think in a wholly
different way. But it is the first illusion that is exemplified in the
attitude of the anti-historical critics. In the admirable poetry text–
book of Mr. Cleanth Brooks and Mr. Austin Warren, the authors,
themselves accomplished historical scholars, disclaim all historical
intention. Their purpose being what it is, they are right to do so,
but I wonder if they are right in never asking in their aesthetic
analysis the question, What effect is created by your knowledge
that the language of this poem is not such as would be uttered by
a man now? To read, say, Wordsworth's Immortality Ode prop·
erly requires as much translation of its historical circumstances
a~
of its metaphors. This the trained critic forgets; his historical
sense is often so deeply ingrained that he is not conscious of it. But
