METAPHrSICALS AND BAROQUE
13
ingly personal distortion of rhetoric, recalling Michaelangelo's sculp–
ture:
Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorr{J d shears,
And slits the thin spun life. But not the praise,
Phrebus
repli' d, and touch' d my trembling ears;
Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil
Nor in th e glistering foil
Set off to th'world, nor in broad rumour lies
...
The rhetoric of the eighteenth century, when it failed of the
rococo taste and refinement, was not ordinarily successful. Hence the
Wordsworthian reversion to a language of common life.
VI
. The fact remains, however, that critics who have identified form
with substance (particularly those who have followed
I.
A. Richards)
may have dt>nied an entirely legitimate employment of rhetoric. In
so doing they undermine a proper evaluation of Virgil or Milton or,
for that matter, the exquisite rhetoric of Pope. No one would deny
the claims of poetry in which the language is functional, in which there
is no interruption between the surface and the core. Yet is there not
a "romantic" and "semantic" fallacy in the view that iu estimable
poetry substance and language are one? Is not the rhetoric of Shelley
as false as that of Wordsworth's
Ode to Duty
is
not
false?
By report, a New Zealand prisoner of war lately wrote to the
Red Cross explaining that because he is eager to become a poet, he
wishes to be sent books upon metres of English verse and the mythol–
ogy of ancient Greece. Possibly he is not in error. In a sense poetry
is
a ritual. One of its rituals- its liturgy, iQ. the phrase of C. S. Lewis
-is its rhetoric (in the sense of its embellishment). Arnold said that
the protestantism of the protestant religion, its nakedness, is the result
of individualism. This same individualism in poetry expressed itself
only imperfectly in the so-called "romantic" poets, who to a large
degree continued to practice a poetic liturgy or ritual sanctioned by
tradition. Wordsworth at one timle determined to compose in the
plain language of men, to strip his poetic performance of the ritual
of gaudyverse. But in some of his most successful passages he con–
tinued the rhetorical gestures that had always patently set poetry
apart from common speech. Keats and Byron, and often Shelley,
