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and its essential wit-is very close to Mr. Cruttwell's own: while he
diagnoses the destructive blight much more emphatically as science and
rationalism. But science-and-rationalism or not, the twentieth-century
poets, many of them, from Auden onwards, did according to Mr.
Brooks recapture some of their drama, metaphoric fusion and wit, their
true 'metaphysical' capacity. How they did this, since science and ra–
tionalism continue to flourish and since Mr. Brooks does not adopt the
contemporary religious panacea, we need not go into here.
But the general answer may be that the problem can only be under–
stood in purely poetic terms. That is wide enough. It means that what
is happening in religion and politics and all the continual ideological
and physical wars of mankind, disturbing and significant though that
may be, is in the long run less important than what the poets are mak–
ing out of it in their primitive and mythopoeic interpretation and
contribution.
We still like to think of Shakespeare as the Great Anonymity, as
though he were a kind of literary
Marie Celeste.
We even like to think
of
him
as warbling his native wood-notes wild. But more today than at
any time, perhaps because we have since had three centuries covering
intellectual patrons, intellectual hostesses and non-intellectual radio–
listeners, we cannot really understand how he got away without explain–
ing himself in a critical theory of poetry which "those who ran" (from
the creative cooperation of reading the poetry) might read instead.
What we forget is that all the best criticism of poetry has been
written by poets simply analyzing their own creative processes. Poet–
critics, from Coleridge and Wordsworth to Mr. Eliot, humanly sympa–
thizing with our partly instinctive, partly schoolroom hatred of reading
the poetry itself, have been obliging enough to write down, in limpid
prose, what they thought they were doing themselves, with something
of what they thought their social and psychological impingements were
doing to them in driving them to be poets. They have consoled-or
revenged-themselves, for this necessity of making social contact at a
sub-poetic level, by erecting their private poetic necessities or prejudices
irito critical laws: "This is not merely the way that
The Lyrical Ballads
were in fact composed, it is the way that all poetry worthy of the name
is and ought to be composed."
What Mr. Cruttwell emphasizes so interestingly is that Shakespeare
was just as critical, just as theorizing as any other poet, aware of him–
self, of his own art and its difficulties, of the crises and developments
of the society around him, and in particul;;tr of the conflicting claims of
his own popular dramatic urge and of the learned and courtly society
