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287
or
does not happen-that no
particular
conditions are required to foster
it. "The critic," wrote EliDt, "must not coerce, and he must not make
judgments .of worse or better. He must simply elucidate: the reader
will
fDrm
the correct judgment for himself." A critical analysis makel>
the experience of poetry
possible
for the reader; to prompt that ex–
perience in any way should not be its intention. Faced with any text–
beer can labels, encyclopedias, Milton, the Bible--the critic distinguish–
es
t4e object of literary attention from what can be subjected to other
modes of awareness; whether "the full surprise and elevation of a new
experience of poetry" follows or not is none of his business.
The real antagonist ,of Eliot's position is not the anti-traditiDnalist
(whoever he may be) but that whole effDrt of criticism for which the
tension between the isolated literary experience and the general con–
ditions of ., social life is a meaningful one, not the prDduct of logical
error. (For Arnold, too, the experience of value was a gift, but one fDr
which mankind was unprepared, and therefore something that must be
argued
for~
successively redefined, lifted to the point of free and
knDw–
ing acceptance.) But it appears to me that the conditions of life have a
great deal to do with the nature of literary experience--the thing itself,
and not just our particular adjustment to it. Sophocles and Dante are
not for us what they were for their cDntemporaries; and Eliot tells us
that this is because of all the poets who have intervened since. That
explanation might once have served, but it holds no longer. They are
different for us because we encounter them under different conditions–
in a seminar course of Great Books, between hamburgers at lunch, while
traveling
.on
the subway, or fagged .out at the end of a working day. I
speak of more than exhaustion, boredom, lack of discriminating atten–
tion. What gets established in human life as a need, the kinds and
intensities of desires that the individual gradually assumes as his own,
and the quality of satisfaction that these afford him, are conditioned by
agencies that we have learned to call
cultuml,
whether we believe them to
be
the work
.of
reason, histDry, or the whim of supernatural powers.
Man's communal existence has always demanded the surrender of his
energies to public manipulation; but never before to such a degree and
never before so reconditely. And this, I would argue, has had some
ef–
fect upon our encounter with art; it goes far to explain, fDr instance, the
backward-looking temperament that seems associated with literary con–
sciousness. My own c,ondition is academic, and therefore fairly easy; I
have time fDr leisure and cultivation. But I do not find in my public
life, nor in my intellectual life, much support for the kind of self–
confrontation that I imagine the artistic experience demands. I am
never very sure whether I have read
King
Lear,
really read it, or just
