Hamlet and His Problems

T.S Eliot

FEW critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the 1

character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most
dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which
through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often
find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe,
who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and
probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to
study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of
Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical
insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution—of their
own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s—which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that
Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.
Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll of the University of Minnesota, 2

have issued small books which can be praised for moving in the other direction. Mr. Stoll
performs a service in recalling to our attention the labours of the critics of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, 1 observing that
they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but they were nearer in
spirit to Shakespeare’s art; and as they insisted on the importance of the effect of the whole
rather than on the importance of the leading character, they were nearer, in their old-
fashioned way, to the secret of dramatic art in general.
Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only 3

criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for “interpretation” the
chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know.
Mr. Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their “interpretation”
of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious: that Hamlet is a stratification, that it
represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his
predecessors. The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating
the whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his Hamlet to be
superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form.
We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) 4

genius who was in all probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as the Spanish
Tragedy and Arden of Feversham; and what this play was like we can guess from three clues:
from the Spanish Tragedy itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd’s Hamlet must have
been based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare’s lifetime which bears strong
evidence of having been adapted from the earlier, not from the later, play. From these three
sources it is clear that in the earlier play the motive was a revenge-motive simply; that the action
or delay is caused, as in the Spanish Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch
surrounded by guards; and that the “madness” of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion,
and successfully. In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is
more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly “blunts” the latter; the delay in revenge
is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the “madness” is not to
lull but to arouse the king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be
convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to the Spanish Tragedy as to leave no
doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the text of Kyd. And finally there are
unexplained scenes—the Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes—for which there is
little excuse; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in the style of
Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes to be scenes in the original play of Kyd reworked by a
third hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with very
strong show of reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in two
parts of five acts each. The upshot of Mr. Robertson’s examination is, we believe, irrefragable:
that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a
mother’s guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully
upon the “intractable” material of the old play.
Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the 5

play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is
none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare
spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty
revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like
Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill,
are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act v. sc. ii.,
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep…
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf’d about me, in the dark
Grop’d I to find out them: had my desire;
Finger’d their packet;
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable condition. We are
surely justified in attributing the play, with that other profoundly interesting play of “intractable”
material and astonishing versification, Measure for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which
follow the tragic successes which culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as
“interesting” as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic
success. And probably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it
interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of
literature.
The grounds of Hamlet’s failure are not immediately obvious. Mr. Robertson is undoubtedly 6

correct in concluding that the essential emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty
mother:
[Hamlet’s] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score of his mother’s
degradation.… The guilt of a mother is an almost intolerable motive for drama, but it had to
be maintained and emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of one.
This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the “guilt of a mother” that cannot
be handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the
pride of Coriolanus. The subject might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these,
intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the
writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this
feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localize. You cannot point to it in the
speeches; indeed, if you examine the two famous soliloquies you see the versification of
Shakespeare, but a content which might be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of
the Revenge of Bussy d’ Ambois, Act v. sc. i. We find Shakespeare’s Hamlet not in the action, not
 in any quotations that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably
not in the earlier play.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in 7

other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of
that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory
experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s
more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind
of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of
imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if,
given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the
series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion;
and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion
which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed
identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence
of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face
of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his
mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds
her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains
to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that
Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that the very
nature of the données of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have heightened the
criminality of Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in
Hamlet; it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet
the feeling which she is incapable of representing.
The “madness” of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare’s hand; in the earlier play a simple ruse, and to the
end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience. For Shakespeare it is less than
madness and more than feigned. The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not
part of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the character Hamlet it
is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it is the
buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art. The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible,
without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has
known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person
puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it
alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an
adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must
simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he
attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to
express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his
biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what
personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii., Apologie de Raimond Sebond. We should have,
finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an
experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand
things which Shakespeare did not understand himself

LITERARY CRITICISM AND PHILOSOPHY

F.R Leavis
I MUST thank Dr Wellek l for bringing fundamental criticism to my work, and above all for raising in so
complete a way an issue that a reviewer or two had more or less vaguely touched on an issue of which no
one can have been more conscious than myself, who had seen the recognition of it as an essential
constituent of what I naturally (whatever the quality of my performance) hoped for: an appreciation of my
undertaking. Dr Wellek points out, justly, that in my dealings with English poetry I have made a number
of assumptions that I neither defend nor even state : 'I could wish', he says, 'that you had made your
assumptions more explicitly and defended them systematically'. After offering me a summary of these
assumptions, he asks me to 'defend this position abstractly and to become conscious that large ethical,
philosophical and, of course, ultimately, also aesdietic choices are involved'.

I in my turn would ask Dr Wellek to believe that if I omitted to undertake the defence he desiderates it
was not from any lack of consciousness : I knew I was making assumptions (even if I didn't and shouldn't
now state them to myself quite as he states them) and I was not less aware than I am now of what they
involve. I am interested that he should be able to say that, tor the most part, he shares diem with me. But,
he adds, he would 'have misgivings in pronouncing them without elaborating a specific defence or a
theory in their defence'. That, I suggest, is because Dr Wellek is a philosopher ; and my reply to him in
the first place is that I myself am not a philosopher, and that I doubt whether in any case I could elaborate
a theory that he would find satisfactory. I am not, however, relying upon modesty for my defence. If I
profess myself so freely to be no philosopher it is because I feel that I can afford my modesty ; it is
because I have pretensions pretensions to being a literary critic. And I would add that even if I had felt
qualified to satisfy Dr Wellek on his own ground I should have declined to attempt it in that book.

Literary criticism and philosophy seem to me to be quite distinct and different kinds of discipline at least,
I think they ought to be (for while in my innocence I hope that philosophic writing commonly represents
a serious discipline, I am quite sure that literary-critical writing commonly doesn't). This is not to suggest
that a literary critic might not, as such, be the better for a philosophic training, but if he were, the
advantage, I believe,would manifest itself partly in a surer realization that literary criticism is not
philosophy. I pulled up just short of saying 'the two disciplines . . .', a phrase that might suggest too great
a simplification : it is no doubt possible to point to valuable writing of various kinds representing varying
lands of alliance between the literary critic and the philosopher. But I am not the less sure that it is
necessary to have a strict literary criticism somewhere and to vindicate literary criticism as a distinct and
separate discipline.

The difficulty that one who approaches with the habit of one kind of discipline has in duly recognizing
the claims of a very different kind the difficulty of reconciling the two in a working alliance seems to me
to be illustrated in Dr Wellek's way of referring to the business of literary criticism : 'Allow me', he says,
'to sketch your ideal of poetry, your "norm" with which you measure every poet . . / That he should slip
into this way of putting things seems to me significant, for he would on being challenged agree, I
imagine, that it suggests a false idea of the procedure of the critic. At any rate, he gives me an excuse for
making, by way of reminder, some elementary observations about that procedure.

By the critic of poetry I understand the complete reader : the ideal critic is the ideal reader. The reading
demanded by poetry is of a different kind from that demanded by philosophy. I should not find it easy to
define the difference satisfactorily, but Dr Wellek knows what it is and could give at least as good an
account of it as I could. Philosophy, we say, is 'abstract' (thus Dr Wellek asks me to defend my position
'more abstractly'), and poetry 'concrete'. Words in poetry invite us, not to 'think about' and judge but to
'feel into' or 'become' to realize a complex experience that is given in the words. They demand, not merely
a fuller-bodied response, but a completer responsiveness a kind of responsiveness that is incompatible
with the judicial, one-eye-on the- standard approach suggested by Dr Wellek's phrase : 'your "norm" with
which you measure every poet*. The critic the reader of poetry is indeed concerned with evaluation, but
to figure him as measuring with a norm which he brings up to the object and applies from the outside is to
misrepresent the process. The critic's aim is, first, to realize as sensitively and completely as possible this
or that which claims his attention; and a certain valuing is implicit in the realizing. As he matures in
experience of the new thing he asks, explicitly and implicitly : 'Where does this come e How does it stand
in relation to . . . e How relatively important does it seem ?' And the organization into which it settles as a
constituent in becoming 'placed* is an organization of

similarly 'placed' things, things that have found their bearings with regard to one another, and not a
theoretical system or a system determined by abstract considerations.

No doubt (as I have admitted) a philosophic training might possibly ideally would make a critic surer and
more penetrating in the perception of significance and relation and in the judgment of value. But it is to
be noted that the improvement we ask for is of the critic, the critic as critic, and to count on it would be to
count on the attainment of an arduous ideal. It would be reasonable to fear to fear blunting of edge,
blurring of focus and muddled misdirection of attention : consequences of queering one discipline with
the habits of another. The business of the literary critic is to attain a peculiar completeness of response
and to observe a peculiarly strict relevance in developing his response into commentary ; he must be on
his guard against abstracting improperly from what is in front of Him and against any premature or
irrelevant generalising of it or from it. His first concern is to enter into possession of the given poem (let
us say) in its concrete fulness, and his constant concern is never to lose his completeness of possession,
but rather to increase it. In making value-judgments (and judgments as to significance), implicitly or
explicitly, he does so out of that completeness of possession and with that fulness of response. He doesn't
ask, 'How does this accord with these specifications of goodness in poetry ?' ; he aims to make fully
conscious and articulate the immediate sense of value that 'places' the poem.

Of course, the process of 'making fully conscious and articulate' is a process of relating and organizing,
and the 'immediate sense of value* should, as the critic matures with experience, represent a growing
stability of organization (the problem is to combine stability with growth). What, on testing and re-testing
and wider experience, turn out to be my more constant preferences, what the relative permanencies in my
response, and what structure begins to assert itself in the field of poetry with which I am familiar? What
map or chart of English poetry as a whole represents my utmost consistency and most inclusive coherence
of response?

From this consistency and this coherence (in so far as I have achieved them) it should, of course, be
possible to elicit principles and abstractly formidable norms. Dr Wellek's first criticism of me is (to give it
its least exceptionable force) that I haven't proceeded to elicit them: that, having written the book I
undertook to write, I haven't gone on to write another book in which I develop the theoretical implications
of the first (for it would be essentially a matter of two books, even if there were only one binding). To this
I make again my modest reply that I doubt, in any case, my capacity to satisfy Dr Wellek in this respect.
And I add again that I do not think my modesty has any adverse bearing on my qualifications for writing
the book I did undertake to write. The cogency I hoped to achieve was to be for other readers of poetry
readers of poetry as such. I hoped, by putting in front of them, in a criticism that should keep as close to
the concrete as possible, my own developed 'coherence of response', to get them to agree (with, no doubt,
critical qualifications) that the map, the essential order, of English poetry seen as a whole did, when they
interrogated their experience, look like that to them also. Ideally I ought perhaps (though, I repeat, I
should not put my position in quite the terms Dr Wellek ascribes to me) to be able to complete the work
with a theoretical statement. But I am sure that the kind of work that I have attempted comes first, and
would, for such a theoretical statement to be worth anything, have to be done first.

If Dr Wellek should still insist that I ought, even if I declined to elaborate the philosophy implicit in my
assumptions, at any rate to have been more explicit about them, I can only reply that I think I have gone
as far in explicitness as I could profitably attempt to go, and that I do not see what would be gained by the
kind of explicitness he demands (though I see what is lost by it). Has any reader of my book been less
aware of the essential criteria that emerge than he would have been if I had laid down such general
propositions as : 'poetry must be in serious relation to actuality, it must have a firm grasp of the actual, of
the object, it must be in relation to life, it must not be cut off from direct vulgar living, it should be
normally human . . .' ? If, as I did, I avoided such generalities, it was not out of timidity ; it was because
they seemed too clumsy to be of any use. I thought I had provided something better. My whole effort was
to work in terms of concrete judgments and particular analyses: 'This doesn't it? bears such a relation to
that ; this kind of thing don't you find it so ? wears better than that*, etc. If I had to generalize, my
generalization regarding the relation between poetry and 'direct vulgar living' or the ' actual' would run
rather in die following way than in that suggested by Dr Wellek : traditions, or prevailing conventions or
habits, that tend to cut poetry in general off from direct vulgar living and the actual, or that make it
difficult for the poet to bring into poetry his most serious interests as an adult living in his own time, have
a devitalizing effect. But I cannot see that I should have added to the clarity, cogency or usefulness of my
book by enunciating such a proposition (or by arguing it theoretically). Again, I did not say that the
language of poetry 'should not flatter the singing voice, should not be merely mellifluous', etc. I illustrated
concretely in comparison and analysis the qualities indicated by those phrases, pointed to certain
attendant limitations, and tried to show in terms of actual poetic history that there were serious
disadvantages to be recognized in a tradition that minsisted on such qualities as essential to poetry. In
fact, though I am very much aware of the shortcomings of my work, I feel that by my own methods I have
attained a relative precision that makes this summarizing seem intolerably clumsy and inadequate. I do
not, again, argue in general terms that there should be 'no emotion for its own sake, no afflatus, no mere
generous emotionality, no luxury in pain and joy' ; but by choice, arrangement and analysis of concrete
examples I give those phrases (in so far, that is, as I have achieved my purpose) a precision of meaning
they couldn't have got in any other way. There is, I hope, a chance that I may in this way have advanced
theory, even if I haven't done the theorizing. I know that the cogency and precision I have aimed at are
limited ; but I believe that any approach involves limitations, and that it is by recognizing them and
working within them that one may hope to get something done.

Dr Wellek has a further main criticism to bring against me : it is that my lack of interest in philosophy
makes me unfair to the poets of die Romantic period. I hope he will forgive me if I say that his
demonstration has, for me, mainly the effect of demonstrating how difficult it is to be a philosopher and a
literary critic at the same time. The positive aim of his remarks he sums up as being 'to show that the
romantic view of the world . . . underlies and pervades the poetry ofBlake, Wordsworth and Shelley,
elucidates many apparent difficulties, and is, at least, a debatable view of the world'. 'The romantic view
of the world', a view common to Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley and others yes, I have heard of it; but what
interest can it have for the literary critic ? For the critic, for the reader whose primary interest is in poetry,
those three poets are so radically different, immediately and finally, from one another that the offer to
assimilate them in a common philosophy can only suggest the irrelevance of the philosophic approach.

My attitude towards Blake Dr Wellek, I think, misunderstands. He certainly misrepresents my verdict on

the particular poem, the Introduction to Songs of Experience. The comparison with Ash-Wednesday has a
context in the chapter to which the note challenged by Dr Wellek is appended, and, so far from arguing
that Blake's poem is 'so ambiguous as to have no "right sense'", I have in that note the explicit aim of
showing how Blake, with his astonishingly original technique, achieves something like the extraordinary
precision of Ash-Wednesday. And in general, where Blake is concerned, my intention is the reverse of a
slighting one. My view of the poem, in fact, seems to me more favourable than that implied by Dr
Wellek, who says : 'Actually I think the poem has only one possible meaning, which can be ascertained
by a study of the whole of Blake's symbolical philosophy'. I myself, a literary critic, am interested in
Blake because it is possible to say with reference to some of his work that his symbolical philosophy is
one thing, his poetry another. I know that even in his best poetry symbolism appears, and I was aware of
symbolism in the poem I picked on ; but I judged that I might fairly avoid a large discussion that seemed
inessential to the point I was proposing to make.

I will say now, though, that when in Blake's poetry his symbols function poetically they have, I believe, a
life that is independent of his 'symbolical philosophy' : for instance, 'Earth', 'starry pole', 'dewy grass' and
'wat'ry shore', in the Introduction to Songs of Experience, seem to me to have a direct evocative power.
Knowledge of Blake's arbitrary assignment of value to a symbol may often help to explain why he should
have written as he has done here, there and elsewhere ; I do not believe that it will ever turn what was
before an unsuccessful poem into a good one. And I think Hear the voice ofthe Bard! decidedly a good
one. Dr Wellek's account of it seems to me to justify my assumption that I could fairly discuss the poem
without talking about symbols; for I cannot see that his account tends to invalidate mine. I cannot, in fact,
see why he should suppose it does. Or rather, I see it is because he assumes that what we are elucidating
is a text of symbolical philosophy written as such and to be read as such.

The confidence of his paraphrase made me open my eyes. It is a philosopher's confidence the confidence
of one who in the double strength of a philosophic training and a knowledge of Blake's system ignores the
working of poetry. The main difference, one gathers, between the philosopher and the poet is that to the
poet there may be allowed, in the interests of rhythm and mere formal matters like that, a certain
looseness, a laxity of expression ; 'Delete "and" (in line 7) which was inserted only because ofthe rhythm
and the sense is quite dear' Yes, immediately clear, if one derives from a study of 'the whole of Blake's
symbolical philosophy' the confidence to perform these little operations. But I myselfbelieve that in this
poem Blake is using words with very unusual precision the precision of a poet working as a poet.

And it is this precision that Dr Wellek ignores in his paraphrase and objects to my noticing :

In spite of his fall Man might yet control the universe ('the starry pole') , . . The next 'that' cannot possibly
refer to God, but to the soul or to Man, who after his rebirth might control the 'starry pole'. There is no
need to evoke Lucifer.
'Man' capable of controlling the universe may surely be said to have taken on something of God and may
be, I suggest, in Blake's syntax in his peculiar organization of meaning not so sharply distinguishable
from God as Dr Wellek's notion of *clear sense' and 'one possible meaning* demands. And if 'fallen,
fallen light' does not for Dr Wellek bring into the complex of associations Lucifer _

from morn

To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,

A summer's day, and with the setting sun,

Dropt from the zenith like a falling star

On Lemnos, the Aegean isle

-then I think we have an instance of the philosopher disabling the critic ; an instance of the philosophical
approach inducing in the reader of poetry a serious impercipience or insensitiveness. Blake is not
referring to abstract ideas of Man and rebirth ; he works in the concrete, evoking by a quite unprose like
(that was my point) use of associations a sense of a state of desolation that is the more grievous by
contrast with an imagined state of bliss in which Man, in harmonious mastery of his full potentialities,
might be godlike an unfallen and un sinful Lucifer (Milton, we remember, was of the Devil's party
without knowing it).

The twinkling stars in Blake mean always the light of Reason and the watery shore the limit of matter or
of Time and Space. The identification of Earth and Man in this poem is explicitly recognized by Blake in
the illustration to this very poem which represents a masculine figure lying upon the * watery shore* and,
with the 'starry floor' as a background, painfully lifting his head.

I would call Dr Wellek's attention to the poem, Earth's Answer, immediately following that which is
under discussion. It opens :

Earth raised up her head

From the darkness dread and drear.

Her light fled,

Stony dread !

And her locks cover'd with grey despair.

Prison'd on wat'ry shore.

Starry Jealousy does keep my den :

Cold and hoar,

Weeping o'er,

I hear the father of the ancient men.

I quote these stanzas as a way of suggesting to him that his neat and confident translation of symbols will
not do (I am not saying that 'Reason' and 'Jealousy' could not be reconciled), and that even an argument
from one of Blake's illustrations may not be as coercive as Dr Wellek supposes.

Again, where Wordsworth is concerned, Dr Wellek seems to misunderstand my intention. 'So contrary to
your own conclusion' (p. 164), he says, 'I would maintain the coherence, unity, and subtlety of
Wordsworth's thought'. Well, I had heard of and read about Wordsworth's thought, which, indeed, has
received a great deal of notice, but my business was with Wordsworth's poetry ; I never proposed, and do
not propose now, to consider him as a philosophic thinker. When I look up p. 164 in my book I find this
as die only passage Dr Wellek can be referring to : 'His phlosophizing (in the sense of the Hartleian
studies and applications) had not the value he meant it to have ; but it is an expression of his intense moral
seriousness and a mode of that essential discipline of contemplation which gave consistency and stability
to his experience'. In saying that Wordsworth's philosophizing hadn't the value he meant it to have I was
pointing out that it hadn't the relation he supposed to his business as a poet, and my analysis still seems to
me conclusive. Dr Wellek merely says in general terms that it isn't conclusive for him : 'I cannot see why
the argument of Canto II of the Prelude could not be paraphrased'. It can, I freely grant, be very easily
paraphrased if one brings to it a general knowledge of the kind of thought involved and an assumption
that poets put loosely what philosophers formulate with precision. For would Dr Wellek in prose
philosophy be satisfied with, or even take seriously, such looseness of statement and argument as
Wordsworth's in his philosophic verse ? If so, he has a very much less strict criterion for philosophy as
philosophy than I have for poetry as poetry. Even if Wordsworth had a philosophy, it is as a poet that he
matters, and if we remember that even where he offers 'thought' the strength of what he gives is the poet's,
we shall, as critics, find something better to do than supply precision and completeness to his abstract
argument.

I do not see what service Dr Wellek does either himself or philosophy by adducing chapter V of Science
and the Modern World. That an eminent mathematician, logician and speculative philosopher should be
so interested in poetry as Professor Whitehead there shows himself to be is pleasing ; but I have always
thought the quality of his dealings with poetry to be exactly what one would expect of an authority so
qualified. I will add, perhaps wantonly and irrelevantly, that the utterances of Professor Whitehead's
quoted by Dr Wellek look to me like bad poetry ; in their context no doubt they become something
different, but I cannot see why even then they should affect a literary critic's view of Wordsworth and
Shelley.

When Dr Wellek comes to Shelley he hardly makes any serious show of sustaining his case against me
and the weakness of his own approach is most clearly exposed. He is so interested in philosophy that he
pays no real attention to my analyses of poetry. Take, for instance, his suggested interpretations of points
in the Ode to the West Wind : it is not merely that they are, it seems to me, quite unacceptable ; even if
they were otherwise, they would make no substantial difference to my carefully elaborated analysis of the
way in which Shelley's poetry works. And why should Dr Wellek suppose that he is defending Shelley in
arguing that 'the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean may allude to "the old mystical conception of the
two trees of Heaven and Earth intertwining'"? Not that I attack the Ode to the West Wind', I merely
illustrate from it the characteristic working of Shelley's poetry.

Nor do I attack Mont Blanc. When Dr Wellek says, I cannot see the slightest confusion in the opening
paragraph of Mont Blanc he seems to me to be betraying an inappreciation of Shelley an inappreciation
explained by the approach intimated in his next sentence: *It states an epistemological proposition quite
clearly'. Now to me the opening paragraph of Mont Blanc evokes with great vividness a state of excited
bewilderment and wonder. The obvious Wordsworthian element in the poem suggests a comparison with
Wordsworth, and, regarding as I do the two poets, not as stating epistemological propositions or asserting
general conceptions, but as reacting characteristically to similar concrete occasions, the comparison I
actually make seems to me justified. When Dr Wellek tells me that the passage I quote from die Prelude
*has philosophically nothing to do with the introduction of Shelley's Mont Blanc', he merely confirms my
conviction that philosophy and literary criticism are very different things.

Having described certain Shelley an habits I go on to point out that these carry with them a tendency to
certain vices ; vices such that, in diagnosing them, the literary critic finds himself becoming explicitly a
moralist. I conduct the argument very carefully and in terms of particular analysis, and I cannot see that
Dr Wellek makes any serious attempt to deal with it. I cannot see why he should think that his alternative
interpretation of the third stanza of When the lamp is shattered makes that poem less bad in any of the
ways in which I have judged it adversely. But I do see that, not reading as a literary critic, he fails to
respond with his sensibility to the peculiarly Shelley an virtue, the personal voice of the last stanza, and
so fails to realize the force of my radical judgment on the poem (I cannot recapitulate the whole argument
here).

Actually, of course, Dr Wellek's attention is elsewhere than on Shelley's poetry and my analysis. 'These
notes', he slips into saying, 'are made only to support my main point that Shelley's philosophy, I think, is
astonishingly unified, and perfectly coherent' I do not consider it my business to discuss that proposition,
and Dr Wellek has given me no grounds for judging Shelley's poetry to be anything other than I have
judged it to be. If, in reply to my charge that Shelley's poetry is repetitive, vaporous, monotonously self-
regarding and often emotionally cheap, and so, in no very long run, boring, Dr Wellek tells me that
Shelley was an idealist, I can only wonder whether some unfavourable presumption has not been set up
about idealism. Again, it is no consolation for disliking the characteristic Shelleyan vapour to be told :

This fusing of the spheres ofthe different senses in Shelley is exactly paralleled in his rapid transitions
and fusions of the emotions, from pleasure to pain, from sorrow to joy. Shelley would like us similarly to
ignore or rather to transcend the boundaries of individuality between persons just as Indian philosophy
or Schopenhauer wants us to overcome the curse and. burden of the prindpium individuationis.

Of course, according to that philosophy, poetry may be a mistake or illusion, something to be left behind.
But Dr Wellek will hardly bring it against me that I have been unfair to Shelley's poetry out of lack of
sympathy with such a view.

Unfairness to poets out of lack of interest in their philosophy he does, of course, in general charge me
with. His note concludes :

Your book . . . raises anew the question of the poet's 'belief and how far sympathy with this belief and
comprehension of it is necessary for an appreciation of the poetry. A question which has been debated a
good deal, as you know, and which I would not like to solve too hastily on the basis of your book.
 I will only comment, without wishing to question the justice of this conclusion, that Dr Wellek seems to
me to assume too easily that the poet's essential 'belief is what can be most readily extracted as such from
his works by a philosopher.