University of Kentucky UKnowledge Comparative Literature Arts and Humanities 12-31-1965 Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism W. K. Wimsatt Yale University Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Wimsatt, W. K., "Hateful Contraries: Studies in Literature and Criticism" (1965). Comparative Literature. 9. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_comparative_literature/9 Hateful Contraries This page intentionally left blank Hateful Contraries STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND CRITICISM By W. K. WIMSATT With an Essay on English Meter Written in Collaboration with Monroe C. Beardsley KENTUCKY PAPERBACKS UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY PRESS Lexington, 1966 Copyright© 1965 by the University of Kentucky Press Printed in the United States of America by the University of Kentucky Printing Division Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 65-11823 F. W. H. HUMANITATE INSIGNI DOCTOR! ET DUCTORI D. D. D. W. K. W. This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENT THE ESSAYS in criticism and critical history which compose this book were published (all but one), in their original versions, over a period of about twelve years, from 1950 to 1962. The first essay in the collection, "Horses of Wrath: Recent Critical Lessons," has been rewritten from parts of the fol­ lowing three: "Criticism Today: A Report from America," in Essays in Criticism, VI (January, 1956); "Poetic Tension: A Summary," in the New Scholasticism, XXXII (January, 1958); and "Horses of Wrath: Recent Critical Lessons," in Essays in Criticism, XII (January, 1962). Parts of "Criticism Today" have been adapted in my Epilogue to Literary Criticism, A Short History, written with Cleanth Brooks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957). And parts of the original "Horses of Wrath" are used in the Introduction to the present volume. "Aristotle and Oedipus or Else" is revised from a lecture delivered first for the Program of Directed Studies in Yale College, 1958, and thereafter on a number of other occasions. It has not been published before. A considerable degree of compression in this essay is due in part to the fact that it parallels two of my chapters in Literary Criticism, A Short History, written too soon for me to take into account Pro­ fessor Else's radical reinterpretations of Aristotle's Poetics. vii Acknowledgment "The Criticism of Comedy" is very slightly adapted from the Introduction to English Stage Comedy, English Institute Essays, 1954 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955). The other essays have appeared in the following places: "Two Meanings of Symbolism: A Grammatical Exercise" in Renascence, VIII (Autumn, 1955); "The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction" in PMLA, LXXIV (December, 1959); "The Augustan Mode in English Poetry" in ELH, A Journal of English Literary History, XX (March, 1953); "The Fact Imagined: James Boswell" in the Yale Review, XLIX (Autumn, 1959); "Eliot's Comedy: The Cocktail Party" in the Sewanee Review, LVIII (October, 1950); "Prufrock and Maud: From Plot to Symbol" in Yale French Studies, No. 9 (Spring, 1952); "What to Say About a Poem" in Reports and Speeches of the Eighth Yale Conference on the Teaching of English, April 13 and 14, 1962, Office of Teacher Training, Yale University, 1962. "The Concept of Meter," written with Monroe C. Beards­ ley, provoked two replies, one from Professor Joseph W. Hendren and one from Professor Elias Schwartz. These may be consulted, together with the comments which the editor gave the original authors the privilege of adding, in PMLA, LXXVI (June, 1961) and LXXVII (December, 1962). Parts of the essay on James Boswell have been repeated in my Introduction to Boswell for the Defence 1769-1774, edited with F. A. Pottle (New York: McGraw Hill Book Co., 1959; London: Heinemann, 1960). "What to Say About a Poem" has been republished, along with the remarks of seven other scholar-critics and the "responses" of the author, as a CEA Chap Book, What viii Acknowledgment to Say About a Poem, edited by Donald A. Sears and dis­ tributed as a Supplement to the CEA Critic, XXVI (Decem­ ber, 1963). I wish to thank the several editors for their courtesy in extending permission for the republication of these ma­ terials. Drafts of several of the essays were read before learned meetings. Some were written specifically for the occasions. I am grateful to all the audiences and all the chairmen. In addition to the Program of Directed Studies in Yale College, 1958, already mentioned, let me name English Section II, The Modern Language Association of America, Boston, 1952; the Annual Symposium of the Catholic Renascence Society, Philadelphia, 1954, and Milwaukee, 1955; the Con­ ference on Methods in Philosophy and the Sciences at the New School for Social Research, New York, 1957; the Con­ ference on Style, Indiana University, 1958; the Annual Meeting of the Lecturers in English, St. John's College, Cambridge, 1961; and the Yale Conference on the Teaching of English, 1962. As always, I owe a great deal, in one way or another, to many friends-and especially to Monroe Beardsley, who renewed an earlier collaboration in writing one of these essays with me, and without whose help an essay on meter would not have been written; to Cleanth Brooks, who over a period of seven years collaborated with me in writing Literary Criticism, A Short History, the close relation of which to parts of the present book I have indicated above; and to F. A. Pottle, who collaborated with me in editing Boswell for the Defence and to whose instruction, both early and late, I owe nearly all that I know about Boswell. ix Acknowledgment Richard Foster was kind enough to read the original essays at a time when I first thought of collecting them; his carefully considered suggestions have played a large part in their revision and rearrangement. Silliman College W.K.W. Yale University 4 August 1964 X CONTENTS Acknowledgment page vii Introduction xiii ONE Horses of Wrath: Recent Critical Lessons 3 TWO Two Meanings of Symbolism: A Grammatical Exercise 51 Aristotle and Oedipus or Else 72 The Criticism of Comedy 90 The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction 108 THREE The Augustan Mode in English Poetry 149 The Fact Imagined: James Boswell 165 Eliot's Comedy: The Cocktail Party 184 Prufrock and Maud: From Plot to Symbol 201 FOUR What to Say about a Poem 215 Notes 245 Index 255 xi Notes for the Title of This Book I in none of these Find place or refuge; and the more I see Pleasures about me, so much more I feel Torment within me, as from the hateful siege Of contraries. For only in destroying I find ease To my relentless thoughts. -John Milton, Paradise Lost, IX. 118-130, Satan in Paradise Without Contraries is no progression. -William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell I wish I could say Tom was any better.... I am obliged to write and plunge myself into abstract images to ease myself of his countenance, his voice, and feebleness-so that I live now in a continual fever. It must be poisonous to life, although I feel well. Imagine "the hateful siege of contraries." -John Keats to Charles Wentworth Dilke, 21 September 1818 INTRODUCTION My EXPOSITION begins by quoting a British critic in an American quarterly for the winter of 1953. Not that his essay is a weak or unimpressive instance of the sort of contention that I wish to illustrate. On the contrary it is the most thoughtful instance of its genre that I know-not only expressing discontent with a certain externally identifiable school of criticism but naming the grounds of the feeling in considered theoretical terms. John Holloway's essay "The Critical Intimidation," in the Hudson Review. voiced a double complaint: namely, that American criticism in the tradition of Richards and Eliot was trying too hard to operate in a "scheme of things where science was the norm," and that in some way connected with this fault the same school of criticism had gone too far in the pursuit of the ironic principle. He thought it could not be right to liberate poetry from the restricted range of "picturesque lyricism," only to shackle it again to another restricted range, that of "paradox, ambiguity, and ironic contrast." He thought that certain American critics had made too easy a gift to science of the art of prose; they wanted to make poetry too separate a thing, whereas poetry is really just a refinement of a certain "straight-forward" kind of non-scientific or impressionistic "truth" which is shared by "ordinary" prose on many oc­ casions.1 xiii Introduction Mr. Holloway, I think correctly enough, saw a close connection between the cognitive critical enterprise in America and the classic principle of reconciled opposites. But to pursue first the simpler part of the argument: so far as his essay expressed a deep misgiving about excess of cognitive effort-of thinking in criticism-he was far from being alone in his attitude at that date. In America, for ex­ ample, we had Leslie Fiedler's "Credo" in the Kenyon Review symposium of 1950-"Toward an Amateur Criticism." This was one of the earliest announcements of a sort of emancipa­ tion from criticism, a New Amateurism, a "passionate com­ mitment to not having any commitment," which was cele­ brated recurrently in articles and reviews in America during the 1950's. In England all along, the same views found ready expression.