"aesthetics" and the rise of lyric in the eighteenth century

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"Aesthetics" and the Rise of Lyric in the Eighteenth CenturyAuthor(s): Douglas Lane PateySource: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 33, No. 3, Restoration and EighteenthCentury (Summer, 1993), pp. 587-608Published by: Rice UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/451015 .

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SEL 33 (1993)ISSN 0039-3657

"Aesthetics"and the Rise of Lyricin theEighteenth Century

DOUGLAS LANE PATEY

In the literary theory of the eighteenth century we habituallyconfront two opposed views of poetry and in particular of what asuccession of critics identifies as the oldest and most "poetical"kind of poetry: lyric. Both are views that an older literary historytaught us to associate more with the nineteenth century than theeighteenth, or at best only with-to use the term popularized inthe 1920s-the "preromantic" strain in later eighteenth-centuryliterature. On the one hand, the eighteenth century celebratesitself as the great age of lyric, an age that has revived and evenmanaged to improve upon lyric forms seldom practiced sinceantiquity. On the other, it argues that as a form of verbal activitypoetry-and lyric in particular-has become culturally outmoded,displaced by more advanced, "philosophical" uses of mind. It isthis conflict I wish to examine: to say something about its historicalroots, and in particular about the ways in which eighteenth-centuryBritish critics themselves used and misused their awareness of theconflict, especially in relation to the lyric, to rewrite the literaryhistory of their own period. And I will argue that if we are to makesense of the revisionary literary history practiced in mid-centuryBritain by such writers as Joseph Warton, Richard Hurd, andThomas Gray, we need to look precisely where they would suggestthe poet not look either for poetic models or poetic theory: toFrance, and in particular to the debates over poetry initiated inFrance by the so-called Quarrel between the Ancients and theModerns. Finally, I would like to show some of these theoretical

Douglas Lane Patey, Professor of English at Smith College, is the authorof Probabilityand LiteraryForm:Philosophic Theoryand LiteraryPractice in theAugustan Age (1984), and is now completing a book on the novels of EvelynWaugh.

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quarrels at work in changes in British lyric practice from mid-century onward.First, the eighteenth century's own view of itself as the lyric age.From the time of Cowley, Augustan poets had understood the"greater ode" to be one of the great inventions of the age; Drydenhimself thought Alexander's Feast his greatest poem, andrecommended to a youngJohn Dennis that he "cultivate this kindof Ode," which "looks like a vast Tract of Land newly discover'd"(one whose many new settlers are pioneers).1 It is possible to seethe irregular Pindaric, with its succession of diverse stanzas, as theRestoration's answer to the Renaissance sonnet sequence; in anycase, by 1700 "ode" had come to mean "Pindaric ode," and Cowleyis ranked with Shakespeare as a poetic "inventor."2 His and others'practice of both greater and lesser odes-of those "Lyric Poems"which, Joseph Trapp wrote in 1713, are "of all Kinds of Poetry,the most Poetical"3-initiated that outpouring of musical odes,birthday odes, biographical odes, and satirical odes which we nowremember best for its failures and excesses-for poems like JohnHughes's 1702 "The House of Nassau. A Pindaric Ode," with its

appalling invocation:Here pause my Muse! and wind up higherThe strings of my Pindaric lyre.

And we should note for future reference that, as Charles Gildontestified in 1718, "the Lyric"was "a Poem in which . . . the Ladieshave excell'd": not just in the lesser ode, but also the greater, aspracticed by Lady Mary Chudleigh, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn,and Anne Finch.4It was only in the 1740s, long after Congreve's essay correctingnotions of the irregularity of Pindar's lyric measures and afterirregular odes had become so tiresome that some poets rewrotetheir Pindarics into couplets (as John Dyer did his Grongar Hill in1726), that we begin to hear in England general complaints aboutthe condition of lyric, a view most famously voiced by JosephWarton in his 1756 Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope. Wartonframes the complaint in terms of the debate between Ancients andModerns: "The moderns have, perhaps, practised no species ofpoetry with so little success, and with such indisputable inferiorityto the ancients, as the ODE."5I shall return to Warton's arguments,and in particular to his most influential of all eighteenth-centuryidentifications of lyric as the truest poetry. What is important torealize now is that for the rest of the century Warton provided anobject of attack for critic after critic defending modern lyric

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accomplishment-for critics like John Ogilvie, who argues in his1762 "Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients" that Pindar andAnacreon have been excelled, and so should not serve as standardsfor imitation, or simply for those like the young Hester Salisbury,who cites modern examples against Warton in her "Irregular Odein Praise of the English Poets" (1759).We too often take Wordsworth at his word when, in the Prefaceto Lyrical Ballads, he explains that he has selected Gray's sonneton West as an example of the previous age's poetic blunderssimply because of what he sees as Gray's faults. By 1800 forty yearsof readers (despite sporadic dissent) had deemed Gray the greatestlyrist of the English tradition, perhaps of the world; forWordsworth to take Gray to task was a demonstration of thehighest poetic ambition. As early as 1759 Adam Smith had writtenthat "Gray joins to the sublimity of Milton the elegance andharmony of Pope; and nothing is wanting to render him, perhaps,the first poet in the English language, but to have written a littlemore." After Johnson's Life of Gray the testimonials grow evenwarmer: forJohn Pinkerton in 1785, "Gray is the first and greatestof modern lyric writers; nay, I will venture to say, of all lyricwriters, his works tho few . . . uniting the perfections of every lyricpoet, both of present and former times." For all these critics, Graywas only the foremost of a number of great recent lyrists: in 1794,Richard Alves controverts Warton by ending his chapter "OfEnglish Lyric Poets" in his Sketches of a History of Literature, asurvey of elegists and odists from the Wartons, Akenside,Shenstone, and Collins through Mason, Beattie, and especiallyGray: "I have insisted upon this kind of writers, as no species ofpoetry is more worthy of notice, and, in no age whatsoever, waslyric poetry cultivated to more advantage." In 1800 Nathan Drakeagain takes Warton to task, placing Gray's Bard "without anyexception ... at the head of lyric poetry"; Drake goes so far as todraw up the contents for an anthology of the greatest Englishlyrics, divided into "sublime," "pathetic," "descriptive," and"amatory odes." Of the 104 poems Drake lists, only six werewritten by poets before Milton, that is, before the age that mosteighteenth-century critics recognized as their own.6

It is precisely in this age of self-proclaimed lyrism that we alsohear that poetry has become an outmoded form of discourse-thatit has been displaced by philosophy in our cultural progress, andso can no longer, as Hegel says in his Aesthetic, "serve our highestneed." When Thomas Love Peacock made this case in his essay onthe "Four Ages of Poetry" (1820) he was in fact only providing anelegant summary of six decades of speculation by philosophical

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historians, especially Scots, from Thomas Blackwell and AdamFerguson to Dugald Stewart. In 1779 that great Scots compendium,the Encyclopedia Britannica, could take it as common knowledgethat "poetry has been cultivated with most success in the earlieststages of society"; such views had been current in Britain since the1750s, and in the '60s inspired treatises such as William DuffsEssay on Original Genius (1767), written, according to its"Advertisement," "to show that the early and uncultivated periodsof society are peculiarly favourable to the display of original PoeticGenius, and that that quality will seldom appear in a very highdegree in cultivated life."7Some critics, such as John Brown, simply mourn poetry'sdecline; others like Joseph Priestley celebrate the march of reasonand refinement, arguing that past ages have provided the worldwith enough poetry already.8 Most, however, find a balancebetween social and intellectual progress and artistic deterioration,and mark that balance in verbal formulations such as the oneRichard Hurd made famous in his Letterson Chivalry and Romance(1762): "What we have gotten by this revolution, you will say, is agreat deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of finefabling."9 But for all, it is lyric poetry that suffers most fromcultural advance. James Macpherson writes in 1768, in his CriticalDissertation on ... theAntient Caledonians: "Poetry is the triumphantvoice of joy or the broken sighs of sorrow and melancholy. Theextremes of these passions are the most violent in the earlieststages of society before the faculties of the human mind areregulated by advanced civilization, and the feelings of the heartare strong: and strong feelings always produce the sublimity ofexpression we call poetry." In his Philosophical Dictionary of 1771Voltaire argues that the "ode," the oldest and least philosophicalof literary forms, has least meaning for the modern world and soprophesies that it will be the first to die out entirely.10To understand how two such divergent views of poetry-especially lyric poetry-could coexist, we need first to understandthat the later eighteenth-century British histories of poetic eclipseare themselves not original: they originate not in Scotland but inFrance, among the party of the Moderns in the famous Quarrel. Itwas here, for instance, that the Abbe Trublet had argued in hisessay "De la poesie et des poetes" (1754): "As reason is perfected,judgment will more and more be preferred to imagination, and,consequently, poets will be less and less appreciated. The firstwriters, it is said, were poets. I can well believe it; they couldhardly be anything else. The last writers will be philosophers."(Again: "It is said that in verse the images have more value than

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DOUGLAS LANE PATEYthe thoughts. So much the worse for verse; for this is an excellentproof of its inferiority to prose.")1' Trublet in fact comes late inthe French Quarrel: he is preceded by such fellow-Moderns (calledby their enemies geomentres, proponents of the "esprit degeometrie") as Houdar de la Motte, the Abbe Terrasson, and theAbbe de Pons (who had argued in 1738 against that chief ofAncients, Madame Dacier: "L'art de vers est un art frivole").'2Among their allies the geometres could count the youngMontesquieu, who wrote in the Lettrespersanes (1721): "Here arethe Poets. . . that is, those authors whose business it is to shacklecommon sense, and to load down the reason with trimmings, justas women used to be buried beneath their ornaments andjewels.... Here are the Lyric Poets, whom I especially despise,and who have made of their art a melodious nonsense."'3 Behindall these critics stand their teachers, the architects of the Modernposition in France: Perrault and especially Fontenelle.Historians of English literature have customarily examined thatliterature in a European context only at the beginning and end ofthe eighteenth century; we look to French criticism inunderstanding the early Augustans, German for the late. A.F.B.Clark's classic Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England(1925), for instance, devoted only a scant 18 of its 530 pages to"Other French Critics": those writing after Boileau, Bouhours,and Rapin, such as the Abbe Du Bos, Charles Batteux, and Remondde Saint-Mard. We stop looking to the French Quarrel of Ancientsand Moderns after we have used them to explicate Swift and Pope.But eighteenth-century English writers continued as much as everto read and learn from their French counterparts: few Frenchworks of criticism are so often echoed in Britain as Batteux's LesBeaux-Arts reduits a un memeprincipe (1746)-in its careful anatomyof prose genres, and especially its remarks on "la poesie lyrique"-and few English critics made such careful use of French sources asJoseph Warton. What Warton does in the Essay on Pope is first ofall to borrow French critical concepts and terms to build his caseabout Pope-even his characterization of Pope as the "Poet ofReason" is borrowed from Voltaire's much-publicized receptionspeech of 1746 to the French Academy, in which Boileau is "lepoete de la raison"-and second to treat Pope (as Voltaire hadBoileau) as a "Modern" poet, that is, to use against him languageand arguments first devised in France by proponents of the Ancientcause for use against the poetry and criticism of the geometres.'4We have perhaps been blind to Warton's sources because of theEssay's participation in mid-century British nationalism, with itscharacterization of French literary tradition as dogmatically

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antilyrical. "[GJoodsense and judgment were [Pope's] characteristicexcellencies, rather thanfancy and invention.... This turn of mindled him to admire French models; he studied Boileau attentively;formed himself upon him, as Milton formed himself upon theGrecian and Italian sons of Fancy" (2:402). This characterizationof French literary culture was of course not new, but it took onrenewed vigor in the heavily charged political atmosphere of the1740s, and quickly hardened into that revisionary literary historywhich treated writers from the Restoration through Pope astraveling along a French cul-de-sac (having succeeded by dextroushistorical sleight-of-hand in plucking Paradise Lost out of theRestoration).'5John Upton's account of 1746 is typical: "'Twere tobe wished that with our restored king [Charles II], some of thattaste of literature had been restored which we enjoyed in the daysof Queen Elizabeth. But when we brought home our frenchifiedking, we did then, and have to this day, continued to bring fromFrance our models."'6 This literary history became endemic tomid-century British lyric practice, as for instance Thomas Gray'sPindaric Progressof Poesy (1757) traces the progress of the poeticalspirit-in effect, the spirit of lyric poetry-from Greece to Italy toEngland, pointedly omitting any stops in France. And I wouldsuggest that this literary history has deflected our attention notonly from British use of French critical sources, but also from theimportance for British mid-century lyric poets such as Akensideand Warton of a model closer to their own time than their nationalheroes Spenser and Milton: Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1671-1741),commonly regarded on the Continent as the greatest lyric poet ofthe age, and one whose odes of the 1710s and '20s often soundlike the mid-century British allegorical ode.It is tempting to speculate that Warton deliberately covered histracks in the Essay to mask the irony of turning to France for thetools with which to criticize French influence in English literature;this is after all the same Joseph Warton who, we now know,included several of his own lyrics in the 1748 collection heassembled of Poems supposedly by his father, Thomas Warton theelder, in order to suggest a longer native and familial genealogyfor his own kind of verse than in fact existed.'7 But if its manyreferences to d'Alembert, Du Bos, Caylus, Fenelon, Fontenelle,Marmontel, La Motte, Perrault, and Voltaire were not enough, thevery critical vocabulary of Warton's Essay betrays its inspiration.Favorite terms such as "enthusiasm" and "imagery," though ofcourse not new to English criticism, had recently been the subjectsof intense scrutiny and attempts at definition in France, particularlyin relation to lyric. For a host of early eighteenth-century French

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critics, enthusiasme,defined by La Motte as une imagination echaufee,naturally issues in a poetry of images, a carefully analyzed termwhich had come to include a whole range of features from isolatedfigures to full-scale descriptions.All poetry partakes of such features,but most of all does lyric: according to Remond de Saint-Mard, forinstance, though other poetic kinds can detail actions, this resourceis denied to lyric; "mais en recompense l'Ode est le triomphe duSublime des Images."'8This sort of criticism informs such judgments as Warton'splacement of Alexander's Feast "at the head of modern lyriccompositions" on the basis of "the beauty and force of its images"and his verdict on the poems of the geometre La Motte (hereWarton echoes a host of French evaluations): "The Odes of laMotte, though so highly praised by Sanadon, and by Fontenelle,are fuller of delicate sentiment, and philosophical reflection, thanof imagery, figures, and poetry" (1:50, 66). Warton's treatment ofPope's "correctness" echoes earlier French accounts of poetry'srecent excessive cultivation of "precision."And Warton's famoustest of poetical merit, for which he was so abused by later criticssuch as Percival Stockdale'9-that a great poem, when reduced toprose, does not lose its "imagery" and "fire"-had itself emerged asa chief point of contention in the French quarrel between Ancientsand Moderns as Fenelon and Montesquieu produced poems inprose, and La Motte even attempted prose lyric in "La Libreeloquence: ode en prose." But nowhere perhaps is Warton's debtto France clearer than in the Essay's most famous passage, in itsDedication to Edward Young, justifying his placement of Pope inthe second rank of poets (along with "Fontenelle and La Motte"):"We do not, it should seem, sufficiently attend to the differencethere is betwixt a MAN OF WIT, a MAN OF SENSE, and a TRUEPOET. Donne and Swift were undoubtedly men of wit, and menof sense; but what traces have they left of PURE POETRY?" (l:ii).The phrase "pure poetry," used here for the first time in English,quickly caught on and came to be identified with lyric. In 1769Hurd contrasts "the greater and what may be called pure poetry"with "the humbler sorts of poetry, chiefly satiric and ethic," and inhis notes to Horace finds that "Poetry, pure Poetry, is the properlanguage of Passion."20Mrs. Barbauld divides "the different speciesof Poetry" into "two comprehensive classes": the first includesepic, dramatic, and didactic verse, all of which treat of externalmatters, whereas

The other class consists of what may be called pure Poetry, orPoetry in the abstract. It is conversant with an imaginary

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world, peopled with beings of its own creation. It deals insplendid imagery, bold fiction, and allegorical personages. Itis necessarily obscure to a certain degree; because [it has] todo chiefly with ideas generated within the mind.... All thatis properly Lyric Poetryis of this kind.2'

Warton did not however coin the phrase "pure poetry"; heborrowed it from its inventor Charles Batteux, who had introducedit in 1746 in Les Beaux-Arts reduits at un meme principe in an effort todistinguish forms he thought closest to prose-didactic andnarrative poems-from those more "purely" poetic genres thateschew both action and day-to-day social and "historical" realities.22Even the revisionist story of recent literary history told byWarton and other mid-century English critics is profoundlyinformed, I would suggest, by earlier French accounts of thatnation's recent past, and in particular its decline from the greatage of Louis XIV (who stands to early eighteenth-century Frenchcriticism rather in the position Elizabeth I does to Hurd and theWartons). Let me here take just one French text for comparison,Remond de Saint-Mard's Reflexions sur la poesie en general, firstpublished in 1729 and then expanded in 1734 by the addition ofthree chapters on "The Birth, Progress, and Decadence of Taste"in France, chapters which in fact owe a great deal to MadameDacier's Des causes de la corruption du gout (1714).Like his fellow Ancients-and like so many British critics later inthe century-Remond develops an elaborate parallel between thecourses of ancient and recent history, showing that in both aperiod of poised cultural balance ("reconciliation") and so also ofartistic efflorescence was followed by another of imbalance andartistic "dryness" (secheresse).Under Louis XIV France enjoyed anage of empire, freedom, and natural plain-dealing (now replacedby artifice, disguise, and an "esprit de manege"); as a result, inboth the culture at large and in individuals, France then enjoyedas well a poised balance of "reason" and "imagination": "Tout yetoit mesure sans etre froid, & l'Imagination sembloit etre devenuel'Interprete de la Raison." But there emerged the philosophy ofDescartes, with its "contempt for the ancients" and its "espritdeGeometrie," ts unyielding "irethode."In the hands of later writers-Remond cites as chief villains Fontenelle and La Motte-balancewas lost: mankind came to be treated as "substances absolumentpensantes, des Esprits purs" and throughout the arts "reason" and"correctness" came to the fore: "nous immolons tout a une Raisonsevere, & fiers de nos sacrifices, nous disons que nous avons de laprecision." A few great poets like Jean-Baptiste Rousseau remain,

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DOUGLAS LANE PATEYbut most suffer the sense of having come too late-"venus troptard"-in cultural history.23

In all this, Remond could be Thomas Warton in his History ofEnglish Poetry celebrating the age of Elizabeth as one of "feelingundisguised and unrestrained by custom," of "civilizedsuperstition," a period of poised balance like that enjoyed inancient Athens which made possible the highest literaryachievement; or he could be Richard Hurd celebrating the sameage as one that "had not yet been controlled by the prosaic geniusof philosophy and logic." We even find in France the origins ofBritish talk of "what we have lost. . . what we have gained": forRemond, "ce que nous avons perdu en Gout, nous l'avons gagneen Exactitude."24

What difference does it make that we can trace mid-centuryBritish critical propensities, including the paradoxical evaluationof lyric, to France? The exercise helps us to understand what iswrong with the idea of "preromanticism"; but more than this, itwas in the French context, in the Quarrel of the Ancients and theModerns, that the two sides of our paradox about poetry firstcame to be defined. Here, in the course of the Quarrel, the "arts"and the "sciences" were first reconceived in their modern senses;as the term and concept of "art,"and hence also of poetry, suffereda radical redefinition, it became inevitable both that "pure poetry,""poetry in the abstract," would come to be identified with lyric,and that the cultural value of such poetry would come intoquestion. And just as we recognize the Quarrel to be one of thecornerstones of Augustan thought, we should recognize theparadoxical valuation of lyric not as a "preromantic" strain in anotherwise classic eighteenth century, but rather as an instability atthe heart of the Augustan literary enterprise itself. To make thispoint we must step back a moment to examine the initial phasesof the Quarrel and what was at stake there: essentially, aredefinition of disciplines-a remapping of the intellectual terrain-comprised especially in its reinterpretation of the division betweenthe "arts" and the "sciences."The French Quarrel had begun as a debate about the relativemerits in all fields of ancient accomplishments and those of the"modern" (postmedieval) world, especially France under LouisXIV. Thus Charles Perrault surveys all fields in his massive Paralleledes anciens et des modernes en ce qui concerne les arts et les sciences(1688-96), finding that in all except sculpture-"the simplest andmost limited of all the arts"-there has been progress. For Perrault,time is the parent of politeness and good taste as of natural

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knowledge; not only in natural philosophy but also in poetry,eloquence, and ethics has the seventeenth century outdone theancients, for these activities depend like natural philosophy onjustness of reasoning as well as on detailed knowledge of humannature, both of which have been perfectionnes in the century ofDescartes. If, Perrault argued, it is the task of the highest poetry,especially epic, to convey wisdom in all fields, then it is absurdnow to claim Homer's greatness: Homer would have been a betterpoet had he lived in Louis's enlightened age.25Perrault's was an extreme Modernist statement; much moretypical is Fontenelle's "Digression sur les anciens et les modernes"(1688), the essay that Sir William Temple was to attempt to refute,thereby bringing the Battle of the Books to England. In anargument that was to become standard in the century to follow,Fontenelle divides the palm of victory, by dividing disciplinesaccording to how they progress: in some fields, first efforts may bethe best; in others, progress is inevitably slower and-once anadequate method is in place-cumulative:

If the moderns are to be able to improve continually on theancients, the fields in which they are working must be of akind which allows progress. Eloquence and poetry requireonly a certain number of rather narrow ideas as comparedwith other arts, and they depend for their effect primarilyupon the liveliness of the imagination. Now mankind couldeasily amass in a few centuries a small number of ideas, andliveliness of imagination has no need of a long sequence ofexperiences nor many rules before it reaches the furthestperfection of which it is capable. But physics, medicine,mathematics are composed of numberless ideas and dependupon precision of thought which improves with extremeslowness, yet is always improving.... It is obvious that all thisis endless and that the last physicists or mathematicians willnaturally have to be the ablest.26

Fontenelle's new division of knowledge is immediately taken upin England: in 1694, William Wotton writes in his massive surveyof progress throughout the disciplines, his Reflections upon Ancientand Modern Learning, on what was to be the main point ofcontention between him and William Temple:

[Of kinds of knowledge] there are two sorts: One, of thosewherein the gravest part of those Learned Men who havecompared Ancient and Modern Performances, either give up

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DOUGLAS LANE PATEYthe Cause to the Ancients quite, or think, at least, that theModerns have not gone beyond them. The other of those,where the Advocates for the Moderns think the Case so clearon their Side, that they wonder how any Man can dispute itwith them. Poesie, Oratory, Architecture, Painting, andStatuary, are of the First Sort: Natural History, Physiology,and Mathematicks, with all their Dependencies, are of thesecond.27

Divisions of knowledge such as this are in fact new in theseventeenth century. The first group of fields would soon comeexplicitly to be called the "arts," the second, the "sciences";Fontenelle and his followers have transformed traditionaldistinctions between poetry (or rhetoric) and philosophy into whatwill by the time of Wordsworth and Coleridge be called theopposition of "poetry" and "science."28 Since antiquity the term"art" had meant a practical activity of making (as opposed tocontemplative "science") and-equally central to the term'smeaning-a procedure of making done according to rules. But as abyproduct of the Quarrel, "rules" or "method" (in particular thenew method of Descartes and his followers) becomes the definingproperty of disciplines such as mathematics and physics, ratherthan of "art." "Science" had always suggested in its most technicalusage-whether the "science" in question were geometry ortheology-knowledge organized in a certain rational fashion; inthe aftermath of Cartesianism, this organization came to be thatof "method": disciplines came to be known as "sciences" accordingto whether they were pursued according to such method. We cansee the completion of this redivision of knowledge by lookingahead to a work such as William Hazlitt's fragment of 1814, "Whythe Arts are not Progressive?" Hazlitt writes:

the complaint. . . that the arts do not attain that progressivedegree of perfection which might reasonably be expectedfrom them, proceeds on a false notion, for the analogyappealed to in support of the regular advances of art tohigher degrees of excellence, totally fails; it applies to science,not to art. . . . What is mechanical, reducible to rule, orcapable of demonstration, is progressive, and admits ofgradual improvement: what is not mechanical or definite, butdepends on genius, taste, and feeling, very soon becomesstationary or retrograde.29

Thus in the seventeenth-century Quarrel of Ancient andModern, it was the new understanding of what were to be called

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RISE OF LYRICthe sciences that provided the motive force in what I have calledthe "modern" division of the arts and the sciences (a division fromwhich we "post-moderns" are of course now moving away). Thearts-those fields that the seventeenth century was just beginningto group together in a new way, and to which the eighteenth, in anattempt to theorize them after the initial division of disciplineshad been made, was to give the new name of the "aesthetic"-werein effect what was left over in the new partition. The concept ofthe "aesthetic," in other words, emerges as a byproduct of theseventeenth century's redefinition of science-just as eighteenth-century attempts to define what it will call "literary art" or "poetry"characteristically do so by treating it as a deviation from the alreadyunderstood norm of prose. In the words of Robert Lowth, "Reasonspeaks literally, the passions poetically."30The new division of knowledge was at first distinctly the propertyof the Moderns; it was a major project of such Ancients as Popeand Swift to point up its shortcomings.31 But as we all know, theModerns "won" the Battle, with the result that their divisionbecame our heritage. In 1712 Joseph Addison outlines in theSpectatorthe "pleasures of the imagination," as distinct from thoseof "understanding" or "judgment"-pleasures rooted in sense,especially the sense of vision-and in 1719 his French disciple DuBos, in the Reflexions critiques sur la poesie et la peinture, usesAddison's theory to construct a theory of all the "beaux-arts," artswhich take as their end pleasure, derived through sensory imagesand the passions, rather than instruction, which is left to "lessciences." In 1735, Alexander Baumgarten, a reader of bothAddison and Du Bos, coins the new term "aesthetic" (in oppositionto "logic") to name the territory staked out by the "arts" in thenew division of disciplines.The story of the consolidation of the new category of theaesthetic is familiar from the history of philosophy; what I meanto stress here is first that it is a late theorization of positionsworked out in the Quarrel of Ancient and Modern, and secondthat it entailed both sides of our paradox about poetry. On theone hand, the new "aesthetic" conception of art transformeddefinitions of "literature," and especially poetry, so that lyricbecame, as Coleridge was to say, "that which in its very essence ispoetical";32 on the other, it drained poetry of what had beenunderstood to be many of its intellective functions, resulting in itscultural devaluation. We are all familiar with late-eighteenth-century critics, such asJohann Bergk, who argue, "The function ofpolite literature is not to increase our knowledge, for this it wouldshare with the sciences, but to cultivate our taste"; in fact this

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position is implicit from the first in the Moderns' new division ofknowledge.33Already when Perrault and Fontenelle classed poetry under theheading of "imagination," they were calling upon a faculty whosemeaning had changed since Bacon's time: imagination had lostwhat in the Renaissance had been its major intellective functions,especially its connection with judgment; the understanding alonenow performs those tasks. Hence Fontenelle's dismissive treatmentof the arts in his Digression: just as Wotton would identify thesciences as the realm of knowledge, the arts as that of opinion,Fontenelle contrasts the "tricks of eloquence" with thedependability of la physique, "liveliness" with "precision"; poetryand eloquence, he writes, "are not very important in themselves"-eloquence may once have had a political function, but"Poetry ..was good for nothing, as it has always been under allkinds of regimes; that failing is of the essence of poetry."34

I would like, finally, to sketch some of the pressures the newtheory of art, and so of poetry, exerted in practice on theparadigmatically "poetic" genre of lyric, pressures that we seebecoming dominant at mid-century, with the collapse of theAncient cause. We might summarize these changes as expressionsof a new account of the discontinuity between aesthetic and otherexperience. It had been a central position of the Ancients to stressthe continuity of poetry with knowledge and social practice: forthe poet of Boileau's Artpo6tique,"IIfaut savoir encore et converseret vivre."35In their different ways, Swift and Pope press the sameview. But the new theory of art stressed, to quote Warton again,the "difference there is, betwixt a MAN OF WIT, a MAN OFSENSE, and a TRUE POET": "the most solid observations onhuman life, expressed with the utmost elegance and brevity, areMORALITY, and not POETRY" (1:ii). And just as the new aestheticexcludes such materials from the highest poetry, it trains readersnot to expect them: we read for instance in Du Bos's Reflexions:"Les gens de metier sont les seuls qui se fassent une etude de lalecture des Poetes. On ne les lit plus, nous l'avons deja dit, quepour s'occuper plus agreablement, des qu'on est sorti du College,& non pas comme on lit les Historiens & les Philosophes, c'est adire, pour apprendre."36 Du Bos here sounds the death-knell ofthe old ideal of the doctus poeta and of praise of poetry for theuseful knowledge it memorializes and imparts: after the death ofPope, only self-conscious conservatives such as Johnson's Imlacproduce the old lists of all the fields of knowledge the poet's"comprehensive soul" must master.37

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Instead we find the new gesture-from Thomas Warton's "AFarewell to Poetly" (1748) to Coleridge's "Reflections on HavingLeft a Place of Retirement" (1795)-of the lyrist who says he mustgive up poetry in order to rejoin the historical world of socialpractice. Warton explains in his "Farewell" why he must leave "theMuse" for "Virtue," give up lyric to pursue "the Moral Melody,""beyond the Strains / Of Attic Harp":

My serious soul these Woods and Walks disdainsWhere my Youth rov'd: A loftier Task demandsMy sober Hours, . . . Not to smoothThe tuneful Cadence of a polisht Line,But harmonize my soul,while Coleridge explains he "was constrained" to quit his "delicioussolitude," with its "feelings all too delicate for use":

I therefore go, and join head, heart, and hand,Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fightOf Science, Freedom, and the Truth in Christ.

In both cases, lyric is figured in the language of pastoral retirement,and the decision to abandon lyric solitude for the world of actionis framed according to the rhetorical pattern previous poets hadestablished for speaking of their desire to ascend in the traditionalgeneric hierarchy from pastoral to epic: when poetry equals lyric,the ascent to epic action means abandoning poetry altogether.38As Batteux is the first to make explicit, whereas all other literaryforms take actions as their object, lyric, "the most perfect kind ofpoem," "is wholly consecrated to feeling"-"c'est sa matiere, sonobjet essentiel"; lyric is what happens when actions stops, and thepoet restricts himself to "la seule situation de l'ame." As a result, itexcludes both reflection and historical detail (in Joseph Warton'sparaphrase, "Lyric poetry, especially, should not be minutelyhistorical").39 Lyric thus becomes a mechanism of escape from thesecular world: Edward Young says in his Conjectures on OriginalComposition (1759): "To men of letters and leisure, [originalcomposition] is not only a noble amusement, but a sweetrefuge; ... it opens a back-door out of the bustle of this busy andidle world, into a delicious garden." In the next century, ananonymous reviewer of Crabbe's poetry will make the point morestarkly: "To talk of binding down poetry to dry representations ofthe world as it is, seems idle; because it is precisely in order toescape from the world as it is that we fly to poetry. We turn to it,

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DOUGLAS LANE PATE Ynot that we may see and feel what we see and feel in our dailyexperience, but ... that we may take a shelter from the realities oflife in the paradise of fancy." As William Hazlitt would say inreviewing Coleridge's Biographia, "We would not, with Plato,absolutely banish poets from the commonwealth; but we reallythink they should meddle as little with its practical administrationas may be. They live in an ideal world of their own; and it wouldbe well, if they were confined to it."40Soame Jenyns recognizes all this in his splendid parody ofcontemporary lyric practice, entitled simply "An Ode" (1780).Jenyns supplies in his Preface what had become sinceJohnson andGoldsmith a familiar criticism of the new ode's imagistic excess:

Just and lively pictures are the very essence of an ode, as wellas of an auction-room, whether there are any proper placesto hang them in or not; and such there are in the narrowcompass of this little piece, of every thing that is great andbeautiful in nature; of the morning rising from the ocean; ofthe Sun, the Moon, and the planetary system; of a giant and ahermit; of woods, rocks, and mountains, and the seasons ofthe revolving year: and in all these, the transitions so suddenand unexpected, so void of all apparent art, yet not withoutmuch that is quite invisible; the thoughts are so sublime, sodistant from all vulgar ideas or common sense, that thejudicious reader will scarcely find in it a single deviation fromthe severest laws of just criticism.4'

Jenyns makes clear his sense of such lyric as an evasion of nature:the poem begins with a parody of Gray's Bard: "I'll combat Nature,interrupt her course, / And baffle all her stated laws by force."Jenyns also understands the politics of poetic solitude: the "Ode"concludes:

Hail, Liberty, fair goddess of this isle!Deign on my verses, and on me, to smile;Like them, unfettered by the bonds of sense,Permit us to enjoy life's transient dream,To live, and write, without the least pretenceTo method, order, meaning, plan, or scheme;And shield us safe beneath thy guardian wings,From law, religion, ministers, and kings.

Lyric has become the favored vehicle for a new vision of selfhoodnot as informed or constituted by social role-by one's place in the

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RISE OF LYRIChierarchical structure of nature and society-but as autonomous,as may be seen by comparing nearly any late Augustan lyric withany earlier one.With the new, lyricized theory of poetry comes as well, as I havesuggested, new accounts of how poetry is to be composed andespecially how it is to be read. Typically in eighteenth-centurypoetry speakers serve as models for readers, establishing the pointof view from which their verses are to be read. The mid-centurylyrist, as John Sitter has explained in our best guide to date tothese poems of escape, "asks to be overpowered-'transported,''led,' 'hurried,' even 'drowned'-by Fancy."42Correlatively, criticselaborate new accounts of reading as an essentially passive process.Lyric escape includes escape from conscious volitional cognition:from the will. For Edward Young, "As what comes from the writer'sheart reaches ours; so what comes from his head sets our brains atwork, and our hearts at ease. It makes a circle of thoughtful critics,not of distressed patients; and a passive audience is what" thehighest poetry requires.43Such accounts of passive poetic experience are perhaps to beexpected in the context of theories which understood taste itselfto be a receptive faculty-in Goldsmith's phrase, "a capacity ofreceiving pleasure"; they become most marked among associationisttheories of taste. Thus for instance Coleridge's youthful favoriteArchibald Alison explains in his Essays on Taste (1790) that in allexperiences of taste, "no labour of thought, or habits of attentionare required": objects of taste "lead [the mind] insensibly along, ina kind of bewitching reverie," a "powerless state of reverie, whenwe are carried on by our conceptions, not guiding them." Just aspoets "abandon themselves to the emotions which . . . scenes mayhappen to inspire," we readers of poetry must "yield ourselves upto the emotion which [the] composition demands," "relax theseverity of attention, and yield to the relation of resemblingthought." (It is such late Augustan accounts of passive poeticresponse that Wordsworth will attack in the next century in aneffort to reconstitute an activist account of literary reading.)44More generally, much in later eighteenth-century Britishassociationist theories of literature constitutes an extension to allpoetry of characterizations given by earlier critics (especiallyFrench) specifically of lyric: the distinctively associationist accountof literary unity as a "unity of expression" or "sentiment," forinstance, had already been outlined by Batteux as the lyric's "unitede sentiment."45Finally, as formulations such as these suggest, there is also apolitics of gender in the new poetic. What the age called "the

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poetical character" now comes to be thought genuinely to fitwomen-but because it has been made to exclude erudition andparticipation in practical affairs. With the Augustan redefinitionof imagination and conception of poetry as a balance of judgmentand fancy had come as well a new, gendered understanding of thefaculties at play in poetic composition. Earlier Augustanformulations follow Pope's allegory in the Essay on Criticism ofjudgment and wit or fancy as "man and wife," kept in the bestpoems in hierarchical balance. But lyric-the ode, with its abrupttransitions, its real or seeming lack of "method"-had always beena partial exception to this rule; and as we have heard, it was afavorite form for early Augustan women writers. Edward Young'searly "Discourse of Lyric Poetry" (1728) makes the age'sunderstanding of its critical terminology painfully clear:

Judgment, indeed, that masculine power of the mind, inOde, as in all compositions, should bear the supreme sway;and a beautiful imagination, as its mistress, should be subduedto its dominion. Hence, and hence only, can proceed thefairest offspring of the human mind.But then, in Ode, there is this difference from other kindsof poetry,-that there the imagination, like a very beautifulmistress, is indulged in the appearance of domineering,though the judgment, like an artful lover, in reality carries itspoint; and the less it is suspected of it, it shows the moremasterly conduct, and deserves the greater commendation.

With less lumbering gallantry, Remond had spoken of the balancedfaculties of the previous age as having produced a poetry expressiveof "des Esprits males sans durete, delicats sans affeterie, precissans secheresse."46

But critics such as Joseph Warton revise this hierarchy, with theresult that, as Sitter has put it, "in the middle years of the centurythe ideal poem and the ideal woman grow increasingly alike."47And in contemporary criticism the analogy carries over withsurprising explicitness to writers and readers as well. Thus in thechapters "Of the Varieties of Intellectual Character" with which heconcludes his Eleutents of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792-1827), Dugald Stewart produces with seeming unconsciousness, incontiguous chapters on "The Poet" and "The Sexes," nearlyidentical characterizations of (1) women, (2) children, and (3)poets, understood as including all those who give themselves to"the culture of the arts which are addressed to the imagination."All three groups share a "preternaturally great . . . nervous

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irritability," "a peculiarly strong sympathy with the feelings ofothers," "peculiar quickness and facility of association," "pronenessto superstition," and "unmanly desire of praise." In all this theydiffer from "those who cultivate the abstract sciences," as themathematician and the man of affairs differ from the poet.48Ancient poetry, Hugh Blair assures us, was "manly," whereasmodern-especially modern lyric-partakes of an "effeminate"delicacy. It is in this context that we should understandWordsworth's program in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: part andparcel of Wordsworth's own understanding of his project to re-create active readers is an effort to remasculinize poetry (as shortlythereafter Scott was to seek to remasculinize the novel). We canhear as much in his account of poetry as the voice of "a manspeaking to men," in what he calls the "manliness" of his "style"-and perhaps also in those schoolmasterish letters he wrote to hiswomen readers.49 Something of the same purpose may even havemotivated Thomas Gray in his attempt to reunify lyric and epicfeatures in poems such as The Bard-a poem which, he wrote,because of its "learning," "no woman" would be able tounderstand.50

Gray's flirtation with epic-and the peculiar obtuseness of apoem such as The Bard-call to mind those later critics, likeColeridge, Henry Crabb Robinson, and John Stuart Mill, who willexplicitly oppose epic and lyric, the narrative and the expressive,the objective and the subjective.5' These are oppositions, as I havesaid, that we associate with early nineteenth-century criticism; butthey are all implicit from the start in the polemics of the Modernsin the famous Quarrel-in which theories of the ode were crucial-and so in that important product of the Quarrel, the "aesthetic"theory of art. That theory forces an identification of "true" poetrywith lyric, complicating and eventually helping to fragment thepoised hierarchical balance of the just and the lively, judgmentand fancy, the probable and the marvelous, with which Augustanpoetic theory began. Continuing adherence to the new division ofknowledge meant as well that nineteenth-century efforts likeColeridge's to theorize a reunification of faculties would fail, andthat the need to provide defenses of poetry would be immenselygreater in 1800 than in 1700.

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'John Dryden, The Lettersofohn Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham:Duke Univ. Press, 1942), p. 72.2See G.N. Shuster, The English Odefrom Milton to Keats (New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 1940), chap. 1.3Joseph Trapp, Lectureson Poetry(1711-19; Eng. trans. London, 1742), p.203; cf. John Norris on "the Pindaric way; which is the highest and mostsignificant kind of writing in verse" (A Collectionof Miscellanies:ConsistingofPoems,Essays,Discoursesand Letters[London, 1717], p. 6).4Charles Gildon, The CompleteArt ofPoetry, 2 vols. (London, 1718), 1:172.Hence perhaps also Johnson's comment in his Life of Cowley: "all the boysand girls caught the pleasing fashion, and they could do nothing else but writelike Pindar" (Livesof theEnglishPoets,ed. G. B. Hill, 6 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1905], 1:48).5Joseph Warton, Essayon the Genius and Writingsof ope, 2 vols. (1756 and1782; London, 1806), 1:62 (subsequent references to this work appearparenthetically in text).6Adam Smith, TheoryofMoralSentiments,ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 123-24; Robert Heron John Pinkerton],Lettersof Literature London, 1785), p. 131; Richard Alves, Sketchesof a Historyof Literature (Edinburgh, 1794), p. 252; Nathan Drake, Literary Hours, 2ndedn., 2 vols. (Sudbury, 1800), 2:75, 80-94.7G.W.F. Hegel, in Werke,ed. E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel, 20 vols.

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970-71), 13:24; EncyclopediaBritannica, s.v. "Ossian";William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767), Advertisement.8JohnBrown, The History of the Rise and ProgressofPoetry,through ts SeveralSpecies Newcastle, 1764);Joseph Priestley, Lectureson Historyand GeneralPolicy(London, 1826), p. 408 ("more [poems] are hardly desirable. Few people haveleisure to read, much less read with care, or to study, all that is really excellentof this kind of the productions of the last age").9RichardHurd, Works,8 vols. (London, 1811), 4:350. Cf. Thomas Warton:"What have we gained by this revolution? It may be answered, much goodsense, good taste, and good criticism. But in the meantime we have lost..."(Historyof English Poetry,4 vols. [London, 1774-90], 2:463).'?JamesMacpherson, CriticalDissertationon theOrigin,Antiquities,Language,Government,Manners, and Religion of the Antient Caledonians (Dublin, 1768),p. 182; Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (1771), s.v. "Exageration.""Nicholas-Charles-Joseph Trublet, Essais sur diverssujetsde litteratureet demorale, 4 vols. (Paris, 1760), 4:215, 245.'2Jean-Francoisde Pons, Dissertationsur e poemeepique, contre a doctrinedeM.D., in Oeuvres(Paris, 1738), p. 143."'Baron de Montesquieu, Lettrespersanes,No. 137, in OeuvrescompletesdeMontesquieu,2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1758), 1:275-76.Joseph Warton, Essay, 2:403 and (quoting Voltaire) l:vi-vii.'5On the process by which, among mid-eighteenth-century critics, ParadiseLost ceased to be a Restoration, and became a Renaissance poem, see my "The

Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon," MLS 18, 1 (Winter 1988): 17-37, 27-28. Part of this historical revisionism was a generic reclassification of Milton'spoem not as epic but as a kind of lyric:as Henry Crabb Robinson would write,"What lives in the hearts of readers from the works of Milton is not the epicpoem. Milton's story has merit unquestionably; but it is rather a lyric than anepic narrative" (Diaries,Reminiscences,and Correspondence,d. Thomas Sadler,4 vols. [Boston, 1898], 1:301).

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'6John Upton, Critical Observationson Shakespeare London, 1746), p. 15.'7See David Fairer, "The Poems of Thomas Warton the Elder?", RES n.s.26, 103-104 (August-November 1975): 287-300, 395-406, and Arthur H.Scouten, "The Warton Forgeries and the Concept of Preromanticism inEnglish Literature," Etudesanglaises 40, 4 (October-December 1987): 43447.'8Antoine Houdar de la Motte, "Discours sur la poesie en general et surl'ode en particulier," Odes,2 vols. (Paris, 1713), 1:36 (the phrase is taken upby Du Bos and Batteux); Toussaint Remond de Saint-Mard, Rflexions sur lapoesieen general (La Haye, 1734), p. 212. The classic work on "images," muchreprinted, was Cesar Chesnau Du Marsais's Des Tropes(1730); the term wascharacteristically interpreted in light of Addison's teaching, so that, forinstance, Vauvernargues writes in 1746, "I call imagination the gift ofconceiving things in a figurative manner, and of representing thoughts byimages" (Luc de Clapiers, marquis de Vauvernargues, Connaissance de I'esprithumain, in Oeuvres, ed. Gilbert [Paris, 1857], p. 6), while for Batteux"Imagination is an aptitude for conceiving objects in the form of materialimages" (Cours de belles-lettresdistribuepar exercises,4 vols. [Paris, 174748],1:67).'9PercivalStockdale, An Inquiryinto the Nature, and Genuine Laws of Poetry(London, 1778).20Hurd,entry in commonplace book, quoted in Rene Wellek, A HistoryofModern Criticism,vol. 1: The Later EighteenthCentury New Haven: Yale Univ.Press, 1955), p. 130; Works, 1:104.21AnnaLaetitia Barbauld, Preface, The PoeticalWorksof Mr. William Collins(London, 1797), pp. iii-v.22Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts: "II y a des fictions poetiques qui semontrent avec l'habit simple de la prose: tels sont les Romans & tout ce quiest dans leur genre. Il y a de meme des matieres vraies, qui paroissent revetues& parees de tous les charmes de l'harmonie poetique: tels sont les Poemesdidactiques & historiques. Mais ces fictions en prose & ces histoires en vers,ne sont ni pure Prose ni Poesie pure: c'est un melange des deux natures"(Paris, 1773), pp. 72-73). In Pure Poetry:Studies in French Poetic Theory andPractice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), D.J. Mossop finds this passage tobe the first use by any critic of the phrase "pure poetry" (p. 32)."Remond de Saint Mard, Reflexionssur la poesie, pp. 302-10.24Thomas Warton, History, 1:30; 4:328; Hurd, "On the Age of QueenElizabeth," Works, 3:210-11; Remond, Reflexions,p. 343.25CharlesPerrault, Parallele des anciens et des modernesen ce qui concernelesarts et les sciences,2nd edn., 4 vols. (Paris, 1692-96), 1:183; 2:29-31; 3:98.26Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle, "Digression," trans. John Hughes,1719, in Scott Elledge and Donald Schier, eds., The ContinentalModel [Ithaca:Cornell Univ. Press, 1970], p. 362, altered.27WilliamWotton, Reflectionsupon Ancient and ModernLearning (London,1694), p. 19 (Gildon draws a similar division in his MiscellaneousLettersandEssaysof the same year, as will Addison in the Spectator,no. 160).

28Wordsworth,Preface to LyricalBallads, ProseWorksof William Wordsworth,ed. WJ.B Owen andJ.W. Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974),1:14041; Coleridge, Lectures 1808-1819 on Literature,ed. R.A. Foakes, vol. 2of The CollectedWorksof Samuel Taylor Coleridge(Princeton: Princeton Univ.Press, 1987), 1:217 ("Poetry is not the proper Antithesis to Prose; but toScience").2William Hazlitt, "Whythe Arts are not Progressive?-A Fragment," in TheCompleteWorksof William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent,1960), 4:160-64, 160.

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30RobertLowth, Lectureson the SacredPoetry of the Hebrews 1753), quotedin Norman Maclean (who also makes the point about poetry as a deviationfrom the norm of prose), "From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric inthe Eighteenth Century," in R.S. Crane, ed., Criticsand Criticism(Chicago:Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 408-60, 417.3'I have made this case about Swift and Pope in "Swift's Satire on 'Science'and the Structure of Gulliver'sTravels,"ELH58, 4 (Winter 1991): 809-39, and"The Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon."32S.T.Coleridge, Lectures 1808-1819 on Literature,p. 118.33Johann Bergk, Die Kunst, Buicher u Lesen (Jena, 1799), p. 176.34Bernard de Fontenelle, "Digression," pp. 359-64.35 Que les vers ne soient pas votre eternel emploiCultivez vos amis, soyez homme de foi:

C'est peu d'etre agreable et charmant dans un livre,Il faut savoir encore et converser et vivre.Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux, L 'Artpoetique, 4:221-24, in Oeuvres,ed. Georges-Mongredien (Paris: Garnier, 1961), p. 186.36JeanBaptiste Du Bos, Reflexions,7th edn., 3 vols. (Paris, 1770), pt. 1, sect.23, 1:303.3'By 1800, Wordsworth's poet is an aristocrat not of learning but of "morelively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness. . . than are supposed tobe common among mankind" (Prose,1:138), while forJohn Stuart Mill, "Greatpoets are often proverbially ignorant of life" ("Whatis Poetry?",in Mill's Essayson Literatureand Society,ed. J.B. Schneewind [New York: Macmillan, 1965],p. 106).38Thomas Warton the Elder, Poems (London, 1748), p. 220; Coleridge,"Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement," lines 60-62, in PoeticalWorks,ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p.108.39Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts,ch. 13, pp. 316, 323, 326, and Principesde la litterature 5th edn., 4 vols. [Paris, 1775]), 3:237 ("Lanaivete [de la lyrique]n'exclut que ce qui est trop pense, trop reflechi, ou qui n'a qu'une secheressehistorique"); Warton, Essay on Pope, 1:374. Batteux distinguishes lyric fromother forms in language that presages Wordsworth's 1800 Preface: in othergenres, "les sentimens suivent les idees; au lieu que dans les airs, ce sont lesidees qui suivent les sentimens" (Principes,3:238; cf. Wordsworth: "the feelingtherein developed gives importance to the action and situation and not theaction and situation to the feeling" [Prose, 1:128]).40EdwardYoung, The Complete Works, Poetry and Prose, 2 vols. (London,1834), 2:550; Anon., QuarterlyReview 4 (1810): 282; William Hazlitt, EdinburghReview 28 (August 1817). Arguing that "Reason and imagination are bothexcellent things, but their provinces ought to be kept a little more distinctthan they are at present," Hazlitt remarks of poets, "they make strange workof matters of fact; and, if they were allowed to act in public affairs, wouldsoon turn the world upside down. They indulge only in their own flatteringdreams, . . . caring as little for 'history and particular fact' as for generalreasoning."41InAlexander Chalmers, The Worksof the English Poets, from Chaucer toCowper, 20 vols. (London, 1810), 17:620-22. For Goldsmith's view ofcontemporary lyric as "a combination of luxuriant images without plot orconnection; a string of epithets" in which "gaudy images pass before [the]imagination like the figures in a dream," leaving the "reason . . . fast asleep,"see CollectedWorksof Oliver Goldsmith,ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford:

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Clarendon Press, 1966), 4:46; 2:388.4John Sitter, LiteraryLoneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century ngland (Ithaca:Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), p. 121.3EdwardYoung, Conjectures n Original Composition 1759), in Works2:574-75.

"Oliver Goldsmith, CollectedWorks,1:308; Archibald Alison, Essayson theNature and Principles of Taste (Edinburgh, 1790), pp. 14, 42, 86, 12. ForWordsworth, see especially the "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface":"TASTE... is a metaphor, taken from a passive sense of the human body,and transferred to things which are in their essence not passive,-to intellectualacts and operations" Prose, 3:81).4Batteux, Principes, 3:231-32; on associationist theories of unity, see RalphCohen, "Association of Ideas and Poetic Unity," PQ 36, 4 (October 1957):465-74.46EdwardYoung, Works, 1:416; Remond de Saint Mard, Reflexions,p. 343.47JohnSitter, LiteraryLoneliness, p. 123.8Dugald Stewart, The Collected Worksof Dugald Stewart, ed. Sir WilliamHamilton, 10 vols. (Edinburgh, 1854), 4:22245.4Wordsworth, Prose, 1:138, 146; on the "feminization of literature" in thesecond half of the eighteenth century, see David Simpson, Romanticism,Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,1993), chap. 6.50Thomas Gray, Correspondence, d. P. Toynbee and L. Whibley, rev. H.W.Starr, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:416; 2:478. Gray's attemptin The Bard to join epic (narrative) with lyric-an effort foretold in the firststanza of The Progressof Poesy, in Gray's topographical figuring of the generichierarchy-was noted in the eighteenth century: see for instance WilliamJackson, The Four Ages;Togetherwith Essayson Various Subjects London, 1798),p. 218: "The conducting of the story is altogether epic."51ForColeridge and Crabb Robinson's oppositions of the objectivity of epicwith the subjectivity of lyric, see M.H. Abrams, The Mirrorand theLamp (NewYork: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953), p. 242. (Abrams traces the opposition tolate eighteenth-century German criticism); according to Mill, "an epicpoem ... in so far as it is epic (i.e., narrative) ... is not poetry at all" ("Whatis Poetry?", p. 113).

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"aesthetics" and the rise of lyric in the eighteenth century

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