NOTES

Introduction:

p. 5, line 7. "John Stuart Mill." "Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties," Dissertations and Discussions, Series I.

p. 9, line 24. "Matthew Arnold," "The Literary Influence of Academies," Essays in Criticism, First Series.

p 15, line 7. "whatever it is now." This phrase expresses, not a contempt for aesthetics, but a conviction that it is time for aesthetics to get out from under philosophy, as psychology has already done. Most philosophers deal with aesthetic questions only as a set of analogies to their logical and metaphysical views, hence it is difficult to use, say, Kant or Hegel on the arts without getting into a Kantian or Hegelian "position." Aristotle is the only philosopher known to me who not only talks specifically about poetics when he is aware of larger aesthetic problems, but who assumes that such poetics would be the organon of an independent discipline. Consequently a critic can use the Poetics without involving himself in Aristotelianism (though I know that some Aristotelian critics do not think so).

p, 15, line 9. "state of naive induction." I am indebted here to a passage in Susanne K. Langer, The Practice of Philosophy (1930).

p, 18, line 38. "better critics of all ages." Shelley, for example, speaks in A Defence of Poetry of "that great poem, which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world."

p. 21, line 22. "Arnold's 'touchstone' theory." "The Study of Poetry," Essays in Criticism, Second Series.

First Essay:

p. 37, line 1. "Beowulf." The precise meaning of "enta geweorc" (2717) does not affect the illustration.

p. 37, line 19 "central position of high mimetic tragedy." Cf. Louis L. Martz, "The Saint as Tragic Hero," Tragic Themes in Western Literature, ed. Cleanth Brooks (1955), 176.

p. 41, line 7 "Coleridge." See Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T, M. Raysor (1936), 294; I have expanded what Coleridge says in order to bring out the critical principle involved.

p. 46, line 8 "deliverance from the unpleasant." Cf. Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Laughter (1936), which also provides some illuminating comments on the eiron and alazon roles.

p 46, line 1 3 "suggested for Old Comedy," See Francis M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (1934).

p. 53, line 23 "named after its plot." See R. S. Crane, "The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones," Critics and Criticism, ed, R. S. Crane (1952), 616 ff.

p. 61, line 8 "Augenblick of modem German thought." The Erkennung of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (II, xii) is a less vague example; it also illustrates the conception of thematic discovery or recognition (p, 52; cf p. 302).

p, 61, line 37 "One study." Sir George Rostrevor Hamilton, The Tell-Tale Article (1949).

p. 71, line 1 "lack of a technical vocabulary/' The revival of the technical language of rhetoric would not only provide us with useful terms, but in many cases would revive the conceptions themselves which have been forgotten along with their names. It may be true that, as Samuel Butler said: "... all a rhetorician's rules teach nothing but to name his tools", but if a critic cannot name his tools, the world is unlikely to concede much authority to his craft. We should not entrust our cars to a mechanic who lived entirely in a world of gadgets and doohickeys.

p. 76, line 30 "Dante says." Epistola X, to Can Grande (Opere, ed. Moore and Toynbee, 4th ed., 416). See also II Convivio, II, i (op. cit. t 251-252).

p. 82, line 2 "What is now called 'new criticism' " The account of literal meaning given here depends on I. A. Richards, Richard Blackmur, William Empson (ambiguity), Cleanth Brooks (literal irony), and John Crowe Ransom (texture) in particular.

p. 82, line 26 "the word form." For the theory of the formal phase, I have been considerably indebted to R. S. Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953), as well as to Critics and Criticism (1952), edited by him.

p. 86, line 21 "'the intentional fallacy/" See W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe Beardsley, The Verbal Icon (1954), Ch. i, I have taken the word "holism" (p. 326) from the same book, p. 238.

p. 93, line 9 "Yeats and Sturge Moore/' See W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore; Their Correspondence, 1901-1937 (1953).

p. 95, line 18 "convention and genre." The conception of the autonomy of form in art is essential to the argument of Andr Mal- raux, The Voices of Silence, tr. Stuart Gilbert (1953). In modern English criticism the archetypal approach is highly developed in both theory and practice. In theory, the books of Maud Bodkin, Kenneth Burke, Gaston Bachelard, Fran cis Fergusson, and Philip Wheelwright are of obvious and exceptional usefulness. See the excellent bibliographies in Ren6 Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1942), Ch. xv.

p. 98, line i "remark of Mr. Eliot." In his essay on Philip Massinger.

p. 99 line 34 "literary adaptation of the ritual of the Adonis lament." This phrase should be understood in the light of the general principle that "ritual" refers to content rather than source.

p. 101,line 34 "clueless/ 1 My only point is that there may not be any point, but as Rose Armiger is a sister to dragons rather than knights errant, there is a faint possibility of parody-symbolism, discussed below.

p. 103, line 16 "topoi." For these see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard Trask (1953), 79 fr*. An example of the point made in the text is the relation of Milton's first prolusion, "Whether Day is more excellent than Night," to L' Allegro and Il Penseroso.

p. 105, line 6 "the work of the dream." Throughout this book "dream" is used in an extended sense to mean, not simply the fantasies of the sleeping mind, but the whole interpenetrating activity of desire and repugnance in shaping thought.

p. 111, line 2 3 "actual content, its dianoia." The expression here is care less, as dianoia refers to form.

p. 113, line 32 "its own object." I have taken this phrase from an oral lecture by M. Jacques Maritain.

p. 122, line 8 "a letter of Rilke." Letter to Ellen Delp, October 27, 1915.

p. 122, line 22 "universal human body." To these should be added the great meditation on time in the second part of Le Temps Retrouv. One wonders if there is anything more than doubt ful puns connecting the anagogic perspective in literature with Kant's conception of "transcendental aesthetic" as the a priori consciousness of space and time.

p. 125, line 10 "Coleridge." Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (1936), 343.

p. 135, line 10 "credible facts." I pass over the point that the younger brother is warned of his danger by the elder brother's cow.

p. 140, line 27 "hero descending." The statement that Hamlet descends into the grave is expendable, but the contrast in his mood before and after the scene indicates some kind of rite de passage.

p. 141, line 21 "grammar of apocalyptic imagery." For Biblical typology a useful book is Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images (1949). See also Alan W. Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity

p. 142, line 5 " 'figura.' " See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, tr. Willard Trask
( 1 953)^73-

p. 144, line i "Of birds." Several poems by Wallace Stevens, including "The Dove in the Belly," employ this symbolism. Other favored members of the animal kingdom include the fish and the dolphin, traditionally Christian in contrast to the leviathan, and among insects the bee, so beloved of Virgil, whose sweetness and light are a contrast to the devouring spider. Cf. Dame Edith Sitwell's poem, "The Bee Oracles." The old theory of "primates" in the various kingdoms is connected with this symbolic use of typical representatives.

p. 145, line 37 "burning man." Cf. D. H. Lawrence's remarks on vermilion paint in Etruscan Places, Ch. in.

p. 146, line 4 "In alchemy." For alchemical symbolism see Herbert Sil- berer, Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism, tr. Smith Ely Jelliffe (1917), and C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alche my, tr. R. F. C. Hull (1953). Allegorical alchemy, Rosi- crucianism, Cabbalism, Freemasonry, and the Tarot pack are all typological constructs based on paradigms similar to those given here. For the literary critic they are simply ref erence tables: the atmosphere of oracular harrumph about pp. 159-1 60

p. 165, line 28 p. 166, line 14

p. 168, line 39

p. 171, line 28 p. 173, line 28

p. 178, line 34

p. 183, line 30 p. 186, line 32 them, which recurs in some forms of archetypal criticism, is not much to the point.

"Animal lives." Hence the relation of animal symbolism to the phase of the cycle is characterized by the choice of animal rather than by its age. We expect to find deer in romances and rats in The Waste Land. "carefully marked." Volpone, V, ii, 12-14. "Tractatus Coislinianus" See Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (1922).

"Mr. E. M. Forster." Aspects of the Novel (1927), Ch. i. It would perhaps be better to draw the contrast between a fictional repetition like Mrs, Micawber's formula, and a thematic repetition, like Matthew Arnold's deliberate echo ing ad nauseam of fatuous phrases used by his opponents. For the role of such thematic repetitions in Forster's own work, see E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel (1950). "occupies the middle action." Hence the archetype of the blocking character in comedy is the "interrex" or deputy ruler: see Theodor H. Caster, Thespis (1950), 34. Angelo in Measure for Measure is the clearest example, "amateur detective of modem fiction." This is his naive incarnation; in more sophisticated comedy a popular form of gracioso is the dandy, a disengaged figure whose epigrams are largely inverted cliches, whose attitude is that of comic scorn for sentimentality as described on p. 48, and who is normally a conservative, opposed to a group of humors who feel that they are progressive because they all face in the same direction. He is well exhibited in Wilde's An Ideal Husband. In the twenties the dandy revived, both fictionally and thematically, in Firbank, Huxley, Waugh, the Knicker bocker figure of The New Yorker, and elsewhere. "and then reverses the action." The impetus of irony or "realism" is toward a conclusion which remains within the state of experience; the impetus of comedy is toward a lift out of that state. Which conclusion the author chooses is often a matter of a sentence or two, like a piece of music in a minor key which may or may not end on the parallel major chord. Besides The Beggar's Opera, Dickens's Great Expectations and Charlotte Bronte's Villette go to the length of providing alternative endings, one conventionally comic, the other more equivocal.

" 'behind the eight-ball/ " I forget where I read this, but perhaps the reader will excuse the reference, "endless form." This endless form has many literary mani festations: in the sequence of stories based on the same formula, like The Monk's Tale in Chaucer and its slower- witted descendants in Lydgate and The Mirror for Magis trates; in the arbitrarily determined number of stories to be told in a given situation, like the thousand and one that Scheherezade tells for dear life; in the curiously muted con clusion of Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji, which, though a logical enough conclusion, would hardly have precluded the author from starting again. For its appearance in drama, see the note to p. 289. The principle of discovery, which brings the end into line with the beginning, gives to the symmetri cal plot its characteristic parabola shape.

p. 187, line 10 "using Greek terms." That is, using the terms employed by Sir Gilbert Murray in his Excursus in Jane Harrison, Themis, 2nd ed. (1927), 341 ff.

p. 188, line 18 "'subconscious' factor/' It should also be said, however, that archetypal criticism, which can do nothing but abstract and typify and reduce to convention, has only a "subcon scious" role in the direct experience of literature, where uniqueness is everything. In direct experience we are dimly aware of familiar conventions, but as a rule we are con sciously aware of them only when we are bored or disap pointed, and feel that there is nothing new here. Hence the usual confusion between direct experience and criticism may well lead to the feeling that archetypal criticism is simply bad criticism, as in some pronouncements of Mr. Wyndham Lewis.

p. 191, line 17 "Paradise Regained" See "The Typology of Paradise Re gained" Modern Philology (1956), 227 if.

p. 192, line 26 "central unifying myth." Cf. Joseph Campbell, The Hero "with a Thousand Faces (1949); Lord Raglan, The Hero (1936); C. G. Jung, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, soon to be retranslated in the Bollingen series as Symbols of Transformation, and the account of the "eniautos-dai- mon" in Jane Harrison, Themis. To these perhaps I may add my own account of Blake's Ore symbolism in Fearful Symmetry (1947), Ch. vn.

p. 194, line 6 "we are told." Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920).

p. 194, line 25 "identified." The Biblical identification is in Rev. 12:9, from which the phrase "that old dragon" in the head verse to Canto xi comes.

p. 198, line 8 "studied in some detail." See Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1910); also C. G. Jung and C. Kerenyi, Essays toward a Science of Mythology, tr. R. F. C. Hull (1949).

p. 201, line 13 "natural sequel to the first book." The archetype is that of the building of a habitation for the god or hero after his tri umph: cf. Theodor H. Caster, Thespis, 163. The phrase "Beauty and money" is from Faerie Queene, II, xi. For the distinctions between temperance and continence and the two levels of nature, see A. S. P. Woodhouse, "Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene" ELH (1949), 194 ff. and "The Argument of Milton's Comus," University of Toronto Quarterly (1941), 46 ff.

p. 203, line 35 "analogues of the Biblical stories of the Fall." See Apollodo- rus, Bibliotheca, ed. Frazer (Loeb Classical Library, 1921); Sir James Frazer, Folk Lore in the Old Testament, Vol. I (1918); Leo Frobenius, The Childhood of Man, tr. A. H. Keane (1909).

p. 204, line 2 " 'gold bug' in Poe's story." This example will not please the oh-come-now school of criticism, but is added because it illustrates the principle that logical construction, in a popular tale, is a matter of the linking of archetypes. The use of the gold bug to discover the treasure is, from the ir relevant point of view of plausibility, unnecessary, and only the lamest excuse is given for it in the dialogue.

p. 208, line 2 3 "rise of Ionian and of Renaissance science." Cf. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), Ch. i.

p. 214, line 20 "treatment of the tragic vision." See Also Sprach Zara- thustra, III, IviL Zarathustra is at the point of epiphany, with the cyclical world below him; as his vision is primarily that of the tragic hero, his natural movement is downward into the cycle. Like the Father's speech in Milton, to which it affords an instructive parallel, the argument itself may be unconvincing, but the reason for its being there is plain enough. Eliot's Ash Wednesday and Yeats's Dialogue of Self and Soul, which deal with the same archetype from di rectly opposed points of view, are much clearer in structure.

p. 228, line 17 "does not need a great person." Chaucer's pardoner is a perhaps better example.

p. 231, line 31 "Charles Fort." See The Books of Charles Fort (1941 ), 435.

p. 235, line 3 "Emerson says." Nature, vi.

p. 237, line 7 "Coriolanus." See Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox

p. 244, line 20 "Ezra Pound." ABC of Reading, Ch. iv. Melopoiia is actually Aristotle's word: I use melos because it is short.

p. 245, line 40 "Coleridge." From the Essay on Method in The Friend, iv. I do not claim that I am correctly interpreting Coleridge's term, but the necessity of being a terminological buccaneer
should be clear enough by now.

p. 250, line 37 "no controlling rhythm." No specifically -verbal rhythm, that is: the controlling rhythm of drama is the rhythm of its production on the stage.

p. 253, line 24 "his own modification." I should modify it myself to make the beat "on no side" begin with an eighth rest.

p. 258, line 13 "recurrent Alexandrine." Also by a number of six-stress pentameters; see "Lexis and Melos/' Sound and Poetry (English Institute Essays 1956; forthcoming) .

p. 259, line 2 "treatise on rhetoric." Rhetoric III, xi; but the actual use of the line (Od. xi, 598) as a blackboard example of imitative harmony comes rather from Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

p. 261, line 26 " 'ten low words/ " Essay on Criticism, 347; what is wrong with the line, of course, is not too many monosyllables, but too many stressed accents.

p. 264, line 32 " 'Senecan amble/ " See the book of that title by George Williamson (1951).

p. 265, line 37 "Wulfstan." Another text of the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos adds two more alliterative pairs to the quotation given, in dicating a certain ad libitum quality in such rhetoric.

p. 268, line 1 3 "Cassiodorus." Quoted from W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages (1911), 119.

p. 269, line 33 "literary mannerism." Cf. T. S. Eliot, Poetry and Drama

p 272, line 10 " 'true voice of feeling/ " See the book of that title by Sir F * Herbert Read (1953).

p. 275, line 20 "little has yet been said/' See however the conception of "parody" in Frederick W. Sternfeld, Goethe and Music

p. 278, line 2 3 "Camellia Sabina" See Marianne Moore, Selected Poems (1935); the scheme of the poem is altered in later editions.

p. 281, line 25 "thirty-eight phrases/' The book examined was Oscar Wil liams, The Man Coming Toward You (1940); the only point made by the count is that modern diction is as con ventionalized as any other diction.

p. 284, line i "secular Eucharist symbol." We may glance in passing at the conclusion of Richard III (V, iv, 31-32) :
And then, as we have ta'en the sacrament, We will unite the white rose and the red.

p. 286, line 34 "preface to Getting Married" More exactly, in a prefatory note separated from the preface.

p. 289, line 14 "tendency to linear movement." For this processional struc ture, so much disliked by Aristotle, cf. the note to p. 186. The hypothesis that Shakespeare may have used a collabora tor in Pericles does not affect my statements about it.

p. 290, line 7 "said to be descended." See Enid Welsford, The Court Masque (1927).

p. 293, line 21 "along with such epos forms." An extremely complicated problem, the problem of the intervening generic stages be tween lyric and epos, has had to be omitted from this discussion.

p. 317, line 10 "two epic frameworks." In G. R. Levy, The Sword from the Rock (1954), three types of epic structure are recognized: mythical epics, quest-epics, and conflict-epics. As far as the epic material used is concerned, these correspond roughly to our mythical, romantic and high mimetic encyclopaedic forms.

p. 320, line 36 "in France/' See H. J. Hunt, The Epic in Nineteenth-Cen tury France ( 1941 ) .

p. 326, line 8 "a Longinian point of view." This conception of Aristote lian aesthetic catharsis and Longinian psychological ecstasis as complementary to one another (cf. p. 66) is explained perhaps more coherently in "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," ELH (1956), 1445., in connection with eighteenth-century English literature.

p. 328, line 10 "Swinburne." The passage, if it matters, comes from his introduction to the Mermaid Series edition of Middleton, ed. Havelock Ellis (1887).

p. 334, line 10 "possibility of links." For a criticism of some of the views here advanced, see Donald Davie, Articulate Energy (1955), 130^.

p. 341, line 24 "allegorical explanations of myths." See Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, tr. Barbara Sessions (1953), Bk. n.

p. 349, line 40 "center of society/' Cf. Ezra Pound's conception of the "unwobbling pivot."

p. 353, line 5 "some kind of metaphor." The critic would of course need to distinguish an explicit metaphor from a metaphorical verbal construct. "X has a bee in his bonnet about Y" is an explicit metaphor; "X has got the notion Y into his head" is the verbal frame of the same metaphor, but for ordinary purposes it would pass as a simply descriptive statement.

p. 354, line 7 "either mathematical or mythical." It is difficult to see how aesthetic theory can get much further without recognizing the creative element in mathematics. The arts might be more clearly understood if they were thought of as forming a circle, stretching from music through literature, painting and sculpture to architecture, with mathematics, the missing art, occupying the vacant place between architecture and music. The reeling that mathematics belongs to science rather than art is largely due to the fact that mathematics is an art that we know how to use. The difference between mathematics and literature on this point will be greatly re duced when criticism achieves its proper form of the theory of the use of words.