Abstract
Oakeshott’s theory of poetry was a pure theory. But it was so pure a theory it emptied out most of what we would normally mean by poetry, it ignored the history of poetry in extracting a meaning out of it, and it left to one side most of the questions about poetry which are of interest to poets, critics or indeed anyone. This chapter places Oakeshott’s theory of poetry in the context of theories of poetry from Aristotle through Johnson, Wordsworth and Shelley through to figures as varied as Wittgenstein, Leavis, Eliot and Auden in order to suggest that Oakeshott theory was, as a theory of poetry, a provocation, and, as a theory of something undoubtedly worth thinking about, not a theory of poetry at all.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 509, 528 & 539.
- 2.
Michael Oakeshott, Notebooks, 1922–86, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2014), 472.
- 3.
James Alexander, “The Four Points of the Compass,” Philosophy 87 (2012), 79–107.
- 4.
Quoted in T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1939/1964), 18.
- 5.
Ibid., 64.
- 6.
Gilbert Highet, The Powers of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 3.
- 7.
Oakeshott, Notebooks, 13.
- 8.
James Alexander, “The Philosophy of Political History in Oakeshott and Collingwood,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 10 (2016), 279–303.
- 9.
Oakeshott, Notebooks, 147.
- 10.
Ibid., 242.
- 11.
Ibid., 303.
- 12.
“Neither the poet nor the critic of poetry will find very much to his purpose in what I have to say.” Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry,” 495.
- 13.
Collingwood’s theory resembles Oakeshott’s, except, importantly, it is a theory of “art” not “poetry”. R.G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, or The Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), especially 61, 68 & 107.
- 14.
Heidegger’s theory does not resemble Oakeshott’s because Heidegger is exercised by the loss of divine order and wants to talk about it, whereas Oakeshott seems to be content to have lost it or, at least, content not to talk about it. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), especially 92.
- 15.
Richard Rorty, “Getting Rid of the Appearance-Reality Distinction”, New Literary History 47 (2016), 67–81.
- 16.
Eliot, Use of Poetry, 16.
- 17.
From the inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, June 1956, in W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 344–5.
- 18.
The only poet or critic I have found who did maintain such a binary was W.H. Auden: “The political history of the world would have been the same if not a poem had been written.” Quoted in A.L. Rowse, The Poet Auden: A Personal Memoir (London: Methuen, 1987), 65.
- 19.
F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1932/1950), 11.
- 20.
Ibid., 16.
- 21.
Ibid., 18.
- 22.
Eliot, Use of Poetry, 15.
- 23.
Leavis, New Bearings in Poetry, 165.
- 24.
Quoted in Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London: Hogarth, 1952/1984), 29.
- 25.
G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (London: Williams and Norgate, n.d.), 19.
- 26.
Ernest Barker, “An Attempt at Perspective,” in ed. Ernest Barker, The Character of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 550–576, at 572.
- 27.
See Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden and Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
- 28.
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (Yale University Press, 1990), 45.
- 29.
Eliot, Use of Poetry, 22, 25, 26.
- 30.
See Robert J. Yanal, “Aristotle’s Definition of Poetry,” Nous 16 (1982), 499–525.
- 31.
Johnson, Rasselas, 43–5.
- 32.
Walter Bagehot, in “Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning; or Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry” (1864), in Literary Studies, vol. 2 (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1911), 305–352, at 309.
- 33.
John Ross Baker, “Poetry and Language in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 39 (1981), 437–449.
- 34.
Garry Shapiro, “Hegel on the Meanings of Poetry,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 8 (1975), 88–107.
- 35.
For Oakeshott’s association of poetry with adolescence see Notebooks, 89 and 388, and perhaps especially the interesting note on p. 267: “Adolescence—the refusal of substitutes; the demand for complete satisfaction”. For the suggestion that at least some poetry was suitable for old age (though he saw that there was a problem), see Leslie Stephen, “Wordsworth’s Ethics,” in Hours in a Library, vol. II (London: Folio Society, 1991), 259–296, and for the suggestion that Auden never escaped adolescence see Leavis, New Bearings in Poetry, 167.
- 36.
See Glenn Worthington, “The Voice of Poetry in Oakeshott’s Moral Philosophy,” The Review of Politics 64 (2002), 285–310, at 286; Efraim Podoksik, “The Voice of Poetry in the Thought of Michael Oakeshott,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2002), 717–733, at 725; Martyn P. Thompson, “Intimations of Poetry in Practical Life,” in The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott ed. Corey Abel and Timothy Fuller (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), 281–92, at 283; Robert Grant, in “Oakeshott on the Nature and Place of Aesthetic Experience,” in the same book, 293–305, at 294; Wendell John Coats Jr, in “Michael Oakeshott and the Poetic Character of Human Activity,” in the same book, 306–315, at 311; Corey Abel, “Whatever It Turns Out to Be: Oakeshott on Aesthetic Experience,” in A Companion to Michael Oakeshott, ed. Paul Franco and Leslie Marsh (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 151–172, at 152.
- 37.
See Wendell John Coats Jr, “Michael Oakeshott as Philosopher of ‘the Creative’,” in The Place of Michael Oakeshott in Contemporary Western and Non-Western Thought, ed. Noël O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2017), 123–41.
- 38.
Worthington, “The Voice of Poetry,” 304.
- 39.
Grant, “Oakeshott on the Nature,” 303.
- 40.
Michael Oakeshott, What is History? and Other Essays, ed. Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004), 86.
- 41.
T.S. Eliot, “Arnold and Pater” in T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays 3rd. ed.(London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 431–443 at 442.
- 42.
Grant, “Oakeshott on the Nature,” 301.
- 43.
Eliot, Use of Poetry, 141.
- 44.
For which, see Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 158–68.
- 45.
Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry,” 538.
- 46.
Charles Williams, The English Poetic Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 1.
- 47.
John Powell Ward, The English Line: Poetry of the Unpoetic from Wordsworth to Larkin (London: Macmillan, 1991), 4.
- 48.
Quoted in Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1984), 89.
- 49.
George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 255.
- 50.
Consider the fact that the following are quoted in On Human Conduct: Francis Quarle (1592–1644), “Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man” (p. 324), Henry King (1592–1669), “Exequy on his Wife” (p. 82), Henry Vaughan (1621–1695), “Distraction” (p. 85), Samuel Butler (1613–1680), “Hudibras” (misquoted on p. 166), Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), “Dover Beach” (p. 23), A.E. Houseman (1859–1936), “Spring Morning” (p. 65), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend” (p. 84), Mervyn Peake (1911–1968), “May 1940” (p. 236), and some others—showing seventeenth century and nineteenth century tastes (whereas his political tastes seem to have been eighteenth century, admiring Hume and Hazlitt’s Chatham, Fox, Pitt, etc).
- 51.
Williams, The English Poetic Mind, 8.
- 52.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, section 6.41, quoted in Stanley Stewart, “Was Wittgenstein a Closet Literary Critic?” New Literary History 34 (2003), 43–57, at 53.
- 53.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” The Philosophical Review 74 (1965), 3–12, at 12.
- 54.
Oakeshott, Notebooks, 94.
- 55.
Frank Kermode, “Dissociation of Sensibility,” The Kenyon Review 19 (1957), 169–194, at 180 (my italics).
- 56.
Rorty, “Getting Rid,” 67, 69.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Alexander, J. (2022). The Problem of a Pure Theory of Poetry. In: Kos, E.S. (eds) Oakeshott’s Skepticism, Politics, and Aesthetics. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83055-7_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83055-7_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-83054-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-83055-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)