"Pure poetry": Cultural capital and the rejection of classicism

Modern Language Quarterly

Volumn 58, Issue 4, 1997, Pages 437-456

  Ross, Trevor ^a  

^a DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 33646683982     PISSN: 00267929     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00267929-58-4-437     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope ( 1756), rpt. in Eighteenth-Cmtury Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge, 2 vols. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961), 2:717.
2. Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759)' ed. Edith J. Morley (Man-Chester: Manchester University Press, 1918), 13.
3. Line references for Pope's poetry are to the Twickenham edition, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. (London: Methuen, 1939-69).
4. On Pope and the gendering of the marketplace see Catherine Ingrassia, "Women Writing/Writing Women: Pope, Dulness, and 'Feminization' in the Dunciad," Eighteenth-Century Life 14 ( 1990) : 40-58.
5. Bourdieu, "Principles for a Sociology of Cultural Works," in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 187.
6. See Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic ExpPrience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw, Theory and History of Literature, 3 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)' 260.
7. Bourdieu stresses that such a disavowal of economic concerns is "neither a simple ideological mask nor a complete repudiation of economic interest" but is necessary within any cultural practice whose authority and legitimacy derive to no small degree from its apparent autonomy from the realms of the economic and political. Disavowal and disinterest are thus practical negations employed by social agents within a practice who "can only work by pretending not to be doing what they are doing" ("The Production of Belief," in Field of Cultural Production, 74-6).
8. Jonson, Epigram 18:2, and W i s , ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925-52), 433
9. Thomas M. Greene first discussed Jonson's valorization of moral fixity in his classic essay "Ben Jonson and the Centered Self," Studies in English Literature 10 ( 1970): 325-48.
10. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 3:251
11. The abbe Batteux, in Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même pincipe ( 1746), was evidently the first to use the phrase "poesie pure" to designate works of imagination in verse
12. See D. J. Mossop, Pure Poetry: Studies in French Poetic Theory and Practice, 1746 to 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 32-3.
13. Douglas Lane Patey relates the English adoption of the phrase to the reorganization of knowledge in the later eighteenth century in his valuable essay "'Aesthetics' and the Rise of Lyric in the Eighteenth Century," Studies in English Literature 33 ( 1993): 587-608.
14. This is the argument of Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
15. J. C. D. Clark also sees the rise of the vernacular canon as helping to displace an "Anglo-Latin tradition," though he insists that "humanist classicism . . . lasted for longer, and was more powerful, than historians or literary scholars have generally allowed" (Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion, and English Cultural Politics from the Restoration to Romanticism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 2).
16. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hehews (1753; trans. 1787), partly rpt. in Elledge, 2587-703.
17. Distancing his sociology from Marxist economism, Bourdieu has lately argued that economic capital may be subordinate to symbolic capital even in capitalist economies, since acts of exchange may not be possible without symbolic disavowals of economic interests: "In an economy which is defined by the refusal to recognize the 'objective' truth of 'economic' practices, that is, the law of 'naked selfinterest' and egoistic calculation, even 'economic' capital cannot act unless it succeeds in being recognized through a conversion that can render unrecognizable the true principle of its efficacy. Symbolic capital is this denied capital, recognized as legitimate, that is, misrecognized as capital" ( The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 19901, 118)
18. Jonathan Loesberg offers a fine account of the increasing significance of symbolic capital in Bourdieu's work in "Bourdieu and the Sociology of Aesthetics," ELH 60 ( 1993) : 1033-56.
19. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 9 37-50.
20. Nancy Armstrong first proposed the case for the feminization of culture in the eighteenth century in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History o/ the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3-27.
21. Since then Adam Potkay has discussed the complex ambivalence in Macpherson's poems, which "are animated, at a deep level, with male ressentiment toward the very ideal of polite domesticity they help to formulate" ("Virtue and Manners in Macpherson's Poems of Ossian," PMLA 107 [ 1992: 128)
22. David Simpson has likewise considered the masculinist backlash in aesthetic theories of the period, notably Burke's "remasculinization" of the sublime (Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19931, 126-31). See also Patey (n. 10 above) on the male appropriation of the "feminine" expressiveness of the lyric.
23. Bourdieu writes, "A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded" (Distinction: A Social Critique of the P Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, 2 ) . My definition of cultural capital is based on Johnson's summary paraphrase, in his introduction to The Field of Cultural Production (7) .
24. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson, 2 vols. (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), 1:214.
25. Howard Caygill, Art ofJudgement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 100-2.
26. The commercialization of letters had earlier prompted several of the Augustans to toy with mythologies of compulsion even as they resisted the cultural autonomization which these mythologies implied. For the satirist?, distressed by their deepening exile from the drawing rooms of state, poetry's masculine fire was transformed into afflictions of the affective body. Dryden, in his later work as a professional author, frequently complained of his failing memory and of being "a cripple in my limbs" (Of Ihamatick Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George U'at.on, 2 vols. [London: Dent, 1962, 2:272). Desire of any kind, Swift alleged, could stem from a mere disorder of the bowels. For the early Pope, poetic inspiration could be imaginatively equated with a disabling internalization of the Muses, in the Cave of Spleen and in Eloisa's imprisoned raptures, inflamed by thoughts of her lover's mutilated body. Yet Pope was less reluctant than his colleagues to find a measure of liberation in compulsion, as it enabled him to present himself ever more dramatically as a poet driven by innate disinterestedness (as opposed to the simple reactive indignation of the Juvenalian satirist). By the time of the Imitations to Horace, though, Pope had both fully masculinized this mythology and sentimentalized it so that it did not seem like an enslaving irrationality: "My Head and Heart thus flowing thro' my Quill, / Verseman or Prose-Man, term me which you will" (Satire, 2. I .63-4).
27. U'ordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, 2d ed. ( 18o2), rpt.
28. Wmdszuorth? Liter Criticism, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Imndon: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 72. On the eighteenth-century attempts to locate the source of genius in providence or nature
29. see Ken Frieden, (;UniuJ and Monologue (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985)
30. Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, trans. Richard Nice, 2d ed. (London: Sage, 1990)3,1.
31. William Mason, ed., The Poems of Mr Gray, to which are prefixed Memoirs of his Lije and Writing, 2 vols. (York, 1775), 2:91
32. quoted in Robert Folkenflik, "The Artist as Hero in the Eighteenth Century," Yearbook of English Studies 12 (1982): 97.
33. Richard I-lord, Works, 8 vols. (iSii; rpt. NewYork: AMS Press, 1967), 1:104.
34. Susan Staves argues that for Pope, "refinement was a kind of bourgeois and nationalist scheme of improvement"; it gave him "a vivid sense of individually owning his poetic texts and a most entrepreneurial and patriotic attitude towards improving or refining them in his own interest and in the interest of the nation" ("Pope's Refinement," Eighteenth Centur'ç: Theory and Interpretation 29 [19881: 146). Staves's historical claim is somewhat misleading: refinement had long been considered a rhetorical ideal, since one of the civic humanist poet's prime functions was to heighten the persuasive power of political discourse (see n. 33 below). Nonetheless, Pope was a special case, since his relation to civic humanism remained problematic throughout his career, and especially in his later work. Pope may have officially aligned himself with the great landowners Bolingbroke and Bathurst, but he "lived in a ditferent world, made his living by his pen, cherished his independence. Only by considerable distortion, therefore, can Pope be transformed into the spokesman for civic humanisni"
35. (David B. Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19841, 194). The public-minded laureate poets of old had similarly cherished their moral independence from powerful influences, hut by the time Pope was writing his last satires, he was engaging in strenuous efforts to define an autonomous poetic subjectivity at odds with all dominant interests: spurning political allies in the fragmentary One Thousand Seven Hundred and Forty, abandoning the traditional project of refinement in the final Dunciad, and ultimately presenting himself as a poet of sublime egotistical rage in the Epilogue to the Satires.
36. In this final mode Pope was intent to wage all-out "cultural combat" in order to assert his distinctiveness (Carole Fabricant, "Pope's Moral, Political, and Cultural Combat," Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29 [19881: i8o). By assuming a stance of total disavowal in the name of culture, Pope effectively announced the very project of cultural autonomixation that his detractors would soon champion.
37. The Poems of 7'homa.y Gra, William Collins, and oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lons- dale (London: Longmans, 1969), 157.
38. Gray, Ch-rPspondmce, ed. Paget Toynbee arid Leonard Whibley, zd ed., ;3 vols. ( 1935; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971 ), 1 296.
39. On Gray's authorial self-definition in relation to the book market see Linda Zionkowski, "Bridging the Gulf Between: The Poet and the Audience in the Work of Gray," ELH 58 ( 1991): 331-50.
40. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767), 292.
41. Thomas Warton, Observations on "The Fairy Queen" of Spenser (1754), rpt In Elledge, 2:772.
42. That the valorization of pure poetry reflected an attempt to autonomize the cultural field from economic exchange relations is implicit in Terry Eagleton's summary account of the emergence of an aesthetic ideology during the eighteenth ecu- tory: "In a notable historical irony, the birth of aesthetics as an intellectual discourse coincides with the period when cultural production is beginning to suffer the miseries and indignities of commodification. The peculiarity of the aesthetic is in part spiritual compensation for this degradation: it is just when the artist is becoming dehased to a petty commodity producer that he or she will lay claim to transcendent genius. But there is another reason for the foregrounding of the artefact which aesthetics achieves. What art is now able to offer, in that ideological reading of it as aesthetic, is a paradigm of more general social significance-an image of self-referentiality which in an audacious move seizes upon the very ftmnctionlessness of artistic practice and transforms it into a vision of the highest good" (The Ideology of the Aesthetic [Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990], 64-5).
43. John Sitter made the case for a post-Augustan "flight from history" in Literori Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 77-103
44. William C. Dowling has since proposed a revision of Sitter's thesis, wherein the Gothic revival in midcenturv poetry reflected a change from the Augustans'"retrospective radicalism" to a modern notion of historical progressivism ("Ideology and the Flight from History in Eighteenth-Century Poetry," in The Profession of Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reflections on an Institution, ed. Leo Damrosch [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, iqqa], 135-53). Duwling's argument anticipates mine in several respects, including the use of Pocock's intellectual history to suggest how the generational shift Irons the Augustans to their successors involved differing responses to new economic realities. Dowling suggests that the poets at midcentury were as dismayed with these new realities as the August.ans hot that their opposition did not take the form of political satire; instead, they promoted the realm of the imagination as a sanctuary from the "desacralization of the world" (148). Though I agree generally with Dowling's assessment, I propose that the historical change he discusses was far more complex and consequential than he allows. I follow Bourdieu in suggesting, rather, that the rejection of classicism and the concomitant vahwization of the imagination were aspects of a much broader process of autonomization, wherein the entire cultural field had to be distinguished more fervently than ever from the commercial world, now that the new realities of exchange threatened to become the only currency of social power.
45. Lowth's observation may recall Gray's notorious remark, in his letter of 8 April 1742 to West, that "the language of the age is never the language of poetry." Yet Gray, at least in the context of this letter, rehearses the traditional view that the poet enriches the language through verbal innovations and refinements. The poet, in this view, may be in the rhetorical avant-garde but does not write in a language peculiar to poetry. For this reason, I cannot entirely agree with John Guillory's argument in his otherwise brilliant chapter on Gray in Cultnral Capital: The Problem of Li/nary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85-133