Joseph Warton, "Genuine Poesy," and the American Indian: The Search for a Poetic Ideal

Joseph Warton, "Genuine Poesy," and the American Indian: The Search for a Poetic Ideal Edward J. Rielly Saint Joseph's College (Maine) The poetic world of the mid-eighteenth century was still heavily mimetic, with the poet looking in a variety of places for a poetic model to imitate or an ideal to champion. At the same time, the primitive urge, so strong throughout the century, led him in this search to what today might be called underdeveloped regions. Foremost among these regions was America, or more properly, the Americas. The American Indian, especially when viewed as a Noble Savage, thus became a principal figure in eighteeneth-century primitivism and a common character in the literature of the age. 1 No matter if many, perhaps most, English writers had never seen an Indian, and surely not an Indian in his native habitat, or that the literary depiction of the Indian usually had a limited resemblance to reality, at least until the American Revolution (Heilman 29596 ). The writer could always turn his mind westward and create. Much of what one reads about the Noble Savage comes across today as extraordinarily simplistic and naive, repetitive and, in the worst sense, merely conventional. Joseph Warton's primitivism, however, comes through with a special focus. His perception of the ideal state of the American Indian does not fit smoothly into the normal culturalchronological /soft-hard categories of primitivism, which usually stress the ethical, physical, and social superiority of primitive man — concepts that Warton goes far beyond.2 Warton instead sees the Indian (normally the South American Indian) as the possessor of that state of mind most conducive to the creation of true poetry. The natural poet, of course, was much admired in the eighteenth century by those who tended to link poetic spontaneity and beauty with freedom and natural goodness (Fairchild 441-97; Tinker 61-89). Joseph Warton, though, brings the American Indian into his own theory of the nature of poetry — makes him, in fact, an integral part of that theory. Perhaps nowhere else in the century is this fusion of primitive man with literary criticism and poetic theory so thoroughly accomplished. Warton's view of the Indian as an embodiment and symbol of the poetic ideal and as the historical type best suited aesthetically (because of his freedom from convention and his close proximity to nature) for the composition of sublime and pathetic poetry demands a category of primitivism different from those listed above. Warton's version might well be called "psychological primitivism." The sublime and the pathetic are the primary elements in Joseph Warton 's aesthetic thought. Indeed, he called them the "chief nerves of all 35 36Rocky Mountain Review genuine poesy," and thus the surest indicators of that "creative and glowing IMAGINATION" that alone, in Warton's judgment, stamps a writer as a true poet (Essay l:iv-x). By allying sublimity with pathos, Joseph Warton was well within the major trend in eighteenth-century sublime theory away from the rhetorical sublime, in which sublimity was most often a characteristic of prose style, and toward the pathetic sublime, which made strong feeling the basis for sublimity and emphasized sublimity as substantive rather than adjectival (that is, the Sublime , rather than the sublime style).3 Eighteenth-century aestheticians such as John Dennis, Bishop Lowth, and Edmund Burke also turned their attention to the sublime effect on readers and attempted to analyze the essential qualities and sources of sublimity. As Joseph Wartonjoins this pursuit of the sublime, he finds, for example , that the sublime is the effect of divine subjects, such as the "omnipresence of the Deity" (Essay 2:77), and that it can result from either domestic scenes (Adventurer 101, 25:59) or exalted love (for example, the love of Eloisa for Abelard) (Essay 1:322, 355n). Warton also finds extension, or development in physical magnitude, conducive to the sublime effect. He notes, for example, the image of Melancholy in Pope's "Eloisa to Abelard," who sits on the convent, expanding her wings over the whole building, spreading gloom (Essay 1:331).4 Warton adds, however, that the gigantic alone is not synonymous with the sublime (Essay 1:368). Cosmic scenes...