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  • Belief and Disbelief
  • M. H. Abrams

NOTES

1. Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (London, 1932), 138.

2. “Bentham,” in Early Essays by John Stuart Mill, ed. I. W. M. Gibbs (London, 1897), 208; Jeremy Bentham, “The Rationale of Reward,” in Works, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh, 1843), II, 253–4.

3. Early Essays, 202, 208; Letters of John Stuart Mill, ed. H. S. R. Elliot (London, 1910), II, 358.

4. Science and Poetry (London, 1926), 56–61.

5. Science and Poetry, 82.

6. Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London, 1911), 137–9.

7. Meditationes philosophicae (1735), §§ 51–69; Aesthetica (1750, 1758), §§441, 511–18, 585.

8. Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London, 1950), 4–6; 17.

9. Selected Essays, 30; The Sacred Wood (London, 1950), viii.

10. The World’s Body (New York, 1938), 343.

11. On the Limits of Poetry (New York, 1948), 48.

12. Bradley, Oxford Lectures, 6; Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk, Connecticut, 1941), 43, 281.

13. The Verbal Icon (University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 241. E. M. Forster wrote (in Anonymity, Hogarth Essay, 1925, 14): “[in reading a poem] we have entered a universe that only answers to its own laws, supports itself, internally coheres, and has a new standard of truth. Information is true if it is accurate. A poem is true if it hangs together.”

14. On the Limits of Poetry, 113.

15. The Verbal Icon, 87.

16. “Beauty is Truth,” Symposium, I (1930), 466–501.

17. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (1930), 187, 278–9; T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 256.

18. For Keats’s use of “truth” as equivalent to “existence,” see The Letters of John Keats, ed. M. B. Forman (London, 1947), 67. I prefer attributing “That is all Ye know on earth …” to the lyric speaker rather than to the Urn because the former reading is at least as probable in the context, and makes a richer poem. But even if we take the whole of the last two lines to be asserted by the Urn, the point holds that their significance is qualified by the nature of the speaker.

19. The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), 141–2; 151–2.

20. Letters of John Keats, 72, 227–8.

21. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1940–9), IV, 463–4.

22. “Poetry and Propaganda,” in Literary Opinion in America, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York, 1951), 103.

23. Blake, Jerusalem, I. 10; Yeats, A Vision (New York, 1938), 8.

24. Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), II, 107, 111–13, 120–1.

25. Coleridge on Imagination (London, 1934), 135–7.

26. Biographia Literaria, II, 6.

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