Antididacticism as a Contested Principle in Romantic Aesthetics

MARCUS: In general...your theory gave me a new outlook on the didactic ...genre. I realize now how this crux of all previous classifications necessarily belongs to poetry. For the nature of poetry as a higher, idealistic view of things, of man as well, and of nature is incontestable....

ANTONIO: I cannot consider didactic poetry as an actual genre, as I cannot the romantic. Every poem should actually be romantic as well as didactic, in that broader sense of the word where it describes the general tendency in its deep and infinite sense. We make this demand everywhere, without using the name. -- Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry ¹

If the Russian Formalists were right in claiming that alterations in the hierarchy of genres are the deepest indicators of literary change, one important measure of the "revolution in literature" that we call Romanticism is the changed status of didactic poetry. A genre that, in Addison's eyes, had produced "the most complete, elaborate and finished Piece of all Antiquity"--Virgil's Georgics ² --and that Thomas Tickell could rank "second to Epic alone" in the hierarchy of poetic forms, ³ became for the Romantics a byword for mediocrity, a violation of the true nature of poetry, or a simple contradiction in terms. The reorientation of literary values signaled by Joseph Warton's Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756), which damned Pope with the faint praise of having excelled in poetry "of the didactic, moral, and satyric kind; and, consequently, not of the most poetic species of poetry" ⁴ was strengthened and extended half a century later by the Romantics, who favored genres--especially lyric forms--marginalized by the "French School" of Dryden and Pope, and who developed a poetics based on expressly antididactic premises. William Lisle Bowles' presumed victory over Byron and others in the long-running "Pope controversy" was critical confirmation of the new literary order, whose antididactic stance is exemplified by many of the period's most famous pronouncements on the subject of poetry. Blake's "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction" and "cast aside from Poetry all that is not Inspiration," ⁵ Keats' "We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us" and his insistence that "an artist" must serve the "Mammon" of "Poetry, and dramatic effect" rather the "God" of "purpose," ⁶ Shelley's "didactic poetry is my abhorrence" ⁷ and De Quincey's contradistinction of the "literature of knowledge" from the "literature of power" (see note 19 below) are all indicative of the new poetic, which has exact parallels in Germany and France in the elaboration of the Kantian doctrine of aesthetic autonomy into a full-blooded theory of "art for art's sake."

Such is the familiar story. It took shape in the earliest critical accounts of the Romantic movement, which M. H. Abrams enriched rather than amended in his remapping of the Romantic critical tradition in The Mirror and the Lamp, Wellek supplemented in his more compendious History of Modern Criticism, ⁸ and the new Cambridge History of Literary Criticism ⁹ also leaves largely intact even while registering the changes wrought in other areas of Romantic scholarship. Its endurance, one suspects, derives not only from the quality of the evidence that can be adduced in support of it and the authority of the critics who have endorsed it, but because the antididactic criteria promoted by the Romantic literary revolution remain integral to our own sense of literary worth. Though "art for art's sake" is a cause that few would still want to fight for, and literary criticism is currently dominated by discussion of literature's social and ideological responsibilities, Henry James' axiom that the artist must "show not tell" and Edgar Allen Poe's strictures on the "heresy of The Didactic" ¹⁰ have as much relevance now as they did a hundred years ago; and a poet today would no more think to versify...