The Use and Abuse of Literature Read Free

the pit of the stomach that he likened to a phrase from Keats, when “everything … goes through me like a spear.” Although these symptoms may sound painful, Housman clearly associates them with a singular kind of pleasure.
    So, once again: “feels good” or “is good for you.” Both of these desiderata, we might think, are covered by Horace’s
Ars Poetica
, with its celebrated advice that poetry should be
“dulce et utile,”
its aims to delight and to instruct.
    A latter-day “Ars Poetica”—one too often dismissed these days—is the popular poem by Archibald MacLeish, with its two famous and quotable pronouncements:
    A poem should be equal to:
    Not true.
    And
    A poem should not mean
    But be.
    These precepts, so perfectly attuned to close reading and New Critical thinking, also embody a sentiment elegantly summarized by Keats when he wrote, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket.” 15 Yet some of the best literature, whether poetry or prose, has been polemical, political, and/or religious (not always in an orthodox way; think of Blake, whose Jerusalem hymn is, ironically, sung in churches all over Britain). Some of the novels of Dickens (the Brontës, Woolf, Conrad, Lawrence, Cervantes, Flaubert) have had palpable designs for political, social, or moral change, as have the great epics, from those by Homer and Virgil to those by Milton and Joyce. This palpable design of epic is the glorification of nationalism and empire; Wordsworth’s personal epic,
The Prelude
, acknowledges the boldness of using such a public genre for chronicling “the growth of a poet’s mind.” But MacLeish’s poem is a poem about poems. Paradoxically, this witty, sensuous verse about what poetry should not do—it should not “mean,” it should not be taken as true—has been read both as a truism and as an explanation of a poem’s proper “meaning.”
    Before we leave the questions of whether and how literature can be good for you, we should perhaps note that in the matter of whether works of fiction should model—or inculcate—virtue and morality, “good for you” and “bad for you” have the same status. Both are judgmental and moral. These effects may be claimed or discerned by preachers or censors or even by the courts. But they are incidental and accidental by-products of literature, not literary qualities. In
The Art of Fiction
, Henry James queried the whole category of the morality of the novel: “Will you not define your terms and explain how (a novel being a picture) a picture can be either moral or immoral? You wish to paint a moral picture or carve a moral statue; will you not tell us how you would set about it? We are discussing the Art of Fiction; questions of art are questions (in the widest sense) of execution; questions of morality are quite another affair … The only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is … that it be interesting.” 16
    There have always been schools of thought about literature and its value, or lack of value, from Plato’s suspicions of poetry to Aristotle’s codification of its terms and rules. (The fact that Plato’s chosen form was the dialogue, and Aristotle’s, the category, sorts oddly with their views, since Plato is arguably writing “literature,” just as Aristotle is writing “criticism.”) Horace’s
Ars Poetica
claimed literature as an art or craft—just what Plato said it was not—and proposed genial, workmanlike procedures for the aspiring poet. Pope and others followed in this tradition, establishing what are sometimes thought of as classical rules, only to be disrupted by the return of admiration for the mad or inspired poet, a taste often associated with Romanticism. There were vatic, inspired, and mad poets before the Romantic period, and classical poets during it; like all pairs of opposites, these are as much alike as they