is rooted in a desire for language to represent, rather than disrupt, the rational and ideational. And yet, while in the pivotal poem Empedocles on Etna, discussed at the end of this chapter, we find Arnold presenting, through the figure of Callicles, an oppositional aesthetics that celebrates sensation, and thus explores language’s ability to represent but also generate affect. Arnold’s rejection of the poem from the reissued Poems of 1853 provided the motivation for his famous Preface. In that essay, as in his later essays on poetics, Arnold’s aesthetic strictures against the exploration of linguistic materiality finally result in a disavowal of language’s ability to interrupt, rather than repeat, ideology. Ultimately Arnold’s poetics resists what defenders of poetry’s negatively critical force (from Shelley and Arthur Hallam to Althusser and Adorno, to Robert Kaufman, Joan Retallack, and Isobel Armstrong, to name a few such defenders relevant here) see as poetic language’s capacity to (in Adorno’s words), “let those things be heard which ideology conceals . . . [to] proclaim a dream of a world in which things would be different” (“Lyric Poetry,” 157).
One might protest here that Arnold’s concept of the “grand style” or “grand manner” betrays an interest in language’s “literariness,” in de Man’s sense, that Arnold’s insistence on the importance of style reveals that for him “content” was not all, that he was not purely interested in language’s discursive functionality. In “On Translating Homer: Last Words” (1861), where Arnold praises Homer for “nobleness, the grand manner,” we find him articulating a theory of poetic language that argues for the importance of style, and thus, we might think, of language’s material properties. And yet, Arnold insists that poetic vocabulary is a product of convention, and as such, an ideally invisible aspect of the poem. Again, this invisibility finally limits the possibility for the poem’s surface to complicate, rather than simply reflect or repeat, the poem’s ideational function.
Arguing for the “plainness of words and style,” in Homer’s poetry, Arnold writes:
Everyone at Athens who dabbled in epic poetry, not only understood Homer’s language,—he possessed it. He possessed it as everyone who dabbles in poetry with us, possesses what may be called the poetical vocabulary, as distinguished from the vocabulary of common speech and of modern prose: I mean, such expressions as perchance for perhaps, spake for spoke, aye for ever, don for put on, charmed for charm’d, and thousands of others. (Works, 1:180)
For Arnold, poetic language is provisional, a product of time and place. However, language’s relativity is not a product of individual invention, but instead of convention. For poetry to “carry” the race it must be recognizably pleasing as poetry; like the domestic woman, it must be unthreateningly “beautiful.” Style becomes useful as a bearer of ideas only in how well it disappears into the invisibility of conventional taste.
And yet it should be said that the notion that poetry must bear the burden of criticism’s ideas is not unfamiliar to twenty-first century readers of experimental poetry. Robert Kaufman discusses just this issue in his essay “Sociopolitical (i.e. Romantic) Difficulty in Modern Poetry and Aesthetics,” in which he examines the close relationship between late twentieth-century critical theory and experimental poetry. In Kaufman’s analysis of “difficulty” in its romantic, modernist and postmodernist poetic incarnations, the lyric presses language in order to make language “think” beyond its objective purposeful function. The “special intensity” of lyric “arises from lyric’s constitutive need musically to stretch ‘objective’ conceptual thought’s very medium, language—to stretch it quasi-conceptually all the way towards affect and song, but without relinquishing any of the ‘rigor’ of conceptual intellection” (“Sociopolitical,” n. pag.).
This celebration of lyric’s intellectual rigor forces us to ask if our contemporary “experimentation,” often called upon as a critical infiltration, more or less overt, into political and social hegemonies, does not rather closely follow Arnold’s model of poetry as the transmitter of criticism’s ideas. And yet this question hinges on how we understand poetry’s engagement with language. Kaufman is arguing that contemporary theory and contemporary poetry share a “negativity,” which is perhaps inherently critical of dominant patterns.xxxv As opposed to arguing that poetry should carry theory’s ideas as if it were incapable of generating ideas of its own, Kaufman (following Adorno) suggests that lyric itself takes a critical stance, that lyric difficulty per se presents, “a potentially emancipatory capacity for constructing new conceptual-objective knowledge.” In other words, poetry’s language-experiments are thought-experiments, capable of restructuring how we, its readers, think. Conversely, Arnold’s poetics places poetry in a secondary or belated position, even as his poems themselves, and poetic moments within his prose, quite stunningly suggest alternatives to the very positioning he sets up.xxxvi
Following Arnold’s own hierarchy, I have begun this chapter with Arnold’s criticism, his poetics, rather than with his poetry itself. I will continue by examining the aesthetic politics that arise out of the essay “Democracy” and the more developed Culture and Anarchy before turning to the poems.
II. The Future Contained: “Democracy” and Culture and Anarchy
The resistance to the new, the unknowable, which Arnold’s perpetually pregnant poetry suggests, manifests itself also in Arnold’s politics. This should not be surprising, for again, Arnold makes no pretense of distinguishing between the aesthetic and the political. As Ian Gregor puts it, “education, religion, politics, literature are not a series of interrelated ‘subjects,’ but fade into one another as they are woven into the fabric of contemporary society” (Culture and Anarchy, xxii). For Arnold, the problems of democracy are, at least in part, aesthetic problems. Describing in “Democracy” (1861) the inevitable rise of working-class political power, Arnold writes regretfully,
I do not . . . say that a popular order, accepting [the] demarcation of classes as an eternal providential arrangement, not questioning the natural right of a superior order to lead it, content within its own sphere, admiring the grandeur and high-mindedness of its ruling class, and catching on its own spirit some reflex of what it thus admires, may not be a happier body, as to the eye of the imagination it is certainly a more beautiful body, than a popular order, pushing, excited, and presumptuous; a popular order jealous of recognizing fixed superiorities, petulantly claiming to be as good as its betters, and tastelessly attiring itself with the fashions and designations which have become unalterably associated with a wealthy and refined class, and which, tricking out those who have neither wealth nor refinement, are ridiculous. But a popular order of that old-fashioned stamp exists now only for the imagination. (Works, 2:10)
Arnold’s distaste is not reserved for the working classes alone. The British middle class offends not only because it seems to have no “ideals,” not only because of its materialism and stubborn attachment to “stock notions and habits,” but also because it has no style and no taste, or worse, bad style, bad taste. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold presents his aesthetic repugnance of the middle class, the philistines:
Culture says: ‘Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?’ (41)
This aestheticization of class, conflating the happiness of the social body with its beauty of body or voice, associating (uncultured) thoughts with (presumably ugly) furniture, points to the degree to which Arnold’s “culture,” which will be invoked to rescue the democratic nation from the self-interested strivings of its members, is always meant in part as aesthetic refinement. Arnold’s belief in the inevitable rise of democracy is matched by his worry that in modernity aristocratic characterological and aesthetic values will be lost. Despite the critique Arnold levels against the
