CRITICS AND POETS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 893, 14 September 1956, Page 13

CRITICS AND POETS

THE EDINBURGH’ REVIEW AND ROMANTIC POETRY (1802-29), by Thomas Crawford, Auckland University College, Bulletin No. 47, English series No, 8, 4/-. "Who killed John Keats?" "T," said the Quarterly So savage and tartarly"TI killed John Keats."’ POSTERITY is often harsher in its judgment on critics than on poets. A bad poet remains unread; a_ bad critic is dragged from his tomb, to answer the charge of malicious pontificating ignorance, or even (as in Byron’s quatrain above) the charge of homicide. Such (continued on next page) |

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(continued from previous page) judgments afte far too sweeping and partisan. How many of us, in their shoes, would have assessed the merits of the writing of the time more accurately than did the Quarterly, Blackwood’s, or Edinburgh reviewers? How many of us can now assess accurately contemporary work? Gifford, of the Quarterly (quoted by Mr. Crawford), wrote in 1810 of Crabbe: "The peculiarity of this author is, that he wishes to discard every thing like illusion from poetry. . . To talk of binding down poetry to dry representations of the world as it is, seems idle; because it is in order to escape from the world as it is, that we fly to poetry." These sentiments have a most familiar ring. Mr. Crawford has laboured to show that criticism of the Edinburgh Review, unlike that of the Quarterly, was a

genuine and sympathetic attempt to bring views of art and life into align-ment---sometimes incomplete, rarely ignorant or petulant. He points out that Jeffrey’s judgment of Keats agrees substantially with Keats’s own self-criti-cism; that Jeffrey criticised the Lake poets for a "defect of realism" which Coleridge also recognised; that under Jeffrey's editorship the reviewers had progressed from "the 1797 attitude of mind" to "something resembling alliance with the second generation of Romantics." These points are a mere skimming of his exposition, which is concise, energetic and (since fashions change but not the hearts and minds pf men) cogent for our own generation.

James K.

Baxter