Volume 6, Number 5 · March 31, 1966
Words & Music
By Christopher Ricks
The Lyric Impulse
by C. Day Lewis
Harvard, 164 pp., $4.25
There is an apocryphal story, dating from 1933, about some of the New(ish) Critics who stumbled discomfited from A.E. Housman's lecture at Cambridge University on The Name and Nature of Poetry. Discomfited, and muttering that the lecture put the clock back twenty years. Housman was full of years (in his seventies), of honor, and of wickedly brilliant perversity. There he stood, devolving his rounded periods, all to the effect that the best poems were lyrical poems and that they were so good precisely because their meaning was unimportant or nonexistent. And how do we know that those lyrics (by Blake or Shakespeare) are so good? 'Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.' All of which was widely understood as a tacit snub to professional literary criticism (T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis). And to the academic study of literature. If Housman were right, then the final examination ought to give the grade A to the candidate whose skin bristled best.
Review, 1785 words
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