Book Review

Something understood

Poets and God

The forthright, even startling, title of this enjoyable book defines exactly what it is about: an examination of seven poets – Chaucer, Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake – in order to find out what they actually believed, in terms of their religion; and to measure how this framework, however different they are from each other, and however heterodox they were within it, affected, directed, their lives and work.

The “lives” part is given particular importance: their political, social and historical backgrounds. In his Introduction David Edwards defends this unfashionable method. “My treatment is biographical, defying those who warn us not to ‘meet the author’.” He deftly avoids taking sides with any of the contemporary schools of critical approach:

With the formalists or New Critics I respectfully agree that a poem is good or bad as a poem, not as a manifesto; with the psychoanalysts that a poet often reveals interesting traces of being human; with the Marxist-materialists or New Historicists that a poet’s background in class and culture is important; with the reader-response theorists or the deconstructionists that a work of art need not have a single, simple message; and with the feminists that these men were prejudiced. This failure to take sides may be because I do not understand the arguments, but I have the impression that in its internal divisions which are too exclusive, literary criticism has recently been too like religion.

This is well and modestly said (Dr Edwards understands a great deal). There is much to be learned from these various “schools”. How ever, a book of essays by some prominent practitioners, published not long ago, failed to mention a single work of literature; they all seemed happy to argue, with and quote, each other, just as many who most vehemently argue points of religion sometimes seem to have forgotten its origin and purpose.

This book is firmly text-based; indeed, in the Chaucer essay we are given a précis of nearly all The Canterbury Tales (a godsend to an over-burdened student). Chaucer, like Shakespeare, is “a humanist, if we can use that term without the modern implication that to be a humanist is to be an atheist”. Blake said of Chaucer’s characters, “they are the physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life”; Chaucer was amused, detached, but Dr Edwards can draw a judgement out of him. For example, in the psychologically subtle Troilus and Criseyde, the smooth and clever Pandarus cannot understand why Criseyde has moved to the Grecian camp. “In the end he simply hates Criseyde and says so, and he fails to understand why Troilus cannot forget her: he offers his own sister as a substitute. He understands nothing.”

With Shakespeare Edwards is of course up against it, searching out his relationship with God: apart from Shakespeare’s famous elusiveness, there was censorship to be considered; these were dangerous times as, later, they were for Milton. Of Shakespeare Dr Johnson complains, “he seems to write without a moral purpose”, but that is the eighteenth century talking.

Dr Edwards, dogged in his pursuit, says, “His tragedies show great sympathy with questions or denials in the darkness of human suffering, but they do not record admiration for the response of full atheism. In King Lear the atheists are the villains ...” His account of the plays is useful but there becomes something almost comic in his nearly fruitless rummagings; he throws up his hands: “Like Hamlet, King Lear ends without a clear message.” However, he tentatively puts forward an interesting suggestion: that the tragedies are based on five of the Seven Deadly Sins (gluttony and envy being insufficiently dramatic): Hamlet (sloth), Othello (anger), King Lear (pride), Macbeth (covetousness) and Antony and Cleopatra (lust), and this gives Shakespeare “a new awareness of the destructiveness of evil”.

George Herbert was by birth a gentleman and by nature a courtier. He treats God like a great prince from whom he might solicit some place or job. His place and job turned out to be a tiny country parish near Salisbury, his church at most could hold 40 souls. But a gentleman of his period he remained; his energies went into his parish and his poems, “many of which have the character of a raging storm which has been poured into a decanter of cut glass”.

Milton had private means and Edwards dislikes his consequent haughtiness, but admires his courage and defends him from “being of the devil’s party without knowing it” (Blake again). At the start of his voyage to Earth, Satan meets Hell’s gatekeepers, Sin and Death. Sin was born out of his head but Satan raped her and she became the mother of Death. This is not a party which Milton hopes his readers will join.

The radical, near-animist Wordsworth slowly clothes himself in conventional Anglicanism; Coleridge, always explicitly Christian, becomes wider and deeper, and from early on was made uneasy by Wordsworth’s nature-worship. An 1803 Notebook entry (not quoted by Edwards) is evidence of Coleridge’s dismay. Wordsworth has accused some Christian divines of “pedantry”:

... Dear William, pardon Pedantry in others & avoid it in yourself, instead of scoffing & reviling at Pedantry in good men in a good cause, and becoming a Pedant yourself in a bad cause... Surely always to look at the superficies of Objects for the purpose of taking delight in their Beauty, & sympathy with their real or imagined Life is deleterious to the Health & manhood of Intellect... O dearest William! Would Ray, or Durham, have spoken of God as you spoke of Nature?

(“And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature”, as Herbert puts it in “The Pulley”.) Edwards, by the way, is hard on Coleridge for his “failure”. We know that he ruined his health with drugs, but “failure”? By what altitudinous standard? Of Wordsworth’s later Anglicanism Coleridge is uncharacteristically dismissive: “Wordsworth has convinced himself of truths which the generality of persons have either taken for granted from infancy, or else adopted early in life.” Coleridge could not foresee the time when Christianity could very much not be “taken for granted”, however widely interpreted. These “basic beliefs”, as Edwards points out, “were not permanently safe”, and therein lies the motive and interest of his book.

Finally comes Blake, the great tease, scaring his genteel visitor, Crabb Robinson: “Jesus Christ is the only God and so am I and so are you.” Robinson confessed himself “not anxious to be frequent in my visits”. Edwards seems to love Blake (as he is not able to love Milton) and it is easy to see why. “Thinking as I do that the Creator of this world is a very cruel Being, and being a worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying ‘the Son, O how unlike the Father!’ First God Almighty comes with a thump on the head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it.”

We are taken through Blake’s Prophetic Books and helped to understand them a little. How useful I would have found this book when I was an undergraduate! How pleased I am to have read it now!

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