theoryofliteratu00inwell

112 Theory of Literature
even, as in a few instances, speculative philosophers themselves
and wrote poetry which could be called "philosophical," we shall
still have to ask such questions as these: Is poetry better because
it is more philosophical? Can poetry be judged according to the
value of the philosophy which it adopts or according to the degree
of insight which it shows into the philosophy it adopts? Or
can it be judged by criteria of philosophical originality, by the de-
gree with which it modified traditional thought? T. S. Eliot has
preferred Dante to Shakespeare because the philosophy of Dante
seemed to him sounder than that of Shakespeare. A German
philosopher, Hermann Glockner, has argued that poetry and
philosophy have never been farther apart than in Dante because
Dante took over a finished system without changing it. 12 The
true collaboration between philosophy and poetry occurred when
there were poets-thinkers like Empedocles in the pre-Socratic
age of Greece, or during the Renaissance when Ficino or Giordano
Bruno wrote poetry and philosophy, poetic philosophy
and philosophical poetry, and later in Germany, when Goethe
was both a poet and an original philosopher.
But are philosophical standards of this sort criteria of literary
criticism? Is Pope's Essay on Man to be condemned because it
shows considerable eclecticism in its sources and consistency only
passage by passage, while the total is riddled with over-all inco-
herencies? Does the fact that we can show Shelley to have pro-
gressed, at a certain time of his life, from the crude materialism
of Godwin to some sort of Platonic idealism, make him a better
poet or a worse? Can the impression that Shelley's poetry is
vague, monotonous, and boring, which seems to be the experience
of a new generation of readers, be refuted by showing that, prop-
erly interpreted, his philosophy made sense in its time, or that
this or that passage is not meaningless but alludes to contempo-
rary scientific or pseudo-scientific conceptions? 13 All these criteria
are surely based on the intellectualist misunderstanding, on a
confusion of the functions of philosophy and art, on a misunder-
standing of the way ideas actually enter into literature.
These objections to the excessive intellectualism of the philosophical
approach have been taken account of in some methods
developed especially in Germany. Rudolf Unger has most clearly
defended an approach which, though not systematically ex-