gotthold ephraim lessing 1729–1781 - St. Francis Xavier University

461 

GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING 

1729 –1781 

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is known for having questioned one of the most famous 

statements never meant. In Horace’s Ars Poetica, the Latin phrase ut pictura poesis 

(as painting, so poetry) was taken by many generations of critics to be prescriptive 

(“poetry should be like painting”) rather than analogical (“poetry, like painting, 

does the following . . .”). Regardless of Horace’s intent, the prescription has been 

im mensely productive for poetry; but in Laocoön (1766) Lessing attacks this presumption 

of equivalence between poetry and painting, spelling out the differences 

between the visual and the verbal arts. 

Born in Kamenz, Saxony, to a country pastor, Lessing was the first of twelve children 

(five died in childhood). After acquiring a solid education in languages and 

sciences, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig and soon fell under the spell of a 

more worldly and freethinking friend. His parents, alarmed by this influence and 

by Lessing’s familiarity with the theater, called him home. When he explained to 

them that the hostility between church and theater could be overcome by improving 

the theater, he was allowed to return to Leipzig, where he became actively involved 

with a theatrical company, writing and producing plays. Unfortunately, the company 

failed, leaving Lessing to cover the debts; he fled, first to Wittenberg, then to 

Berlin. 

Once in Berlin, he declared financial in de pen dence; working as a translator, 

reviewer, and playwright, he became the first German author to live by his pen. He 

found intellectual companionship with several close friends, especially the phi los o- 

pher Moses Mendelssohn, who was introduced to Lessing as a chess partner and 

who influenced many of Lessing’s aesthetic ideas. 

In Berlin Lessing developed his gifts for both drama and debate. To him, the 

recommendation that German theater imitate seventeenth- century French classical 

drama (an idea promoted by Johann Christoph Gottsched) seemed a terrible 

mistake. The French had literalized Aristotle and tied the theater to an overly 

formal set of rules. In his play Miss Sara Sampson (1755), Lessing attempted something 

quite different from pierre corneille, the epitome of classicism. He wrote 

the first German bourgeois tragedy— that is, a tragedy involving not the court but a 

middleclass family. He also entered the first of several intense polemical exchanges 

on unlikely topics by writing Vademecum (1754), a critique of a translation of Horace 

written by a pastor who was, unfortunately for Lessing, a protégé of Frederick 

II of Prus sia. Frederick later repaid him by not appointing him to the post of royal 

librarian in Berlin. 

Though he was barely supporting himself, the next few years were very productive: 

he wrote fables and a treatise on fables, plays, and a life of Sophocles, and he 

collaborated on the Letters Concerning the Most Recent Literature (1759– 81) with 

his friends Mendelssohn and Gotthold Samuel Nicolai. In these letters. Lessing 

continued his campaign to free drama from French classicism, arguing that it 

should take its inspiration from Shakespeare. He also became close friends with a 

poet and military man who later served as the model for the hero of his comedy of 

honor, Minna von Barnhelm (1767). In 1760 Lessing took up a post as secretary to a 

general in Breslau. His excellent salary enabled him to send money to his family 

and to buy books. It was during this period that he wrote Laokoon, oder Über die 

Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Laocoön, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry), 

from which our selection is taken. 

Thwarted in his hopes to become the royal librarian in Berlin, he became dramatist 

and con sul tant to a repertory theater in Hamburg. There he began publishing

462 / GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING 

the periodical the Hamburg Dramaturgy (which contained views far more radical 

than any he could practice), invested in a publishing house, and engaged again 

in a polemic— this time with the antiquarian Christian Adolphe Klotz, who had 

attacked his Laocoön. In response, he wrote Letters of Antiquarian Content (1768– 

69) and How the Ancients Portrayed Death (1769). Finally, unable to extricate himself 

from the dispute, frustrated with the constraints of the theater, and unsuccessful 

in business, he took refuge in the post of librarian at the Ducal Library in Wolfenbüttel. 

Lessing was well suited for the job, though the library was dilapidated and isolated. 

As he put it in order, he corresponded with scholars and, in 1773, began publishing 

some of the library’s holdings. He also began a correspondence with the 

recently widowed Eva König (whose family he had known in Hamburg), whom he 

married in 1776; a year later Eva gave birth to a child, and both died within days. 

Lessing continued his work in drama, completing Emilia Galotti, a po liti cal tragedy, 

in 1772. Nathan the Wise, a dramatic poem about religious tolerance, was performed 

at Easter 1778; it stirred controversy by putting its message of universal 

brotherhood in the mouth of a noble Jew. Lessing went on publishing his library discoveries 

as well, and the fragments from Heinrich Samuel Reimarus’s thesis on natural 

religion embroiled him in his final, and most intense, polemical exchange. His 

main attacker was Johann Melchior Goeze, and Lessing’s angry Anti- Goeze pamphlets 

of 1778 and other writings on religion led to his being censored: he had to submit his 

later writings to the duke for approval. His provocative argument was that the truth 

of religion could never be captured in any fixed form; even the Bible was full of errors 

and contradictions. It was the search for truth and not any one Truth that proved the 

value of humanity. Little wonder that Lessing fell so readily into polemic: for him, 

such exchanges did not lead to truth but enacted it. In his last work, The Education 

of the Human Race (1780), Lessing continued to analyze the relation between reason 

and faith, education and revelation. Furious with all existing religions, Lessing 

was equally furious with smug atheism or complacent freethinking. His health 

declined after 1778, and he died at Wolfenbüttel at the age of fifty- two. 

In spite of the variety of his interests and writings, Lessing’s importance for literary 

criticism in En glish rests almost exclusively on the impact of his 1766 Laocoön. 

He begins it by discussing the role of the critic, whose duty with respect to the work 

of art is to make distinctions and discern causes rather than simply to register 

effects. While endorsing the wellknown saying of the early- fifth- century b.c.e. 

poet Simonides that painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture, he 

argues that although the two arts are similar in aim (imitation) and in effect (pleasure), 

they differ greatly in means (visual versus verbal). Lessing goes on to analyze 

their differences. 

In the course of his essay, Lessing takes on a veritable bookshelf of other writings, 

most notably Count Caylus’s Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade, de l’Odyssée d’Homère et 

de l’Enéide de Virgile, avec des observations générales sur le costume (1757, Scenes from 

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, with General Comments about Costume); 

Joseph Spence’s 1747 dialogues on visual and verbal art called Polymetis; 

and, most important, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1754 Gedanken über die 

Nachahmung der greichischen Werke (Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works). It 

is Winckelmann’s concept of classical Greek “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” 

that Lessing wishes to combat, not in the visual arts (where, he argues, it belonged) 

but in the verbal arts: epic and (implicitly) tragedy. The cold formalism of classical 

French drama was too much like sculpture; Lessing wants to make sure that the art 

of imitation in drama draws on Aristotle (plot is the “imitation of an action”) rather 

than plato (mimesis is the imitation of a form). Winckelmann’s idealization of Greek 

beauty had a powerful appeal; indeed, it was still being attacked a century later by 

friedrich Nietz sche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872).

GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING / 463 

Laocoön stands as the first modern contribution to what we might call “media 

studies,” in the sense that Lessing attempts to describe the limits and possibilities 

of the visual and verbal media. Our selection highlights the lines of the analysis and 

minimizes the polemical digressions and extended classical allusions, emphasizing 

the argument— which runs as follows. Painting is more similar to its subject than 

poetry is: in painting, both the medium and the thing imitated are visual, whereas 

poetry can use only words, arbitrary designations, to convey things that do not 

resemble words at all. In addition, visual art is static while verbal art unfolds through 

succession. Visual art is an art of space; verbal art is an art of time. Verbal art cannot 

equal the instant vividness of sculpture or painting, but it can depict things that 

visual art cannot capture: invisibility, negation, rhetoric. Visual art, in order to 

achieve maximum dynamism, has to choose the “pregnant moment,” the moment 

most suggestive of the entire situation. 

The word “pregnant” has come to have a life of its own in Lessing criticism in 

En glish; it was used by many translators (though not ours) to render the German 

fruchtbar (“fruitful”— here translated “effective”) and prägnant (from the verb prägen, 

“to stamp, emboss, impress”; the adjective does mean “pregnant,” but only figuratively, 

as “pregnant with meaning”— here translated “suggestive”). Behind the 

German word lies a Latin one (praegnans, “pregnant”). This phantom pregnancy is 

a good symbol of what Lessing is describing: the moment most likely to contain 

forces that can be continued in the imagination of the spectator. In visual art, 

therefore, a covert narrative force is always present. The same force exists in verbal 

descriptions of purely visual phenomena; even when poetry depicts an object rather 

than an action, it moves along the object in time as if from the standpoint of the 

object’s maker rather than of its passive viewer. 

Lessing’s distinction between the arts has often been contested. In his 1957 essay 

on Lessing, the art historian E. H. Gombrich points out that visual art itself is conventional, 

not natural. In 1945 the literary critic Joseph Frank protested that a literary 

work of art exists not just in time but also in space. And many art historians 

have objected that a painting cannot be viewed all at once; it must be experienced 

through time. Taking an opposite tack, some theorists of ecphrasis (the depiction of a 

work of visual art in a poem) have felt that Lessing opens up possibilities he doesn’t 

pursue. Far from being impossible in poetry, ecphrasis constitutes an interesting 

poetic challenge. 

Because of his per sis tent fascination with what could not be visualized, Lessing 

is a particularly useful theorist of verbal art. In his discussion of fables, he points 

out that the test of a good fable is the impossibility of illustrating it. In his last writings 

about religion, he argues that even writing has too positive an existence to 

convey what escapes repre sen ta tion altogether. Perhaps this dissatisfaction with 

every medium is what makes his writings so suggestive for literary and aesthetic 

theory. 

bibliography 

Lessing’s Laokoon (1766) has been translated into En glish many times. The most 

easily accessible edition was published in 1962 as Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of 

Painting and Poetry, translated with an introduction and useful notes by Edward 

Allen McCormick. Many of Lessing’s other theoretical works, however, are available 

only in German. The best selection of Lessing’s works, heavily oriented toward theater, 

is Nathan the Wise, Minna von Barnhelm, and Other Plays and Writings, edited 

by Peter Demetz (1991). For Lessing’s drama theory, see Hamburg Dramaturgy, edited 

by Victor Lange (1962). See also Lessing’s Theological Writings, edited by Henry 

Chadwick (1956). A more complete En glish translation was undertaken by E. C. 

Beasley and Helen Zimmern, under the editorship of Edward Bell, more than a


century ago: Selected Prose Works of G. E. Lessing (1890). H.B. Nisbet’s Lessing: 

Philosophical and Theological Writings (2005) includes some newly translated materials 

as well as overviews that provide useful context. Good general studies devoted 

to Lessing’s life and works are H. B. Garland, Lessing: The Found er of Modern German 

Literature (1962), and Edward M. Batley, Catalyst of Enlightenment: Gotthold 

Ephraim Lessing (1990). Studies situating Lessing in a larger context include a very 

useful collective volume edited by Alexej Ugrinsky called Lessing and the Enlightenment 

(1986), Robert S. Leventhal’s Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, 

Schlegel, and Hermeneutics in Germany, 1750– 1800 (1994), and the anthology edited 

by Barbara Fischer and Thomas C. Fox titled A Companion to the Works of Gotthold 

Ephraim Lessing (2005). Early in the twentieth century, Irving Babbitt’s New Laokoon: 

An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (1910) attempted to restore Lessing’s sense 

of distinction to a world led astray by Romanticism’s tendency to cross or blur 

boundaries. E. H. Gombrich’s short Lessing (1957) paints a brilliant portrait of a 

man whose dialectical mind had no real use for visual art. 

The publication in 1984 of David Wellbery’s Lessing’s “Laocoön”: Semiotics and 

Aesthetics in the Age of Reason brought Lessing into post- Saussurian discussions of 

sign theory. Simon Richter’s Laocoön’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, 

Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe (1992) provides an interesting analysis of 

the relation between pain and beauty. Carol Jacobs offers a good analysis of the 

rhetoric of Lessing’s polemics in “Fictional Histories: Lessing’s Laocoön,” in her Telling 

Time (1993). Susan Gustafson’s Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers: Narcissism 

and Abjection in Lessing’s Aesthetic and Dramatic Production (1995) combines 

a discussion of Lessing’s plays with a reading of the Laocoön that uses Julia Kristeva’s 

theory of maternal erasure or “abjection,” in a daring feminist psychoanalysis. 

A special issue of Poetics Today on Lessing (20.2 [1999]) offers a very interesting 

collection of essays, particularly striking for the debates about gender as a category 

of analysis. The volume concludes with a long, energetic, polemical review of the 

literature on Lessing by Meir Sternberg. For debates about ecphrasis, see Murray 

Krieger’s 1967 essay “Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or, Laokoön 

Revisited,” later collected in Krieger’s Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign 

(1992); W. J. T. Mitchell’s 1984 essay “Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoön and the 

Politics of Genre,” later collected in his Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986); 

and James Heffernan’s Museum of Words (1993). There is a bibliography in German 

on Lessing by Doris Kuhles, Lessing- Bibliographie 1971– 1985 (1988). See 

also the updated bibliography in A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim 

Lessing. 

From Laocoön 1 

From Preface 

The first person to compare painting with poetry was a man of fine feeling 

who observed that both arts produced a similar effect upon him. Both, he 

felt, represent absent things as being present and appearance as reality. 

Both create an illusion, and in both cases the illusion is pleasing. 

A second observer, in attempting to get at the nature of this plea sure, 

discovered that both proceed from the same source. Beauty, a concept 

which we first derive from physical objects, has general rules applicable to 

a number of things: to actions and thoughts as well as to forms. 

1. Translated by Edward Allen McCormick (who sometimes adds clarifying words or phrases in square 

brackets); the full title is Laocoön, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry.

Laocoön / 465 

A third, who examined the value and distribution of these general rules, 

observed that some of them are more predominant in painting, others in 

poetry. Thus, in the one case poetry can help to explain and illustrate painting, 

and in the other painting can do the same for poetry. 

The first was the amateur, the second the phi los o pher, and the third the 

critic. 

The first two could not easily misuse their feelings or their conclusions. 

With the critic, however, the case was different. The principal value of his 

observations depends on their correct application to the individual case. And 

since for every one really discerning critic there have always been fifty clever 

ones, it would have been a miracle if this application had always been made 

with the caution necessary to maintain a proper balance between the two 

arts. 

* * * 

From Chapter One 

The general and distinguishing characteristics of the Greek masterpieces of 

painting and sculpture are, according to Herr Winckelmann, 2 noble simplicity 

and quiet grandeur, both in posture and in expression. “As the depths of 

the sea always remain calm,” he says “however much the surface may be 

agitated, so does the expression in the figures of the Greeks reveal a great 

and composed soul in the midst of passions.” 

Such a soul is depicted in Laocoön’s 3 face— and not only in his face— 

under the most violent suffering. The pain is revealed in every muscle 

and sinew of his body, and one can almost feel it oneself in the painful 

contraction of the abdomen without looking at the face or other parts 

of the body at all. However, this pain expresses itself without any sign 

of rage either in his face or in his posture. He does not raise his voice 

in a terrible scream, which Virgil describes his Laocoön as doing; 4 the 

way in which his mouth is open does not permit it. Rather he emits the 

anxious and subdued sigh described by Sadolet. 5 The pain of body and 

the nobility of soul are distributed and weighed out, as it were, over the 

entire figure with equal intensity. Laocoön suffers, but he suffers like 

the Philoctetes of Sophocles 6 ; his anguish pierces our very soul, but at 

the same time we wish that we were able to endure our suffering as well 

as this great man does. 

Expressing so noble a soul goes far beyond the formation of a beautiful 

body. This artist must have felt within himself that strength of spirit 

2. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717– 1768), 

German classical scholar whose Thoughts on the 

Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture 

(1754) prompted Lessing’s response. 

3. A Trojan priest. The best- known version of his 

story is found in the Aeneid, by the Roman poet 

Virgil (70– 19 b.c.e.), who describes how when 

Laocoön unsuccessfully tries to warn his countrymen 

against the Greek “gift” of the Trojan 

horse, the goddess Athena sends two huge serpents 

to strangle him and his two sons (2.40– 56, 

199– 227). The famous sculpture described by 

Winckelmann represents the three dying figures 

in the grip of the snakes; discovered in 1506, it is 

thought to be a collaborative work of the 2d century 

b.c.e. Laocoön is thus depicted in both 

sculpture and poetry, giving Lessing the pivot on 

which he will differentiate between the arts. 

4. Aeneid 2.222. 

5. Jacopo Sadoleto (1477– 1547), Italian prelate 

and poet, who wrote a poem about the Laocoön 

group when it was discovered. 

6. Greek tragedian (ca. 496– 406 b.c.e.). The 

Greek hero Philoctetes used the bow and arrows 

of Heracles; he sailed for Troy but was left behind 

on an island because a wound on his foot, caused 

by snakebite, produced a horrible smell. He 

remained alone for 10 years, until on the advice of 

an oracle he and his bow were brought to Troy.


which he imparted to his marble. In Greece artists and phi los o phers 

were united in one person, and there was more than one Metrodorus. 7 

Philosophy extended its hand to art and breathed into its figures more 

than common souls. . . . 8 

The remark on which the foregoing comments are based, namely that the 

pain in Laocoön’s face is not expressed with the same intensity that its violence 

would lead us to expect, is perfectly correct. It is also indisputable 

that this very point shows truly the wisdom of the artist. Only the ill- informed 

observer would judge that the artist had fallen short of nature and had not 

attained the true pathos of suffering. 

But as to the reasons on which Herr Winckelmann bases this wisdom, 

and the universality of the rule which he derives from it, I venture to be of 

a different opinion. 

* * * 

[I]f, according to the ancient Greeks, crying aloud when in physical 

pain is compatible with nobility of soul, then the desire to express such 

nobility could not have prevented the artist from representing the scream 

in his marble. There must be another reason why he differs on this point 

from his rival the poet, 9 who expresses this scream with deliberate 

intention. 

From Chapter Two 

Whether it be fact or fiction that Love inspired the first artistic effort in the 

fine arts, 1 this much is certain: she never tired of guiding the hands of the 

old masters. Painting, as practiced today, comprises all repre sen ta tions of 

three- dimensional bodies on a plane. The wise Greek, however, confined it 

to far narrower limits by restricting it to the imitation of beautiful bodies 

only. The Greek artist represented only the beautiful, and ordinary beauty, 

the beauty of a lower order, was only his accidental subject, his exercise, his 

relaxation. The perfection of the object itself in his work had to give delight, 

and he was too great to demand of his audience that they be satisfied with 

the barren plea sure that comes from looking at a perfect resemblance, or 

from consideration of his skill as a craftsman. Nothing in his art was dearer 

to him or seemed nobler than its ultimate purpose. 

“Who would want to paint you when no one even wants to look at you?” 

an old epigrammatist 2 asks of an exceedingly deformed man. Many an artist 

of our time would say, “Be as ugly as possible, I will paint you nevertheless. 

Even though no one likes to look at you, they will still be glad to look 

at my picture, not because it portrays you but because it is a proof of my art, 

which knows how to present such a monster so faithfully.” 

7. An Athenian (2d c. b.c.e.) who, according to 

Pliny the Elder (23 / 4– 79 c.e.; see Natural History 

35.135), was both a paint er and a phi los o- 

pher. 

8. Winckelmann, Thoughts on the Imitation of 

Greek Works, pp. 21, 22 [Lessing’s note]. Some of 

the author’s notes have been edited, and some 

omitted. 

9. That is, Virgil. 

1. Lessing alludes to the story of a Corinthian 

maid who, saddened by her lover’s impending 

departure drew his outline on a wall while he 

slept (see Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.151); 

her father, a potter, filled in the outline with clay 

and thus invented bas relief. 

2. Antiochus of Syracuse (5th c. b.c.e.).


* * * 

The law of the Olympic judges sprang from the same idea of the beautiful. 

Every victor in the Olympic games received a statue, but only the threetime 

winner had a portrait- statue erected in his honor. This was to prevent 

the increase of mediocre portraits among works of art, for a portrait, although 

admitting idealization, is dominated by likeness. It is the ideal of one partic 

u lar man and not of man in general. 

We laugh when we hear that among the ancients even the arts were subject 

to the civil code. But we are not always right when we do so. Unquestionably, 

laws must not exercise any constraint on the sciences, for the ultimate goal of 

knowledge is truth. Truth is a necessity to the soul, and it is tyranny to 

impose the slightest constraint on the satisfaction of this essential need. But 

the ultimate goal of the arts is plea sure, and this plea sure is not indispensable. 

Hence it may be for the lawmaker to determine what kind of plea sure 

and how much of each kind he will permit. 

The plastic arts in particular— aside from the inevitable influence they 

exert on the character of a nation— have an effect that demands close supervision 

by the law. If beautiful men created beautiful statues, these statues in 

turn affected the men, and thus the state owed thanks also to beautiful statues 

for beautiful men. (With us the highly susceptible imagination of mothers 

seems to express itself only in producing monsters.) 

From this point of view I believe I can find some truth in some of the 

ancient tales which are generally rejected as outright lies. The mothers of 

Aristomenes, Aristodamas, Alexander the Great, Scipio, Augustus, and Galerius 

3 all dreamed during pregnancy that they had relations with a serpent. 

The serpent was a symbol of divinity, and the beautiful statues and paintings 

depicting Bacchus, Apollo, Mercury, or Hercules 4 were seldom without 

one. Those honest mothers had feasted their eyes on the god during the day, 

and their confused dreams recalled the image of the reptile. Thus I save the 

dream and abandon the interpretation born of the pride of their sons and 

the impudence of the flatterer. For there must be some reason why the adulterous 

fantasy was always a serpent. 

But I am digressing. I wanted simply to establish that among the ancients 

beauty was the supreme law of the visual arts. Once this has been established, 

it necessarily follows that what ever else these arts may include must 

give way completely if not compatible with beauty, and, if compatible, must 

at least be subordinate to it. 

Let us consider expression. There are passions and degrees of passion 

which are expressed by the most hideous contortions of the face and which 

throw the whole body into such unnatural positions as to lose all the 

beautiful contours of its natural state. The ancient artists either refrained 

from depicting such emotions or reduced them to a degree where it is possible 

to show them with a certain mea sure of beauty. 

3. This list mixes the legendary (the first 2 are 

Greek heroes) and the historical— the great general 

Alexander of Macedonia (356– 323 b.c.e.), the 

Roman general Scipio Africanus (236– 184 / 3 

b.c.e.), and the Roman emperors Augustus (63 

b.c.e.– 14 c.e.) and Galerius (ca. 250– ca. 311 c.e.). 

4. The Roman name for Heracles, the greatest of 

the Greek heroes. Bacchus: Greek and Roman 

god of wine and a name of Dionysus, whose cult 

was orgiastic. Apollo: Greek and Roman god of 

music, healing, and prophecy. Mercury: Roman 

messenger of the gods.


* * * 

If we apply this now to the Laocoön, the principle which I am seeking 

becomes apparent. The master strove to attain the highest beauty possible 

under the given condition of physical pain. The demands of beauty could not 

be reconciled with the pain in all its disfiguring violence, so it had to be 

reduced. The scream had to be softened to a sigh, not because screaming 

betrays an ignoble soul, but because it distorts the features in a disgusting 

manner. Simply imagine Laocöon’s mouth forced wide open, and then judge! 

Imagine him screaming, and then look! From a form which inspired pity 

because it possessed beauty and pain at the same time, it has now become 

an ugly, repulsive figure from which we gladly turn away. For the sight of pain 

provokes distress; however, the distress should be transformed, through 

beauty, into the tender feeling of pity. 

The wide- open mouth, aside from the fact that the rest of the face is 

thereby twisted and distorted in an unnatural and loathsome manner, becomes 

in painting a mere spot and in sculpture a cavity, with most repulsive 

effect. 

* * * 

From Chapter Three 

As I have already said, art has been given a far wider scope in modern times. 

It is claimed that repre sen ta tion in the arts covers all of visible nature, of 

which the beautiful is but a small part. Truth and expression are art’s first 

law, and as nature herself is ever ready to sacrifice beauty for the sake of 

higher aims, so must the artist subordinate it to his general purpose and pursue 

it no farther than truth and expression permit. It is enough that truth 

and expression transform the ugliest aspects of nature into artistic beauty. 

But even if we were willing to leave these ideas for the moment unchallenged 

as to their value, we would still have to consider, quite in de pendently 

of these ideas, why the artist must nevertheless set certain restraints 

upon expression and never present an action at its climax. 

The single moment of time to which art must confine itself by virtue of 

its material limitations will lead us, I believe, to such considerations. 

If the artist can never make use of more than a single moment in everchanging 

nature, and if the paint er in par tic u lar can use this moment only 

with reference to a single vantage point, while the works of both paint er and 

sculptor are created not merely to be given a glance but to be contemplated— 

contemplated repeatedly and at length— then it is evident that this single 

moment and the point from which it is viewed cannot be chosen with too 

great a regard for its effect. But only that which gives free rein to the imagination 

is effective. 5 The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine. 

And the more we add in our imaginations, the more we must think we see. 

In the full course of an emotion, no point is less suitable for this than its 

climax. There is nothing beyond this, and to present the utmost to the eye is 

to bind the wings of fancy and compel it, since it cannot soar above the 

impression made on the senses, to concern itself with weaker images, shunning 

the visible fullness already represented as a limit beyond which it cannot 

5. In German, fruchtbar: “fruitful.”


go. Thus, if Laocoön sighs, the imagination can hear him cry out; but if he 

cries out, it can neither go one step higher nor one step lower than this 

repre sen ta tion without seeing him in a more tolerable and hence less interesting 

condition. One either hears him merely moaning or else sees him 

dead. 

Furthermore, this single moment, if it is to receive immutable permanence 

from art, must express nothing transitory. According to our notions, 

there are phenomena, which we conceive as being essentially sudden in 

their beginning and end and which can be what they are only for a brief 

moment. However, the prolongation of such phenomena in art, whether 

agreeable or otherwise, gives them such an unnatural appearance that they 

make a weaker impression the more often we look at them, until they finally 

fill us with disgust or horror. La Mettrie, 6 who had himself portrayed in 

painting and engraving as a second Democritus, seems to be laughing only 

the first few times we look at him. Look at him more often and the phi los o- 

pher turns into a fop. His laugh becomes a grin. The same holds true for 

screaming. The violent pain which extorts the scream either soon subsides 

or else destroys the sufferer. When a man of firmness and endurance cries 

out he does not do so unceasingly, and it is only the seeming perpetuity of 

such cries when represented in art that turns them into effeminate helplessness 

or childish petulance. This, at least, the artist of the Laocoön had 

to avoid, even if screaming had not been detrimental to beauty, and if his 

art had been allowed to express suffering without beauty. 

Among the ancient paint ers Timomachus 7 seems to have been the one 

most fond of subjects that display extreme passion. His raving Ajax and his 

infanticide Medea 8 were famous paintings, but from the descriptions we 

have of them it is clear that he thoroughly understood and was able to combine 

two things: that point or moment which the beholder not so much sees 

as adds in his imagination, and that appearance which does not seem so 

transitory as to become displeasing through its perpetuation in art. Timomachus 

did not represent Medea at the moment when she was actually murdering 

her children, but a few moments before, when a mother’s love was 

still struggling with her vengefulness. We can foresee the outcome of this 

struggle; we tremble in anticipation of seeing Medea as simply cruel, and 

our imagination takes us far beyond what the paint er could have shown us 

in this terrible moment. But for this very reason we are not offended at 

Medea’s perpetual indecision, as it is represented in art, but wish it could 

have remained that way in reality. We wish that the duel of passions had 

never been decided, or at least had continued long enough for time and 

reflection to overcome rage and secure the victory for maternal feelings. 

This wisdom on the part of Timomachus has earned him lavish and frequent 

6. Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709– 1751), French 

physician and phi los o pher, whose L’Homme 

machine (1747) made him the most notorious 

materialist of his day. The Greek Democritus (ca. 

460– ca. 370 b.c.e.) was also a materialist (he 

argued that everything, including the soul, is composed 

of atoms); he was known as the “laughing 

phi los o pher,” perhaps because he believed that 

individuals were responsible for their own wellbeing. 

7. Byzantine paint er (late 4th c. b.c.e.) mentioned 

by Pliny the Elder (35.11). 

8. A sorceress from Colchis who took revenge on 

her husband Jason (for deserting her to marry a 

king’s daughter) by killing his (and her) two children. 

Ajax: one of the greatest Greek warriors at 

Troy; driven mad by Athena, he killed animals 

believing that he was attacking the Greek leaders 

who had refused to give him the armor of the 

dead Achilles (when he regained his senses, he 

killed himself). Both figures were often treated 

in art and tragedies.


praise and raised him far above another, unknown paint er who was foolish 

enough to depict Medea at the height of her rage, thus endowing her brief 

instant of madness with a permanence that is an affront to all nature. 

* * * 

From Chapter Nine 

If we wish to compare the paint er and the poet in par tic u lar instances, we 

must first know whether they both enjoyed complete freedom; whether, that 

is to say, they could work toward producing the greatest possible effect in 

their respective arts without any external constraint. 

Religion often represented just such an external constraint on the classical 

artist. His work, destined for worship and devotion, could not always be 

as perfect as it would have been if he had had as his sole aim the plea sure 

of his spectators. But superstition overloaded the gods with symbols, and 

the most beautiful gods were not always honored as such. 

In the temple at Lemnos, from which the pious Hypsipyle 9 rescued her 

father in the disguise of the god, Bacchus was represented with horns. No 

doubt he appeared this way in all his temples since the horns were symbolic 

and one of his necessary attributes. Only the free artist, who did not have 

to create his Bacchus for some temple, omitted this symbol; and if we find 

none with horns among the extant statues of him, we may perhaps take this 

as proof that none of them belongs among the consecrated ones under 

which he was actually worshiped. Besides this, it is highly probable that the 

wrath of pious iconoclasts during the first centuries of Christianity fell in 

great part on these latter. Only seldom did they spare a work of art, because 

it had not been desecrated by adoration. 

However, since pieces of both kinds are to be found among the excavated 

objects of antiquity, I should prefer that only those be called works of art in 

which the artist had occasion to show himself as such and in which beauty 

was his first and ultimate aim. None of the others, which betray too obvious 

traces of religious conventions, deserves this name because in their case 

the artist did not create for art’s sake, 1 but his art was merely a handmaid of 

religion, which stressed meaning more than beauty in the material subjects 

it allotted to art for execution. By this I do not mean to say that religion has 

not also frequently sacrificed meaning for beauty, or, out of consideration 

for art and the more refined taste of the period, has ceased to emphasize it 

to such a degree that beauty alone would seem to be the sole object. 

* * * 

From Chapter Ten 

I comment on an expression of astonishment in Spence 2 which clearly 

shows how little thought he must have given to the limits of poetry and 

painting. “As to the muses in general,” he says, “it is strange that the poets 

9. Daughter of King Thaos, the son of Dionysus; 

the women of the island of Lemnos killed all the 

other men, who had left their wives for Thracian 

women. 

1. Possibly the first use of the expression “art for 

art’s sake.” 

2. Joseph Spence (1699– 1768), an Oxford professor 

whose Polymetis (1747), written in dialogues, 

is one of the targets of Lessing’s criticism.


are so brief in describing them, far briefer in fact than might be expected 

for goddesses to whom they are so greatly indebted.” 3 

What can this mean but that he is amazed that when poets speak of the 

muses they do not use the mute language of paint ers? To the poets Urania 

is the muse of astronomy; we recognize her office from her name and her 

functions. The artist, in order to make her recognizable, must show her pointing 

with a wand to a celestial globe. The wand, the globe, and the pointing 

position are his letters, from which he lets us spell out the name Urania. 

But when the poet wishes to say that Urania had foreseen his death long 

ago in the stars, 

Ipsa diu positis lethum praedixerat astris Uranie . . . 4 

why should he, out of respect for the paint er, add: “Urania, her wand in 

hand, the celestial globe before her”? It is as though a man who can and may 

speak were at the same time using those signs which the mutes in the Turkish 

seraglio 5 invented among themselves for lack of a voice. 

Spence again expresses the same astonishment when speaking of the 

moral beings, those divinities whom the ancients made preside over the virtues 

and the conduct of human life. “It should be remarked,” he says, “that 

the Roman poets have far less to say about the best of these moral beings 

than one would expect. On this point the artists are much more complete, 

and whoever wants to know what appearance each of them made need only 

look at the coins of the Roman emperors. The poets, to be sure, often speak 

of these beings as persons, but of their attributes, their clothing and their 

appearance in general they have little to say.” 6 

When the poet personifies abstractions, he characterizes them sufficiently 

by their names and the actions he has them perform. 

The artist lacks these means and must therefore add to his personified 

abstractions symbols by which they may be recognized. But because these 

symbols are something different and mean something different, they make 

the figures allegorical. 

The female figure with a bridle in her hand; another leaning against a 

pillar— these are, in art, allegorical figures. For the poet, however, Moderation 

and Constancy are not allegorical beings but simply personified abstractions. 

Necessity invented these symbols for the artist, for only through them 

can he make it understood what this or that figure is supposed to represent. 

But why should the poet have forced upon him what the artist had to accept 

of necessity; a necessity which he himself has no part of? 

The very thing which so surprised Spence should be prescribed to poets 

as a general law. They must not convert the necessities of painting into a 

part of their own wealth. Nor must they regard the means that art has 

invented in order to keep up with poetry as perfections which should give 

them reason for envy. When the artist adorns a figure with symbols, he 

3. Polymetis, Dialogue VIII, p. 91 [Lessing’s 

note]. “Muses”: in Greek mythology, the 9 daughters 

of memory who preside over the arts and all 

intellectual pursuits. 

4. Statius, Thebaid 8.551 [Lessing’s note]; the 

preceding clause translates the Latin. Statius 

(ca. 46– 96 c.e.), Roman poet. 

5. The harem, women’s quarters overseen at 

courts by eunuchs and, in Lessing’s account, 

mutes. 

6. Polymetis, Dialogue X, pp. 137, 139 [Lessing’s 

note].


raises what was a mere figure to a higher being; but if the poet employs 

these artistic trimmings, he turns that higher being into a puppet. 

* * * 

Chapter Twelve 

Homer 7 treats of two kinds of beings and actions, visible and invisible. This 

distinction cannot be made in painting, where everything is visible and visible 

in but one way. Hence, when Count Caylus 8 makes the pictures of invisible 

actions follow the visible ones in an unbroken sequence, and when in his 

paintings showing mixed actions, i.e., those in which both visible and invisible 

beings take part, he does not and perhaps cannot specify how the latter 

(which only we who look at the picture are supposed to discover in it) are to 

be introduced so that the figures in the painting do not see them (or at least 

appear not to see them)— when Count Caylus does this, I say, the series as 

a whole as well as a number of single pictures necessarily become extremely 

confused, incomprehensible, and self- contradictory. 

Still, with the book before us it would be possible to remedy this fault. 

The worst of it is that when painting erases the distinction between visible 

and invisible beings it simultaneously destroys all those characteristic features 

by which this latter, higher order is raised above the lower one. 

For example, when the gods, who are divided as to the fate of the Trojans, 

finally come to blows, the entire battle is represented in the poem as being 

invisible. 9 This invisibility gives the imagination free rein to enlarge the 

scene and envisage the persons and actions of the gods on a grander scale 

than the mea sure of ordinary man. But painting must adopt a visible scene, 

whose various indispensable parts become the scale for the figures participating 

in it— a scale which the eye has ready at hand and whose lack of proportion 

to the higher beings makes them appear monstrous on the artist’s 

canvas. 

Minerva, whom Mars 1 ventures to attack first in this battle, steps back 

and with her mighty hand seizes a large, black, rough stone which the 

united strength of men had rolled there for a landmark in times past: 

δ’ ναχασσαμένη λίθον ελετο χειρ παχείη 

κείμενον ν πεδίω, μέλανα, τρηχν τε μέγαν τε, 

τν ρ’ νδρες μρτεροι θέσαν μμεναι ορον αρορης 2 

In order to form a proper estimate of the size of this stone we should remember 

that Homer makes his heroes twice as strong as the strongest men of his 

own time but tells us that these again were surpassed in strength by the men 

whom Nestor 3 knew in his youth. Now I ask, if Minerva hurls a stone which 

no one man, not even one from Nestor’s youth, could set up as a landmark— 

if Minerva hurls such a stone at Mars, of what stature is the goddess sup- 

7. Greek epic poet (ca. 8th c. b.c.e.) to whom the 

Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed. 

8. Philippe de Tubières (1692– 1765), French art 

critic; his Scenes from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey 

and Virgil’s Aeneid (1757) is the third of Lessing’s 

targets. 

9. Iliad 21.385 [Lessing’s note]. 

1. Ares, Greek god of war. Minerva: Athena, Greek 

goddess of war and wisdom. 

2. But Athene giving back caught up in her heavy 

hand a stone / that lay in the plain, black and 

rugged and huge, one which men / of a former 

time had set there as boundary mark of the cornfield; 

Iliad 21.403– 5 (trans. Richmond Lattimore) 

[translator’s note]. 

3. The oldest of the Greek generals who fought at 

Troy.


posed to be? If her stature is in proportion to the size of the stone, then the 

element of the marvelous disappears. A man three times my size naturally 

ought to be able to hurl a stone three times as large as I can. But if the stature 

of the goddess is not in proportion to the size of the stone, an improbability 

for the eye arises in the painting whose offensiveness is not removed by 

the cold calculation that a goddess must possess superhuman strength. 

Wherever I see a greater effect, I also expect to see a greater cause. 

And Mars, thrown to the ground by this mighty stone, 

πτ δ’ πέσχε πέλεθρα πεσν, 4 

covered seven acres of land. It is impossible for the paint er to give the god 

this extraordinary size, and yet if he does not do so, it is no longer Mars— or 

at least not the Homeric Mars— who is lying on the ground, but a common 

warrior. 

Longinus 5 says that it seemed to him now and then as though Homer 

raised his men to gods and reduced his gods to men. Painting carries out this 

reduction. In it everything which in the poem raises the gods above godlike 

human creatures vanishes altogether. Size, strength, and swiftness— qualities 

which Homer always has in store for his gods in a higher and more extraordinary 

degree than that bestowed on his finest heroes— must in the painting 

sink to the common level of humanity. Jupiter and Agamemnon, Apollo and 

Achilles, Ajax and Mars 6 all become exactly the same kind of beings, recognizable 

by nothing more than their outward conventional symbols. 

The means which painting uses to convey to us that this or that object 

must be thought of as invisible is a thin cloud veiling the side of the object 

that is turned toward the other persons in the pictures. It appears that this 

cloud was borrowed from Homer, for when in the tumult of battle one of the 

more important heroes runs into great danger, from which only a divine 

power can save him, the poet has the protecting divinity envelop him in a 

thick cloud, or in darkness, and so carry him away, as Paris is carried off by 

Venus, or Idaeus by Neptune, or Hector by Apollo. 7 And Caylus never fails to 

recommend heartily this mist or cloud to the artist when he outlines for him 

a painting of such occurrences. And yet who can fail to see that concealment 

by cloud or night is, for the poet, nothing more than a poetic expression 

for rendering a thing invisible? For that reason it has always been a 

source of surprise to me to see this poetic expression actually used and a 

real cloud introduced in the painting, behind which the hero stands hidden 

from his enemy as behind a screen. That was not what the poet intended. It 

exceeds the limits of painting, for in this case the cloud is a true hieroglyphic, 

a mere symbol, which does not render the rescued hero invisible, 

but says to the spectators: you must imagine to yourselves that he is invisible. 

4. Falling, he covered seven plethra; Iliad 

21.407. One plethron was 10,000 square feet. 

5. The name given the 1st century c.e. author of 

On Sublimity (see above); the reference is to section 

7. 

6. Lessing pairs each god with an appropriate 

man. Jupiter: Zeus, king of the Gods. Agamemnon: 

king of Mycenae and leader of the Greeks at 

Troy. Achilles: the greatest Greek warrior at Troy 

and the focus of the Iliad. 

7. All episodes from the Iliad (3.380– 82, 5.23, 

20.443– 44). Paris: prince of Troy who was 

awarded the most beautiful woman in the world 

by Aphrodite (Venus), goddess of love, for naming 

her the most beautiful of 3 goddess. Idaeus: son 

of a Trojan priest of Hephaestus who is in fact 

saved by Hephaestus, the god of the forge. Hector: 

oldest prince of Troy and the greatest of the 

Trojan warriors (Apollo favored the Trojans).


It is no better than the scrolls that issue from the mouths of figures in old 

Gothic paintings. 

It is true that when Apollo rescues Hector from Achilles, Homer has the 

latter make three further thrusts with his spear into the thick mist (τρς δ’ 

’ηέρα τψε βαθει^αν). 8 But in the language of poetry this means only that 

Achilles was so enraged that he made the three additional thrusts before 

realizing that his enemy was no longer before him. Achilles did not see an 

actual mist, and the power of the gods to render invisible did not lie in any 

mist, but in their ability to bear the object away swiftly. It was only to show 

that this abduction took place too quickly for the human eye to follow the 

disappearing body that the poet first conceals it in a mist or cloud. And it 

was not because a cloud appeared in place of the abducted body, but because 

we think of that which is wrapped in mist as being invisible. Accordingly, 

Homer sometimes inverts the case, and instead of rendering the object invisible, 

causes the subject to be struck blind. For example, Neptune blinds 

Achilles when he rescues Aeneas from his murderous hands by suddenly 

snatching him out of the thick of the fight and placing him in the rear. 9 

Actually, however, Achilles’ eyes are no more blinded than, in the former 

example, the abducted heroes are wrapped in a cloud. The poet merely makes 

this or that addition in order to make more palpable to our senses that extreme 

rapidity of abduction which we call disappearance. 

However, paint ers have appropriated the Homeric mist not only in those 

cases where Homer himself used it, or would have used it (namely, in rendering 

persons invisible or causing them to disappear), but in every instance 

where the spectator is supposed to see something in the painting which the 

characters themselves, or some of them, cannot see. Minerva became visible 

to Achilles alone when she prevented him from assaulting Agamemnon. 

1 I know of no other way to express this, says Caylus, than by concealing 

her from the rest of the council by a cloud. But this is in complete violation 

of the spirit of the poet! Invisibility is the natural condition of his gods; no 

blindfolding, no interruption of the rays of light is needed to prevent them 

from being seen; but an enlightenment, an increased power of mortal vision 

is required, if they are intended to be seen. Thus it is not only that in painting 

the cloud is an arbitrary and not a natural sign; but this arbitrary sign 

does not even possess the definite distinctness which it could have as such, 

for it is used both to render the visible invisible and the invisible visible. 

Chapter Fifteen 

As experience shows, the poet can raise to this degree of illusion the represen 

ta tion of objects other than those that are visible. Consequently, whole 

categories of pictures which the poet claims as his own must necessarily be 

beyond the reach of the artist. Dryden’s Song for St. Cecelia’s Day 2 is full of 

musical pictures which leave the paint er’s brush idle. But I do not want to 

stray too far from my subject with such examples, from which in the final 

8. Iliad 20.446 [Lessing’s note]. 

9. Iliad, 20.321– 29 [Lessing’s note]. Neptune: 

Poseidon, god of the sea. Aeneas: Trojan ally, a 

son of Aphrodite and later the found er of the 

colony that became Rome. 

1. Iliad 1.194– 98. 

2. Also called Alexander’s Feast, this ode was written 

in 1687 and set to music by Handel in 1739 

[translator’s note]. john Dryden (1631– 1700), 

En glish poet, dramatist, and critic.


analysis we learn little more than that colors are not sounds and ears not 

eyes. 3 

I will confine myself rather to the consideration of pictures of visible 

objects only, which are common to both poet and paint er. Why is it that a 

number of poetic pictures of this kind are of no use to the paint er and, conversely, 

many real pictures lose most of their effect when treated by the poet? 

Example may guide me here. I repeat: the picture of Pandarus 4 in the fourth 

book of the Iliad is one of the most elaborate and graphic in all of Homer. 

From the seizing of the bow to the flight of the arrow every moment is 

painted, and all these moments follow in such close succession and yet are so 

distinct, one from the other, that if we did not know how a bow should be 

handled, we would be able to learn it from this description alone. Pandarus 

takes out his bow, strings it, opens the quiver, chooses an unused, wellfeathered 

arrow, adjusts the arrow’s notch to the string and draws both back; 

the string is brought close to the breast, the metal point of the arrow comes 

close to the bow, the great round bow springs open again with a clang, the 

string vibrates, and the arrow has sped away, flying eagerly toward its mark. 

Caylus cannot have overlooked this splendid picture. What, then, did he 

find there to make him consider it unable to afford material to his artists? 

And why was it that the council of deliberating and drinking gods seemed to 

him better suited for his purpose? The subjects are visible in both cases, and 

what more than visible subjects does the paint er need to fill his canvas? 

The difficulty must be this: although both subjects, being visible, are 

equally suitable for actual painting, there is still this essential difference 

between them: in the one case the action is visible and progressive, its different 

parts occurring one after the other in a sequence of time, and in the 

other the action is visible and stationary, its different parts developing in 

co- existence in space. But if painting, by virtue of its symbols or means of 

imitation, which it can combine in space only, must renounce the element 

of time entirely, progressive actions, by the very fact that they are progressive, 

cannot be considered to belong among its subjects. Painting must be 

content with coexistent actions or with mere bodies which, by their position, 

permit us to conjecture an action. Poetry, on the other hand. . . . 

From Chapter Sixteen 

But I shall attempt now to derive the matter from its first principles. 

I reason thus: if it is true that in its imitations painting uses completely different 

means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colors in space 

rather than articulated sounds in time, and if these signs must indisputably 

bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, then signs existing in space can 

express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow 

one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive. 

Objects or parts of objects which exist in space are called bodies. Accordingly, 

bodies with their visible properties are the true subjects of painting. 

Objects or parts of objects which follow one another are called actions. 

Accordingly, actions are the true subjects of poetry. 

3. An allusion to a quotation in Caylus from Jean 

de la Fontaine (1621– 1695), French author of 

fables. 

4. An ally of the Trojans who broke the truce 

between the Greeks and Trojans in the passage 

described (Iliad 4.105– 26).


However, bodies do not exist in space only, but also in time. They persist 

in time, and in each moment of their duration they may assume a different 

appearance or stand in a different combination. Each of these momentary 

appearances and combinations is the result of a preceding one and can be the 

cause of a subsequent one, which means that it can be, as it were, the center 

of an action. Consequently, painting too can imitate actions, but only by 

suggestion through bodies. 

On the other hand, actions cannot exist in de pen dently, but must be 

joined to certain beings or things. Insofar as these beings or things are bodies, 

or are treated as such, poetry also depicts bodies, but only by suggestion 

through actions. 

Painting can use only a single moment of an action in its coexisting compositions 

and must therefore choose the one which is most suggestive 5 and 

from which the preceding and succeeding actions are most easily comprehensible. 

Similarly, poetry in its progressive imitations can use only one single 

property of a body. It must therefore choose that one which awakens the 

most vivid image of the body, looked at from the point of view under which 

poetry can best use it. From this comes the rule concerning the harmony of 

descriptive adjectives and economy in description of physical objects. 

I should put little faith in this dry chain of reasoning did I not find it 

completely confirmed by the procedure of Homer, or rather if it had not been 

just this procedure that led me to my conclusions. Only on these principles 

can the grand style of the Greek be defined and explained, and only thus 

can the proper position be assigned to the opposite style of so many modern 

poets, who attempt to rival the paint er at a point where they must necessarily 

be surpassed by him. 

I find that Homer represents nothing but progressive actions. He depicts 

bodies and single objects only when they contribute toward these actions, 

and then only by a single trait. No wonder, then, that where Homer paints, 

the artist finds little or nothing to do himself; and no wonder that his harvest 

can be found only where the story assembles a number of beautiful 

bodies in beautiful positions and in a setting favorable to art, however sparingly 

the poet himself may paint these bodies, these positions, and this setting. 

If we go through the whole series of paintings as Caylus proposes 

them, one by one, we find that each is a proof of this remark. 

* * * 

From Chapter Seventeen 

But the objection will be raised that the symbols of poetry are not only successive 

but are also arbitrary; and, as arbitrary symbols, they are of course 

able to represent bodies as they exist in space. Examples of this might be 

taken from Homer himself. We need only to recall his shield of Achilles 6 to 

have the most decisive instance of how discursively and yet at the same 

time poetically a single object may be described by presenting its coexistent 

parts. 

5. In German, den prägnantesten wählen: “choose 

the most pregnant (with meaning).” 

6. Forged by the god Hephaestus to replace the 

armor borrowed by his friend Patroclus, whom 

Hector killed; its intricate work is described at 

length (Iliad 18.478– 608).


I shall reply to this twofold objection. I call it twofold because a correct 

deduction must hold good even without examples; and, conversely, an 

example from Homer is of importance to me even when I am unable to justify 

it by means of deduction. 

It is true that since the symbols of speech are arbitrary, the parts of a 

body may, through speech, be made to follow one another just as readily as 

they exist side by side in nature. But this is a peculiarity of speech and its 

signs in general and not as they serve the aims of poetry. The poet does not 

want merely to be intelligible, nor is he content— as is the prose writer— 

with simply presenting his image clearly and concisely. He wants rather to 

make the ideas he awakens in us so vivid that at that moment we believe 

that we feel the real impressions which the objects of these ideas would 

produce on us. In this moment of illusion we should cease to be conscious 

of the means which the poet uses for this purpose, that is, his words. This 

was the substance of the definition of a poetical painting given above. But 

the poet is always supposed to paint, and we shall now see how far bodies 

with their coexistent parts adapt themselves to this painting. 

* * * 

From Chapter Eigh teen 

And yet should Homer himself have lapsed into this lifeless description of 

material objects? I do hope that there are but few passages which one can 

find to support this; and I feel certain that these few passages are of such a 

nature as to confirm the rule to which they seem to be the exception. 

It remains true that succession of time is the province of the poet just as 

space is that of the paint er. 

It is an intrusion of the paint er into the domain of the poet, which good 

taste can never sanction, when the paint er combines in one and the same 

picture two points necessarily separate in time, as does Fra Mazzuoli 7 when 

he introduces the rape of the Sabine women 8 and the reconciliation effected 

by them between their husbands and relations, or as Titian 9 does when he 

presents the entire history of the prodigal son, his dissolute life, his misery, 

and his repentance. 

It is an intrusion of the poet into the domain of the paint er and a squandering 

of much imagination to no purpose when, in order to give the reader 

an idea of the whole, the poet enumerates one by one several parts or things 

which I must necessarily survey at one glance in nature if they are to give 

the effect of a whole. 

But as two equitable and friendly neighbors do not permit the one to take 

unbecoming liberties in the heart of the other’s domain, yet on their extreme 

frontiers practice a mutual forbearance by which both sides make peaceful 

compensation for those slight aggressions which, in haste and from force of 

circumstance, the one finds himself compelled to make on the other’s 

privilege: so also with painting and poetry. 

7. Francesco Mazzuoli (1503– 1540), Italian 

paint er. 

8. A famous legend of early Rome. Romulus, its 

mythical found er, gained wives for the men he had 

gathered to his new city by inviting neighboring 

peoples to a festival and seizing the women. The 

war that followed between Romans and Sabines 

ended when the Sabine women thrust themselves 

onto the battlefield between their fathers and their 

new husbands, leading to peace and the union of 

the foes under a single government. 

9. Tiziano Vecelli (ca. 1477– 1576), Italian paint er. 

For the story of the prodigal son, see Luke 

15.11– 32.


To support this I will not cite the fact that in great historical paintings the 

single moment is always somewhat extended, and that perhaps there is not 

a single work comprising a wealth of figures in which each one of them is in 

exactly that motion and position it should be in at the moment of the main 

action; some are represented in the attitude of a somewhat earlier, others in 

that of a somewhat later moment. This is a liberty which the master must 

justify by certain refinements in the arrangement— in the way he uses his 

figures and places them closer to or more distant from the main action— 

which permits them to take a more or less momentary part in what is going 

on. I shall merely make use of a remark made by Mengs concerning Raphael’s 

1 drapery. “In his paintings,” he says, “there is a reason for every fold, 

whether it be because of its own weight or because of the movement of the 

limbs. Sometimes we can tell from them how they were before, and Raphael 

even tried to attach significance to this. We can see from the folds whether 

an arm or a leg was in a backward or forward position prior to its movement; 

whether the limb had moved or is moving from contraction to extension, or 

whether it had been extended and is now contracted.” 2 It is indisputable that 

in this case the artist is combining two different moments into one. For 

since that part of the drapery which lies on the foot immediately follows it in 

its forward motion— unless the drapery be of very stiff material and hence 

entirely unsuitable for painting— there is no moment in which the garment 

can form any other fold whatsoever except that which the actual position of 

the limb requires. However, if it is permitted to form a different fold, then 

the drapery is represented at the moment preceding and the limb at the following. 

Nevertheless, who would be so par tic u lar with the artist who finds it 

advantageous to show us these two moments at the same time? Who would 

not praise him rather for having had the understanding and the courage to 

commit such a minor error for the sake of obtaining greater perfection of 

expression? 

The poet deserves the same forbearance. His progressive imitation actually 

allows him to allude to only one side, only one characteristic of his 

material objects at one time. But when the happy structure of his language 

permits him to do this in a single word, why should he not be allowed to add 

a second word now and then? And why not even a third, if it is worth the 

trouble? Or even a fourth? I have already said that for Homer a ship is only a 

black ship, or a hollow ship, or a swift ship, or at the most a well- manned 

black ship. This is to be understood of his style in general. Here and there 

we find a passage in which he adds a third descriptive epithet. Kαμπλακκλα, 

χλκεα, κτκνημα 3 round, bronze, eight- spoked wheels. And also a fourth: 

σπίδαπντοσ’ σην, καλν, χαλκείην, ξήλατον, 4 a uniformly smooth, beautiful, 

embossed bronze shield. Who would censure him for this? Who would 

not rather thank him for this little extravagance when he feels what a good 

effect it can have in some few suitable passages? 

But I shall not allow the par tic u lar justification of either poet or paint er 

to be based on the above- mentioned analogy of the two friendly neighbors. 

A mere analogy neither proves nor justifies anything. The following consid- 

1. Raffaello Santi (1483– 1520), Italian paint er. 

Anton Raphael Mengs (1728– 1779), German 

paint er and art critic; a close friend of Winckelmann. 

2. Thoughts about Beauty and Taste in Painting 

[1771], p. 69 [Lessing’s note]. 

3. Iliad 5.722– 23. 

4. Iliad 12.294– 95.


eration must be their real justification: just as in the paint er’s art two different 

moments border so closely on one another that we can, without 

hesitation, accept them as one, so in the poet’s work do the several features 

representing the various parts and properties in space follow one another in 

such rapid succession that we believe we hear them all at once. 

It is in this, I say, that the excellence of Homer’s language aids him unusually 

well. It not only allows him the greatest possible freedom in the accumulation 

and combination of epithets, but it finds such a happy arrangement for 

these accumulated adjectives that the awkward suspension of their noun disappears. 

Modern languages are lacking entirely in one or more of these 

advantages. For example, the French must paraphrase the χαμπνλα χνχλα, 

χάλχεα, κτκνημα with “the round wheels, which were of bronze and had 

eight spokes.” They give the meaning but destroy the picture. Yet the picture 

is everything here and the meaning nothing; and without the former the latter 

turns the liveliest of poets into a tiresome bore, a fate which has often 

befallen our good Homer under the pen of the conscientious Madame Dacier. 5 

The German language, on the other hand, can usually translate Homer’s 

epithets with equally short equivalent adjectives, although it is unable to imitate 

the advantageous arrangement of Greek. We can say, to be sure, die 

runden, ehernen, achtspeichigten . . . [the round, brazen, eight- spoked], but 

Räder [wheels] drags behind. Who does not feel that three different predicates, 

before we learn the subject, can produce only an indistinct and confused 

picture? The Greek combines the subject and the first predicate, and 

leaves the others to follow. He says, “round wheels, brazen, eight- spoked.” 

And so we know immediately what he is speaking of. In conformity with the 

natural order of thought, we first become acquainted with the thing itself and 

then with its accidents. Our [German] language does not enjoy this advantage. 

Or should I say, it does enjoy it but can seldom make use of it without 

ambiguity? Both amount to the same thing. For if we place the adjectives 

after the subject, they must stand in statu absoluto, i.e., in uninflected form. 

Hence, we must say runde Räder, ehern und achtspeichigt (round wheels, 

brazen and eight- spoked). However, in this statu the German adjectives are 

identical with the German adverbs, and if we take them as such with the next 

verb that is predicated of the subject, they not infrequently produce a completely 

false, and in any case a very uncertain meaning. 

But I am lingering over trifles and it may appear as if I were going to forget 

the shield, the shield of Achilles, that is— the famous picture which 

more than anything else caused Homer to be considered by the ancients a 

master of painting. 6 A shield, it will be said, is a single material object 

which the poet cannot present by describing its coexistent parts. And yet 

Homer, in more than a hundred splendid verses, has described this shield, 

its material, its form, all the figures which filled its enormous surface, so 

exactly and in such detail that it was not difficult for modern artists to produce 

a drawing of it exact in every part. 

My answer to this par tic u lar objection is that I have already answered it. 

Homer does not paint the shield as finished and complete, but as a shield that 

5. Anne Lefèvre Dacier (ca. 1650– 1720), wellknown 

French translator of Greek and Latin 

works, including both the Iliad (1699) and the 

Odyssey (1708). 

6. Dionysius Halicarnassus, Vita Homeri, in 

Thomas Gale, Opuscula mythologica [1671], p. 

401 [Lessing’s note].


is being made. Thus, here too he has made use of that admirable artistic 

device: transforming what is coexistent in his subject into what is consecutive, 

and thereby making the living picture of an action out of the tedious 

painting of an object. We do not see the shield, but the divine master as he is 

making it. He steps up to the anvil with hammer and tongs, and after he has 

forged the plates out of the rough, the pictures which he destines for the 

shield’s ornamentation rise before our eyes out of the bronze, one after the 

other, beneath the finer blows of his hammer. We do not lose sight of him 

until all is finished. Now the shield is complete, and we marvel at the work. 

But it is the believing wonder of the eyewitness who has seen it forged. 

* * * 

From Chapter Twenty- One 

We might ask whether poetry does not lose too much when we take from her 

all depictions of physical beauty? But who would do this? If we dissuade her 

from taking one par tic u lar way to attain such pictures, and from following 

confusedly the footsteps of a sister art without ever reaching the same goal, 

do we thereby exclude her from every other path where art in turn must see 

poetry take the lead? 

The same Homer, who so assiduously refrains from detailed descriptions 

of physical beauties, and from whom we scarcely learn in passing that Helen 

had white arms and beautiful hair, 7 nevertheless knows how to convey to us 

an idea of her beauty which far surpasses anything art is able to accomplish 

toward that end. Let us recall the passage where Helen steps before an 

assembly of Trojan elders. The venerable old men see her, and one says to 

the other: 

O νέμεσις Tρω^‒ας και ϋκνήμιδας ’Aχαιος 

τοιη^δ’ μϕ γυναικ πολν χρνον λγεα πάσχειν’ 

aνω^‒ς 

θανάτη 

σι θεη^ς ες ω ‒ πα οικεν. 8 

What can convey a more vivid idea of beauty than to let cold old age 

acknowledge that she is indeed worth the war which had cost so much 

blood and so many tears? 

What Homer could not describe in all its various parts he makes us recognize 

by its effect. Paint for us, you poets, the plea sure, the affection, the 

love and delight which beauty brings, and you have painted beauty itself. 

* * * 

1766 

7. Iliad 3.329; “white arms” 121 [Lessing’s note]. 

Helen: in Greek mythology, daughter of Zeus and 

Leda and wife of Menelaus; her abduction by 

Paris led to the Trojan War. 

8. Iliad 3.156– 58 [Lessing’s note]. “Surely there is 

no blame on Trojans and strong- greaved Achaians 

/ if for long time they suffer hardship for a woman 

like this one. Terrible is the likeness of her face to 

immortal goddesses” (trans. Lattimore).

481 

FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER 

1759 –1805 

Friedrich von Schiller was one of the foremost German writers of the late eighteenth 

and early nineteenth centuries. Perhaps best known for his dramas, he was 

also an editor, a journalist, a writer of vivid letters (especially to Goethe and to the 

German philologist and diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt), a historian, a translator 

(of Euripides, Shakespeare, and Racine), a poet, and a literary theorist. 

Born in Marbach, Germany, Schiller became an army medical officer in Stuttgart 

in 1780. But soon he began seriously working on poetry and drama, choosing a 

literary career. He published Die Räuber (1781, The Robbers) at his own expense, 

and its per for mance in 1782 was a landmark in German theatrical history. Romantic 

writers in En gland, especially samuel taylor Coleridge and the critic William 

Hazlitt, admired The Robbers for its pre sen ta tion of the themes of liberty, abuse of 

power, and authoritarianism. 

On the recommendation of Goethe, Schiller was named professor of history at 

the University of Jena in 1789, and in 1797– 98 they worked together on a collection 

of ballads (a collaboration contemporaneous with that of william wordsworth 

and Coleridge in En gland). 

Many readers admire Schiller’s lyrics and ballads, though his long didactic poems 

(e.g., The Artists, 1789, on the power of art to civilize and bring compassion to mankind) 

are more famous; best known to English- speaking audiences is his “Ode to 

Joy,” which Beethoven set to music in his monumental Ninth Symphony. 

In several influential texts on literary and dramatic theory, aesthetics, and the 

sublime, Schiller explored the relations between art, politics, and history. He himself 

looked primarily to immanuel kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790; 

see above), and his development of and response to Kant’s ideas later influenced the 

literary theory of the German Romantic writers and of Coleridge. 

In On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), Schiller was writing in the immediate 

aftermath of the French regicide and Reign of Terror, during which thousands were 

executed. The sufferings and shocks of the French Revolution inform his inquiry into 

the role of art: how can humankind achieve freedom when the failure of po liti cal 

solutions is so graphically displayed? In this text, which grew from a series of actual 

letters to a benefactor (our selection contains three letters), Schiller explains that 

freedom can occur only through education, and the key to education is the experience 

of beauty— the elevation of mind and soul through art. Beauty allows persons to 

ennoble their nature; each of us can become a “beautiful soul” (schöne Seele) harmonizing 

duty and inclination through art, which Schiller associates with the “play 

impulse” or “play drive” that makes reconciliation and transcendence possible. 

Schiller’s On Naive and Reflective Poetry (1795– 96), a companion piece, contrasts 

the ancients and the moderns, their different attitudes toward nature, and their perfor 

mances in poetry. (Often the title’s second adjective is given as “sentimental,” but 

this term does not adequately translate sentimentalisch.) Modern poets, Schiller states, 

will never regain the naive— that is, the immediate and unconscious— relationship to 

nature that the ancients enjoyed. He focuses not on rules to be obeyed or ignored but 

rather on different types of consciousness. As in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 

his primary concern is the author’s conception of self and of the ideals and purposes 

of art— the motivating power that informs and imparts life to the text. 

Schiller’s broad sense of a break between a harmonious past and the divided or 

disrupted present in which artists perceive the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of 

embodying their hopes and desires in their actual work, is echoed in the poetry 

and criticism of matthew Arnold, t. s. eliot, and many other nineteenth- and

482 / FRIEDRICH vON SCHILLER 

twentiethcentury writers. They may disagree on the timing, but all emphasize that 

this shift in consciousness— a dissociation of sensibility— manifests itself in the 

operations of individual thought and feeling and in the style and structure of poetry. 

In the selection below from On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Schiller touches 

on the sense of acute cultural crisis that impels his arguments about the priority of 

the aesthetic. He summons up an optimistic vision of the artist preparing “the shape 

of things to come,” even as he testifies to the ordeal of being an artist in a hostile 

environment. Defy the world’s opinion: this is Schiller’s advice to those wondering 

whether they can endure in the midst of an unsympathetic and corrupt age. The 

artist should be true to the heart’s “noble impulses”: “Impart to the world you would 

influence a Direction towards the good, and the quiet rhythm of time will bring it to 

fulfilment.” Through our inner potential, we revitalize ourselves and reinvigorate 

(and sometimes disturb and unsettle) others. 

The weakness of this position is that Schiller separates “the rhythm of time” 

(which he trusts) from the very different rhythm of the world of Utility that, he 

concedes, now rules but that he believes can be transcended. Others grappled more 

directly with the comprehensive changes driven by the accelerating power of capitalism, 

described by the Scottish- born historian (and biographer of Schiller) Thomas 

Carlyle in “Signs of the Times” (1829): “Not the external and the physical alone is 

now managed by machinery, but the internal and spiritual also. . . . Men are grown 

mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand.” Not just karl marx and 

friedrich engels but the Victorian critics and social reformers John Ruskin and 

William Morris responded to this alienation in ways that Schiller— whose aesthetic 

works are grounded less in historical reference and analysis than in idealization of 

the harmonious wholeness of the ancient Greeks— could not. 

Yet Schiller, a prophet of the alienation that would pain many later authors, 

believed that this alienation could be overcome through the civilizing power of literature, 

enabling a higher Ideal to triumph over the degraded principles and practices 

to which persons were currently (and mistakenly) loyal. A passionate advocate 

for individual and po liti cal freedom, Schiller gave everything to his art; “the Muses 

drained me dry,” he wrote to Goethe (1795), and, after a long period of poor health, 

he died in his mid- forties. 

bibliography 

German editions of Schiller’s writings include the Säkular- Ausgabe, edited by Eduard 

von der Hellen (16 vols., 1904– 05), and the Horenausgabe, edited by C. Schüddekopf 

and C. Hofer (22 vols., 1910– 26), which includes many of his letters. German 

scholars have noted that many En glish translations of Schiller’s texts are unreliable. 

Coleridge’s translation of Wallenstein (1800) is important. The translation and edition 

of On the Aesthetic Education of Man by E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby 

(1967) is outstanding. A single- volume edition is Friedrich Schiller: An Anthology 

for Our Times (trans. Jane Bannard Greene et al., 1959). For a selection of Schiller’s 

writings on criticism and aesthetics, see Essays, edited by Walter Hinderer and Daniel 

O. Dahlstrom (1993). 

A good biographical point of departure is William Witte, Schiller (1949). See also 

John Simon, Friedrich Schiller (1981), and T. J. Reed, Schiller (1991). For critical 

analysis, consult S. S. Kerry, Schiller’s Writings on Aesthetics (1961); Charles E. Passage, 

Friedrich Schiller (1975); Juliet Sychrava, Schiller to Derrida: Idealism in Aesthetics 

(1989); and Lesley Sharpe, Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought, and Politics 

(1991), a well- contextualized treatment of Schiller’s work as a dramatist, poet, and 

literary theorist. Patrick T. Murray, The Development of German Aesthetic Theory 

from Kant to Schiller: A Philosophical Commentary on Schiller’s “Aesthetic Education 

of Man,” 1795 (1994), places Schiller’s aesthetics in their literary and national 

contexts. See also Linda Marie Brooks, The Menace of the Sublime to the Individual

On the Aesthetic Education of Man / 483 

Self: Kant, Schiller, Coleridge, and the Disintegration of Romantic Identity (1996), 

and R. D. Miller, Schiller and the Ideal of Freedom (1970). For a study of Schiller’s 

writings on aesthetics and their impact on Coleridge, see Michael John Kooy, 

Coleridge, Schiller, and Aesthetic Education (2002). 

For a concise study of the critical writings, see René Wellek, “Kant and Schiller,” 

in A History of Modern Criticism, 1750– 1950, vol. 1, The Later Eigh teenth 

Century (1955). A more detailed, challenging assessment can be found in Anthony 

Savile, Aesthetic Reconstructions: The Seminal Writings of Lessing, Kant, and Schiller 

(1987). T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre: Goethe and Weimar, 1775– 1832 (1980), 

is stimulating on the relationship between Goethe and Schiller. For bibliography, 

see Wolfgang Vulpius, Schiller- Bibliographie, 1893– 1958 (1959) and Schiller- 

Bibliographie, 1959– 63 (1967); and R. Pick, “Schiller in En gland, 1787– 1960: A 

Bibliography,” Publications of the En glish Goethe Society 30 (1961). The Cambridge 

Companion to German Idealism, edited by Karl Ameriks (2000), provides a more 

recent bibliography of primary and secondary sources in both En glish and German, 

as well as a range of stimulating essays on Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, and 

other writers and phi los o phers in this tradition of theory and criticism. 

From On the Aesthetic Education of Man 1 

Second Letter 

1. But should it not be possible to make better use of the freedom you 

accord me than by keeping your attention fixed upon the domain of the fine 

arts? Is it not, to say the least, untimely to be casting around for a code of 

laws for the aesthetic world at a moment when the affairs of the moral offer 

interest of so much more urgent concern, and when the spirit of philosophical 

inquiry is being expressly challenged by present circumstances to concern 

itself with that most perfect of all the works to be achieved by the art 

of man: the construction of true po liti cal freedom? 

2. I would not wish to live in a century other than my own, or to have 

worked for any other. We are citizens of our own Age no less than of our own 

State. And if it is deemed unseemly, or even inadmissible, to exempt ourselves 

from the morals and customs of the circle in which we live, why should 

it be less of a duty to allow the needs and taste of our own epoch some voice 

in our choice of activity? 

3. But the verdict of this epoch does not, by any means, seem to be going in 

favour of art, not at least of the kind of art to which alone my inquiry will 

be directed. The course of events has given the spirit of the age a direction 

which threatens to remove it ever further from the art of the Ideal. This 

kind of art must abandon actuality, and soar with becoming boldness above 

our wants and needs; for Art is a daughter of Freedom, and takes her orders 

from the necessity inherent in minds, not from the exigencies of matter. 

But at the present time material needs reign supreme and bend a degraded 

humanity beneath their tyrannical yoke. Utility is the great idol of our age, 

to which all powers are in thrall and to which all talent must pay homage. 

1. Translated by E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. These letters were originally addressed to Schiller’s 

benefactor Friedrich Christian (1745–1814), duke of Augustenburg.


Weighed in this crude balance, the insubstantial merits of Art scarce tip 

the scale, and, bereft of all encouragement, she shuns the noisy marketplace 

of our century. The spirit of philosophical inquiry 2 itself is wresting 

from the imagination one province after another, and the frontiers of art 

contract the more the boundaries of science expand. 

4. Expectantly the gaze of phi los o pher and man of the world alike is fixed 

on the po liti cal scene, where now, so it is believed, the very fate of mankind 

is being debated. Does it not betray a culpable indifference to the common 

weal not to take part in this general debate? If this great action is, by reason 

of its cause and its consequences, of urgent concern to every one who calls 

himself man, it must, by virtue of its method of procedure, be of quite special 

interest to every one who has learnt to think for himself. For a question 

which has hitherto always been decided by the blind right of might, is now, 

so it seems, being brought before the tribunal of Pure Reason 3 itself, and 

anyone who is at all capable of putting himself at the centre of things, and 

of raising himself from an individual into a representative of the species, 

may consider himself at once a member of this tribunal, and at the same 

time, in his capacity of human being and citizen of the world, an interested 

party who finds himself more or less closely involved in the outcome of the 

case. It is, therefore, not merely his own cause which is being decided in 

this great action; judgement is to be passed according to laws which he, as 

a reasonable being, is himself competent and entitled to dictate. 

5. How tempting it would be for me to investigate such a subject in company 

with one who is as acute a thinker as he is a liberal citizen of the 

world! And to leave the decision to a heart which has dedicated itself with 

such noble enthusiasm to the weal of humanity. What an agreeable surprise 

if, despite all difference in station, and the vast distance which the 

circumstances of the actual world make inevitable, I were, in the realm of 

ideas, to find my conclusions identical with those of a mind as unprejudiced 

as your own! That I resist this seductive temptation, and put Beauty before 

Freedom, can, I believe, not only be excused on the score of personal inclination, 

but also justified on principle. I hope to convince you that the 

theme I have chosen is far less alien to the needs of our age than to its taste. 

More than this: if man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he 

will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is 

only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom. But this cannot 

be demonstrated without my first reminding you of the principles by which 

Reason is in any case guided in matters of po liti cal legislation. 

Sixth Letter 

1. Have I not perhaps been too hard on our age in the picture I have just 

drawn? That is scarcely the reproach I anticipate. Rather a different one: 

2. Pertaining not only to the study of fundamental 

principles but also to the empirical investigation 

into practical things. 

3. See immanuel kant, The Critique of Pure 

Reason (1781). In the preface, Kant states that his 

goal is to “assure to reason its lawful claims, and 

dismiss all groundless pretensions, not by despotic 

decrees, but in accordance with its own 

eternal and unalterable laws.”


that I have tried to make it prove too much. Such a portrait, you will tell 

me, does indeed resemble mankind as it is today; but does it not also resemble 

any people caught up in the pro cess of civilization, since all of them, 

without exception, must fall away from Nature by the abuse of Reason 

before they can return to her by the use of Reason? 

2. Closer attention to the character of our age will, however, reveal an astonishing 

contrast between contemporary forms of humanity and earlier ones, 

especially the Greek. The reputation for culture and refinement, on which 

we otherwise rightly pride ourselves vis-à- vis humanity in its merely natural 

state, can avail us nothing against the natural humanity of the Greeks. For 

they were wedded to all the delights of art and all the dignity of wisdom, 

without however, like us, falling a prey to their seduction. The Greeks put us 

to shame not only by a simplicity to which our age is a stranger; they are at 

the same time our rivals, indeed often our models, in those very excellences 

with which we are wont to console ourselves for the unnaturalness of our 

manners. In fullness of form no less than of content, at once philosophic 

and creative, sensitive and energetic, the Greeks combined the first youth of 

imagination with the manhood of reason in a glorious manifestation of 

humanity. 

3. At that first fair awakening of the powers of the mind, sense and intellect 

did not as yet rule over strictly separate domains; for no dissension had 

as yet provoked them into hostile partition and mutual demarcation of their 

frontiers. Poetry had not as yet coquetted with wit, nor speculation prostituted 

itself to sophistry. Both of them could, when need arose, exchange 

functions, since each in its own fashion paid honour to truth. However 

high the mind might soar, it always drew matter lovingly along with it; and 

however fine and sharp the distinctions it might make, it never proceeded 

to mutilate. It did indeed divide human nature into its several aspects, and 

project these in magnified form into the divinities of its glorious pantheon; 

but not by tearing it to pieces; rather by combining its aspects in different 

proportions, for in no single one of their deities was humanity in its entirety 

ever lacking. How different with us Moderns! With us too the image of the 

human species is projected in magnified form into separate individuals— 

but as fragments, not in different combinations, with the result that one 

has to go the rounds from one individual to another in order to be able to 

piece together a complete image of the species. With us, one might almost 

be tempted to assert, the various faculties appear as separate in practice as 

they are distinguished by the psychologist in theory, and we see not merely 

individuals, but whole classes of men, developing but one part of their 

potentialities, while of the rest, as in stunted growths, only vestigial traces 

remain. 

4. I do not underrate the advantages which the human race today, considered 

as a whole and weighed in the balance of intellect, can boast in the 

face of what is best in the ancient world. But it has to take up the challenge 

in serried ranks, and let whole mea sure itself against whole. What individual 

Modern could sally forth and engage, man against man, with an individual 

Athenian for the prize of humanity?


5. Whence this disadvantage among individuals when the species as a 

whole is at such an advantage? Why was the individual Greek qualified to 

be the representative of his age, and why can no single Modern venture as 

much? Because it was from all- unifying Nature that the former, and from 

the all- dividing Intellect that the latter, received their respective forms. 

6. It was civilization itself which inflicted this wound upon modern man. 

Once the increase of empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of 

thought, made sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once 

the increasingly complex machinery of State necessitated a more rigorous 

separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature 

was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance. 

The intuitive and the speculative understanding now withdrew in 

hostility to take up positions in their respective fields, whose frontiers they 

now began to guard with jealous mistrust; and with this confining of our 

activity to a par tic u lar sphere we have given ourselves a master within, who 

not infrequently ends by suppressing the rest of our potentialities. While in 

the one a riotous imagination ravages the hard- won fruits of the intellect, 

in another the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart should 

have warmed itself and the imagination been kindled. 

7. This disor ga ni za tion, which was first started within man by civilization 

and learning, was made complete and universal by the new spirit of government. 

It was scarcely to be expected that the simple or ga ni za tion of the 

early republics should have survived the simplicity of early manners and 

conditions; but instead of rising to a higher form of organic existence it 

degenerated into a crude and clumsy mechanism. That polypoid character 

of the Greek States, in which every individual enjoyed an in de pen dent 

existence but could, when need arose, grow into the whole organism, now 

made way for an ingenious clock- work, in which, out of the piecing together 

of innumerable but lifeless parts, a mechanical kind of collective life 

ensued. State and Church, laws and customs, were now torn asunder; 

enjoyment was divorced from labour, the means from the end, the effort 

from the reward. Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the 

Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in 

his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops 

the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity 

upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his 

occupation or of his specialized knowledge. But even that meagre, fragmentary 

participation, by which individual members of the State are still 

linked to the Whole, does not depend upon forms which they spontaneously 

prescribe for themselves (for how could one entrust to their freedom 

of action a mechanism so intricate and so fearful of light and enlightenment?); 

it is dictated to them with meticulous exactitude by means of a 

formulary which inhibits all freedom of thought. The dead letter takes the 

place of living understanding, and a good memory is a safer guide than 

imagination and feeling. 

8. When the community makes his office the mea sure of the man; when in 

one of its citizens it prizes nothing but memory, in another a mere tabular-


izing 4 intelligence, in a third only mechanical skill; when, in the one case, 

indifferent to character, it insists exclusively on knowledge, yet is, in another, 

ready to condone any amount of obscurantist thinking as long as it is accompanied 

by a spirit of order and law- abiding behaviour; when, moreover, it 

insists on special skills being developed with a degree of intensity which is 

only commensurate with its readiness to absolve the individual citizen from 

developing himself in extensity— can we wonder that the remaining aptitudes 

of the psyche are neglected in order to give undivided attention to the one 

which will bring honour and profit? True, we know that the outstanding individual 

will never let the limits of his occupation dictate the limits of his activity. 

But a mediocre talent will consume in the office assigned him the whole 

meagre sum of his powers, and a man has to have a mind above the ordinary 

if, without detriment to his calling, he is still to have time for the chosen 

pursuits of his leisure. Moreover, it is rarely a recommendation in the eyes of 

the State if a man’s powers exceed the tasks he is set, or if the higher needs 

of the man of parts constitute a rival to the duties of his office. So jealously 

does the State insist on being the sole proprietor of its servants that it will 

more easily bring itself (and who can blame it?) to share its man with the 

Cytherean, than with the Uranian, Venus. 5 

9. Thus little by little the concrete life of the Individual is destroyed in 

order that the abstract idea of the Whole may drag out its sorry existence, 

and the State remains for ever a stranger to its citizens since at no point 

does it ever make contact with their feeling. Forced to resort to classification 

in order to cope with the variety of its citizens, and never to get an impression 

of humanity except through repre sen ta tion at second hand, the governing 

section ends up by losing sight of them altogether, confusing their concrete 

reality with a mere construct of the intellect; while the governed cannot but 

receive with indifference laws which are scarcely, if at all, directed to them 

as persons. Weary at last of sustaining bonds which the State does so little 

to facilitate, positive society begins (this has long been the fate of most 

Eu ro pe an States) to disintegrate into a state of primitive morality, in which 

public authority has become but one party more, to be hated and circumvented 

by those who make authority necessary, and only obeyed by such as 

are capable of doing without it. 

10. With this twofold pressure upon it, from within and from without, 

could humanity well have taken any other course than the one it actually 

took? In its striving after inalienable possessions in the realm of ideas, the 

spirit of speculation could do no other than become a stranger to the world 

of sense, and lose sight of matter for the sake of form. The practical spirit, 

by contrast, enclosed within a monotonous sphere of material objects, and 

within this uniformity still further confined by formulas, was bound to find 

the idea of an unconditioned Whole receding from sight, and to become 

just as impoverished as its own poor sphere of activity. If the former was 

tempted to model the actual world on a world conceivable by the mind, and 

to exalt the subjective conditions of its own perceptual and conceptual 

4. Making lists or tables. 

5. Uranian Venus presides over sacred love; Cytherean Venus presides over profane love.


faculty into laws constitutive of the existence of things, the latter plunged 

into the opposite extreme of judging all experience whatsoever by one partic 

u lar fragment of experience, and of wanting to make the rules of its own 

occupation apply indiscriminately to all others. The one was bound to 

become the victim of empty subtilities, the other of narrow pedantry; for 

the former stood too high to discern the par tic u lar, the latter too low to 

survey the Whole. But the damaging effects of the turn which mind thus 

took were not confined to knowledge and production; it affected feeling and 

action no less. We know that the sensibility of the psyche depends for its 

intensity upon the liveliness, for its scope upon the richness, of the imagination. 

The preponderance of the analytical faculty must, however, of 

necessity, deprive the imagination of its energy and warmth, while a more 

restricted sphere of objects must reduce its wealth. Hence the abstract 

thinker very often has a cold heart, since he dissects his impressions, and 

impressions can move the soul only as long as they remain whole; while the 

man of practical affairs often has a narrow heart, since his imagination, 

imprisoned within the unvarying confines of his own calling, is incapable 

of extending itself to appreciate other ways of seeing and knowing. 

11. It was part of my procedure to uncover the disadvantageous trends in 

the character of our age and the reasons for them, not to point out the 

advantages which Nature offers by way of compensation. I readily concede 

that, little as individuals might benefit from this fragmentation of their 

being, there was no other way in which the species as a whole could have 

progressed. With the Greeks, humanity undoubtedly reached a maximum 

of excellence, which could neither be maintained at that level nor rise any 

higher. Not maintained, because the intellect was unavoidably compelled 

by the store of knowledge it already possessed to dissociate itself from feeling 

and intuition in an attempt to arrive at exact discursive understanding; 

not rise any higher, because only a specific degree of clarity is compatible 

with a specific fullness and warmth. This degree the Greeks had attained; 

and had they wished to proceed to a higher stage of development, they 

would, like us, have had to surrender their wholeness of being and pursue 

truth along separate paths. 

12. If the manifold potentialities in man were ever to be developed, there 

was no other way but to pit them one against the other. This antagonism of 

faculties and functions is the great instrument of civilization— but it is only 

the instrument; for as long as it persists, we are only on the way to becoming 

civilized. Only through individual powers in man becoming isolated, and 

arrogating to themselves exclusive authority, do they come into conflict with 

the truth of things, and force the Common Sense, which is otherwise content 

to linger with indolent complacency on outward appearance, to penetrate phenomena 

in depth. By pure thought usurping authority in the world of sense, 

while empirical thought is concerned to subject the usurper to the conditions 

of experience, both these powers develop to their fullest potential, and exhaust 

the whole range of their proper sphere. And by the very boldness with which, 

in the one case, imagination allows her caprice to dissolve the existing worldorder, 

she does, in the other, compel Reason to rise to the ultimate sources of 

knowing, and invoke the law of Necessity against her.


13. One- sidedness in the exercise of his powers must, it is true, inevitably 

lead the individual into error; but the species as a whole to truth. Only by 

concentrating the whole energy of our mind into a single focal point, contracting 

our whole being into a single power, do we, as it were, lend wings to 

this individual power and lead it, by artificial means, far beyond the limits 

which Nature seems to have assigned to it. Even as it is certain that all individuals 

taken together would never, with the powers of vision granted them 

by Nature alone, have managed to detect a satellite of Jupiter which the telescope 

reveals to the astronomer, so it is beyond question that human powers 

of reflection would never have produced an analysis of the Infinite or a Critique 

of Pure Reason, 6 unless, in the individuals called to perform such 

feats, Reason had separated itself off, disentangled itself, as it were, from all 

matter, and by the most intense effort of abstraction armed their eyes with a 

glass for peering into the Absolute. But will such a mind, dissolved as it were 

into pure intellect and pure contemplation, ever be capable of exchanging 

the rigorous bonds of logic for the free movement of the poetic faculty, or of 

grasping the concrete individuality of things with a sense innocent of preconceptions 

and faithful to the object? At this point Nature sets limits even 

to the most universal genius, limits which he cannot transcend; and as long 

as philosophy has to make its prime business the provision of safeguards 

against error, truth will be bound to have its martyrs. 

14. Thus, however much the world as a whole may benefit through this 

fragmentary specialization of human powers, it cannot be denied that the 

individuals affected by it suffer under the curse of this cosmic purpose. 

Athletic bodies can, it is true, be developed by gymnastic exercises; beauty 

only through the free and harmonious play of the limbs. In the same way 

the keying up of individual functions of the mind can indeed produce 

extraordinary human beings; but only the equal tempering of them all, 

happy and complete human beings. And in what kind of relation would we 

stand to either past or future ages, if the development of human nature 

were to make such sacrifice necessary? We would have been the serfs of 

mankind; for several millennia we would have done slaves’ work for them, 

and our mutilated nature would bear impressed upon it the shameful marks 

of this servitude. And all this in order that a future generation might in 

blissful indolence attend to the care of its moral health, and foster the free 

growth of its humanity! 

15. But can Man really be destined to miss himself for the sake of any purpose 

whatsoever? Should Nature, for the sake of her own purposes, be able 

to rob us of a completeness which Reason, for the sake of hers, enjoins upon 

us? It must, therefore, be wrong if the cultivation of individual powers 

involves the sacrifice of wholeness. Or rather, however much the law of 

Nature tends in that direction, it must be open to us to restore by means of 

a higher Art the totality of our nature which the arts themselves have 

destroyed. 

6. That is, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.


Ninth Letter 

1. But is this not, perhaps, to argue in a circle? Intellectual education is to 

bring about moral education, and yet moral education is to be the condition 

of intellectual education? All improvement in the po liti cal sphere is to proceed 

from the ennobling of character— but how under the influence of a 

barbarous constitution is character ever to become ennobled? To this end 

we should, presumably, have to seek out some instrument not provided by 

the State, and to open up living springs which, what ever the po liti cal corruption, 

would remain clear and pure. 

2. I have now reached the point to which all my preceding reflections have 

been tending. This instrument is Fine Art; such living springs are opened 

up in its immortal exemplars. 

3. Art, like Science, is absolved from all positive constraint and from all 

conventions introduced by man; both rejoice in absolute immunity from 

human arbitrariness. The po liti cal legislator may put their territory out of 

bounds; he cannot rule within it. He can proscribe the lover of truth; Truth 

itself will prevail. He can humiliate the artist; but Art he cannot falsify. 

True, nothing is more common than for both, science as well as art, to pay 

homage to the spirit of the age, or for creative minds to accept the critical 

standards of prevailing taste. In epochs where character becomes rigid and 

obdurate, we find science keeping a strict watch over its frontiers, and art 

moving in the heavy shackles of rules; in those where it becomes enervated 

and flabby, science will strive to please, and art to gratify. For whole centuries 

thinkers and artists will do their best to submerge truth and beauty in 

the depths of a degraded humanity; it is they themselves who are drowned 

there, while truth and beauty, with their own indestructible vitality, struggle 

triumphantly to the surface. 

4. The artist is indeed the child of his age; but woe to him if he is at the 

same time its ward or, worse still, its minion! Let some beneficent deity 

snatch the suckling betimes from his mother’s breast, nourish him with the 

milk of a better age, and suffer him to come to maturity under a distant 

Grecian sky. Then, when he has become a man, let him return, a stranger, 

to his own century; not, however, to gladden it by his appearance, but rather, 

terrible like Agamemnon’s son, 7 to cleanse and to purify it. His theme he 

will, indeed, take from the present; but his form he will borrow from a nobler 

time, nay, from beyond time altogether, from the absolute, unchanging, unity 

of his being. Here, from the pure aether 8 of his genius, the living source of 

beauty flows down, untainted by the corruption of the generations and ages 

wallowing in the dark eddies below. The theme of his work may be degraded 

by vagaries of the public mood, even as this has been known to ennoble it; 

but its form, inviolate, will remain immune from such vicissitudes. The 

7. Orestes, who “cleansed” his home on his return 

by killing his mother Clytemnestra and her lover 

Aegisthus, who had murdered Agamemnon (a 

myth often treated in Greek tragedy, most notably 

in Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, 458 b.c.e.). 

8. For the Greeks, the clear air beyond the 

clouds; the element breathed by the gods.


Roman of the first century had long been bowing the knee before his emperors 

when statues still portrayed him erect; temples continued to be sacred 

to the eye long after the gods had become objects of derision; and the infamous 

crimes of a Nero or a Commodus 9 were put to shame by the noble 

style of the building whose frame lent them cover. Humanity has lost its 

dignity; but Art has rescued it and preserved it in significant stone. Truth 

lives on in the illusion of Art, and it is from this copy, or after- image, that 

the original image will once again be restored. Just as the nobility of Art 

survived the nobility of Nature, so now Art goes before her, a voice rousing 

from slumber and preparing the shape of things to come. Even before Truth’s 

triumphant light can penetrate the recesses of the human heart, the poet’s 

imagination will intercept its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be radiant 

while the dews of night still linger in the valley. 

5. But how is the artist to protect himself against the corruption of the age 

which besets him on all sides? By disdaining its opinion. Let him direct his 

gaze upwards, to the dignity of his calling and the universal Law, not downwards 

towards Fortune and the needs of daily life. Free alike from the futile 

busyness which would fain set its mark upon the fleeting moment, and from 

the impatient spirit of enthusiasm which applies the mea sure of the Absolute 

to the sorry products of Time, let him leave the sphere of the actual to 

the intellect, which is at home there, whilst he strives to produce the Ideal 

out of the union of what is possible with what is necessary. Let him express 

this ideal both in semblance and in truth, set the stamp of it upon the play 

of his imagination as upon the seriousness of his conduct, let him express it 

in all sensuous and spiritual forms, and silently project it into the infinity of 

time. 

6. But not everyone whose soul glows with this ideal was granted either the 

creative tranquillity or the spirit of long patience required to imprint it upon 

the silent stone, or pour it into the sober mould of words, and so entrust it to 

the executory hands of time. Far too impetuous to proceed by such unobtrusive 

means, the divine impulse to form often hurls itself directly upon 

present- day reality and upon the life of action, and undertakes to fashion 

anew the formless material presented by the moral world. The misfortunes 

of the human race speak urgently to the man of feeling; its degradation more 

urgently still; enthusiasm is kindled, and in vigorous souls ardent longing 

drives impatiently on towards action. But did he ever ask himself whether 

those disorders in the moral world offend his reason, or whether they do not 

rather wound his self- love? If he does not yet know the answer, he will detect 

it by the zeal with which he insists upon specific and prompt results. The 

pure moral impulse is directed towards the Absolute. For such an impulse 

time does not exist, and the future turns into the present from the moment 

that it is seen to develop with inevitable Necessity out of the present. In the 

eyes of a Reason which knows no limits, the Direction is at once the Destination, 

and the Way 1 is completed from the moment it is trodden. 

9. Both were notoriously cruel emperors of Rome: 

Nero (37– 68 c.e.), emperor 54– 68; Commodus 

(161– 192), emperor 180– 92. Under the Republic, 

which ended in the 1st century b.c.e., Romans 

did not “bow the knee.” 

1. See John 14.6: “Jesus saith unto him, I am the 

way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto 

the Father, but by me.”


7. To the young friend of truth and beauty who would inquire of me how, 

despite all the opposition of his century, he is to satisfy the noble impulses of 

his heart, I would make answer: Impart to the world you would influence a 

Direction towards the good, and the quiet rhythm of time will bring it to 

fulfilment. You will have given it this direction if, by your teaching, you have 

elevated its thoughts to the Necessary and the Eternal, if, by your actions 

and your creations, you have transformed the Necessary and the Eternal 

into an object of the heart’s desire. The edifice of error and caprice will 

fall— it must fall, indeed it has already fallen— from the moment you are 

certain that it is on the point of giving way. But it is in man’s inner being that 

it must give way, not just in the externals he presents to the world. It is in the 

modest sanctuary of your heart that you must rear victorious truth, and project 

it out of yourself in the form of beauty, so that not only thought can pay 

it homage, but sense, too, lay loving hold on its appearance. And lest you 

should find yourself receiving from the world as it is the model you yourself 

should be providing, do not venture into its equivocal company without first 

being sure that you bear within your own heart an escort from the world of 

the ideal. Live with your century; but do not be its creature. Work for your 

contemporaries; but create what they need, not what they praise. Without 

sharing their guilt, yet share with noble resignation in their punishment, 

and bow your head freely beneath the yoke which they find as difficult to 

dispense with as to bear. By the steadfast courage with which you disdain 

their good fortune, you will show them that it is not through cowardice that 

you consent to share their sufferings. Think of them as they ought to be, 

when called upon to influence them; think of them as they are, when 

tempted to act on their behalf. In seeking their approval appeal to what is 

best in them, but in devising their happiness recall them as they are at their 

worst; then your own nobility will awaken theirs, and their unworthiness not 

defeat your purpose. The seriousness of your principles will frighten them 

away, but in the play of your semblance they will be prepared to tolerate 

them; for their taste is purer than their heart, and it is here that you must lay 

hold of the timorous fugitive. In vain will you assail their precepts, in vain 

condemn their practice; but on their leisure hours you can try your shaping 

hand. Banish from their pleasures caprice, frivolity, and coarseness, and 

imperceptibly you will banish these from their actions and, eventually, from 

their inclinations too. Surround them, wherever you meet them, with the 

great and noble forms of genius, and encompass them about with the symbols 

of perfection, until Semblance conquer Reality, and Art triumph over 

Nature. 

1795

493 

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT 

1759 –1797 

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote one of the first treatises of modern feminism. A Vindication 

of the Rights of Woman (1792) inserts an analysis of the relations between the 

sexes into a wholesale revolutionary attack on hereditary privilege of all sorts— 

birth, wealth, rank, and gender. Of course, not every revolutionary theorist in the 

1790s would include male privilege on such a list: the French National Assembly’s 

Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 said nothing about the rights of women. 

Yet Wollstonecraft’s argument for rational education for both sexes was based on 

the promise of freedom enthusiastically greeted by many En glish writers in the 

early days of the French Revolution. 

Wollstonecraft had previously written A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), 

one of the first polemical responses to edmund burke’s conservative Reflections 

on the Revolution in France (1790). Months before Thomas Paine’s perhaps betterknown 

Rights of Man (1791– 92), Wollstonecraft composed the first Vindication at 

white heat; it was printed anonymously. For Wollstonecraft, Burke’s defense of 

the charms of existing arrangements was of a piece with the implicit gendering of 

his earlier aesthetic distinction between the beautiful and the sublime in his 

Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 

(1757; see above). Beauty was a property of weaker entities than man; sublimity, 

of stronger. Women’s beauty was thus synonymous with women’s inferiority. In 

both her Vindications, Wollstonecraft skillfully demystifies all arguments designed 

to justify in e qual ity on the basis of existing arrangements, customs, or feelings 

alone. 

As the second- born and first daughter of six children, she experienced firsthand 

the preference accorded men in both property and dignity. Her older brother was the 

only grandchild to inherit part of his grandfather’s fortune (made in the silk industry), 

much of which was consumed by Mary’s father as he attempted to lead the life 

of a gentleman farmer. As his finances worsened, he appropriated money that had 

been set aside for the other children and seems to have become increasingly brutal. 

At age nineteen Mary decided to strike out on her own. 

In addition to trying her hand at several of the positions open to middleclass 

women without resources (lady’s companion, governess, seamstress), Wollstonecraft 

opened a school at Newington Green with her two younger sisters and a dear 

friend, Fanny Blood. Although Mary’s formal education had ended when she was 

fifteen, she was an avid reader and later taught herself French, German, Dutch, 

and Italian. The school failed, but the experience gave rise to Wollstonecraft’s first 

publication, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786), and to an acquaintance 

with antiestablishment thinkers, especially the Dissenter Dr. Richard Price (whose 

sermon on the anniversary of En gland’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 was soon to 

provoke Burke’s Reflections). 

While working as a governess for the Kingsborough family in Ireland, Wollstonecraft 

wrote her first novel—Mary, A Fiction (1788); when dismissed by the Kingsboroughs 

(for reasons that are unclear), she returned to London, where her 

sympathetic publisher, Joseph Johnson, put her to work doing translations and 

reviews for his new Analytical Review. Around his table gathered some of the most 

interesting intellectuals of the day, including the radical thinker Thomas Paine, the 

paint er Henry Fuseli, the po liti cal phi los o pher and novelist William Godwin, and 

the poet William Blake. 

When the Bastille prison was stormed by a Paris mob in 1789, inaugurating the 

French Revolution, En glish radicals looked to France with great enthusiasm. As

494 / MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT 

william wordsworth would later put it in his poem “French Revolution” (1809), 

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive[.] . . . What temper at the prospect did not wake 

/ To happiness unthought of?” (also included in The Prelude [1805] 10.692– 707). It 

was in this climate that Mary Wollstonecraft composed her Vindications. To the 

promise of liberty and equality for all men, Wollstonecraft added the simple but 

radical idea that women, too, had a right to develop their faculties freely, that the 

laws subjecting them to fathers or husbands could be changed, and that their 

existing defects (and indeed their charms) were largely a result of social conditioning, 

and could be modified. By comparing women to military men— both are fond 

of dress, trained in obedience, and not expected to think for themselves— she 

implies that education and socialization account for more differences than does 

gender alone. 

At the time of writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft was 

just beginning to experience the additional complications that a life of passion 

could create for an in de pen dent woman attempting to live by her reason. She fell in 

love with Henry Fuseli and horrified his wife by suggesting that the three of them 

might live together. Soon thereafter, she went to Paris alone. 

Once in France, she wrote about the French Revolution (her Historical and Moral 

View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, and the Effect It Has Produced 

in Eu rope was published in 1794), observed the Reign of Terror with increasing 

recoil, and fell in love with a dashing American, Gilbert Imlay, who, when British 

citizens were being rounded up, registered her as his wife for her protection. She 

conceived a child with him, whom she named Fanny, after Fanny Blood. Though the 

birth was without complications, Wollstonecraft’s life was not. Gilbert was often 

absent on “business,” and on two occasions when Wollstonecraft was to join him in 

London, she discovered evidence of his infidelities. She twice attempted suicide; 

between attempts, she offered to journey to Scandinavia to investigate some business 

dealings for Imlay, and, traveling with a toddler and an attendant, wrote letters 

detailing her travels (later published as Letters Written during a Short Residence in 

Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, 1796). But the relationship with Imlay was over. As 

virginia woolf memorably surmised in her 1929 short essay on Wollstonecraft 

(reprinted in The Second Common Reader): “Tickling minnows he had hooked a 

dolphin, and the creature rushed him through the waters till he was dizzy and only 

wanted to escape.” 

Wollstonecraft reentered the circle of intellectuals around Joseph Johnson, and 

this time she found a great deal to discuss with the forty- year- old William Godwin, 

who was now at the peak of his career (having published Po liti cal Justice in 1793 

and the novel Caleb Williams in 1794). Soon “it was friendship melting into love,” 

as Godwin later described it. Both of them were opposed to marriage on principle— 

he felt that all formal commitments violate the feelings that inspire them, and she 

felt that marriage laws disadvantage women. Nevertheless, when Mary found herself 

pregnant again, they married at the beginning of 1797 so that the child would 

be legitimate. Ironically, many “respectable” acquaintances who had wanted to 

believe that Mary was married to Imlay broke off relations when this gesture of 

propriety revealed the earlier illegitimacy. 

The author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was happily working on a novel 

titled Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (the play— and lack of symmetry— between 

universal “rights” and gender- specific “wrongs” sums up the differences between 

Wollstonecraft’s treatises and her novels) while she awaited the birth of “William.” 

But she and Godwin had little chance to test their marital experiment. On September 

10, 1797, she died of an infection contracted during unsuccessful attempts to 

remove her broken and unexpelled placenta, eleven days after giving birth to a 

daughter— the future Mary Shelley, author of a Gothic novel of education (Frankenstein) 

and wife of a passionate disciple of both Godwin and Wollstonecraft, percy 

bysshe shelley.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT / 495 

Unlike other middleclass women, whose husbands, fathers, wealth, or connections 

veiled their legal powerlessness, Mary Wollstonecraft clearly saw the damage 

caused by sexual in e qual ity. She was socialized for but she never experienced a life 

of respectable de pen den cy. The first readers of A Vindication of the Rights of 

Woman applauded her apparent commitment to bourgeois respectability, but when 

Godwin published in his Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft (1798) a frank account of 

her subsequent sexual life, the increasingly conservative public reacted to her lack 

of deference (for which modern feminists applaud her) with horror. Her freedom 

and in de pen dence were seen as proof of licentiousness and immorality. 

Mary Wollstonecraft was a cultural and not a literary critic, but as an acute 

reader of the contradictions inherent in the literary tradition she is a forerunner of 

“ideological” reading. Literature was central to her work in several fundamental 

ways. In her novels, she plumbs the conflicts between reason and emotion (“sensibility”), 

or within reason itself, neither of which are dealt with in her treatises. In 

her reply to Burke, she does not separate his aesthetic from his po liti cal theory. And 

she finds at the heart of the literary canon the same sexual in e qual ity and incoherence 

she is arguing against in society at large. 

In the extract printed below, for example, Wollstonecraft begins by pointing out 

two incompatible moments in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Adam’s plea to God for an equal 

and Eve’s birth as an unequal. How are these to be reconciled? If God exists, she 

argues, and if humans are all characterized by their capacity for immortality, then 

one God fits all, and virtue must be the same in kind, if not in degree, for both sexes. 

The obedience and secondariness expected of women (“He for God only, she for God 

in him,” as Milton put it) make a mockery of true companionship, giving women 

access only to a reflection of the light of reason that they should seek for themselves. 

In good Enlightenment fashion, Wollstonecraft comes close to taking the Serpent’s 

role, arguing Eve out of blind obedience and into in de pen dent thinking. 

Wollstonecraft is particularly concerned with the education of women, entering 

a larger discussion concerning education in general during the period. Jean- Jacques 

Rousseau’s Emile (1762) had argued that men should have less rather than more 

education. Society needed to return to, preserve, and nurture man’s natural goodness. 

Wollstonecraft agreed with much that Rousseau wrote about fresh air, exercise, 

and natural reason, but she vigorously criticized his differentiation between 

the educations of Emile and of Sophie. While Emile was expected to develop all his 

faculties, Sophie was expected to develop only in such a way as to remain “pleasing” 

to men. Wollstonecraft was not alone in calling for change— she had reviewed with 

approval Catharine Macauley Graham’s Letters on Education (1790), and her treatise 

was dedicated to Charles- Maurice de Talleyrand- Périgord, who had promoted 

women’s education in a 1791 report to the French National Assembly— but her logic 

was particularly incisive. 

Today Wollstonecraft is celebrated for her early advocacy of women’s equality 

and rationality and for arguing against the degradation and subjugation of women 

justified by “the arbitrary power of beauty.” Her unblinking accounts of existing 

female defects in mind, body, and character— which sometimes sound misogynist 

themselves— were in the ser vice of the new forms of freedom and education sought 

by proponents of Enlightenment reason and revolutionary change. 

bibliography 

Mary Wollstonecraft has been well served by modern editors. Her complete works 

have been edited in seven volumes by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (1989), and A 

Vindication of the Rights of Woman is available in several accessible editions. Her 

two novels Mary and Maria (along with Matilda, an early novel by Mary Wollstonecraft 

Shelley, her daughter) have been published in a single volume edited by Janet 

Todd (1991). An excellent edition of the two Vindications, with helpful notes and


appendixes, has been prepared by D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (1997). Following 

the first modern scholarly biography, Ralph Wardle’s Mary Wollstonecraft 

(1951), numerous others have appeared; particularly noteworthy are Claire Tomalin’s 

Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974), Gary Kelly’s Revolutionary Feminism: 

The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (1992), Janet Todd’s Mary Wollstonecraft: 

A Revolutionary Life (2000), and Lyndall Gordon’s Vindication: A Life of Mary 

Wollstonecraft (2005). Many general studies of Wollstonecraft devote substantial 

space to the intertwining of her life and work: good basic introductions include 

Moira Ferguson and Janet Todd’s Mary Wollstonecraft (1984), Jennifer Lorch’s Mary 

Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Radical Feminist (1990), and Harriet Jump’s Mary 

Wollstonecraft: Writer (1994). For a good selection of essays, see Feminist Interpretations 

of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Maria Falco (1996), and The Cambridge Companion 

to Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Claudia L. Johnson (2002). To contextualize 

Wollstonecraft within the aesthetics and politics of her day, see Mary Poovey, The 

Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 

Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (1984); the debate about Enlightenment “reason” 

between Timothy Reiss and Frances Ferguson in Gender and Theory (ed. Linda 

Kauffman, 1989); Syndy Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensibility 

(1994); and Claudia Johnson’s discussion of politics, gender, and sentimentality in 

Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (1995). Susan 

Gubar’s examination of current feminist criticism, Critical Condition: Feminism at 

the Turn of the Century (2000), contains an analysis of Wollstonecraft’s own misogyny. 

Janet Todd’s Mary Wollstonecraft: An Annotated Bibliography (1976) is helpful 

for the period before the flowering of contemporary feminist criticism, but it needs 

updating. The Cambridge Companion contains a useful bibliography. 

From A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 

From Chapter II. 

The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed 

To account for, and excuse the tyranny of man, many ingenious arguments 

have been brought forward to prove, that the two sexes, in the acquirement 

of virtue, ought to aim at attaining a very different character: or, to speak 

explicitly, women are not allowed to have sufficient strength of mind to 

acquire what really deserves the name of virtue. Yet it should seem, allowing 

them to have souls, that there is but one way appointed by Providence 

to lead mankind to either virtue or happiness. 

If then women are not a swarm of ephemeron 1 triflers, why should they be 

kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? Men complain, 

and with reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex, when they do not 

keenly satirize our headstrong passions and groveling vices.— Behold, I 

should answer, the natural effect of ignorance! The mind will ever be unstable 

that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive 

fury when there are no barriers to break its force. Women are told from 

their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge 

of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward 

obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, 

will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, 

every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives. 

1. Short- lived (literally, living only one day).

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman / 497 

Thus Milton 2 describes our first frail mother; though when he tells us 

that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot 

comprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahometan 3 strain, he meant 

to deprive us of souls, and insinuate that we were beings only designed by 

sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the senses of 

man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation. 

How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to render ourselves 

gentle, domestic brutes! For instance, the winning softness so warmly, and 

frequently, recommended, that governs by obeying. What childish expressions, 

and how insignificant is the being— can it be an immortal one? who 

will condescend to govern by such sinister methods! “Certainly,” says Lord 

Bacon, “man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and if he be not of kin to 

God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature!” 4 Men, indeed, appear 

to me to act in a very unphilosophical manner when they try to secure the 

good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of 

childhood. Rousseau 5 was more consistent when he wished to stop the 

progress of reason in both sexes, for if men eat of the tree of knowledge, 

women will come in for a taste; 6 but, from the imperfect cultivation which 

their understandings now receive, they only attain a knowledge of evil. 

Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to 

men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness. For if it be allowed that 

women were destined by Providence to acquire human virtues, and by the 

exercise of their understandings, that stability of character which is the 

firmest ground to rest our future hopes upon, they must be permitted to 

turn to the fountain of light, and not forced to shape their course by the 

twinkling of a mere satellite. 7 Milton, I grant, was of a very different opinion; 

for he only bends to the indefeasible right of beauty, though it would be 

difficult to render two passages which I now mean to contrast, consistent. 

But into similar inconsistencies are great men often led by their senses. 

“To whom thus Eve with perfect beauty adorn’d. 

My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst 

Unargued I obey; so God ordains; 

God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more 

Is Woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise.” 8 

These are exactly the arguments that I have used to children; but I have 

added, your reason is now gaining strength, and, till it arrives at some degree 

of maturity, you must look up to me for advice— then you ought to think, 

and only rely on God. 

Yet in the following lines Milton seems to coincide with me; when he 

makes Adam thus expostulate with his Maker. 

2. John Milton (1608– 1674), En glish poet whose 

epic poem, Paradise Lost (1667), tells the biblical 

story of the fall of humankind; Wollstonecraft 

refers to book 4.298. 

3. Muslim. Islam was thought to deny that 

women have souls. 

4. Francis Bacon (1561– 1626), Essays or Counsels 

Civil and Moral (1625), Essay 16, “Of Atheism” 

[D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf’s note]. 

5. Jean- Jacques Rousseau (1712– 1778), Swissborn 

French po liti cal phi los o pher; author of 

Emile, or, On Education (1762). All references to 

Rousseau in this selection are to book 5 of Emile, 

unless otherwise specified. 

6. See Genesis 2– 3. The story of “man’s first disobedience” 

(1.1) in eating this fruit forms the 

center of Milton’s Paradise Lost. 

7. That is, women should turn to the sun, not the 

moon. 

8. Milton, Paradise Lost 4.634– 38 (Wollstonecraft’s 

italics).


“Hast thou not made me here thy substitute, 

And these inferior far beneath me set? 

Among unequals what society 

Can sort, what harmony or true delight? 

Which must be mutual, in proportion due 

Giv’n and receiv’d; but in disparity 

The one intense, the other still remiss 

Cannot well suit with either, but soon prove 

Tedious alike: of fellowship I speak 

Such as I seek, fit to participate 

All rational delight—” 9 

In treating, therefore, of the manners of women, let us, disregarding sensual 

arguments, trace what we should endeavour to make them in order to 

co- operate, if the expression be not too bold, with the supreme Being. 

By individual education, I mean, for the sense of the word is not precisely 

defined, such an attention to a child as will slowly sharpen the senses, form 

the temper, regulate the passions as they begin to ferment, and set the 

understanding to work before the body arrives at maturity; so that the man 

may only have to proceed, not to begin, the important task of learning to 

think and reason. 

To prevent any misconstruction, I must add, that I do not believe that a 

private education can work the wonders which some sanguine writers have 

attributed to it. Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the 

opinions and manners of the society they live in. In every age there has been 

a stream of pop u lar opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family 

character, as it were, to the century. It may then fairly be inferred, that, till 

society be differently constituted, much cannot be expected from education. 

It is, however, sufficient for my present purpose to assert, that, what ever 

effect circumstances have on the abilities, every being may become virtuous 

by the exercise of its own reason; for if but one being was created with 

vicious inclinations, that is positively bad, what can save us from atheism? or 

if we worship a God, is not that God a dev il? 

Consequently, the most perfect education, in my opinion, is such an exercise 

of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and 

form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such 

habits of virtue as will render it in de pen dent. In fact, it is a farce to call any 

being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason. 

This was Rousseau’s opinion respecting men: 1 I extend it to women, and 

confidently assert that they have been drawn out of their sphere by false 

refinement, and not by an endeavour to acquire masculine qualities. Still 

the regal homage which they receive is so intoxicating, that till the manners 

of the times are changed, and formed on more reasonable principles, it may 

be impossible to convince them that the illegitimate power, which they 

obtain, by degrading themselves, is a curse, and that they must return to 

nature and equality, if they wish to secure the placid satisfaction that unsophisticated 

affections impart. But for this epoch we must wait— wait, perhaps, 

till kings and nobles, enlightened by reason, and, preferring the real 

9. Paradise Lost 8.381– 91 (Wollstonecraft’s italics). 

“Participate”: partake of. 

1. Expressed early in Emile.


dignity of man to childish state, throw off their gaudy hereditary trappings: 

and if then women do not resign the arbitrary power of beauty— they will 

prove that they have less mind than man. 

I may be accused of arrogance; still I must declare what I firmly believe, 

that all the writers who have written on the subject of female education and 

manners from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory, 2 have contributed to render women 

more artificial, weak characters, than they would otherwise have been; and, 

consequently, more useless members of society. I might have expressed this 

conviction in a lower key; but I am afraid it would have been the whine of 

affection, and not the faithful expression of my feelings, of the clear result, 

which experience and reflection have led me to draw. When I come to that 

division of the subject, I shall advert to the passages that I more particularly 

disapprove of, in the works of the authors I have just alluded to; but it is first 

necessary to observe, that my objection extends to the whole purport of those 

books, which tend, in my opinion, to degrade one half of the human species, 

and render women pleasing at the expence of every solid virtue. 

Though, to reason on Rousseau’s ground, if man did attain a degree of 

perfection of mind when his body arrived at maturity, it might be proper, in 

order to make a man and his wife one, that she should rely entirely on his 

understanding; and the graceful ivy, clasping the oak that supported it, 

would form a whole in which strength and beauty would be equally conspicuous. 

But, alas! husbands, as well as their helpmates, are often only overgrown 

children; nay, thanks to early debauchery, scarcely men in their outward 

form— and if the blind lead the blind, one need not come from heaven 3 to tell 

us the consequence. 

Many are the causes that, in the present corrupt state of society, contribute 

to enslave women by cramping their understandings and sharpening their 

senses. One, perhaps, that silently does more mischief than all the rest, is 

their disregard of order. 

To do every thing in an orderly manner, is a most important precept, 

which women, who, generally speaking, receive only a disorderly kind of 

education, seldom attend to with that degree of exactness that men, who 

from their infancy are broken into method, observe. This negligent kind of 

guess- work, for what other epithet can be used to point out the random 

exertions of a sort of instinctive common sense, never brought to the test of 

reason? prevents their generalizing matters of fact— so they do today, what 

they did yesterday, merely because they did it yesterday. 

This contempt of the understanding in early life has more baneful consequences 

than is commonly supposed; for the little knowledge which women 

of strong minds attain, is, from various circumstances, of a more desultory 

kind than the knowledge of men, and it is acquired more by sheer observations 

on real life, than from comparing what has been individually observed 

with the results of experience generalized by speculation. Led by their dependent 

situation and domestic employments more into society, what they learn 

is rather by snatches; and as learning is with them, in general, only a secondary 

thing, they do not pursue any one branch with that persevering ardour 

2. John Gregory (1724– 1773), A Father’s Legacy 

to His Daughters (1774). Wollstonecraft included 

substantial excerpts from Gregory in The Female 

Reader ([compiled in] 1789) [Macdonald and 

Scherf’s note]. 

3. That is, be Jesus; in Matthew 15.14 he declares 

that “if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall 

into the ditch.”


necessary to give vigour to the faculties, and clearness to the judgment. In 

the present state of society, a little learning is required to support the character 

of a gentleman; and boys are obliged to submit to a few years of discipline. 

But in the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is 

always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment; 

even while enervated by confinement and false notions of modesty, the body 

is prevented from attaining that grace and beauty which relaxed half- formed 

limbs never exhibit. Besides, in youth their faculties are not brought forward 

by emulation; and having no serious scientific study, if they have natural 

sagacity it is turned too soon on life and manners. They dwell on effects, and 

modifications, without tracing them back to causes; and complicated rules to 

adjust behaviour are a weak substitute for simple principles. 

As a proof that education gives this appearance of weakness to females, 

we may instance the example of military men, who are, like them, sent into 

the world before their minds have been stored with knowledge or fortified 

by principles. The consequences are similar; soldiers acquire a little superficial 

knowledge, snatched from the muddy current of conversation, and, 

from continually mixing with society, they gain, what is termed a knowledge 

of the world; and this acquaintance with manners and customs has 

frequently been confounded with a knowledge of the human heart. But can 

the crude fruit of casual observation, never brought to the test of judgment, 

formed by comparing speculation and experience, deserve such a distinction? 

Soldiers, as well as women, practise the minor virtues with punctilious 

politeness. Where is then the sexual difference, when the education 

has been the same? All the difference that I can discern, arises from the 

superior advantage of liberty, which enables the former to see more of life. 

It is wandering from my present subject, perhaps, to make a po liti cal 

remark; but, as it was produced naturally by the train of my reflections, I 

shall not pass it silently over. 

Standing armies can never consist of resolute, robust men; they may be 

well disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men under the 

influence of strong passions, or with very vigorous faculties. And as for any 

depth of understanding, I will venture to affirm, that it is as rarely to be 

found in the army as amongst women; and the cause, I maintain, is the same. 

It may be further observed, that officers are also particularly attentive to 

their persons, fond of dancing, crowded rooms, adventures, and ridicule. 4 

Like the fair sex, the business of their lives is gallantry.— They were taught 

to please, and they only live to please. Yet they do not lose their rank in the 

distinction of sexes, for they are still reckoned superior to women, though 

in what their superiority consists, beyond what I have just mentioned, it is 

difficult to discover. 

The great misfortune is this, that they both acquire manners before morals, 

and a knowledge of life before they have, from reflection, any acquaintance 

with the grand ideal outline of human nature. The consequence is 

natural; satisfied with common nature, they become a prey to prejudices, 

and taking all their opinions on credit, they blindly submit to authority. So 

4. Why should women be censured with petulant 

acrimony, because they seem to have a passion 

for a scarlet coat? Has not education placed them 

more on a level with soldiers than any other class 

of men? [Wollestonecraft’s note]. “Ridicule”: that 

which is ridiculous.


that, if they have any sense, it is a kind of instinctive glance, that catches 

proportions, and decides with respect to manners; but fails when arguments 

are to be pursued below the surface, or opinions analyzed. 

May not the same remark be applied to women? Nay, the argument may 

be carried still further, for they are both thrown out of a useful station by 

the unnatural distinctions established in civilized life. Riches and hereditary 

honours have made cyphers of women to give consequence to the 

numerical figure; 5 and idleness has produced a mixture of gallantry and 

despotism into society, which leads the very men who are the slaves of their 

mistresses to tyrannize over their sisters, wives, and daughters. This is only 

keeping them in rank and file, it is true. Strengthen the female mind by 

enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but, as blind obedience 

is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right 

when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only 

want slaves, and the latter a plaything. The sensualist, indeed, has been 

the most dangerous of tyrants, and women have been duped by their lovers, 

as princes by their ministers, whilst dreaming that they reigned over them. 

I now principally allude to Rousseau, for his character of Sophia is, 

undoubtedly, a captivating one, though it appears to me grossly unnatural; 

however it is not the superstructure, but the foundation of her character, 

the principles on which her education was built, that I mean to attack; nay, 

warmly as I admire the genius of that able writer, whose opinions I shall 

often have occasion to cite, indignation always takes place of admiration, 

and the rigid frown of insulted virtue effaces the smile of complacency, 

which his eloquent periods 6 are wont to raise, when I read his voluptuous 

reveries. Is this the man, who, in his ardour for virtue, would banish all the 

soft arts of peace, and almost carry us back to Spartan discipline? Is this 

the man who delights to paint the useful struggles of passion, the triumphs 

of good dispositions, and the heroic flights which carry the glowing soul out 

of itself?— How are these mighty sentiments lowered when he describes the 

pretty foot and enticing airs of his little favourite! But, for the present, I 

wave 7 the subject, and, instead of severely reprehending the transient effusions 

of overweening sensibility, I shall only observe, that whoever has cast 

a benevolent eye on society, must often have been gratified by the sight of 

humble mutual love, not dignified by sentiment, or strengthened by a union 

in intellectual pursuits. The domestic trifles of the day have afforded matters 

for cheerful converse, and innocent caresses have softened toils which 

did not require great exercise of mind or stretch of thought: yet, had not the 

sight of this moderate felicity excited more tenderness than respect? An 

emotion similar to what we feel when children are playing, or animals 

sporting, 8 whilst the contemplation of the noble struggles of suffering merit 

5. That is, women are merely zeroes (“ciphers”) to 

add to the family name, inflating its value but 

being nothing in themselves. 

6. Sentences. 

7. Waive. 

8. Similar feelings has Milton’s pleasing picture 

of paradisiacal happiness ever raised in my mind; 

yet, instead of envying the lovely pair, I have, 

with conscious dignity, or Satanic pride, turned 

to hell for sublimer objects. In the same style, 

when viewing some noble monument of human 

art, I have traced the emanation of the Deity in 

the order I admired, till, descending from that 

giddy height, I have caught myself contemplating 

the grandest of all human sights;— for fancy 

quickly placed, in some solitary recess, an outcast 

of fortune, rising superior to passion and 

discontent [Wollestonecraft’s note].


has raised admiration, and carried our thoughts to that world where sensation 

will give place to reason. 

Women are, therefore, to be considered either as moral beings, or so 

weak that they must be entirely subjected to the superior faculties of men. 

Let us examine this question. Rousseau declares that a woman should 

never, for a moment, feel herself in de pen dent, that she should be governed 

by fear to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquetish slave in order 

to render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, 

whenever he chooses to relax himself. He carries the arguments, which he 

pretends to draw from the indications of nature, still further, and insinuates 

that truth and fortitude, the corner stones of all human virtue, should 

be cultivated with certain restrictions, because, with respect to the female 

character, obedience is the grand lesson which ought to be impressed with 

unrelenting rigour. 

What nonsense! when will a great man arise with sufficient strength of 

mind to puff away the fumes which pride and sensuality have thus spread 

over the subject! If women are by nature inferior to men, their virtues must 

be the same in quality, if not in degree, or virtue is a relative idea; consequently, 

their conduct should be founded on the same principles, and have 

the same aim. 9 

Connected with man as daughters, wives, and mothers, their moral character 

may be estimated by their manner of fulfilling those simple duties; but 

the end, the grand end of their exertions should be to unfold their own faculties 

and acquire the dignity of conscious virtue. They may try to render their 

road pleasant; but ought never to forget, in common with man, that life 

yields not the felicity which can satisfy an immortal soul. I do not mean to 

insinuate, that either sex should be so lost in abstract reflections or distant 

views, as to forget the affections and duties that lie before them, and are, in 

truth, the means appointed to produce the fruit of life; on the contrary, I 

would warmly recommend them, even while I assert, that they afford most 

satisfaction when they are considered in their true, sober light. 

Probably the prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man, may 

have taken its rise from Moses’s poetical story; 1 yet, as very few, it is presumed, 

who have bestowed any serious thought on the subject, ever supposed 

that Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam’s ribs, the deduction 

must be allowed to fall to the ground; or, only be so far admitted as it proves 

that man, from the remotest antiquity, found it con ve nient to exert his 

strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to shew that she 

ought to have her neck bent under the yoke, because the whole creation 

was only created for his con ve nience or plea sure. 

Let it not be concluded that I wish to invert the order of things; I have 

already granted, that, from the constitution of their bodies, men seem to be 

designed by Providence to attain a greater degree of virtue. I speak collectively 

of the whole sex; but I see not the shadow of a reason to conclude that 

their virtues should differ in respect to their nature. In fact, how can they, 

if virtue has only one eternal standard? I must therefore, if I reason conse- 

9. Rousseau argues that men’s and women’s virtues 

are essentially different [Macdonald and 

Scherf’s note]. 

1. Moses was traditionally credited with writing 

the first 5 books of the Bible; see Genesis 

2.18–25.


quentially, as strenuously maintain that they have the same simple direction, 

as that there is a God. 

It follows then that cunning should not be opposed to wisdom, little 

cares to great exertions, or insipid softness, varnished over with the name 

of gentleness, to that fortitude which grand views alone can inspire. 

I shall be told that woman would then lose many of her peculiar graces, 

and the opinion of a well known poet might be quoted to refute my unqualified 

assertion. For Pope has said, in the name of the whole male sex, 

“Yet ne’er so sure our passion to create, 

As when she touch’d the brink of all we hate.” 2 

In what light this sally places men and women, I shall leave to the judicious 

to determine; meanwhile I shall content myself with observing, that I 

cannot discover why, unless they are mortal, 3 females should always be 

degraded by being made subservient to love or lust. 

To speak disrespectfully of love is, I know, high treason against sentiment 

and fine feelings; but I wish to speak the simple language of truth, and 

rather to address the head than the heart. To endeavour to reason love out of 

the world, would be to out Quixote 4 Cervantes, and equally offend against 

common sense; but an endeavour to restrain this tumultuous passion, and to 

prove that it should not be allowed to dethrone superior powers, or to usurp 

the sceptre which the understanding should ever coolly wield, appears less 

wild. 

Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of thoughtless 

enjoyment provision should be made for the more important years of life, 

when reflection takes place of sensation. But Rousseau, and most of the male 

writers who have followed his steps, have warmly inculcated that the whole 

tendency of female education ought to be directed to one point:— to render 

them pleasing. 

Let me reason with the supporters of this opinion who have any knowledge 

of human nature, do they imagine that marriage can eradicate the 

habitude of life? The woman who has only been taught to please will soon 

find that her charms are oblique sunbeams, and that they cannot have 

much effect on her husband’s heart when they are seen every day, when the 

summer is passed and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to 

look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? or, is it 

not more rational to expect that she will try to please other men; and, in the 

emotions raised by the expectation of new conquests, endeavour to forget 

the mortification her love or pride has received? When the husband ceases 

to be a lover— and the time will inevitably come, her desire of pleasing will 

then grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps, the 

most evanescent of all passions, gives place to jealousy or vanity. 

I now speak of women who are restrained by principle or prejudice; such 

women, though they would shrink from an intrigue with real abhorrence, 

yet, nevertheless, wish to be convinced by the homage of gallantry that they 

2. alexander pope (1688– 1744), “Epistle II, To 

a Lady: Of the Characters of Women” (1735), 

51– 52. 

3. That is, unless they are not as capable as men 

of immortal life. 

4. That is, to be more foolishly impractical than 

Don Quixote, the overly idealistic title character 

of the novel (1605, 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes 

(1547– 1616).

504 / GERMAINE NECKER DE STAËL 

are cruelly neglected by their husbands; or, days and weeks are spent in 

dreaming of the happiness enjoyed by congenial souls till their health is 

undermined and their spirits broken by discontent. How then can the great 

art of pleasing be such a necessary study? it is only useful to a mistress; the 

chaste wife, and serious mother, should only consider her power to please 

as the polish of her virtues, and the affection of her husband as one of the 

comforts that render her task less difficult and her life happier.— But, 

whether she be loved or neglected, her first wish should be to make herself 

respectable, and not to rely for all her happiness on a being subject to like 

infirmities with herself. 

* * * 

1792 

GERMAINE NECKER DE STAËL 

1766 –1817 

Mme de Staël is one of the few women writers without whom the history of French 

literature cannot be told. Bridging the gap between the old regime and the Revolution, 

between national and comparative literatures, and between classical aesthetics 

and littérature engagée, her writings were an advance justification of both 

Romanticism and realism in France. Celebrated for her conversation, condemned 

for her sexuality, and alternately lauded and vilified for her politics, she embodied 

the kind of freedom that revolutionary theorists seldom imagined for women. She 

was a child of the Enlightenment and never abandoned the principles of selfrealization 

it entailed. “The only reason to fear women’s wit,” she wrote in 1800, 

“would be some sort of scrupulous anxiety about their happiness. And indeed, by 

developing their rational minds one might well be enlightening them as to the misfortunes 

often connected with their fate; but the same reasoning would apply to the 

effect of the enlightenment on the happiness of the human race in general, a question 

which seems to me to have been decided once and for all.” 

Germaine de Staël was born in Paris to Swiss Protestant parents. Her father, 

Jacques Necker, had amassed a fortune in banking, thanks to French laws that 

prevented most Catholics from lending money at high interest. Her mother, Suzanne 

(née Curchod), maintained a celebrated salon. Germaine seems not to have inherited 

her mother’s great beauty, but her childhood was spent in the company of 

famous Enlightenment figures such as Edward Gibbon, chronicler of the fall of the 

Roman Empire and former suitor of Suzanne Curchod; Denis Diderot and Jean 

d’Alembert, authors of the Encyclopédie; and many others. Her father, appointed to 

act as Louis XVI’s finance minister in 1777, was lionized by both the king, whose 

trea sury he restored, and the people, whom he fed. Indeed, it was his dismissal by 

the king in 1789 that led to the storming of the Bastille. 

At age nineteen, Germaine Necker was one of the wealthiest heiresses in Eu rope. 

Her parents, seeking a son- in- law who was not Catholic, briefly considered William 

Pitt the Younger, but she was unwilling to move to En gland. In 1786 she settled on 

a young Swedish suitor very much in favor with the French and the Swedish courts.

GERMAINE NECKER DE STAËL / 505 

Erik Magnus de Staël- Holstein, a penniless nobleman, had had his eye on Germaine’s 

fortune since she was twelve. King Gustavus III made him Swedish ambassador 

to France for life (in a complicated bargain in which France gave Sweden the 

Ca rib be an Island of St. Barthélémy), and Germaine was assured she would never 

have to live in Sweden. 

Germaine de Staël supplemented this marriage of con ve nience through passionate 

involvements with some of the most interesting men of the century. Her lovers 

were numerous; among the best known were Charles- Maurice de Talleyrand, then 

bishop of Autun; Count Louis de Narbonne, whose ambivalence during the early 

revolutionary period led him to support both Lafayette and the royal family; Benjamin 

Constant, whose brilliant conversation matched her own and who fictionalized 

their affair in his novel Adolphe (1816); and Adolphe Ribbing, who masterminded 

the assassination of the same Swedish king who had brought about her marriage. 

August Wilhelm von Schlegel was central to her intellectual life and preceptor to 

her children (she gave birth to five, and only the first— who died in infancy— was 

conceived within marriage). Her last love was a younger man and a commoner, John 

Rocca, with whom at forty- five she bore a mentally disabled son and whom she 

secretly married before she died (Erik having died in 1802). On reading Mme de 

Staël’s first novel, Delphine (1802), and recognizing the autobiographical elements 

in it, Talleyrand quipped: “Mme de Staël has disguised both herself and me as 

women in her novel.” De Staël’s mother, influenced by Jean- Jacques Rousseau’s 

theories of education in his Emile (1762) but switching the gender roles presented 

in that work, had brought her daughter up with the in de pen dence of an Emile, not 

the compliance of a Sophie. 

Although she wanted nothing more than to live in Paris, Mme de Staël spent 

most of her adult life elsewhere— not just in France but also in En gland, Germany, 

Italy, Sweden, Rus sia, Austria, and, most important, Switzerland, where her parents, 

in and out of favor in France, had bought the château of Coppet in 1784. Her 

exile by Napoleon in 1803 to “forty leagues from Paris” was only the most official of 

her banishments by po liti cal forces on the left and on the right. Her defense of a 

constitutional monarchy was too royalist for the revolutionary Jacobins, and her 

defense of a republic was too revolutionary for the aristocratic émigrés. A moderate 

in favor of both liberty and property, she offended everyone. The authors of the 

French constitution frequented her Paris salon, but she wrote in defense of Queen 

Marie Antoinette. Napoleon, neither constitutional nor republican, was a worthy 

opponent for fourteen years. He not only exiled her from Paris but also planted 

spies in her entourage, had her correspondence read, took offense at all her writings, 

and stopped publication of her On Germany in 1810. Yet her opposition to 

Napoleon did not prevent a certain identification: in his final days, she informed 

him of a plot on his life. In 1815, when Napoleon was at last defeated, she hoped for 

a constitutional monarchy but rallied to the support of the restoration of Louis 

XVIII; she was reimbursed, in the pro cess, for the two million francs her father had 

lent the royal trea sury. 

Wherever she lived, Mme de Staël configured a brilliant salon around her. Her 

passion for intellectual conversation both seduced and exhausted her guests, whom 

she received, in the manner of the old regime, from the moment she awoke to the 

moment she retired (a day whose length grew as her insomnia worsened). Conversations 

within the “Groupe de Coppet” (Coppet Group) revolved around liberal opposition 

to Napoleon and around Romantic ideals of literature and human progress. 

Leading figures such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, 

Lord Byron, Simonde de Sismondi, and Juliette Récamier fueled Mme de Staël’s 

changing sense of the possibilities. Her château at Coppet has remained a gathering 

place for scholars and writers; colloquia on her work regularly take place there, 

where she was laid to rest next to her parents.


De Staël’s early “Essay on Fictions,” published in 1795 (our first selection), makes 

the case, in her characteristic epigrammatic style, for what was eventually to 

become the nineteenthcentury realist novel. Novels, she claims, should broaden 

their range to include every human predicament, not simply romantic love. Novels 

can give the creative intellect the space to explore every intractable problem facing 

postrevolutionary man and woman. Fictions in which “nothing is true and everything 

is likely” will challenge novel writers to represent what they take to be the 

real. Unlike philosophical allegories, which subordinate fiction to ideas, and historical 

fictions, which subordinate fiction to facts, the novel can re- create the world 

as it is and, in the pro cess, change it. Useless if merely accurate or merely imaginary, 

literature has the power to move, to awaken, to inform, to distract, and to 

console. Far from being outside of history, the novel can come to grips with everything 

that makes history. 

On Literature Considered in Its Relationship to Social Institutions (1800), from 

which our second selection is taken, is a fitting monument to the turn from the 

eigh teenth to the nineteenth century. Deeply connected to the fate of the French 

Revolution, which had just passed through the Reign of Terror (during which Mme 

de Staël lost many friends and was almost executed herself), On Literature describes 

history as an ongoing pro cess that, what ever its setbacks, ultimately heads toward 

human progress and perfectibility. As a domain in which the mind can stretch itself 

to the utmost, literature is an intimate part of the pro cess. When, in later conversation, 

Mme de Staël was introduced to Goethe’s views on art for art’s sake, she found 

this Weimar aesthetic contrary to all she hoped for from literature, but so dialectical 

was her mind that she loved to find an idea she could resist. As Goethe later 

reported, “My obstinate contrariness often drove her to despair, but it was then that 

she was at her most amiable and that she displayed her mental and verbal agility 

most brilliantly.” 

Romanticism in France is rooted in the writings of Rousseau, another Swiss, but 

by all accounts the decisive turn was taken when Mme de Staël introduced German 

Romanticism to the French. In her book On Germany (1810), she offered Eu rope 

and particularly France an alternative to the empire of Napoleon with his taste for 

classicism and absolutism. Her division between northern literature (melancholy, 

medieval, Christian, emotional, misty— Romantic) and southern literature (sunny, 

rational, sensual, pagan— classical) was both cosmopolitan and nationalist in an age 

when modern nationalism was just taking shape. All of the categories were problematic, 

but despite the rhetorical force of Mme de Staël’s oppositions, their thrust was 

less essential (“the German soul,” “the French mind”) than dialectical. Within the 

French tradition, the seeds of Romanticism already existed: all that was needed was 

to make them grow. And German thinkers would provide the nutrients. 

In addition to her theoretical and po liti cal writings, de Staël is famous for two 

novels—Delphine (1802) and Corinne, or Italy (1807). The latter paints a portrait of 

a celebrated, in de pen dent woman artist; her art is deepened by her love for an 

En glishman who, initially attracted by her talent, eventually abandons her for a less 

complex partner. Corinne, who is half En glish and half Italian, combines the 

genius of the Mediterranean with the sensitivity of the North in her poetry, but she 

suffers, in the end, from culture’s inability to incorporate superior and complex 

women. Mme de Staël had much to say about the plight of the woman intellectual, 

whether living in a monarchy or in a republic, a plight that is nowhere more 

cogently analyzed than in our selection from On Literature. The category of “exceptional 

woman,” a term invented by French culture both to counteract and to appropriate 

women like Mme de Staël, continued to function well into the twentieth 

century, as simone de beauvoir was to find out. By separating the exception from 

the condition of women in general, society recognizes and benefits from female talent 

without having to change its view— often shared by the exceptional woman 

herself— of women as such.

Essay on Fictions / 507 

bibliography 

In addition to the literary and cultural works mentioned above, Mme de Staël’s 

writings include many stories and plays, a tribute to Rousseau (Letters on Rousseau, 

1788), Reflections on the Trial of the Queen (1793), Reflections on Peace (1794), The 

Influence of the Passions (1796), Reflections on Suicide (1813), and “The Spirit of 

Translation” (1816). Posthumously published were the Considerations on the Principal 

Events of the French Revolution (1818), Ten Years of Exile (1820), the Complete 

Works (1820), and many volumes of correspondence, some of which is still being 

discovered. Mme de Staël’s work is not all easy to obtain in En glish translation. A 

wide range of selections can be found in Madame de Staël on Politics, Literature, 

and National Character, edited and translated by Monroe Berger (1964), and in An 

Extraordinary Woman, edited and translated by Vivian Folkenflik (1987). The biography 

by J. Christopher Herold, Mistress to an Age (1958; rpt. 2002), is, while somewhat 

dated, informative and well written. Maria Fairweather’s Madame de Staël 

(2005) is an equally wellresearched and more recent biography. 

In France there is a very active de Staël industry, which publishes a journal, 

Cahiers staëliens (Staël Notebooks), and holds many conferences. The most important 

figure in this enterprise is Simone Ballayé, whose work has not been much 

translated into En glish, but who has contributed an essay to the excellent anthology 

Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders, edited by Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger, 

and Karyna Szmurlo (1991). Madelyn Gutwirth’s own Madame de Staël, 

Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman (1978) is also good, especially in its 

account of the shift in de Staël studies opened up by feminist criticism. Two fine 

general studies of Mme de Staël’s life and works are Charlotte Hogsett, The Literary 

Existence of Germaine de Staël (1987), and Gretchen Rous Besser, Germaine de 

Staël Revisited (1994). For an analysis of the place of On Germany in the rise of 

Romanticism, see John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of Eu ro pe an Romanticism: Truth 

and Propaganda in Staël’s “De l’Allemagne,” 1810– 1813 (1994). And for a study of 

the complexity of gender roles and models in Rousseau and de Staël, see Lori Jo 

Marso’s excellent (Un)Manly Citizens (1999). There is an extensive annotated bibliography 

of criticism on de Staël in French by Pierre H. Dubé, Bibliographie de la 

Critique sur Madame de Staël, 1789– 1994 (1998). 

From Essay on Fictions 1 

Introduction 

Man’s most valuable faculty is his imagination. Human life seems so little 

designed for happiness that we need the help of a few creations, a few 

images, a lucky choice of memories to muster some sparse plea sure on this 

earth and struggle against the pain of all our destinies— not by philosophical 

force, but by the more efficient force of distraction. The dangers of 

imagination have been discussed a good deal, but there is no point in looking 

up what impotent mediocrity and strict reason have said on this topic 

over and over again. The human race is not about to give up being stimulated, 

and anyone who has the gift of appealing to people’s emotions is even 

less likely to give up the success promised by such talent. The number of 

necessary and evident truths is limited; it will never be enough for the 

human mind or heart. The highest honor may well go to those who discover 

1. Translated by Vivian Folkenflik.


such truths, but the authors of books producing sweet emotions or illusions 

have also done useful work for humanity. Metaphysical precision cannot be 

applied to man’s affections and remain compatible with his nature. Beginnings 

are all we have on this earth— there is no limit. Virtue is actual and 

real, but happiness floats in space; anyone who tries to examine happiness 

inappropriately will destroy it, as we dissolve the brilliant images of the mist 

if we walk straight through them. And yet the advantage of fictions is not the 

plea sure they bring. If fictions please nothing but the eye, they do nothing 

but amuse; but if they touch our hearts, they can have a great influence on 

all our moral ideas. This talent may be the most powerful way there is of 

controlling behavior and enlightening the mind. Man has only two distinct 

faculties: reason and imagination. All the others, even feeling, are simply 

results or combinations of these two. The realm of fiction, like that of imagination, 

is therefore vast. Fictions do not find obstacles in passions: they 

make use of them. Philosophy may be the invisible power in control of fictions, 

but if she is the first to show herself, she will destroy all their magic. 

When I talk about fictions, I will therefore be considering them from two 

perspectives of content and charm: this kind of writing may contain pleasure 

without useful purpose, but never vice versa. Fictions are meant to 

attract us; the more moral or philosophical the result one is trying to 

achieve, the more they have to be decked out with things to move us, leading 

us to the goal without advance warning. In mythological fictions I will 

consider only the poet’s talent; these fictions could well be examined in the 

light of their religious influence, but such a point of view is absolutely foreign 

to my subject. I will be discussing the writings of the ancients according 

to the impression they create in our times, so my concern must be with 

their literary talent rather than their religious beliefs. 

Fictions can be divided into three groups: (1) marvelous and allegorical 

fictions, (2) historical fictions, (3) fictions in which everything is both invented 

and imitated, where nothing is true and everything is likely. 2 

This topic should really be discussed in an extensive treatise including most 

existing literary works and involving thoughts on almost every topic, since 

the complete exposition of any one idea is connected to the whole chain of 

ideas. But I am only trying to prove that the most useful kind of fiction will 

be novels taking life as it is, with delicacy, eloquence, depth, and morality, 

and I have excluded everything irrelevant to that goal from this essay. 

III 

The third and last part of this essay must deal with the usefulness of natural 

fictions, as I call them, where everything is both invented and imitated, so 

that nothing is true but everything looks true to life. Tragedies with completely 

imaginary subjects will not be included here; they portray a more 

lofty nature, an extraordinary situation at an extraordinary level. The verisimilitude 

of such plays depends on events that are extremely rare, and morally 

applicable to very few people. Comedies and other dramas are in the 

theater what novels are to other fiction: their plots are taken from private 

life and natural circumstances. However, the conventions of the theater 

2. That is, realist novels, discussed under heading III.


deprive us of the commentary which gives examples of reflections their individuality. 

Dramas are allowed to choose their characters among people 

other than kings and heroes, but they can show only broadly defined situations, 

because there is no time for nuance. And life is not concentrated like 

that— does not happen in contrasts— is not really theatrical in the way plays 

have to be written. Dramatic art has different effects, advantages, and means 

which might well be discussed separately, but I think only the modern novel 

is capable of achieving the constant, accurate usefulness we can get from the 

picture of our ordinary, habitual feelings. People usually make a separate 

case of what they call philosophical novels; all novels should be philosophical, 

as they should all have a moral goal. Perhaps, however, we are not guided 

so inevitably toward this moral goal when all the episodes narrated are 

focused on one principal idea, exempting the author from all probability in 

the way one situation follows another. Each chapter then becomes a kind 

of allegory— its events are only there to illustrate the maxim at the end. The 

novels Candide, Zadig, and Memnon, 3 while delightful in other respects, 

would be much more useful if they were not marvelous, if they offered an 

example instead of an emblem and if, as I say, the whole story did not have to 

relate to the same goal. Such novels are at the same disadvantage as teachers: 

children never believe them, because they make everything that happens 

relate to the lesson at hand. Children unconsciously know already that there 

is less regularity than that in real life. Events are also invented in novels like 

Richardson’s and Fielding’s, 4 where the author is trying to keep close to life 

by following with great accuracy the stages, developments, and inconsistencies 

of human history, and the way the results of experience always come 

down to the morality of actions and the advantages of virtue, nonetheless. In 

these novels, however, the feelings are so natural that the reader often 

believes he is being spoken to directly, with no artifice but the tactfulness of 

changing the names. 

The art of novel- writing does not have the reputation it deserves because 

of a throng of bad writers overwhelming us with their colorless productions; 

in this genre, perfection may require the greatest genius, but mediocrity is 

well within everyone’s grasp. This infinite number of colorless novels has 

almost used up the passion portrayed in them; one is terrified of finding the 

slightest resemblance in one’s own life to the situations they describe. It has 

taken the very greatest masters to bring this genre back again, despite the 

writers who have degraded it. And others have dragged it even lower by 

including disgusting scenes of vice. Despite the fact that fiction’s main 

advantage is to gather around man everything in nature that might be useful 

to him as a lesson or model, some writers supposed we might have some 

kind of use for these detestable paintings of evil habits. As if such fictions 

could ever leave a heart that rejected them in the same state of purity as a 

heart that had never known them! The novel as we conceive of it, however— 

as we have a few examples of it— is one of the most beautiful creations of the 

human mind, and one of the most influential on individual morality, which 

is what ultimately determines the morality of the public. 

3. Tales by Voltaire: Zadig was published in 1747; 

Memnon in 1749, Candide in 1759 [translator’s 

note]. 

4. Samuel Richardson (1689– 1761) and Henry 

Fielding (1707– 1754), En glish novelists.


There is a very good reason why public opinion does not have enough 

respect for the writing of good novels, however. This is because novels are 

considered to be exclusively devoted to the portrayal of love— the most violent, 

universal, and true passion of them all, but also the passion which 

inspires no interest at any other time of life than youth, since youth is all it 

influences. We may well believe that all deep and tender feelings belong to 

the nature of love, and that hearts which have neither known nor pardoned 

love cannot feel enthusiasm in friendship, devotion in misery, worship of 

one’s parents, passion for one’s children. One can feel respect for one’s 

duties, but no delight or self- surrender in their accomplishment, if one has 

not loved with all the strength of one’s soul, ceasing to be one’s self to live 

entirely in another. The destiny of women and the happiness of men who are 

not called upon to govern empires often depend for the rest of their lives on 

the role they gave to the influence of love in their youth. Nevertheless, when 

people reach a certain age, they completely forget the impression love made 

on them. Their character changes; they devote themselves to other goals, 

other passions; and these new interests are what we should extend the subjects 

of novels to include. A new career would then be open to authors who 

have the talent to paint all the emotions of the human heart, and are able to 

use their intimate knowledge of it to involve us. Ambition, pride, greed, vanity 

could be the primary topic of novels which would have situations as varied 

as those arising from love, and fresher plots. Will people object that such 

a tableau of men’s passions exists in history, and that we should look for it 

there? History does not reach the lives of private men, feelings and characters 

that do not result in public events. History does not act on you with 

sustained moral interest. Reality often fails to make an effect; and the commentary 

needed to make a lasting impression would stop the essential quick 

narrative pace, and give dramatic form to a work that should have a very different 

sort of merit. And the moral of history can never be completely clear. 

This may be because one cannot always show with any degree of certainty 

the inner feelings that punish the wicked in their prosperity and reward the 

virtuous in their misery, or perhaps because man’s destiny is not completed 

in this life. Practical morality is founded on the advantages of virtue, but the 

reading of history does not always put it in the limelight. 

Great historians (especially Tacitus) 5 do try to attach some moral to every 

event they relate, making us envy the dying Germanicus, and hate Tiberius 

at the pinnacle of his grandeur. But they can still portray only those feelings 

certified by facts. What stays with us from a reading of history is more likely 

to be the influence of talent, the brilliance of glory, the advantages of power, 

than the quiet, subtle, gentle morality which is the basis of individual happiness 

and the relationship between individuals. Everyone would think me 

ridiculous if I said I set no value on history, and that I preferred fictions— as 

if fictions did not arise from experience, and as if the delicate nuances 

shown in novels did not come from the philosophical results and motherideas 

presented by the great panorama of public events! However, the morality 

of history only exists in bulk. History gives constant results by means of 

5. Roman historian (ca. 55– ca. 120 c.e.). In 

Annales 2, Tacitus recounts the strains between 

Tiberius (42 b.c.e.– 37 c.e.; emperor, 14 c.e.– 37 

c.e.) and his nephew Germanicus (15 b.c.e.– 19 

c.e.), whom he adopted but whose popularity he 

perceived as a threat; given command of the eastern 

provinces, Germanicus died (probably poisoned) 

in Syria.


the recurrence of a certain number of chances: its lessons apply to nations, 

not individuals. Its examples always fit nations, because if one considers 

them in a general way they are invariable; but it never explains the exceptions. 

These exceptions can seduce each man as an individual; the exceptional 

circumstances consecrated by history leave vast empty spaces into 

which the miseries and wrongs that make up most private destinies could 

easily fall. On the other hand, novels can paint characters and feeling with 

such force and detail that they make more of an impression of hatred for 

vice and love for virtue than any other kind of reading. The morality of novels 

belongs more to the development of the internal emotions of the soul 

than to the events they relate. We do not draw a useful lesson from what ever 

arbitrary circumstance the author invents as punishment for the crime; 

what leaves its indelible mark on us comes from the truthful rendition of the 

scenes, the gradual pro cess or sequence of wrongdoing, the enthusiasm for 

sacrifices, the sympathy for misfortune. Everything is so true to life in such 

novels that we have no trouble persuading ourselves that everything could 

happen just this way— not past history, but often, it seems, the history of the 

future. 

Novels give a false idea of mankind, it has been said. This is true of bad 

novels, as it is true of paintings which imitate nature badly. When novels are 

good, however, nothing gives such an intimate knowledge of the human 

heart as these portrayals of the various circumstances of private life and the 

impressions they inspire. Nothing gives so much play to reflection, which 

finds much more to discover in details than in generalities. Memoirs would 

be able to do this if their only subjects were not, as in history, famous men 

and public events. If most men had the wit and good faith to give a truthful, 

clear account of what they had experienced in the course of their lives, novels 

would be useless— but even these sincere narratives would not have all 

the advantages of novels. We would still have to add a kind of dramatic effect 

to the truth; not deforming it, but condensing it to set it off. This is the art 

of the paint er: far from distorting objects, it represents them in a way that 

makes them more immediately apprehended. Nature sometimes shows us 

things all on the same level, eliminating any contrasts; if we copy her too 

slavishly we become incapable of portraying her. The most truthful account 

is always an imitative truth: as a tableau, it demands a harmony of its own. 

However remarkable a true story may be for its nuances, feelings, and characters, 

it cannot interest us without the talent necessary for the composition 

of fiction. But despite our admiration for the genius that lets us penetrate 

the recesses of the human heart, it is impossible to bear all those minute 

details with which even the most famous novels are burdened. The author 

thinks they add to the picture’s verisimilitude, blind to the fact that anything 

that slows down the interest destroys the only truth fiction has: the impression 

it produces. To put everything that happens in a room onstage is to 

destroy theatrical illusion completely. Novels have dramatic conventions 

also: the only thing necessary in an invention is what adds to the effect one 

is creating. If a glance, a movement, or an unnoticed circumstance helps paint 

a character or develop our understanding of a feeling, the simpler the means, 

the greater the merit in catching it— but a scrupulously detailed account of 

an ordinary event diminishes verisimilitude instead of increasing it. Thrown 

back on a positive notion of what is true by the kind of details that belong


only to truth, you soon break out of the illusion, weary of being unable to 

find either the instruction of history or the interest of a novel. 

The greatest power of fiction is its talent to touch us; almost all moral 

truths can be made tangible if they are shown in action. Virtue has so much 

influence on human happiness or misery that one can make most of life’s 

situations depend on it. Some severe phi los o phers condemn all emotions, 

wanting moral authority to rule by a simple statement of moral duty. Nothing 

is less suited to human nature. Virtue must be brought to life if she is to fight 

the passions with any chance of winning; a sort of exaltation must be aroused 

for us to find any charm in sacrifice; misfortune must be embellished for us 

to prefer it to the great charm of guilty enticement; and the touching fictions 

which incite the soul to generous feelings make it unconsciously engage itself 

in a promise that it would be ashamed to retract in similar circumstances. 

But the more real power there is in fiction’s talent for touching us, the more 

important it becomes to widen its influence to the passions of all ages, and 

the duties of all situations. The primary subject of novels is love, and characters 

who have nothing to do with it are present only as accessories. It would 

be possible to find a host of new subjects if one followed a different plan. Tom 

Jones 6 has the most general moral of any novel: love appears in it as only one 

of many means of showing the philosophical result. The real aim of Tom 

Jones is to show the uncertainty of judgments founded on appearances, proving 

the superiority of natural and what we may call involuntary virtues over 

reputations based on mere respect for external etiquette. And this is one of 

the most useful, most deservedly famous of all novels. Caleb Williams, by Mr. 

Godwin, 7 is a recent novel which, despite some tedious passages and oversights, 

seems to give a good idea of this inexhaustible genre. Love plays no 

part in this fiction; the only motives for the action are the hero’s unbridled 

passion for the world’s respect and Caleb’s overpowering curiosity, leading 

him to discover whether or not Falkland deserves the esteem he enjoys. We 

read this story with all the absorption inspired by romantic interest and the 

reflection commanded by the most philosophical tableau. 

Some successful fictions do give pictures of life unrelated to love: several 

Moral Tales of Marmontel, a few chapters of Sentimental Journey, various 

anecdotes from the Spectator 8 and other books on morality, some pieces 

taken from German literature, whose superiority is growing every day. There 

is still, however, no new Richardson devoting himself to paint men’s other 

passions in a novel completely exploring the progress and consequences of 

these passions. The success of such a work would come from the truth of its 

characters, the force of its contrasts and the energy of its situations, rather 

than from that feeling which is so easy to paint, so quick to arouse interest, 

pleasing women by what it makes them remember even if it cannot attract 

them by the greatness or novelty of the scenes it presents. What beautiful 

things we would find in the Lovelace 9 of ambition! What philosophical 

6. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), 

a novel by Fielding. 

7. William Godwin (1756– 1836), En glish novelist 

and po liti cal theorist, married to mary Wollstonecraft; 

Caleb Williams was published in 

1794. 

8. A periodical (1711– 12) written by joseph Addison 

and Richard Steele. Jean- François Marmontel 

(1723– 1799), French author whose Moral 

Tales (1761– 86) appeared first in a journal. Sentimental 

Journey through En gland and France: a 

1768 narrative by Laurence Sterne. 

9. The villain- hero who seduces the title character 

in Richardson’s Clarissa, or, The History of a 

Young Lady (1747– 48).


developments, if we were eager to explain and analyze all the passions, as 

novels have already done for love! Let no one object that books on morality 

are enough to teach us a knowledge of our duties; such books cannot possibly 

go into all the nuances of delicacy, or detail the myriad resources of the 

passions. We can glean a morality purer and higher from novels than from 

any didactic work on virtue; didactic works are so dry that they have to be 

too indulgent. Maxims have to be generally applicable, so they never achieve 

that heroic delicacy we may offer as a model but cannot reasonably impose 

as a duty. Where is the moralist who could say: “If your whole family wants 

you to marry a detestable man, and you are prompted by their persecution to 

give a few signs of the most innocent interest to the man you find attractive, 

you are going to bring death and dishonor upon yourself”? This, however, is 

the plot of Clarissa; this is what we read with admiration, without a word of 

protest to the author who touches us and holds us captive. What moralist 

would claim that it is better to abandon oneself to deep despair, the sort of 

despair that threatens life and disturbs the mind, rather than marry the 

most virtuous man in the world if his religion is different from your own? 

Well, we need not approve of the superstitious opinions of Clementina, 1 but 

love struggling against a scruple of conscience and duty winning out over 

passion are a sight that moves and touches even loose- principled people who 

would have rejected such a conclusion disdainfully if it had been a maxim 

preceding the tableau instead of an effect that followed it. In novels of a less 

sublime genre, there are so many subtle rules for women’s conduct! We 

could support this opinion by quoting from masterpieces like The Princess of 

Clèves, The Count of Comminge, Paul and Virginia, Cecilia, most of the writings 

of Madame Riccoboni, Caroline, whose charm is felt by everyone, the 

touching episode of Caliste, the letters of Camilla, 2 in which the mistakes of 

a woman and their miserable consequences give a more moral and severe 

picture than the spectacle of virtue itself, and many other French, En glish, 

and German works. Novels have the right to offer the severest morality without 

revolting our hearts; they have captured feeling, the only thing that can 

successfully plead for indulgence. Pity for misfortune or interest in passion 

often win the struggle against books of morality, but good novels have the 

art of putting this emotion itself on their side and using it for their own 

ends. 

There is still one serious objection to love stories: that they paint love in 

such a way as to arouse it, and that there are moments in life when this danger 

wins out over every kind of advantage. This drawback could not exist in 

novels about any other human passion, however. By recognizing the most 

fleeting symptoms of a dangerous inclination from the very beginning, one 

could turn oneself as well as others away from it. Ambition, pride, and avarice 

often exist without the least consciousness on the part of those they rule. 

Love feeds on the portrait of its own feelings, but the best way to fight the 

1. The Italian woman who renounces the eponymous 

hero of Richardson’s History of Sir Charles 

Grandison (1753– 54) [shortened translator’s 

note]. 

2. All these works are novels. The Princess of 

Clèves is by Mme de La Fayette (1678); The 

Count of Comminge (1735) is by Mme de Tencin; 

Paul and Virginia (1787) is by Jacques- Henri Bernadin 

de Saint- Pierre; Cecilia (1782) and Camilla 

(1796) are by Fanny Burney; Marie- Jeanne Riccoboni 

(1713– 1792) wrote a number of novels in 

the mid- 18th century. Caroline is probably Caroline 

de Litchfi eld (1785), by Isabelle de Montolieu. 

Isabelle de Charrière, later [Benjamin] 

Constant’s intimate friend, wrote Caliste (1787) 

[translator’s note].


other passions is to make them be recognized. If the features, tricks, means, 

and results of these passions were as fully shown and pop u lar ized by novels 

as the history of love, society would have more trustworthy rules and more 

scrupulous principles about all the transactions of life. Even if purely philosophical 

writings could predict and detail all the nuances of actions, as do 

novels, dramatic morality would still have the great advantage of arousing 

indignant impulses, and exaltation of soul, a sweet melancholy— the various 

effects of fictional situations, and a sort of supplement to existence. This 

impression resembles the one we have of real facts we might have witnessed, 

but it is less distracting for the mind than the incoherent panorama of events 

around us, because it is always directed toward a single goal. Finally, there 

are men over whom duty has no influence, and who could still be preserved 

from crime by developing within them the ability to be moved. Characters 

capable of adopting humanity only with the help of such a faculty of emotion, 

the physical plea sure of the soul, would naturally not deserve much respect; 

nevertheless, if the effect of these touching fictions became widespread 

enough among the people, it might give us some assurance that we would no 

longer have in our country those beings whose character poses the most 

incomprehensible moral problem that has ever existed. The gradual steps 

from the known to the unknown stop well before we reach any understanding 

of the emotions which rules the executioners of France. Neither events 

nor books can have developed in them the least trace of humanity, the memory 

of a single sensation of pity, any mobility within the mind itself for them 

to remain capable of that constant cruelty, so foreign to all the impulses of 

nature— a cruelty which has given mankind its first limitless concept, the 

complete idea of crime. 

There are writings whose principal merit is the eloquence of passion, such 

as the “Epistle of Abelard” by Pope, Werther, the Portuguese Letters, and 

especially The New Héloïse. 3 The aim of such works is often moral, but what 

remains with us more than anything else is the absolute power of the heart. 

We cannot classify such novels. Every century has one soul and one genius 

capable of achieving this— it cannot be a genre, it cannot be a goal. Who 

would want to proscribe these miracles of the word, these deep impressions 

which satisfy all the emotions of the passionate? Readers enthusiastic about 

such talent are very few in number; these works always do their admirers 

good. Let ardent, sensitive souls admire them; they cannot make their language 

understood by anyone else. The feelings that disturb such beings are 

rarely understood; constantly condemned, they would believe themselves 

alone in the world, they would soon hate their own nature for isolating them, 

if a few passionate, melancholy works did not make them hear a voice in the 

desert of life, letting them find in solitude a few rays of the happiness that 

escapes them in the middle of society. The plea sure of retreat is refreshing 

after the vain attempts of disappointed hope; far from this unfortunate creature, 

the entire universe may be in motion, but such eloquent, tender writing 

3. Julie, or the New Heloise (1761), an epistolary 

novel by Jean- Jacques Rousseau. “Epistle of Abelard”: 

“Eloisa to Abelard” (1717), by alexander 

pope (1688– 1744); Héloïse fell in love with and 

secretly married her tutor, the 11th- century theologian 

Pierre Abélard (on discovery, she was sent 

to a convent and he became a monk). Werther: 

The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), by Johann 

Wolfgang von Goethe. The Portuguese Letters: 

letters (published 1699) said to have been written 

by a Portuguese nun to her lover, a French officer, 

but probably written by their French “translator,” 

Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, vicomte de Guilleragues.

Literature’s Relationship To Social Institutions / 515 

stays near him as his most faithful friend, the one who understands him best. 

Yes, a book must be right if it offers even one day’s distraction from pain; it 

helps the best of men. Of course there are also sorrows that come from one’s 

own character flaws, but so many of them come from superiority of mind or 

sensitivity of heart! and there are so many that would be easier to bear if one 

had fewer good qualities! I respect the suffering heart, even when it is unknown 

to me; I take plea sure in fictions whose only effect might be to comfort this 

heart by capturing its interest. In this life, which we pass through rather than 

feel, the distributor of the only real happiness of which human nature is 

capable would be someone who distracts man from himself and others, suspending 

the action of the passions by substituting in de pen dent pleasures for 

them— if the influence of his talent could only last. 

1795 

From On Literature Considered in Its Relationship 

to Social Institutions 1 

On Women Writers (2.4) 

Unhappiness is like the black mountain of Bember, at the edge of 

the blazing kingdom of Lahor. As long as you are climbing it, you 

see nothing ahead of you but sterile rocks; but once you are at the 

peak, heaven is at your head, and at your feet the kingdom of Cashmere. 

—The Indian Hut, by Bernadin de Saint- Pierre 2 

The existence of women in society is still uncertain in many ways. A desire 

to please excites their minds; reason recommends obscurity; and their triumphs 

and failures and equally and completely arbitrary. 

I believe a day will come when philosophical legislators will give serious 

attention to the education of women, to the laws protecting them, to the 

duties which should be imposed on them, to the happiness which can be 

guaranteed them. At present, however, most women belong neither to the 

natural nor to the social order. What succeeds for some women is the ruin of 

others; their good points may do them harm, their faults may prove useful. 

One minute they are everything, the next nothing. Their destiny resembles 

that of freedmen under the emperors: if they try to gain any influence, this 

unofficial power is called criminal, while if they remain slaves their destiny 

is crushed. 

It would no doubt be generally preferable for women to devote themselves 

entirely to the domestic virtues, but the peculiar thing about men’s judgments 

of women is that they are much likelier to forgive women for neglecting 

these duties than for attracting attention by unusual talent. Men are 

quite willing to tolerate women’s degradation of the heart, so long as it is 

accompanied by mediocrity of mind. The best behavior in the world can 

scarcely obtain forgiveness for real superiority. 

1. Translated by Vivian Folkenflik. 

2. French naturalist and author (1737– 1814), 

heavily influenced by the writings of Jean- Jacques 

Rousseau (1712– 1788); his novel The Indian Hut 

was published in 1791. “Lahor” and “Cashmere,” 

now better known as Lahore and Kashmir, are 

regions of northern India (in 1947 Lahore was 

divided between India and Pakistan).


I am now going to discuss the various causes of this peculiar phenomenon, 

beginning with the condition of women writers in monarchies, then in 

republics. I am interested in the differences these po liti cal situations make 

in the destinies of women who set their minds upon literary celebrity; I will 

then consider more generally the sort of happiness fame can promise these 

women. 

In monarchies, women have ridicule to fear; in republics, hatred. 

In a monarchy, the sense of the right and proper is so acute that any 

unusual act or impulse to change one’s situation looks ridiculous right away. 

Anything your rank or position forces you to do finds a thousand admirers; 

everything you invent spontaneously, with no obligation, is judged severely 

and in advance. The jealousy natural to all men calms down only if you can 

apologize for success under cover of some obligation. Unless you cover fame 

itself with the excuse of your situation and practical interests, if people think 

your only motive is a need to distinguish yourself, you will annoy those 

whom ambition is leading in the same direction as yourself. 

Men can always hide their vanity or their craving for applause under the 

appearance or reality of stronger, nobler passions; but women who write are 

generally assumed to be primarily inspired by a wish to show off their wit. 

As a result, the public is very reluctant to grant its approval, and the public’s 

sense that women cannot do without this approval is precisely what tempts 

it to deny it. In every walk of life, as soon as a man sees your obvious need 

of him, his feelings for you almost always cool down. A woman publishing a 

book makes herself so dependent on public opinion that those who mete it 

out make her harshly aware of their power. 

These general causes, acting more or less uniformly in all countries, are 

reinforced by various circumstances peculiar to the French monarchy. The 

spirit of chivalry, still lingering on in France, was opposed in some respects to 

the over eager cultivation of letters even by men; it must have aroused all the 

more dislike for women concentrating on literary studies and turning their 

thoughts away from their primary concern, the sentiments of the heart. The 

niceties of the code of honor might well make men averse from submitting 

themselves to the motley criticism attracted by publicity. How much more 

must they have disliked seeing the creatures entrusted to their protection— 

their wives, sisters, daughters— running the gauntlet of public criticism, or 

even giving the public the right to make a habit of talking about them! 

Great talent could triumph over all these considerations, but it was still 

hard for women to bear reputations as authors nobly, simultaneously combining 

them with the in de pen dence of high rank and keeping up the dignity, 

grace, ease, and unself- consciousness that were supposed to distinguish 

their habitual style and manners. 

Women were certainly allowed to sacrifice house hold occupations to a 

love of society and its pleasures; serious study, however, was condemned as 

pedantic. If from the very first moment one did not rise above the teasing 

which went on from all sides, this teasing would end by discouraging talent 

and poisoning the well of confidence and exaltation. 

Some of these disadvantages are not found in republics, especially if one 

of the goals of the republic is the encouragement of enlightenment. It might 

perhaps be natural for literature to become women’s portion in such a state, 

and for men to devote themselves entirely to higher philosophy.


The education of women has always followed the spirit of the constitutions 

established in free countries. In Sparta, women were accustomed to 

the exercises of war; in Rome, they were expected to have austere and patriotic 

virtues. If we want the moving principle of the French Republic to be 

the emulation of enlightenment and philosophy, it is only reasonable to 

encourage women to cultivate their minds, so that men can talk with them 

about ideas that would hold their interest. 

Nevertheless, ever since the Revolution men have deemed it po liti cally 

and morally useful to reduce women to a state of the most absurd mediocrity. 

They have addressed women only in a wretched language with no more 

delicacy than wit. Women have no longer any motive to develop their minds. 

This has been no improvement in manners or morality. By limiting the scope 

of ideas we have not succeeded in bringing back the simplicity of primitive 

life: the only result of less wit has been less delicacy, less respect for public 

opinion, fewer ways to endure solitude. And this applies to everything else in 

the current intellectual climate too: people invariably think that enlightenment 

is the cause of what ever is going wrong, and they want to make up for 

it by making reason go backward. Either morality is a false concept, or the 

more enlightened we are the more attached to morality we become. 

If Frenchmen could give their wives all the virtues of En glishwomen, 

including retiring habits and a taste for solitude, they would do very well to 

prefer such virtues to the gifts of brilliant wit. All the French will manage 

to do this way, however, is to make their women read nothing, know nothing, 

and become incapable of carry ing on a conversation with an interesting 

idea, or an apt expression, or eloquent language. Far from being kept at 

home by this happy ignorance, Frenchwomen unable to direct their children’s 

education would become less fond of them. Society would become 

more necessary to these women— and also more dangerous, because no one 

could talk to them of anything but love, and this love would not even have 

the delicacy that can stand in for morality. 

If such an attempt to make women completely insipid and frivolous ever 

succeeded, there would be several important losses to national morality and 

happiness. Women would have fewer ways to calm men’s furious passions. 

They would no longer have any useful influence over opinion— and women 

are the ones at the heart of everything relating to humanity, generosity, 

delicacy. Women are the only human beings outside the realm of po liti cal 

interest and the career of ambition, able to pour scorn on base actions, 

point out ingratitude, and honor even disgrace if that disgrace is caused by 

noble sentiments. The opinion of society would no longer have any power 

over men’s actions at all if there were no women left in France enlightened 

enough to make their judgments count, and imposing enough to inspire 

genuine respect. 

I firmly believe that under the ancien régime, when opinion exerted such 

wholesome authority, this authority was the work of women distinguished 

by character and wit. Their eloquence was often quoted when they were 

inspired by some generous scheme or defending the unfortunate; if the 

expression of some sentiment demanded courage because it would offend 

those in power. 

These are the same women who gave the strongest possible proofs of devotion 

and energy during the course of the Revolution.


Men in France will never be republican enough to manage without the 

in de pen dence and pride that comes naturally to women. Women may 

indeed have had too much influence on public affairs under the ancien 

régime; but they are no less dangerous when bereft of enlightenment, and 

therefore of reason. Their influence then turns to an inordinate craving 

for luxury, undiscerning choices, indelicate recommendations. Such women 

debase the men they love, instead of exalting them. And is the state the better 

off for it? Should the very limited risk of meeting a woman whose superiority 

is out of line with the destiny of her sex deprive the republic of 

France’s reputation for the art of pleasing and living in society? Without 

any women, society can be neither agreeable nor amusing; with women 

bereft of wit, or the kind of conversational grace which requires the best 

education, society is spoiled rather than embellished. Such women introduce 

a kind of idiotic chatter and cliquish gossip into the conversation, 

alienating all the superior men and reducing brilliant Pa ri sian gatherings to 

young men with nothing to do and young women with nothing to say. 

We can find disadvantages to everything in life. There are probably disadvantages 

to women’s superiority— and to men’s; to the vanity of clever 

people; to the ambition of heroes; to the imprudence of kind hearts, the 

irritability of in de pen dent minds, the recklessness of courage, and so forth. 

But does that mean we should use all our energy to fight natural gifts, and 

direct our social institutions toward humbling our abilities? It is hardly as if 

there were some guarantee that such degradation would promote familial 

or governmental authority. Women without the wit for conversation or writing 

are usually just that much more skillful at escaping their duties. Unenlightened 

countries may not understand how to be free, but they are able to 

change their masters with some frequency. 

Enlightening, teaching, and perfecting women together with men on the 

national and individual level: this must be the secret for the achievement of 

every reasonable goal, as well as the establishment of any permanent social 

or po liti cal relationships. 

The only reason to fear women’s wit would be some sort of scrupulous 

anxiety about their happiness. And indeed, by developing their rational minds 

one might well be enlightening them as to the misfortunes often connected 

with their fate; but that same reasoning would apply to the effect of enlightenment 

on the happiness of the human race in general, a question which 

seems to me to have been decided once and for all. 

If the situation of women in civil society is so imperfect, what we must 

work toward is the improvement of their lot, not the degradation of their 

minds. For women to pay attention to the development of mind and reason 

would promote both enlightenment and the happiness of society in general. 

The cultivated education they deserve could have only one really unfortunate 

result: if some few of them were to acquire abilities distinguished 

enough to make them hungry for glory. Even this risk, however, would do 

society no harm, and would only be unfortunate for the very limited number 

of women whom nature might dedicate to the torture of useless superiority. 

And if there were to be some woman seduced by intellectual celebrity 

and insistent on achieving it! How easy it would be to divert her, if she were 

caught in time! She could be shown the dreadful destiny to which she was 

on the verge of committing herself. Examine the social order, she would be


told; you will soon see it up in arms against any woman trying to raise herself 

to the height of masculine reputation. 

As soon as any woman is pointed out as a person of distinction, the general 

public is prejudiced against her. The common people judge according 

to a few common rules which can be followed without taking any risks. 

What ever goes beyond the habitual immediately offends people who consider 

daily routine the safeguard of mediocrity. A superior man is enough to 

startle them; a superior woman, straying even farther from the beaten 

track, must surprise and annoy them even more. A distinguished man 

almost always has some important career as his field of action, so his talents 

may turn out to be useful to the interests of even those who least value 

the delights of the mind. The man of genius may become a man of power, 

so envious and silly people humor him. But a clever woman is only called 

upon to offer them new ideas and lofty sentiments, about which they could 

not care less; her celebrity seems to them much ado about nothing. 

Even glory can be a source of reproach to a woman, because it contrasts 

with her natural destiny. Strict virtue condemns the celebrity even of something 

which is good in itself, because it damages the perfection of modesty. 

Men of wit are so astounded by the existence of women rivals that they cannot 

judge them with either an adversary’s generosity or a protector’s indulgence. 

This is a new kind of combat, in which men follow the laws of neither 

kindness nor honor. 

Suppose, as a crowning misfortune, a woman were to acquire celebrity in 

a time of po liti cal dissension. People would think her influence unbounded, 

even if she had no influence at all; accuse her of all her friends’ actions; and 

hate her for everything she loved. It is far preferable to attack a defenseless 

target than a dangerous one. 

Nothing lends itself more quickly to vague assumptions than the dubious 

life of a woman with a famous name and an obscure career. An empty- witted 

man may inspire ridicule, a man of bad character may drop under the weight 

of contempt, a mediocre man may be cast aside— but everyone would much 

rather attack the unknown power they call a woman. When the plans of the 

ancients did not work out, they used to convince themselves that fate had 

thwarted them. Our modern vanity also prefers to attribute its failures to 

secret causes instead of to itself; in time of need, what stands in for fatality 

is the supposed power of famous women. 

Women have no way to show the truth, no way to throw light on their 

lives. The public hears the lie; only their intimate friends can judge the 

truth. What real way is there for a woman to disprove slanderous accusations? 

A man who had been slandered lets his actions answer the universe, 

saying, “My life is a witness: it too must be heard.” 3 But where can a woman 

find any such witness? A few private virtues, hidden favors, feelings locked 

into the narrow circle of her situation, writings which may make her known 

in places where she does not live, in times when she will no longer exist. 

A man can refute calumny in his work itself, but self- defense is an additional 

handicap for women. For a woman to justify herself is a new topic for 

3. No source has been identified; but the quoted sentence is written in the French classical alexandrine 

(12- syllable) meter.

520 / FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER 

gossip. Women feel there is something pure and delicate in their nature, 

quickly withered by the very gaze of the public. Wit, talent, passion in the 

soul may make them emerge from this mist which should always be surrounding 

them, but they will always yearn for it as their true refuge. 

However distinguished women may be, the sight of ill will makes them 

tremble. Courageous in misfortune, they are cowards against dislike; thought 

uplifts them, but their character is still weak and sensitive. Most women 

whose superior abilities make them want renown are like Erminia dressed 

in armor. 4 Warriors see the helmet, the lance, the bright plume of feathers, 

and think they are up against strength, so they attack with violence; with 

the very first blows, they have struck at the heart. 

Such injustices can not only spoil a woman’s happiness and peace of mind, 

but also alienate even the most important objects of her affection. Who can 

be sure that a libelous portrayal will not strike at the truth of memory? Who 

knows whether or not slanderers, having wreaked havoc with life, will rob 

death itself of the tender, regretful feelings that should be associated with the 

memory of a beloved woman? 

So far I have portrayed only the unfairness of men: but what about the 

threat of injustice from other women? Do not women secretly arouse the 

malevolence of men? Do women ever form an alliance with a famous woman, 

sustaining her, defending her, supporting her faltering steps? 

And that is still not all. Public opinion seems to release men from every 

duty toward a recognizably superior woman. Men can be ungrateful to her, 

unfaithful, even wicked, without making public opinion responsible for 

avenging her. “Is she not an extraordinary woman?” That says it all; she is 

abandoned to her own strength, and left to struggle with misery. She lacks 

both the sympathy inspired by a woman and the power protecting a man. 

Like the pariahs of India, 5 such a woman parades her peculiar existence 

among classes she cannot belong to, which consider her as destined to 

exist on her own, the object of curiosity and perhaps a little envy: what she 

deserves, in fact, is pity. 

1800 

4. In Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (1581), the princess 

Erminia wears borrowed armor to seek her 

love Tancred in the Christian camp [translator’s 

note]. 

5. Those who are at the bottom or outside of the 

traditional caste system of India (the words in the 

epigraph from The Indian Hut are spoken by a 

pariah). 

FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER 

1768 –1834 

German phi los o pher, classical philologist, and leading liberal Protestant theologian, 

Friedrich Schleiermacher is best known as a found er of modern general hermeneutics: 

that is, the art of understanding and interpreting discourse through systematic 

procedures. His most important contribution to the history of theory and criticism is

FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER / 521 

arguably his “Outline of the 1819 Lectures,” a fragmentary document produced in 

midcareer and published from handwritten notes after his death. In this pioneering 

depiction of the pro cesses of textual understanding, Schleiermacher argued that to 

understand a text fully one must understand simultaneously the entire thought of a 

writer as well as the whole language he or she employs, keeping in mind that the 

language and the author’s thought reciprocally modify each other. The two major 

tasks of textual interpretation, according to Schleiermacher, are to comprehend the 

language and historical culture of a text (grammatical interpretation) and to reconstruct 

an author’s purpose (psychological or “technical” interpretation). With these 

insights Schleiermacher laid the foundation of modern hermeneutics, preparing the 

way for such important yet widely divergent twentiethcentury theorists of interpretation 

as martin Heidegger and Hans- Georg Gadamer. 

Schleiermacher was born in Breslau, Prus sia, and studied at two Moravian 

Brethren schools and at the University of Halle. During the late 1790s he began his 

celebrated translation into German of almost all of Plato’s works (still in print); he 

was active in the Berlin circle of Romanticists, being a close associate and briefly 

roommate of Friedrich Schlegel, to whose vanguard journal, Athenaeum, he was an 

early contributor. He served as chaplain and professor of theology and philosophy 

at Halle between 1804 and 1806, later taking a position at the University of Berlin 

(1810– 34), which he co- founded. Schleiermacher regularly preached at Trinity 

Church in Berlin, advocating the right of union for Reformed and Lutheran groups 

in Prus sia, freedom of the church from the state, shorter working hours, social 

insurance, and women’s rights. 

Schleiermacher’s theology reflects the influence of Romanticism and Moravian 

pietism, especially in his two most famous works, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured 

Despisers (1799) and The Christian Faith (1821– 22), which argue that religion 

is an intuitive feeling for and dependence on the infinite realm, not a set of moral 

or metaphysical principles; religion needed no external justification. It was to convince 

his fellow German Romantics that they were not as far from religion as they 

believed that he undertook the first book, a confession of faith that gained him a 

national reputation overnight. Today he is often regarded as one of the most significant 

Protestant theologians since Luther. In his time his influence was wide, 

reaching such figures as ralph waldo emerson, who also devalued doctrine in 

favor of intuitive dependence on the infinite. 

His interest in understanding the Bible led to Schleiermacher’s concern with 

hermeneutics. In his “Outline of the 1819 Lectures,” our selection, he expands on 

his basic distinction between grammatical and psychological interpretation, noting 

that the latter involves two distinct methods. Using the first, divinatory interpretation, 

one seeks to identify intuitively with the author; Schleiermacher sees this as 

representing a feminine dimension of our knowledge of human nature. (This mode 

of interpretation echoes his notions about religion as an intuitive feeling.) Using 

the second method, comparative interpretation, one works to understand a text as a 

type or historical genre; it is purportedly a masculine force. 

Both psychological and grammatical interpretation primarily seek to isolate the 

text’s central idea, procedure, or motivating principle in light of which all textual 

details can be gauged. Artful interpretation requires such centering and also multiple 

rigorous readings. But problems do arise, some of which are avoidable and 

some not. Interpretation necessarily gets caught up in various circularities. Readers 

early in the pro cess intuit the meaning of a text, which then predetermines the 

directions of meaning. This is one version of the celebrated “hermeneutic circle” of 

interpretation, identified by Schleiermacher and later explored by leading hermeneuticists, 

especially Heidegger and Gadamer. To understand the whole text, 

Schleiermacher points out, one must understand each part; but to understand each 

part, one must understand the whole. He expands this circle by requiring that to


understand an individual text, an interpreter must understand the complete historical 

context and vocabulary of a language— foreknowledge derived paradoxically 

from individual texts. 

Schleiermacher cata logues several types of avoidable misunderstanding, which 

result from bias, mistaking a text’s meaning, or misjudging the value of a segment 

of text. (Under the influence of friedrich Nietz sche and sigmund freud, contemporary 

critics such as harold bloom and paul de man, unlike Schleiermacher, 

have come to conceive “misunderstanding” as an ineradicable, productive element 

of all understanding.) Moreover, for Schleiermacher allegorical interpretation— 

that is, reading symbolically— risks erroneously discovering everything in everything, 

unless the text itself legitimates the approach with an allusion appropriate to 

both the contextual and the central textual ideas. Finally, historical interpretation 

can run into trouble by construing an ancient text in terms of modern conditions 

instead of uncovering its writer’s relationship to his or her milieu and language. 

Schleiermacher posits two broad categories of texts. “Objective texts” such as 

histories and epics require a minimum of psychological interpretation and a maximum 

of grammatical interpretation, whereas “subjective texts” such as personal 

letters and lyrics call for more psychological than grammatical interpretation. The 

goal of hermeneutics in either case is— as he famously declared—“to understand 

the discourse just as well and even better than its creator.” We have no way of 

knowing the creator’s purpose other than through reconstruction, but “No individual 

inspection of a work ever exhausts its meaning.” 

Helpfully, Schleiermacher outlines four types of positive hermeneutical reconstruction. 

There are two types of grammatical or objective reconstruction— historical 

and divinatory— and two types of psychological or subjective reconstruction— 

historical and divinatory. In brief, objective historical reconstruction examines how 

language shapes the text, objective divinatory reconstruction analyzes how the text 

itself developed that language, subjective historical reconstruction explores the text 

as the product of the author’s soul, and subjective divinatory reconstruction 

attempts to determine how the pro cess of writing affects the writer’s inner thoughts. 

Interpretation for Schleiermacher is at once psychological and grammatical, intuitive 

and comparative. It is an art of understanding, not just explaining, the act of a 

living, intuiting person gifted with foreknowledge and experience of life as well as 

linguistic and cultural competence— an art that always requires a leap into the 

midst of textual complexities and circularities. 

Earlier German hermeneutics, as practiced in the contexts of theology, law, and 

literature, focused narrowly on philology, particularly its penchant for interpretive 

procedures and rules of validation. Schleiermacher here broadens its scope toward 

a phenomenological philosophy attentive to the roles of intuition, understanding, 

and foreknowledge in the lived world of human beings. This shift was variously 

amplified by his greatest successors, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833– 1911), Heidegger, and 

Gadamer. Schleiermacher is generally credited with grounding hermeneutics in 

human understanding, with according language a foundational role in interpretation, 

and with highlighting the interdependence of mind and medium, subject and 

object, divination and comparison. 

However much successors and followers admire and build on Schleiermacher’s 

work, they find problems with his hermeneutic theory. In the various editions of 

his Truth and Method— Outline for a Philosophical Hermeneutics (1960), Gadamer 

characterizes the principle of divination as hopelessly Romantic. He faults Schleiermacher 

for not taking into account the historical context and prejudices of the 

interpreter, which, he shrewdly argues, are essential constituents of understanding. 

Intuition assumes uniform human experience; prejudices arise in a world of 

antagonistic standpoints. And the leading modern French hermeneuticist, Paul 

Ricoeur (1913– 2005), contends that Schleiermacher does not sufficiently distinguish 

between the author and the ideas governing the work; Ricoeur sees the latter

FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER / 523 

as the true object of interpretation. Schleiermacher vacillates, too, on what constitutes 

the “text” (or object of inquiry)— it is sometimes the author’s oeuvre (complete 

works), sometimes a par tic u lar work, and sometimes a genre or cultural 

archive. 

Various critics, moreover, have noted Schleiermacher’s tendency, especially in 

his late works, to “psychologize”: that is, to pass through language to the supposed 

prelinguistic mental pro cesses and intentions of the author, forgetting that grammar 

and psychology are interdependent. When this happens, Schleiermacher’s 

hermeneutics turns into psychological reconstruction, which is the direction taken 

by Dilthey. A similar path is staked out by E. D. Hirsch Jr. (b. 1928), who, however, 

turns to interpretative reconstruction as a way to rectify the rampant critical subjectivism 

and relativism that he believes plague contemporary literary criticism, 

including much hermeneutics. 

In spite of criticisms, Schleiermacher’s contributions to hermeneutics should not 

be underestimated. His psychological notion of divination enabled him to explicitly 

correct and complement earlier Enlightenment concepts of rationality. He usefully 

jettisoned the old rigid separations of hermeneutics into specialized biblical, legal, 

and literary kinds, developing a selfconscious project for a general hermeneutics. 

Like his important contemporaries friedrich schiller and samuel taylor 

Coleridge, he attempted to reconcile well- entrenched inherited philosophical 

oppositions, especially subject / object, finite / infinite, individual / social, and psychology 

/ grammar. He construed understanding as an act of dialogue, not verification. 

Lastly, he pictured the act of interpretation as antiauthoritarian and 

nonhierarchical, in keeping with the radical social forces of his time (committed to 

toppling monarchical regimes and feudal class arrangements, manifested especially 

in the French Revolution) and with the dynamics of early democracy and capitalism. 

All these elements, which marked Schleiermacher historically as a Romantic, 

significantly influenced the work of later philosophical hermeneutics. 

bibliography 

Schleiermacher’s collected works, Sämtliche Werke (1835– 64), mainly lecture 

notes, were published after his death in thirty- one volumes, including theological 

writings, sermons, and philosophical and miscellaneous texts, plus four volumes of 

letters (1858– 63). Starting in the early 1980s his collected writings and correspondence 

began to appear in a projected forty- volume German edition, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 

with approximately fifteen volumes reaching print in the first two and a 

half de cades. His manuscripts on interpretation theory were published posthumously 

and first translated into En glish by James Duke and Jack Forstman as 

Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts (1977), based on the German edition 

by Heinz Kimmerle (1959; 2d ed., 1974), and then more fully in a new translation, 

Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, edited and translated by Andrew 

Bowie (1998). Several dozen texts by Schleiermacher covering an array of topics aside 

from hermeneutics are available in En glish translation. 

Biographical information is available in The Life of Schleiermacher as Unfolded in 

His Autobiography and Letters (2 vols., 1860), translated by Frederica Rowan; Wilhelm 

Dilthey’s monumental but unfinished Das Leben Schleiermachers (1870); 

Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach’s Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher in Selbstzeugnissen 

und Bilddokumenten (1967); and Martin Redeker’s spiritually sympathetic 

intellectual biography, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought (1968; trans. 1973). 

Informative texts about Schleiermacher’s work include Richard B. Brandt’s Philosophy 

of Schleiermacher: The Development of His Theory of Scientifi c and Religious 

Knowledge (1941); Richard E. Palmer’s valuable introduction, Hermeneutics: 

Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (1969); 

Manfred Frank’s landmark reassessment of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics in Das


individuelle Allgemeine: Textstrukturierung und - interpretation nach Schleiermacher 

(1977); Tilottama Rajan’s contemporary contextualizing in The Supplement 

of Reading: Figures of Understanding in Romantic Theory and Practice (1990); Julie 

Ellison’s innovative feminist exegesis and critique of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics 

in Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding 

(1990); the cogent introduction in Jean Grondin’s Introduction to Philosophical 

Hermeneutics (1994); and Andrew Bowie’s chapter factoring in the groundbreaking 

recent work of Manfred Frank in From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy 

of German Literary Theory (1997). An updated bibliography as well as a 

collection of scholarly studies on Schleiermacher’s contributions to philosophy, 

Plato scholarship, and theology appears in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich 

Schleiermacher, edited by Jacqueline Mariña (2005). Significant critical essays on 

the wide range of contemporary Schleiermacher scholarship, including his hermeneutical 

theory, can be found in The State of Schleiermacher Scholarship Today: 

Selected Essays, edited by Edwina G. Lawler, Jeffrey Kinlaw, and Ruth Richardson 

(2006). Terrence Tice’s Schleiermacher Bibliography (1966) contains almost 2,000 

items with annotations, and another 1,250 were added to his Schleiermacher Bibliography 

(1784– 1984): Updating and Commentary (1985). 

From Hermeneutics 

From Outline of the 1819 Lectures 1 

Introduction 2 

1. Hermeneutics as the art of understanding does not yet exist in general; 

rather, only various specialized hermeneutics exist. 

1. [We speak of] only the art of understanding, not the exposition of 

the understanding. The latter would only be a specialized part of the art of 

speaking and writing that could only be dependent on the general principles 

of hermeneutics. 

2. This refers as well to difficult points in foreign- language texts. In 

reading them, one more often presumes familiarity with the subject matter 

and the language. When one is familiar with both, the distinction between 

them becomes difficult to make because one has perhaps not understood 

properly the more apparent. Only an artistic understanding consistently 

grasps the discourse [Reden] of a text [Schrift]. 3 

3. Usually one supposes that one could rely on a healthy knowledge of 

human nature for formulating the general principles of interpretation. But 

then there is the danger that one would also tend to rely on a healthy feel- 

1. Edited and translated by Jan Wojcik and 

Roland Haas, who occasionally insert the original 

German or explanatory words or phrases in 

brackets. 

2. The Outline consists of an “Introduction,” 

“First Part: The Grammatical Exposition,” and 

“Second Part: The Technical (or Psychological) 

Interpretation.” The headings are somewhat misleading. 

The “Introduction” gives a systematic 

exposition of principles for analyzing the language 

and psychological manifestations of a literary 

text. The “First Part” elaborates the principles 

for the analysis of language; the “Second Part” 

extends the “Introduction” in describing how the 

two parts of interpretation work together in the 

“divination” of a text. We limit our translation to 

the “Introduction” and the “Second Part” which 

comprise the heart of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical 

principles. We have referred to the 

marginal notes Schleiermacher added to the 

manuscript in 1828 only when they clarified 

ambiguities in the text [translators’ note]. 

3. Discourse (Reden) is Schleiermacher’s term for 

the discursive sense of a text, shaped by the partic 

u lar language the author uses to express his 

inner thoughts (see 4– 6). Here he makes a distinction 

between the literal meaning of a text (Schrift) 

and the discursive meaning (Reden) that is most 

obvious when one reads a somewhat unfamiliar 

foreign language (see 14.2) [translators’ note].

Hermeneutics / 525 

ing about the exceptional qualities of a text in determining what they 

meant. 

2. It is very difficult to determine the exact nature of a general hermeneutics. 

1. For a long time it was handled as a supplement to logic, but as one 

had to give up all logical tenets in its practice, this had to cease. The phi loso 

pher has no inclination to establish a theory about hermeneutics because 

he believes that it is more important to be understood than to understand. 

2. Philology 4 has made positive contributions throughout history. But 

its method of hermeneutics is simply to aggregate observations. 

3. [Hermeneutics is] the art of relating discourse [Reden] and understanding 

[Verstehen] to each other; discourse, however, being on the outer 

sphere of thought, requires that one must think of hermeneutics as an art, 

and thus as philosophical. 

1. Thus the art of exposition depends on their composition. They are 

mutually dependent to the point that where discourse is without art, so is 

the understanding of it. 

4. Discourse is the mediation of shareable thought. As a result both rhetoric 

and hermeneutics share a common relationship to the dialectic. 5 

1. Discourse is of course also a mediation of thought among individuals. 

Thought becomes complete only through interior discourse, and in this 

respect discourse could be considered manifested thought. But where the 

thinker thinks original thoughts, he himself requires the art of discourse to 

transform them into expressions that afterwards require exposition [Auslegung]. 

2. The unity of hermeneutics and rhetoric results from the fact that 

every act of understanding is the obverse of an act of discourse, in that one 

must come to grasp the thought which was at the base of the discourse. 

3. The dependence of both on the dialectic results from the fact that 

all development of knowledge is dependent on both discourse and understanding. 

5. As every discourse has a two- part reference, to the whole language and 

to the entire thought of its creator, so all understanding of speech consists 

of two elements [Momenten]— understanding the speech as it derives from 

the language and as it derives from the mind of the thinker. 

1. Every speech derives from a given language. One can also turn this 

around and say that originally and continuously language only comes into 

being through discourse; at any rate, communication presupposes the accessibility 

of the language; that is, a shared knowledge of the same. When something 

comes between unmediated discourse and communication, the art of 

discourse begins, for one must take into consideration the possibility that the 

listener might find something strange in someone else’s use of language. 

4. The scholarly discipline dedicated to the historical 

understanding of foreign cultures through 

linguistic and comparative analysis of texts. 

5. That part of logic concerned with thinking, 

notably thinking embodied in discourse.


2. Every discourse depends on earlier thought. One can also turn this 

around, of course, but in relation to communication it remains true, since 

the art of understanding only has to do with progressive thinking. 

3. It follows that every person is on one hand a locus in which a given 

language is formed after an individual fashion and, on the other, a speaker 

who is only able to be understood within the totality of the language. In 

the same way, he is also a constantly developing spirit, while his discourse 

remains an object within the context of other intellection. 

6. Understanding is only an interaction of these two elements. 

1. Discourse can only be understood as a fact of the spirit if it is understood 

as a characteristic of the language, because the innateness of the language 

modifies the spirit. 

2. It can also only be understood as a modification of the language if 

it is understood as a fact of the spirit, because all influences of individuals 

on the language are manifested through discourse. 

7. Both stand completely equal, and one could only with injustice claim 

that the grammatical interpretation is the inferior and the psychological the 

superior. 

1. The psychological is the superior only if one views language as the 

means by which the individual communicates his thoughts; the grammatical 

is then merely a cleaning away of temporary difficulties. 

2. The grammatical is the superior if one views language as stipulating 

the thinking of all individuals and the individual’s discourse only as a 

locus at which the language manifests itself. 

3. Only by means of such a reciprocity could one find both to be completely 

similar. 

8. The essential hermeneutical task is to handle every part in such a way 

that the handling of the other parts will produce no change in the results, 

or, in other words, every part must be handled as a discrete unit with equal 

respect paid to all other parts. 

1. This reciprocity is important even if one part predominates over the 

other according to what was said in paragraph six. 

2. But each is only complete if it makes the other redundant and contributes 

to construing the other, because indeed language [Sprache] can 

only be learned inasmuch as its discourse [Rede] can be understood; and in 

the same way, the inner cohesion of humanity can only be understood as it 

manifests itself externally through its discourse. 

9. Exposition [Auslegung] is an art. 

1. Every part stands by itself. Every composition is a finite certainty 

out of the infinite uncertainty. Language is an infinite because every element 

can be determined in a specific manner only through the other elements. 

And this is also true for the psychological part because every 

perspective of an individual is infinite; and the outside influences on people 

extend into the disappearing horizon. A composition composed of such elements 

cannot be defined by rules, which carry with them the security of 

their application.


2. Should the grammatical part be considered by itself, one would 

need in some cases a complete knowledge of the language, or, in others, a 

complete knowledge of the person. As neither can ever be complete, one must 

go from one to the other, and it is not possible to give any rules as to how 

this should be done. 

10. The successful per for mance of the art depends on a linguistic talent 

and a talent for assessing individual human nature. 

1. By the first point we do not mean the facility for learning foreign 

languages— the difference between the mother tongue and a foreign language 

does not come into consideration here for the time being; rather, a 

sense for the contemporaneity of a language, for analogy, difference, etc. 

One could mean by this that rhetoric and hermeneutics must always be 

together. Just as hermeneutics requires other talents, so also does rhetoric, if 

not always the same ones. The linguistic talent, at any rate, is shared, even 

if the hermeneutical method develops it differently than the rhetorical 

method does. 

2. The knowledge of human nature is here the superior of those subjective 

elements in the development of discourse. No less importantly, 

hermeneutics and artistic human pre sen ta tion are always together. But a 

great number of hermeneutical mistakes are based on the deficiency of linguistic 

talent, or in its faulty application. 

3. Inasmuch as these talents are generally given by nature, so hermeneutics 

is a commonsense endeavor. Inasmuch as a person is missing one 

talent, he is crippled, and the other talents can only serve to help him adjudicate 

about that which all together would have permitted him to know 

directly. 

11. Not all discourse is on an equal footing for exposition. Certain discourses 

have no value for it, others an absolute value; the majority lie between 

these two points. 

1. Something of no value might excite no interest as an entity, but 

would still be important in the language as a reiteration which language 

requires for the preservation of its continuity. But that which repeats only 

already available things is worth nothing in itself. Like talking about the 

weather. Alone, this is not an absolute nothing, only minimal. For it developed 

itself in the same way as significant things. 

2. When the grammatical aspect predominates in a work, even the 

most imaginative, we call it classical. When the psychological aspect predominates, 

we call it original. And, of course, one part could absolutely 

dominate the other only if the author was an absolute genius. 

3. To be classical, a work must be more than transitory; it must determine 

subsequent production. No less so the original. And even the best work 

cannot be free from influence. 

12. When both aspects of interpretation— the analysis of the grammatical 

and the psychological part of a text— are used equally throughout, they 

are nevertheless always used in different proportions. 

1. This follows from the fact that something of grammatical insignificance 

does not necessarily have to be of psychological insignificance, and


vice versa; and insignificancy in one does not imply insignificancy in the 

other. 

2. A minimum of psychological interpretation is needed with a predominately 

objective subject. [To this belongs] pure history, especially of specific 

individuals, as comprehensive studies tend more to draw on subjective conclusions; 

also epics, commercial discussions which want to become history, 

and strictly didactic writings of every kind. The interpreter’s subjectivity 

should not enter the exposition; rather, it should be affected by the exposition. 

A minimum of grammatical interpretation accompanies a maximum of 

psychological in the exposition of personal letters, especially when they transmit 

didactic advice or historical information. (Lyrics or polemics too?) 

13. There is no other diversity in the methods of exposition aside from 

those cited above. 

1. As an example, we can take the wonderful perspective which comes 

from the argument over the historical exposition of the New Testament, 

based on the question whether there are special modes of interpretation 

reserved for it alone. In this debate the assertion of the historical school is 

the only correct one, that the New Testament authors are products of their 

age. The only danger in their reasoning is their tendency to overlook the 

power of Christianity to create new concepts and forms of expression; they 

tend to explain everything in light of available concepts and forms. To correct 

the historical style of interpretation one has to resist this one- sidedness. 

Correct interpretation requires a relationship of the grammatical and psychological 

interpretation, since new concepts can arise out of new emotional 

experiences. 

2. One would also err if one thought of a historical interpretation as 

simply a retrospective view of the textual events. One must keep in mind 

that what was written was often written in a different day and age from the 

one in which the interpreter lives; it is the primary task of interpretation 

not to understand an ancient text in view of modern thinking, but to rediscover 

the original relationship between the writer and his audience. 

3. The Allegorical Interpretation. First of all, it is not an interpretation 

of an allegory, where the only purpose is to understand the figurative 

meaning without reference to whether there is truth at the base of it or not. 

Examples of allegories would be the parable of the sower, or the story of the 

rich man. 6 Rather, allegorical interpretation begins with a presupposition 

that the meaning is lacking in the immediate context, and so one needs to 

supply a figurative one. With this supposition one is unsatisfied with the 

general principle that every speech can have only one grammatical meaning. 

The dissatisfaction arises, perhaps, from the correct assessment that 

an allusion in a text does point to a second meaning; one who does not comprehend 

it could completely follow the whole context, but would still be 

missing one meaning situated within the discourse. The danger is that one 

could find an allusion which is not situated within the discourse. Then one 

would dissect the discourse improperly. The test for a proper allusion is 

this: to see whether it seems entwined as one of the contextual ideas within 

6. Both in the New Testament: for the sower, see Matthew 13.1– 9, 18– 23; for the rich man, see Luke 

16.19– 31.


the main line of thought, to assess whether the explicit thoughts inspire the 

implicit. But the contextual ideas are not therewith to be considered merely 

individual and insignificant. Rather, just as the whole world is made up of 

many men, each idea contributes to its whole sense, even if it appears only 

as its dark shadow. 

There is, after all, a parallelism in many various lines of thought, so 

that something could inspire something else; for example, there is parallelism 

between the physical and ethical, and between the musical and the 

visual arts. One should be careful, however, to detect whether there are any 

indications for the figurative expressions one seems to detect. The allegorical 

interpretations which have been made without such indication, especially 

in traditional interpretations of Homer and the Bible, all depend on a 

special assumption. This is that the books of Homer 7 and the Old Testament 

are special compendiums, the Old Testament above all, which contains 

all wisdom in some form or another. Along with this, both of them 

have appeared to have a mystical content compounded of sententious philosophy 

on the one hand and history on the other. 

With myths, however, no technical interpretation is possible, since one 

cannot focus on an individual text 8 and alternatively compare the literal and 

the figurative meaning. There is certainly a different situation regarding the 

New Testament which leads to two kinds of blunders. First, its association 

with the Old Testament encourages the use of the same methods often associated 

with the Old Testament interpretation. Second, the New Testament 

interpreters tend more than their Old Testament counterparts to view the 

Holy Spirit as the book’s author. But the Holy Spirit cannot be thought of as 

a temporally contingent and characteristic consciousness. From this false 

view springs the inclination to find everything foreshadowed everywhere. 

Common sense, or precise instructions on how texts should be read, can protect 

texts from this inclination, but isolated passages which seem to be 

unmeaningful in themselves seem to encourage it. 

4. Here the question occasionally intrudes upon us, whether the holy 

books of the Holy Spirit must be handled differently than others. We must 

not be concerned with dogmatic decisions about inspiration, since they themselves 

derive from interpretation. We must not distinguish between the 

preaching and the writing of the apostles, since their future church had to be 

built on the preaching. And it follows from this that we must not believe that 

the whole of Christianity directly developed from the writings, since they are 

all aimed at specific communities and could also not have been understood 

by subsequent readers if they had not been understood by the original audience. 

Each community simply sought out the specific characteristics of the 

Jesus story according to its own given par tic u lar focus on the many details. 

Therefore, we must expose it to the same method and consider that even if 

the authors were no more than dead tools, still the Holy Spirit could only 

have spoken through them as they themselves would have spoken. 

5. The most dangerous deviation from this principle is encouraged 

by the cabalistic 9 style of exposition which directs its endeavors to find 

7. The Iliad and the Odyssey (ca. 8th c. b.c.e.), 

each divided into 24 books. 

8. Myths have no single author and no single 

established text; therefore technical (psychological) 

interpretation is impossible. 

9. Esoteric, mystical.


everything in everything. Only their interpretive endeavors which respect 

the diversity which results from the various relationships of both constructed 

parts can rightfully be called exposition. 

14. The difference between artful and crude exposition has nothing to 

do with whether the work is familiar or strange, or with the discourse or the 

text, but solely with whether one wants to understand certain things exactly 

or not. 

1. If it were only foreign and old texts that needed the art, the original 

readers would not have needed it, and the art would then depend on the 

differences between them and us. This difference must first be resolved, of 

course, through a knowledge of language and history; the exposition begins 

only after a successful identification of the text’s original meaning. The difference 

between interpreting an old foreign text and a local contemporary 

one is only that with the old text the pro cess of discovering its relevance to 

its milieu cannot completely precede the identification of its meaning; 

rather, both must be integrated from the beginning. 

2. The text [Schrift] is not always the focus of attention either. Otherwise 

the art would only become necessary through the difference between 

text and discourse; that is to say, by the absence of the living voice and by 

the inaccessibility of other personal influences. These things, however, 

require exposition themselves, while they always remain somewhat nebulous. 

A living voice can certainly facilitate understanding a great deal, but 

even the writer must take into consideration that writing is not the same as 

speaking. If it were, then the art of exposition would be superfluous, which 

is, of course, not the case. Consequently, the need for exposition depends 

on the difference between written and spoken discourse, when the latter 

does not accompany the former. 

3. Thus, when discourse and text behave so that no other difference 

remains between them save the one indicated, it follows that the artfully 

correct exposition has no other goal than that which we have in hearing 

every common spoken discourse. 

15. The careless practice of the art results from the fact that understanding 

is pursued in the light of a negative goal: that misunderstanding should 

be avoided. 

1. Careless interpretation tends to limit its understanding to obtaining 

certain easy- to- attain goals. 

2. But even it must avail itself of the art in difficult cases; and thus 

hermeneutics can even arise from the artless practice. But since it only sees 

difficulties as isolated problems, it becomes an aggregate of observations. 

And for the same reason tends to consider itself a specialized hermeneutics 

because it brings special methods to the solving of difficult problems. This 

is how the theological, the juristic, and the philological methods originated, 

and what they consider to be their special purposes. 

3. The basis for their view is the peculiarity of their special languages 

and the peculiar manner in which their speakers communicate to their 

hearers. 

16. Strict interpretation begins with misunderstanding and searches out 

a precise understanding.


1. This results from its beginning with an assumption about what the 

meaning is that properly should only be discovered in the way the language 

and intention present it. 

2. Careless interpretation distinguishes only the [predetermined] sense 

from the manner of expression, which in fact depend on each other for their 

mutual identity, the determination of which is the minimum requirement 

for avoiding artless practice. 1 

17. Two things should be avoided: qualitatively misunderstanding the 

content, and quantitatively misunderstanding nuance. 

1. Examined objectively, qualitative misunderstanding is mistaking 

the place of a part of a discourse in the language with that of another one, 

as, for example, the confusion of the meaning of a word with that of another. 

The qualitative misunderstanding is subjective, the mistaking of the meaning 

of an expression, so that one gives the same thing a different meaning than 

the speaker gave to it in his sphere. 

2. Quantitative misunderstanding arises from a subjective response to 

the value of the elaboration a speaker gives to a part of the text, or by analogy 

from an objective response to a part taken out of context. 

3. The quantitative, which is normally taken little into account, always 

leads to the qualitative. 

4. These negative expressions cover all interpretive operations. But 

one could not develop the rules from their negativity alone; rather, one 

must develop them positively, with a constant eye on the negative. 

5. One must also distinguish the difference between passive and active 

misunderstanding. The latter is timidity which, however it might be the 

consequence of a bias that nothing can appear certain unless it is very obvious, 

can still entertain very false assumptions. 

18. The art can only develop its rules from a positive formula, and this is 

the historical and the divinatory [prophetic], objective and subjective reconstruction 

[Nachkonstruieren] of the given discourse. 

1. Objective historical reconstruction considers how the discourse 

behaves in the totality of the language, and considers a text’s self- contained 

knowledge as a product of the language. Objective divinatory reconstruction 

assesses how the discourse itself developed the language. Without both 

of these, one cannot avoid qualitative and quantitative misunderstanding. 

2. Subjective historical reconstruction considers a discourse as a product 

of the soul; subjective divinatory assesses how the pro cess of writing 

affects the writer’s inner thoughts. Without both, just as was the case above, 

misunderstanding is once again unavoidable. 

3. The task is this, to understand the discourse just as well and even better 

than its creator. Since we have no unmediated knowledge of that which is 

within him, we must first seek to become conscious of much which he could 

have remained unconscious of, unless he had become self- reflectingly his own 

reader. For objective reconstruction he has no more data than we do. 

1. Paraphrase: artful interpretation begins with a 

hunch about a text’s meaning which it continuously 

corrects and refines; careless interpretation 

begins with a prejudice about a text’s meaning 

which it forces the text to support [translators’ 

note].


4. Posed in this manner, the task is an infinite one, because there is an 

infinity of the past and the future that we wish to see in the moment of 

discourse. Hence, this art is just as capable of inspiration as any other. In 

fact, a text has no meaning unless it can give rise to this inspiration. However, 

the decision on how far one wishes to pursue an approach must be, in 

any case, determined practically, and actually is a question for a specialized 

hermeneutics and not for a general one. 

19. One must first equate oneself with the author by objective and subjective 

reconstruction before applying the art. 

1. With objective reconstruction one proceeds through a knowledge of 

the language as the author used it. It must be more exact than even the 

original readers possessed, who themselves had to put themselves in the 

place of the author. With subjective reconstruction one proceeds through 

the knowledge of the author’s inner and outer life. 

2. But both can only be completely secured through a similarly complete 

exposition. For only from a reading of all of an author’s works can one 

become familiar with his vocabulary, his character, and his circumstances. 

20. The vocabulary and the history of the period in which an author 

works constitute the whole within which his texts must be understood with 

all their peculiarities. 

1. This complete knowledge is contained within an apparent circle, 2 so 

that every extraordinary thing can only be understood in the context of the 

general of which it is a part, and vice versa. And all knowledge can only be 

scientific to the extent that it is complete. 

2. This circle makes possible an identification with the author, and thus 

it follows that, first, the more complete knowledge we possess, the better bolstered 

we are for exposition, and, second, no material for exposition can be 

understood in isolation; rather, every reading makes us better suited for 

understanding by enriching our previous knowledge. We can only be satisfied 

with immediate understanding when dealing with the meaningless. 

21. If the knowledge of the par tic u lar vocabulary can only be amassed 

during the exposition through lexical help and through individual observation, 

there can exist no self- sufficient exposition. 

1. Only an in de pen dent knowledge of the actual life of a language 

gives one a source in de pen dent of the exposition for the knowledge of the 

vocabulary. For this reason we have only an incomplete understanding of 

what Greek and Latin words mean. Hence, the first lexical task in such 

cases is to consider the whole literature as a context for understanding the 

individual linguistic item. These complementary tasks balance each other 

through the exposition itself, contributing to an artful exposition. 

2. Under the term vocabulary I subsume the dialect, period, and the 

mode— prose or poetry. 

3. Even first impressions should be based on lexical meaning, for 

spontaneous interpretation can only rest on prior knowledge [Vorkenntnisse], 

but even all decisions about the language in dictionaries and in 

2. The troubling yet unavoidable “hermeneutic circle” of interpretation.


explanatory notes proceed from special and other perhaps unreliable expositions. 

4. In the area of the New Testament, one can say with certainty that 

the unreliability and arbitrariness of the exposition rests largely on this 

fault. This is because contrasting analogies always develop from individual 

observations. For example, the development of New Testament vocabulary 

is rooted in classical antiquity and developed through Macedonian Greek 

through its use by the profane Jewish writers and by Josephus and Philo, by 

the deuterocanonical writers, and by the writers of the Septuagint, 3 who 

flavored their Greek with Hebrewisms. 

22. Even if the necessary knowledge of history comes only from prolegomena, 

there can still exist no self- sufficient exposition. 

1. Such prolegomena are the sort of critical helps it is the duty of a 

publisher who desires to be a mediator to use. But they must depend on a 

knowledge of the whole literary circle a work belongs to, and the whole 

development of an author himself. Thus they are themselves dependent 

on exposition, and so are all reckonings whose beginnings are not determined 

by a specific goal. The exact expositor must, however, gradually 

glean everything from the sources themselves, and it is because of this 

that his task can only progress from easy to more difficult. But the de penden 

cy becomes most injurious if one brings in such notes in the prolegomena 

that actually could only be derived from the interpreted work 

itself. 

2. The New Testament has given birth to a special discipline: the writing 

of the introduction. This is not an actual organic component of the 

theological discipline; but it is a practical expedient, partly for the beginner, 

partly for the master, since it is easier to bring together all of the relevant 

examinations in one place. But the expositor should always contribute 

to it so as to augment and relate the great mass of evidence. 

23. An individual element can only be understood in light of its place in 

the whole text; and therefore, a cursory reading for an overview of the whole 

must precede the exact exposition. 

1. Understanding appears to go in endless circles, for a preliminary 

understanding of even the individuals themselves comes from a general 

knowledge of the language. 

2. Synopses that the author gives himself are too dry to engage even 

the technical aspect of interpretation, and with summaries like those publishers 

authorize for prefaces one comes under the influence of their interpretations. 

3. The aim is to find the main idea in light of which the others must be 

mea sured, and this goes as well for the technical aspect— to find the main 

procedure from which the others can more easily be found. It is similarly 

indispensable for grammatical interpretation, which is obvious from the 

various forms of misunderstanding it often raises. 

3. A Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures 

by Jewish scholars (ca. 3d c. b.c.e.). Flavius Josephus 

(b. 37 / 8 c.e.) and Philo Judaeus (ca. 20 

b.c.e.— ca. 50 c.e.): secular Jewish writers of history 

and philosophy, respectively. “Deuterocanonical 

writers”: authors of books of the Scriptures 

contained in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew 

canon.


4. One can omit it easier when dealing with the unmeaningful, and 

although with difficult works it appears to be less helpful, it is actually all 

the more indispensable. A general summary is characteristically the least 

help in understanding difficult writers. 

Should the exposition be done partially, one would eventually have to 

connect both aspects in the execution of the interpretation, but in theory 

one must divide and handle each specially, even if afterwards one must 

endeavor to develop each so completely that the other becomes indispensable, 

or, what is more important, so that its result coincides with the first. 

The grammatical interpretation leads the way. 

PART TWO 

THE TECHNICAL INTERPRETATION 

1. The common beginning for both the technical and the grammatical 

interpretation is the general overview which grasps the unity of the work 

and the main features of the composition. The unity of the work, the 

theme, will be viewed here as the writer’s motivating principle, and the 

foundation of the composition as his peculiar nature as it is manifested in 

each motif. 

The unity of the work derives from the manner in which the grammatical 

constructions available in the language are composed or connected. The 

author sets a verbal object in motion as communication. The difference 

between pop u lar and scientific works is that the author of the former 

arranges the subject according to his peculiar style, which mirrors itself in 

his ordering. Because each author has minor conceptions each of which is 

determined by his peculiarities, one can recognize them from among analogous 

omissions and anomalous inclusions. 

I perceive the author as he functions in the language: partly bringing 

forth new things by his use of language, partly retaining qualities of language 

which he repeats and transmits. In the same way, from a knowledge 

of an area of speech, I can perceive the author’s language as its product and 

see how he operates under its aegis. Both methods are the same pro cess 

begun from different starting points. 

2. The ultimate goal of the psychological [technical] exposition is nothing 

other than to perceive the consequences of the beginning; that is to say, 

to consider the work as it is formed by its parts, and to perceive every part 

in light of the work’s overall subject as its motivation; this is also to say that 

the form is seen to be shaped by the subject matter. 

When I have looked at everything individually, there is nothing left 

over to understand. It is also obvious in itself that the apparent contrast 

between understanding the individual parts and understanding the whole 

disappears when every part receives the same treatment as the whole. But 

the goal [of good interpretation] is only achieved in the continuity of both 

perspectives. Even when much is only to be understood grammatically, it is 

not understood fully unless one can make an intrinsic analysis which never 

loses sight of the genesis of the work.


3. The goal of good interpretation is to understand the style completely. 

We are accustomed to understanding style as the handling of language. 

We presume that thought and language intertwine throughout, and the 

specific manner with which one understands the subject requires an understanding 

of the arrangement of words: i.e., the handling of language. 

The peculiarity of an individual conception results from what is missing 

or added to a conventional conception. What ever peculiarity results from 

imitation or habit results in a bad style. 

4. Good interpretation can only be approximated. 

We are, considering all advances in hermeneutical theory, still far from 

making it a perfect art, as the perennial fights over the writings of Homer 

and over the comparative merits of the three tragic writers 4 show. 

No individual inspection of a work ever exhausts its meaning; interpretation 

can always be rectified. Even the best is only an approximation of the 

meaning. Because interpretation so seldom succeeds, and because even 

the superior critic is open to criticism, we can see that we are still far from 

the goal of making hermeneutics a perfect art. 

5. Before beginning the technical exposition, we must know the manner 

in which the subject occurred to the originator, and how he acquired his 

language, and anything else one can learn about his mannerisms. 

First, one must consider the prior development of the genre of the work 

at the time when it was written; second, one must consider the use made of 

the genre typically in the place where the writer worked and in adjacent 

areas; finally, no exact understanding of the development and usage is possible 

without a knowledge of the related contemporary literature and especially 

the works the author might have used as a model. Such a cohesive 

study is indispensable. 

The third goal raises very troublesome problems. We could say that the 

interpretive pro cess as a whole is only as easy as this step is to take. But 

because even this step requires a judgment which can also be anticipated in 

the previous steps, it is possible that one might be able to omit it. Biographies 

of the author were originally annexed to their works for this purpose; 

nowadays this connection is overlooked. The best sort of prolegomena 

attends to the first two points. 

With these contextualizations [Vorkenntnissen] in hand one can gain 

an excellent perception of the essential characteristic of a work upon a first 

reading. 

6. The whole task requires the use of two methods, the divinatory and 

the comparative, which, however, as they constantly refer back to each 

other, must not be separated. 

Using the divinatory, one seeks to understand the writer intimately 

[unmittelbar] to the point that one transforms oneself into the other. 

Using the comparative, one seeks to understand a work as a characteristic 

type, viewing the work, in other words, in light of others like it. The one 

4. That is, the Greek tragedians Aeschylus, 

Sophocles, and Euripides (all active 5th c. b.c.e.). 

“Perennial fights”: over whether the Iliad and 

Odyssey were by a single poet or were collections 

of short works put together from various sources.

536 / GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL 

is the feminine force in the knowledge of human nature; the other is the 

masculine. 

Both refer back to each other. The first depends on the fact that every 

person has a susceptibility to intuiting others, in addition to his sharing 

many human characteristics. This itself appears to depend on the fact that 

everyone shares certain universal traits; divination consequently is inspired 

as the reader compares himself with the author. 

But how does the comparative come to subsume the subject under a 

general type? Obviously, either by comparing, which could go on infinitely, 

or by divination. 

Neither may be separated from the other, because divination receives 

its security first from an affirmative comparison, without which it might 

become outlandish. But the comparative of itself cannot yield a unity. The 

general and specific must permeate each other, and this can only happen by 

means of divination. 

7. The idea of the work, by which the author’s fundamental purpose [Wille] 

reveals itself, can only be understood in terms of the convergence of the 

basic material and its peculiarity of his developments. 

The basic material by itself stipulates no set manner of execution. As a 

rule it is easy enough to determine, even if it is not exactly specified; but for 

all that, one can be mistaken. One finds the purpose of the work most precisely 

in its peculiar or characteristic development of its material. Often the 

characteristic motif has only a limited influence on certain sections of a 

work, but nonetheless shapes the character of the work by its influence on 

others. The interpretive knack is to somehow intuit the meaning while 

being cautiously aware of how the intuition in some ways predetermines 

the pro cess of validating it. 

1819, 1828 1959, 1974 

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL 

1770–1831 

immanuel kant (1724– 1804) and G. W. F. Hegel are the Aristotle and plato of 

modern Continental philosophy, the two dominant figures from whom everything 

else flows. Hegel is a great synthesizer, a system builder who bequeaths to modern 

thought the conviction that an individual entity’s meaning rests not in itself but in 

the relationship of that thing to other things within an allencompassing, everchanging 

whole. Where the part is situated is crucial. All modern criticism that 

stresses the historical and social context of utterances or artworks is Hegelian to 

some degree. 

Hegel was the son of a minor court official in the duchy of Württemburg, in what 

is now Germany. He studied theology at the University of Tübingen, where he 

became friends with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the phi los o pher Friedrich von 

Schelling. After graduating in 1793, Hegel worked as a private tutor until he began

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL / 537 

teaching at the University of Jena in 1801, the year he published his first book. In 

1807 he published Phenomenology of Spirit, the first version of his grand philosophical 

vision and one of the great philosophical masterpieces of all time. A sexual 

scandal (he had a child with his landlord’s wife) forced Hegel to leave Jena in 1807, 

and he would not teach in a university again until 1816. He reached the height of his 

fame and influence with his lectures at the University of Berlin, which he delivered 

regularly from 1818 until his death. Many of these series were published either by 

Hegel himself or from the notes taken by his students, as was Lectures on Fine Art 

(1835– 38). 

Hegel is usually associated with the dialectic, which entails the confrontation of 

any thesis with its opposite (antithesis), and the resultant synthesis of the two 

through a pro cess of “overcoming” (aufgehoben in German). We might call the dialectic 

the motor of the Hegelian system, stressing movement and change over stasis. 

This system, which places individual elements in relation to one another, is in constant 

motion. Meaning and truth are never fixed because they are always in process. 

The world possesses not determinate being but only momentary resting places 

on the stages of becoming. Hegel does believe that there will be stasis and perfection 

at the end of history, and at times he appears to believe that his philosophy is 

that end, the moment when consciousness fully understands its own nature— its 

essential unity with all that exists. Spirit (Geist) is the name Hegel most often uses 

to designate this fundamental unity, and the goal of philosophy is to gain the “absolute 

knowledge” that would consist of Spirit recognizing the world as its own emanation. 

The changes of history, its dialectical path, would then come to an end. The 

dream of such completion has proven extraordinarily alluring yet often dangerous. 

Shorn of that dream, Hegel’s philosophy gives us a dynamic world of interrelationships 

in which the various elements contend with one another through dialectical 

struggle. Hegel’s most famous disciple, karl marx, adopts both the vision of struggle 

and the dream of an end to strife. But Hegelian themes also echo, in a different 

key, throughout the work of poststructuralists such as michel Foucault and julia 

kristeva. 

Our first selection presents the most famous instance of dialectical confrontation 

in Hegel, the so- called Master- Slave (“lord” and “bondsman” in our translation) dialectic. 

Although dense and abstract, this section of Phenomenology of Spirit has 

been very influential, especially in France, where, by way of Alexandre Kojève’s celebrated 

Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947), it shaped the thought of jeanpaul 

sartre, simone de beauvoir, jacques lacan, and jacques derrida, among 

others. The question Hegel asks is this: how does a human being come to consciousness 

of itself as a self (a consciousness that animals lack)? Hegel assumes that 

humans are not born with the sense “I am John Smith, and this is what I believe and 

am like.” How then do we acquire selfconsciousness? Only in meeting with something 

that is not the self, according to Hegel. Confrontation with my limits, with the 

not- self, enables me to identify what is self, what belongs to me. The reality of this 

discovered self depends on two things: I must have the consciousness that I am a 

self (which Hegel calls “beingfor- self”), and my existence must be acknowledged or 

recognized by other human beings (“beingfor- others”). In Hegel’s words, “Selfconsciousness 

exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for 

another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.” 

Most interpreters have seen Hegel as demonstrating that selfhood is a social fact. 

The child develops a sense of self largely because others treat it as a self— and the self 

will be socially constructed in different ways, depending on how it is treated. Selves 

are not born but made, in a dialectical social pro cess of interrelationships among 

selves. This ongoing pro cess proceeds through “moments” that Hegel then identifies 

as stages on the way toward full selfconsciousness. Just as the self develops consciousness 

over time, so the human species as a whole passes through moments in 

history on the path to absolute knowledge. Phenomenology of Spirit traces this


movement of humans through time to the culminating moment of the full selfconsciousness 

of Spirit. 

In the Master- Slave dialectic, the counterposed selves who are coming to consciousness 

have so much at stake that their relationships are a constant source of 

strife, “such that they prove themselves and each other through a life- and- death 

struggle.” Selves do not take their fundamental dependence on others kindly. Here 

power enters the discussion, as Hegel imagines that each individual would prefer to 

guarantee continued recognition from the other, while not extending that recognition 

in turn. Such imbalance, taken to its extreme, is figured by Hegel as the relationship 

between a master and a slave, which is established in a battle that ends 

when the Slave grants recognition and ser vice to the Master in return for continued 

life. (Both the Master and Slave stake their life in the battle, but the loser becomes 

a slave by choosing a life of servitude over death at the hand of the victor.) 

The Master, however, finds victory hollow. Recognition, like love, has value only 

when it is freely given, when it comes from someone who is like me in status. If the 

other acknowledges my existence only because forced to do so, how can that calm my 

lurking doubt about who I am? (Hegel not only anticipates the pro cesses of selfformation 

described by sigmund freud but also describes the existential anxiety that 

haunts any attachment to “identity.”) The Master’s access to his own selfhood is 

mediated through his relationship to the Slave; and since that Slave is “not an in depen 

dent consciousness, but a dependent one,” the Master “is, therefore, not certain 

of beingfor- self as the truth of himself.” By obliterating the Slave’s in de pen dence, the 

Master has removed the very “other” that must be encountered to achieve selfhood. 

Meanwhile, the Slave moves from the “dread . . . it has experienced” in the face 

of “death, the absolute Lord [or Master]” to a fairly satisfactory selfconsciousness 

achieved through work. (The Hegelian description of labor as redeeming greatly 

influenced Marx.) The Slave gains a sense of self because his labor has an effect on 

a material world of resistant objects. The Master has lost contact with the non- self 

(except with the Slave) because he has left all physical interaction with the world to 

the Slave. This ironic reversal of the Master- Slave relationship points toward the 

reciprocity of dependence that Hegel sees as characterizing human relationships: 

“They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.” Only if I am willing 

to acknowledge that the other is also a self, who has a need and a right to be a 

beingfor- self, can I satisfactorily establish my own selfhood. 

This account provides a memorable and persuasive model for understanding the 

complex dynamics of intersubjective relationships. Selfhood is a social product that 

individuals crave; identity has to be constructed through contentious interaction with 

and relation to others; this pro cess makes us dependent on others, and thus inclined 

to resent and fear them; and such dependence involves forms of psychological and 

social power that are distinct from physical force or the power afforded by superior 

wealth. Whenever modern literary theorists and critics have been interested in questions 

of identity and of the self’s confrontation with the other (however understood), 

Hegel’s famous account of the Master- Slave dialectic has hovered in the background. 

Our second selection consists of excerpts from the introduction to Lectures on 

Fine Art— Hegel’s contribution to philosophical aesthetics, the field that seeks to 

define the aims of the arts, the features of art objects, the activity of artists, and the 

effects of the arts on audiences. Aesthetics dates from the 1750s, but Hegel clearly 

echoes Plato on the arts. For Hegel, the fundamental goal of humanity is to come 

to full consciousness of the Idea (or Spirit), and philosophy is the golden road to 

that goal. Yet, unlike Plato, he wants to praise art, not condemn it. Because Hegel 

accepts the superiority of spirit over matter, truth over appearance, universal over 

par tic u lar, intellectual over sensual, and logic over feeling, he must argue that art, 

understood correctly, is not merely a sensuous, material, singular thing; instead, it 

contributes to human understanding of the Idea.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL / 539 

Hegel takes the line of argument suggested by his model of thinking. Just as the 

self in the Master- Slave dialectic can come to selfconsciousness only through 

encountering an other, so thinking needs to encounter an object. The Spirit or Idea 

dwells within humans, but as “a thinking consciousness” a person “draws out of 

himself and puts before himself what . . . is.” After art has given Spirit a concrete 

form, it can be apprehended. This account makes art part of the philosophical project 

of coming to full consciousness— and provides Hegel with firm answers to a 

number of problems that bedev il aesthetics. 

In the first part of our selection, Hegel reviews previous notions of the arts, steering 

a middle path between accounts that emphasize rules and those that rely on 

pure inspiration. More important, Hegel asserts the superiority of human- made 

artistic objects to God- made natural ones by appealing to their spiritual purpose. 

Spirit dwells in nature as well as in humans, but only humans are conscious of 

reaching an awareness of spirit. A man needs art “to lift the inner and outer world 

into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own 

self.” In Hegel’s quasi- religious philosophy, human life reaches its highest form 

when we recognize that the spirit of the creator permeates all of the created world, 

including ourselves. To discover this true self, to align ourselves with spirit, is to 

attain “free rationality.” 

True to his historicist convictions, in the second part of our selection Hegel presents 

the movement to full selfconsciousness as occurring in stages. Symbolic, classical, 

and romantic art form a dialectical triad. Symbolic art, tied to “perceived 

natural objects,” attempts but fails to attach a spiritual significance to those objects. 

This failure has its uses, since at least “the foreignness of the Idea to natural phenomena” 

is made manifest. The gap here between the natural and the spiritual is, 

Hegel tells us, “sublime,” a striking revision of a category invoked in antiquity by 

longinus and in the eigh teenth century by joseph addison, edmund burke, and 

Kant. 

The failure of primitive symbolic art, associated with the ancient Near East, generates 

its antithesis, classical art; and what Hegel sees as the higher, Western tradition 

begins. By focusing on “the human form,” the Greeks gave the Idea an adequate 

material embodiment. Since humans are a potent example of the union of spirit 

and body, Hegel finds ingenious the classical solution to the problem of “bring[ing] 

the spiritual before our eyes in a sensuous manner.” But it too has a defect— the 

opposite of that of symbolic art, which could not give the Idea a local habitation 

and name. Classical art fails because it “determine[s]” spirit “as par tic u lar and 

human,” thus obscuring its “absolute and eternal” essence. 

This “defect . . . demands a transition to a higher form,” the Romantic. The 

threat of classical art lies in its sensuousness. Romantic art, even as it utilizes sensuous 

forms, must move both artist and audience (by irony and sublimity) toward 

“the inwardness of selfconsciousness,” toward the indwelling spirit. As a synthesis 

and overcoming of symbolic and classical art, romantic art dissociates the idea 

from the sensuous form (as does symbolic art) even as it presents the sensuous form 

(as does classical art). Romantic art stages the “inadequacy” of the material embodiment 

so that “the Idea . . . appear[s] perfected in itself as spirit and heart.” 

Thus Hegel is a champion of Romantic art. In the move from sensuous form to 

inwardness, he places the expression of “subjective inner depth” and “reflective 

emotion” at the center of the artistic enterprise. This notion of art as expression is 

the cornerstone of Romantic aesthetics—william wordsworth, percy bysshe 

shelley, and ralph waldo emerson are among the nineteenthcentury writers 

who espouse some version of an expressivist aesthetic— and it continues to dominate 

pop u lar understandings of art, especially poetry. But Hegel’s historicism also 

suggests a broader expressivist understanding of art, in which the artwork is viewed 

as an expression of an era, zeitgeist, culture, or nation rather than of the artist’s


self. In both cases, artistic repre sen ta tion is tied not to some visible thing imitated 

by the artist but to some invisible ideas, emotions, attitudes, values, or spirit. 

While much contemporary critical practice, knowingly or not, is Hegelian, postmodern 

theory has self- consciously struggled (sometimes desperately) to slough off 

Hegelian habits. The great problem is Hegel’s will to totality, the movement of his 

philosophy, through dialectical overcoming and synthesis, to include everything. 

Postmodern theorists resist this philosophical imperialism, this “totalizing impulse,” 

insisting that inclusion through the dialectic always comes at the price of overcoming 

what is most singular and different in the incorporated other. The problem with 

subsuming everything into a totalizing system is the erasure of difference. Hence, 

in our selection Hegel makes art safe for philosophy by downplaying or explaining 

away everything that makes art different from and even antithetical to thinking. 

By highlighting the different and the singular, postmodernists question Hegel’s 

placing of everything into a relational, systematic whole. But since postmodern theory 

does accept that meaning is the product of systematic, though differential, relations, 

Hegel has been hard to negate. Because he can be neither banished nor embraced, 

Hegel remains a figure to whom much contemporary theory obsessively returns. 

bibliography 

Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, Hegel’s Werke (22 vols., 1969– 

72) is a complete German edition of his writings. Most of his work has been translated 

into En glish, though there is no standard scholarly edition of the complete 

works. Of special relevance to students of literature are Philosophy of Right, translated 

by T. M. Knox (1942); Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T. M. 

Knox (2 vols., 1975); Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, edited by H. B. Nisbet 

(1975); Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller (1977); and Lectures on the 

History of Philosophy, edited by Robert Brown (3 vols., 1990). The Hegel Reader, edited 

by Stephen Houlgate (1998), offers selections covering the breadth of Hegel’s interests. 

The best biography is Terry Pinkard’s Hegel: A Biography (2000). 

The secondary literature on Hegel is im mense; thus the following bibliography is 

extremely selective. Jean Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology 

of Spirit (1946; trans. 1974) and Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of 

Hegel (1947; trans. 1969) are two French works that shaped the existentialist and 

poststructuralist understandings of Hegel. Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution: 

Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941) and György Lukács’s The Young Hegel 

(1948; trans. 1975) are important documents in Western Marxism’s appropriation of 

Hegel. 

The single best, and most influential, overview remains Charles Taylor’s Hegel 

(1975), which also comes in a slimmer version titled Hegel and Modern Society 

(1979). There are also two recent superb introductions: Stephen Houlgate’s An Introduction 

to Hegel: Freedom, Truth, and History (2d ed., 2005) and Frederick Beiser’s 

Hegel (2005). John Russon’s Reading Hegel’s “Phenomenology” (2004), specifically 

on the Phenomenology of Spirit, is also recommended. Another resource for the 

beginner is The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, edited by Frederick C. Beiser (1993), 

which provides clear essays that summarize Hegel’s work in different areas ranging 

from metaphysics to ethics. 

Jacques Derrida’s Glas (1981; trans. 1986) is the most important of many poststructuralist 

encounters with Hegel. David Kolb’s The Critique of Pure Modernity: 

Hegel, Heidegger, and After (1986), Judith Butler’s Subjects of Desire: Hegelian 

Reflections in Twentieth- Century France (1987), John McGowan’s Postmodernism 

and Its Critics (1991), Theodor Adorno’s Hegel: Three Studies (1963; trans. 1993), 

Louis Althusser’s The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings (1997), and Bruce Baugh’s 

French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (2003) are all relevant to Hegel’s 

presence in contemporary theory. For works that continue the reexamination of

Phenomenology of Spirit / 541 

Hegel in relation to current debates and themes in literary theory, see Slavoj ŽiŽek, 

Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (1993); Feminist 

Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel, edited by Patricia J. Mills (1996); Robert R. 

Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (1997); Hegel, History, and Interpretation, 

edited by Shaun Gallagher (1997); Hegel After Derrida, edited by Stuart Barnett 

(1998); and Jean- Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative (1997; trans. 

2002). Three excellent books that address Hegel’s aesthetics are Allen Speight’s 

Hegel, Literature, and the Problem of Agency (2001), Theodore D. George’s Tragedies 

of Spirit: Tracing Finitude in Hegel’s “Phenomenology” (2006), and Hegel and the 

Arts, edited by Stephen Houlgate (2007). 

Kurt Steinhauer’s massive German/En glish Hegel Bibliographie (1980, 1998) covers 

almost all the secondary literature from 1802. A more manageable bibliography, 

helpfully arranged by topic, can be found in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, 

while the “Bibliographical Essay” at the end of Houlgate’s Introduction is very useful 

and more recent than these other two sources. 

From Phenomenology of Spirit 1 

[The Master- Slave Dialectic] 

178. Self- consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it 

so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged [als ein 

Anerkanntes]. The Notion of this its unity in its duplication embraces many 

and varied meanings. Its moments, then, must on the one hand be held 

strictly apart, and on the other hand must in this differentiation at the same 

time also be taken and known as not distinct, or in their opposite significance. 

The twofold significance of the distinct moments has in the nature 

of selfconsciousness to be infinite, or directly the opposite of the determinateness 

in which it is posited. The detailed exposition of the Notion of this 

spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the pro cess of Recognition 

[Anerkennen]. 

179. Self- consciousness is faced by another selfconsciousness; it has 

come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for 

it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the 

other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other 

sees its own self. 

180. It must supersede this otherness of itself. This is the supersession 

of the first ambiguity, and is therefore itself a second ambiguity. First, it 

must proceed to supersede the other in de pen dent being in order thereby to 

become certain of itself as the essential being; secondly, in so doing it proceeds 

to supersede its own self, for this other is itself. 

181. This ambiguous supersession of its ambiguous otherness is equally 

an ambiguous return into itself. For first, through the supersession, it receives 

back its own self, because, by superseding its otherness, it again becomes 

equal to itself; but secondly, it equally gives the other selfconsciousness 

back again to itself, for it saw itself in the other, but supersedes this being 

of itself in the other and thus lets the other again go free. 

1. Translated by A. V. Miller, who sometimes retains the original German or adds clarifying words or 

phrases in brackets and has added the paragraph numbers.


182. Now, this movement of selfconsciousness in relation to another 

selfconsciousness has in this way been represented as the action of one 

selfconsciousness, but this action of the one has itself the double significance 

of being both its own action and the action of the other as well. For 

the other is equally in de pen dent and self- contained, and there is nothing in 

it of which it is not itself the origin. The first does not have the object 

before it merely as it exists primarily for desire, but as something that has 

an in de pen dent existence of its own, which, therefore, it cannot utilize for 

its own purposes, if that object does not of its own accord do what the first 

does to it. Thus the movement is simply the double movement of the two 

self- consciousnesses. Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does 

itself what it demands of the other, and therefore also does what it does 

only in so far as the other does the same. Action by one side only would be 

useless because what is to happen can only be brought about by both. 

183. Thus the action has a double significance not only because it is 

directed against itself as well as against the other, but also because it is 

indivisibly the action of one as well as of the other. 

184. In this movement we see repeated the pro cess which presented itself 

as the play of Forces, but repeated now in consciousness. What in that process 

was for us, is true here of the extremes themselves. The middle term is 

selfconsciousness which splits into the extremes; and each extreme is this 

exchanging of its own determinateness and an absolute transition into the 

opposite. Although, as consciousness, it does indeed come out of itself, yet, 

though out of itself, it is at the same time kept back within itself, is for itself, 

and the self outside it, is for it. It is aware that it at once is, and is not, 

another consciousness, and equally that this other is for itself only when it 

supersedes itself as being for itself, and is for itself only in the beingfor- self 

of the other. Each is for the other the middle term, through which each 

mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for 

the other, an immediate being to its own account, which at the same time is 

such only through this mediation. 2 They recognize themselves as mutually 

recognizing one another. 

185. We have now to see how the pro cess of this pure Notion of recognition, 

of the duplicating of selfconsciousness in its oneness, appears to 

selfconsciousness. At first, it will exhibit the side of the in e qual ity of the 

two, or the splitting- up of the middle term into the extremes which, as 

extremes, are opposed to one another, one being only recognized, the other 

only recognizing. 

186. Self- consciousness is, to begin with, simple beingfor- self, self- equal 

through the exclusion from itself of everything else. For it, its essence and 

absolute object is ‘I’; and in this immediacy, or in this [mere] being, of its 

beingfor- self, it is an individual. What is ‘other’ for it is an unessential, 

negatively characterized object. But the ‘other’ is also a selfconsciousness; 

one individual is confronted by another individual. Appearing thus immediately 

on the scene, they are for one another like ordinary objects, in de pendent 

shapes, individuals submerged in the being [or immediacy] of Life— for 

the object in its immediacy is here determined as Life. They are, for each 

other, shapes of consciousness which have not yet accomplished the move- 

2. That is, the encounter with the other is necessary for selfconsciousness.


ment of absolute abstraction, of rooting- out all immediate being, and of 

being merely the purely negative being of self- identical consciousness; in 

other words, they have not as yet exposed themselves to each other in the 

form of pure beingfor- self, or as selfconsciousness. Each is indeed certain 

of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own self- certainty still 

has no truth. For it would have truth only if its own beingfor- self had confronted 

it as an in de pen dent object, or, what is the same thing, if the object 

had presented itself as this pure self- certainty. But according to the Notion 

of recognition this is possible only when each is for the other what the other 

is for it, only when each in its own self through its own action, and again 

through the action of the other, achieves this pure abstraction of beingfor- 

self. 

187. The pre sen ta tion of itself, however, as the pure abstraction of selfconsciousness 

consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective 

mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence, not to 

the individuality common to existence as such, that it is not attached to life. 

This pre sen ta tion is a twofold action: action on the part of the other, and 

action on its own part. In so far as it is the action of the other, each seeks 

the death of the other. But in doing so, the second kind of action, action on 

its own part, is also involved; for the former involves the staking of its own 

life. Thus the relation of the two selfconscious individuals is such that they 

prove themselves and each other through a life- and- death struggle. They 

must engage in this struggle, for they must raise their certainty of being for 

themselves to truth, both in the case of the other and in their own case. And 

it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it 

proved that for selfconsciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not 

the immediate form in which it appears, not its submergence in the expanse 

of life, but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be 

regarded as a vanishing moment, that it is only pure beingfor- self. The individual 

who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person, but he 

has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an in de pen dent selfconsciousness. 

Similarly, just as each stakes his own life, so each must seek 

the other’s death, for it values the other no more than itself; its essential 

being is present to it in the form of an ‘other’, it is outside of itself and must 

rid itself of its self- externality. The other is an immediate consciousness 

entangled in a variety of relationships, and it must regard its otherness as a 

pure beingfor- self or as an absolute negation. 

188. This trial by death, however, does away with the truth which was 

supposed to issue from it, and so, too, with the certainty of self generally. 

For just as life is the natural setting of consciousness, in de pen dence without 

absolute negativity, so death is the natural negation of consciousness, 

negation without in de pen dence, which thus remains without the required 

significance of recognition. Death certainly shows that each staked his life 

and held it of no account, both in himself and in the other; but that is not 

for those who survived this struggle. They put an end to their consciousness 

in its alien setting of natural existence, that is to say, they put an end 

to themselves, and are done away with as extremes wanting to be for themselves, 

or to have an existence of their own. But with this there vanishes 

from their interplay the essential moment of splitting into extremes with 

opposite characteristics; and the middle term collapses into a lifeless unity


which is split into lifeless, merely immediate, unopposed extremes; and the 

two do not reciprocally give and receive one another back from each other 

consciously, but leave each other free only indifferently, like things. Their 

act is an abstract negation, not the negation coming from consciousness, 

which supersedes in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is superseded, 

and consequently survives its own supersession. 3 

189. In this experience, selfconsciousness learns that life is as essential to 

it as pure selfconsciousness. In immediate selfconsciousness the simple ‘I’ is 

the absolute object which, however, for us or in itself is absolute mediation, 

and has as its essential moment lasting in de pen dence. The dissolution of that 

simple unity is the result of the first experience; through this there is posited 

a pure selfconsciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself 

but for another, i.e. is a merely immediate consciousness, or consciousness in 

the form of thinghood. Both moments are essential. Since to begin with they 

are unequal and opposed, and their reflection into a unity has not yet been 

achieved, they exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the in depen 

dent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is 

the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be 

for another. The former is lord [Herr], the other is bondsman [Knecht]. 4 

190. The lord is the consciousness that exists for itself, but no longer 

merely the Notion of such a consciousness. Rather, it is a consciousness 

existing for itself which is mediated with itself through another consciousness, 

i.e. through a consciousness whose nature it is to be bound up with an 

existence that is in de pen dent, or thinghood in general. The lord puts himself 

into relation with both of these moments, to a thing as such, the object of 

desire, and to the consciousness for which thinghood is the essential characteristic. 

And since he is (a) qua the Notion of selfconsciousness an immediate 

relation of beingfor- self, but (b) is now at the same time mediation, or a 

beingfor- self which is for itself only through another, he is related (a) immediately 

to both, and (b) mediately to each through the other. The lord relates 

himself mediately to the bondsman through a being [a thing] that is in de pendent, 

for it is just this which holds the bondsman in bondage; it is his chain 

from which he could not break free in the struggle, thus proving himself to 

be dependent, to possess his in de pen dence in thinghood. But the lord is the 

power over this thing, for he proved in the struggle that it is something 

merely negative; since he is the power over this thing and this again is the 

power over the other [the bondsman], it follows that he holds the other in 

subjection. Equally, the lord relates himself mediately to the thing through 

the bondsman; the bondsman, qua selfconsciousness in general, also relates 

himself negatively to the thing, and takes away its in de pen dence; but at the 

same time the thing is in de pen dent vis-à- vis the bondsman, whose negating 

of it, therefore, cannot go to the length of being altogether done with it to the 

point of annihilation; in other words, he only works on it. For the lord, on the 

other hand, the immediate relation becomes through this mediation the 

sheer negation of the thing, or the enjoyment of it. What desire failed to 

achieve, he succeeds in doing, viz. to have done with the thing altogether, 

and to achieve satisfaction in the enjoyment of it. Desire failed to do this 

3. This description of “the negation coming from 

consciousness” encapsulates the dialectic. 

4. Herr and Knecht have often been translated 

“Master” and “Slave.”


because of the thing’s in de pen dence; but the lord, who has interposed the 

bondsman between it and himself, takes to himself only the dependent 

aspect of the thing and has the pure enjoyment of it. The aspect of its in depen 

dence he leaves to the bondsman, who works on it. 

191. In both of these moments the lord achieves his recognition through 

another consciousness; for in them, that other consciousness is expressly 

something unessential, both by its working on the thing, and by its dependence 

on a specific existence. In neither case can it be lord over the being 

of the thing and achieve absolute negation of it. Here, therefore, is present 

this moment of recognition, viz. that the other consciousness sets aside its 

own beingfor- self, and in so doing itself does what the first does to it. 

Similarly, the other moment too is present, that this action of the second is 

the first’s own action; for what the bondsman does is really the action of the 

lord. The latter’s essential nature is to exist only for himself; he is the sheer 

negative power for whom the thing is nothing. Thus he is the pure, essential 

action in this relationship, while the action of the bondsman is impure 

and unessential. But for recognition proper the moment is lacking, that 

what the lord does to the other he also does to himself, and what the bondsman 

does to himself he should also do to the other. The outcome is a recognition 

that is onesided and unequal. 

192. In this recognition the unessential consciousness is for the lord the 

object, which constitutes the truth of his certainty of himself. But it is clear 

that this object does not correspond to its Notion, but rather that the object 

in which the lord has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be 

something quite different from an in de pen dent consciousness. What now 

really confronts him is not an in de pen dent consciousness, but a dependent 

one. He is, therefore, not certain of beingfor- self as the truth of himself. 

On the contrary, his truth is in reality the unessential consciousness and its 

unessential action. 

193. The truth of the in de pen dent consciousness is accordingly the servile 

consciousness of the bondsman. This, it is true, appears at first outside 

of itself and not as the truth of selfconsciousness. But just as lordship 

showed that its essential nature is the reverse of what it wants to be, so too 

servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it 

immediately is; as a consciousness forced back into itself, it will withdraw 

into itself and be transformed into a truly in de pen dent consciousness. 

194. We have seen what servitude is only in relation to lordship. But it is 

a selfconsciousness, and we have now to consider what as such it is in and 

for itself. To begin with, servitude has the lord for its essential reality; hence 

the truth for it is the in de pen dent consciousness that it is for itself. However, 

servitude is not yet aware that this truth is implicit in it. But it does in fact 

contain within itself this truth of pure negativity and beingfor- self, for it has 

experienced this its own essential nature. For this consciousness has been 

fearful, not of this or that par tic u lar thing or just at odd moments, but its 

whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of 

death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, 

has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has 

been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute 

melting- away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of selfconsciousness, 

absolute negativity, pure beingfor- self, which consequently is


implicit in this consciousness. This moment of pure beingfor- self is also 

explicit for the bondsman, for in the lord it exists for him as his object. Furthermore, 

his consciousness is not this dissolution of everything stable 

merely in principle; in his ser vice he actually brings this about. Through his 

ser vice he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single 

detail; and gets rid of it by working on it. 

195. However, the feeling of absolute power both in general, and in the 

par tic u lar form of ser vice, is only implicitly this dissolution, and although 

the fear of the lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom, consciousness is not 

therein aware that it is a beingfor- self. Through work, however, the bondsman 

becomes conscious of what he truly is. In the moment which corresponds 

to desire in the lord’s consciousness, it did seem that the aspect of 

unessential relation to the thing fell to the lot of the bondsman, since in that 

relation the thing retained its in de pen dence. Desire has reserved to itself 

the pure negating of the object and thereby its unalloyed feeling of self. 

But that is the reason why this satisfaction is itself only a fleeting one, for it 

lacks the side of objectivity and permanence. Work, on the other hand, is 

desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and 

shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and 

something permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object 

has in de pen dence. This negative middle term or the formative activity is at 

the same time the individuality or pure beingfor- self of consciousness which 

now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. 5 It is in 

this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the in depen 

dent being [of the object] its own in de pen dence. 

196. But the formative activity has not only this positive significance 

that in it the pure beingfor- self of the servile consciousness acquires an 

existence; it also has negative significance with respect to its first moment, 

fear. For, in fashioning the thing, the bondsman’s own negativity, his beingfor- 

self, becomes an object for him only through his setting at nought the 

existing shape confronting him. But this objective negative moment is none 

other than the alien being before which it has trembled. Now, however, he 

destroys this alien negative moment, posits himself as a negative in the permanent 

order of things, and thereby becomes for himself, someone existing 

on his own account. In the lord, the beingfor- self is an ‘other’ for the 

bondsman, or is only for him [i.e. is not his own]; in fear, the beingfor- self 

is present in the bondsman himself; in fashioning the thing, he becomes 

aware that beingfor- self belongs to him, that he himself exists essentially 

and actually in his own right. The shape does not become something other 

than himself through being made external to him; for it is precisely this 

shape that is his pure beingfor- self, which in this externality is seen by him 

to be the truth. Through this rediscovery of himself by himself, the bondsman 

realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only 

an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own. For this reflection, 

the two moments of fear and ser vice as such, as also that of formative 

activity, are necessary, both being at the same time in a universal mode. 

Without the discipline of ser vice and obedience, fear remains at the formal 

stage, and does not extend to the known real world of existence. Without 

5. Work as “formative activity,” according to Hegel, creates a stable object that comes to signify a similar 

stability for the consciousness that shapes that object.

Lectures on Fine Art / 547 

the formative activity, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness 

does not become explicitly for itself. If consciousness fashions the thing 

without that initial absolute fear, it is only an empty self- centered attitude; 

for its form or negativity is not negativity per se, and therefore its formative 

activity cannot give it a consciousness of itself as essential being. If it has 

not experienced absolute fear but only some lesser dread, the negative 

being has remained for it something external, its substance has not been 

infected by it through and through. Since the entire contents of its natural 

consciousness have not been jeopardized, determinate being still in principle 

attaches to it; having a ‘mind of one’s own’ is self- will, a freedom which 

is still enmeshed in servitude. Just as little as the pure form can become 

essential being for it, just as little is that form, regarded as extended to the 

par tic u lar, a universal formative activity, an absolute Notion; rather it is a 

skill which is master over some things, but not over the universal power and 

the whole of objective being. 

1807 

From Lectures on Fine Art 1 

From Introduction 

* * * 

the work of art as a product of human activity 

(a) As for the first point, that a work of art is a product of human activity, 

this view has given rise to the thought that this activity, being the conscious 

production of an external object, can also be known and expounded, and 

learnt and pursued by others. For what one man makes, another, it may 

seem, could make or imitate too, if only he were first acquainted with the 

manner of proceeding; so that, granted universal acquaintance with the 

rules of artistic production, it would only be a matter of everyone’s plea sure 

to carry out the procedure in the same manner and produce works of art. It 

is in this way that the rule- providing theories, mentioned above, with their 

prescriptions calculated for practical application, have arisen. But what can 

be carried out on such directions can only be something formally regular 

and mechanical. For the mechanical alone is of so external a kind that only 

a purely empty exercise of will and dexterity is required for receiving it into 

our ideas and activating it; this exercise does not require to be supplemented 

by anything concrete, or by anything not prescribed in universal 

rules. This comes out most vividly when such prescriptions do not limit 

themselves to the purely external and mechanical, but extend to the significant 

and spiritual activity of the artist. In this sphere the rules contain only 

vague generalities, for example that ‘the theme should be interesting, every 

character should speak according to his standing, age, sex, and situation’. 

But if rules are to satisfy here, then their prescriptions should have been 

drawn up at the same time with such precision that they could be observed 

just as they are expressed, without any further spiritual activity of the 

1. Translated by T. M. Knox, who sometimes adds explanatory words or phrases in brackets.


artist’s. Being abstract in content, however, such rules reveal themselves, in 

their pretence of adequacy to fill the consciousness of the artist, as wholly 

inadequate, since artistic production is not a formal activity in accordance 

with given specifications. On the contrary, as spiritual activity it is bound 

to work from its own resources and bring before the mind’s eye a quite other 

and richer content and more comprehensive individual creations [than formulae 

can provide]. Therefore, in so far as such rules do actually contain 

something specific and therefore of practical utility, they may apply in case 

of need, but still can afford no more than specifications for purely external 

circumstances. 

(b) Thus, as it turns out, the tendency just indicated has been altogether 

abandoned, and instead of it the opposite one has been adopted to the same 

extent. For the work of art was no longer regarded as a product of general 

human activity, but as a work of an entirely specially gifted spirit which now, 

however, is supposed to give free play simply and only to its own par tic u lar 

gift, as if to a specific natural force; it is to cut itself altogether loose from 

attention to universally valid laws and from a conscious reflection interfering 

with its own instinctive- like productive activity. Indeed it is supposed to 

be protected from such reflection, since its productions could only be contaminated 

and spoiled by such awareness. From this point of view the work 

of art has been claimed as a product of talent and genius, and the natural 

element in talent and genius has been especially emphasized. In a way, 

rightly, since talent is specific and genius universal capability, which man 

has not the power to give to himself purely and simply through his own selfconscious 

activity. On this topic we shall speak at greater length later. 

Here we have only to mention the false aspect of this view, namely that in 

artistic production all consciousness of the artist’s own activity is regarded 

as not merely superfluous but even deleterious. In that case production by 

talent and genius appears as only a state and, in par tic u lar, a state of inspiration. 

To such a state, it is said, genius is excited in part by an object, and in 

part can transpose itself into it by its own caprice, a pro cess in which, after 

all, the good ser vices of the champagne bottle are not forgotten. In Germany 

this notion became prominent at the time of the so- called Period of Genius 

which was introduced by Goethe’s first poetical productions and then sustained 

by Schiller’s. 2 In their earliest works these poets began afresh, setting 

aside all the rules then fabricated; they worked deliberately against these 

rules and thereby surpassed all other writers. However, I will not go further 

into the confusions which have been prevalent about the concept of inspiration 

and genius, and which prevail even today about the omnicompetence of 

inspiration as such. All that is essential is to state the view that, even if the 

talent and genius of the artist has in it a natural element, yet this element 

essentially requires development by thought, reflection on the mode of its 

productivity, and practice and skill in producing. For, apart from anything 

else, a main feature of artistic production is external workmanship, since 

the work of art has a purely technical side which extends into handicraft, 

especially in architecture and sculpture, less so in painting and music, least 

of all in poetry. Skill in technique is not helped by any inspiration, but only 

2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749– 1832) and friedrich von schiller (1759– 1805) were the two 

most important poets of the Romantic period in Germany.


by reflection, industry, and practice. But such skill the artist is compelled to 

have in order to master his external material and not be thwarted by its 

intractability. 

Now further, the higher the standing of the artist, the more profoundly 

should he display the depths of the heart and the spirit; these are not known 

directly but are to be fathomed only by the direction of the artist’s own 

spirit on the inner and outer world. So, once again, it is study whereby the 

artist brings this content into his consciousness and wins the stuff and content 

of his conceptions. 

* * * 

(c) A third view concerning the idea of the work of art as a product of 

human activity refers to the placing of the work of art in relation to the 

external phenomena of nature. Here the ordinary way of looking at things 

took easily to the notion that the human artproduct ranked below the 

product of nature; for the work of art has no feeling in itself and is not 

through and through enlivened, but, regarded as an external object, is 

dead; but we are accustomed to value the living higher than the dead. That 

the work of art has no life and movement in itself is readily granted. What 

is alive in nature is, within and without, an organism purposefully elaborated 

into all its tiniest parts, while the work of art attains the appearance 

of life only on its surface; inside it is ordinary stone, or wood and canvas, or, 

as in poetry, an idea expressed in speech and letters. But this aspect— 

external existence— is not what makes a work into a product of fine art; a 

work of art is such only because, originating from the spirit, it now belongs 

to the territory of the spirit; it has received the baptism of the spiritual and 

sets forth only what has been formed in harmony with the spirit. Human 

interest, the spiritual value possessed by an event, an individual character, 

an action in its complexity and outcome, is grasped in the work of art and 

blazoned more purely and more transparently than is possible on the ground 

of other non- artistic things. Therefore the work of art stands higher than 

any natural product which has not made this journey through the spirit. 

For example, owing to the feeling and insight whereby a landscape has been 

represented in a painting, this work of the spirit acquires a higher rank 

than the mere natural landscape. For everything spiritual is better than any 

product of nature. Besides, no natural being is able, as art is, to present the 

divine Ideal. 

Now on what the spirit draws from its own inner resources in works of art 

it confers permanence in their external existence too; on the other hand, 

the individual living thing in nature is transient, vanishing, changeable in 

outward appearance, while the work of art persists, even if it is not mere 

permanence which constitutes its genuine pre- eminence over natural reality, 

but its having made spiritual inspiration conspicuous. 

But nevertheless this higher standing of the work of art is questioned by 

another idea commonly entertained. For nature and its products, it is said, 

are a work of God, created by his goodness and wisdom, whereas the artproduct 

is a purely human work, made by human hands according to 

human insight. In this contrast between natural production as a divine creation 

and human activity as something merely finite there lies directly the 

misunderstanding that God does not work in and through men at all, but


restricts the sphere of his activity to nature alone. This false opinion must 

be completely rejected if we are to penetrate to the true nature of art. 

Indeed, over against this view we must cling to the opposite one, namely 

that God is more honoured by what the spirit makes than by the productions 

and formations of nature. For not only is there something divine in 

man, but it is active in him in a form appropriate to the being of God in a 

totally different and higher manner than it is in nature. God is spirit, and in 

man alone does the medium, through which the Divine passes, have the form 

of conscious and actively self- productive spirit; but in nature this medium 

is the unconscious, the sensuous, and the external, which stands far below 

consciousness in worth. Now in art- production God is just as operative as 

he is in the phenomena of nature; but the Divine, as it discloses itself in the 

work of art, has been generated out of the spirit, and thus has won a suitable 

thoroughfare for its existence, whereas just being there in the unconscious 

sensuousness of nature is not a mode of appearance appropriate to 

the Divine. 

(d) Now granted that the work of art is made by man as the creation of his 

spirit, a final question arises, in order to derive a deeper result from the foregoing 

[discussion], namely, what is man’s need to produce works of art? On 

the one hand, this production may be regarded as a mere play of chance and 

fancies which might just as well be left alone as pursued; for it might be held 

that there are other and even better means of achieving what art aims at 

and that man has still higher and more important interests than art has the 

ability to satisfy. On the other hand, however, art seems to proceed from a 

higher impulse and to satisfy higher needs,— at times the highest and absolute 

needs since it is bound up with the most universal views of life and the 

religious interests of whole epochs and peoples.— This question about the 

non- contingent but absolute need for art, we cannot yet answer completely, 

because it is more concrete than an answer could turn out to be at this stage. 

Therefore we must content ourselves in the meantime with making only the 

following points. 

The universal and absolute need from which art (on its formal side) springs 

has its origin in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, i.e. that man 

draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and what ever else is. 

Things in nature are only immediate and single, while man as spirit duplicates 

himself, in that (i) he is as things in nature are, but (ii) he is just as 

much for himself; he sees himself, represents himself to himself, thinks, and 

only on the strength of this active placing himself before himself is he spirit. 

This consciousness of himself man acquires in a twofold way: first, theoretically, 

in so far as inwardly he must bring himself into his own consciousness, 

along with what ever moves, stirs, and presses in the human breast; and in 

general he must see himself, represent himself to himself, fix before himself 

what thinking finds as his essence, and recognize himself alone alike in what 

is summoned out of himself and in what is accepted from without. Secondly, 

man brings himself before himself by practical activity, since he has the 

impulse, in what ever is directly given to him, in what is present to him externally, 

to produce himself and therein equally to recognize himself. This aim 

he achieves by altering external things whereon he impresses the seal of his 

inner being and in which he now finds again his own characteristics. Man 

does this in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexi-

3. That is, the different historical forms of art. 


ble foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization 

of himself. Even a child’s first impulse involves this practical alteration 

of external things; a boy throws stones into the river and now marvels at the 

circles drawn in the water as an effect in which he gains an intuition of 

something that is his own doing. This need runs through the most diversiform 

phenomena up to that mode of self- production in external things 

which is present in the work of art. And it is not only with external things 

that man proceeds in this way, but no less with himself, with his own natural 

figure which he does not leave as he finds it but deliberately alters. This 

is the cause of all dressing up and adornment, even if it be barbaric, tasteless, 

completely disfiguring, or even pernicious like crushing the feet of Chinese 

ladies, or slitting the ears and lips. For it is only among civilized people that 

alteration of figure, behaviour, and every sort and mode of external expression 

proceeds from spiritual development. 

The universal need for art, that is to say, is man’s rational need to lift the 

inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which 

he recognizes again his own self. The need for this spiritual freedom he satisfies, 

on the one hand, by making what is within him explicit to himself, but 

correspondingly by giving outward reality to this his explicit self, and thus in 

this duplication of himself by bringing what is in him into sight and knowledge 

for himself and others. This is the free rationality of man in which 

all acting and knowing, as well as art too, have their basis and necessary 

origin. 

* * * 

development of the ideal into the par tic u lar forms 

of the beauty of art 

But because the Idea is in this way a concrete unity, this unity can enter the 

art- consciousness only through the unfolding and then the reconciliation of 

the particularizations of the Idea, 3 and, through this development, artistic 

beauty acquires a totality of par tic u lar stages and forms. Therefore, after 

studying artistic beauty in itself and on its own account, we must see how 

beauty as a whole decomposes into its par tic u lar determinations. This gives, 

as the second part of our study, the doctrine of the forms of art. These forms 

find their origin in the different ways of grasping the Idea as content, whereby 

a difference in the configuration in which the Idea appears is conditioned. 

Thus the forms of art are nothing but the different relations of meaning and 

shape, relations which proceed from the Idea itself and therefore provide the 

true basis for the division of this sphere. For division must always be implicit 

in the concept, the particularization and division of which is in question. 

We have here to consider three relations of the Idea to its configuration. 

(a) First, art begins when the Idea, still in its indeterminacy and obscurity, 

or in bad and untrue determinacy, is made the content of artistic 

shapes. Being indeterminate, it does not yet possess in itself that individuality 

which the Ideal demands; its abstraction and one- sidedness leave its 

shape externally defective and arbitrary. The first form of art is therefore 

rather a mere search for portrayal than a capacity for true pre sen ta tion; the 

Idea has not found the form even in itself and therefore remains struggling


and striving after it. We may call this form, in general terms, the symbolic 

form of art. In it the abstract Idea has its shape outside itself in the natural 

sensuous material from which the pro cess of shaping starts 4 and with 

which, in its appearance, this pro cess is linked. Perceived natural objects 

are, on the one hand, primarily left as they are, yet at the same time the 

substantial Idea is imposed on them as their meaning so that they now 

acquire a vocation to express it and so are to be interpreted as if the Idea 

itself were present in them. A corollary of this is the fact that natural 

objects have in them an aspect according to which they are capable of representing 

a universal meaning. But since a complete correspondence is not 

yet possible, this relation can concern only an abstract characteristic, as 

when, for example, in a lion strength is meant. 

On the other hand, the abstractness of this relation brings home to consciousness 

even so the foreignness of the Idea to natural phenomena, and 

the Idea, which has no other reality to express it, launches out in all these 

shapes, seeks itself in them in their unrest and extravagance, but yet does 

not find them adequate to itself. So now the Idea exaggerates natural 

shapes and the phenomena of reality itself into indefiniteness and extravagance; 

it staggers round in them, it bubbles and ferments in them, does 

violence to them, distorts and stretches them unnaturally, and tries to elevate 

their phenomenal appearance to the Idea by the diffuseness, immensity, 

and splendour of the formations employed. For the Idea is here still 

more or less indeterminate and unshapable, while the natural objects are 

thoroughly determinate in their shape. 

In the incompatibility of the two sides to one another, the relation of the 

Idea to the objective world therefore becomes a negative one, since the Idea, 

as something inward, is itself unsatisfied by such externality, and, as the 

inner universal substance thereof, it persists sublime above all this multiplicity 

of shapes which do not correspond with it. In the light of this sublimity, 

the natural phenomena and human forms and events are accepted, it is true, 

and left as they are, but yet they are recognized at the same time as incompatible 

with their meaning which is raised far above all mundane content. 

These aspects constitute in general the character of the early artistic 

pantheism of the East, which on the one hand ascribes absolute meaning to 

even the most worthless objects, and, on the other, violently coerces the 

phenomena to express its view of the world whereby it becomes bizarre, 

grotesque, and tasteless, or turns the infinite but abstract freedom of the 

substance [i.e. the one Lord] disdainfully against all phenomena as being 

null and evanescent. By this means the meaning cannot be completely pictured 

in the expression and, despite all striving and endeavour, the incompatibility 

of Idea and shape still remains unconquered.— This may be taken 

to be the first form of art, the symbolic form with its quest, its fermentation, 

its mysteriousness, and its sublimity. 

(b) In the second form of art which we will call the classical, the double 

defect of the symbolic form is extinguished. The symbolic shape is imperfect 

because, (i) in it the Idea is presented to consciousness only as indeter- 

4. An unknown block of stone may symbolize the 

Divine, but it does not represent it. Its natural 

shape has no connection with the Divine and is 

therefore external to it and not an embodiment of 

it. When shaping begins, the shapes produced 

are symbols, perhaps, but in themselves are fantastic 

and monstrous [Hegel’s note].


minate or determined abstractly, and, (ii) for this reason the correspondence 

of meaning and shape is always defective and must itself remain purely 

abstract. The classical art- form clears up this double defect; it is the free 

and adequate embodiment of the Idea in the shape peculiarly appropriate 

to the Idea itself in its essential nature. With this shape, therefore, the Idea 

is able to come into free and complete harmony. Thus the classical art- form 

is the first to afford the production and vision of the completed Ideal and to 

present it as actualized in fact. 

Nevertheless, the conformity of concept and reality in classical art must not 

be taken in the purely formal sense of a correspondence between a content 

and its external configuration, any more than this could be the case with the 

Idea itself. Otherwise every portrayal of nature, every cast of features, every 

neighbourhood, flower, scene, etc., which constitutes the end and content of 

the repre sen ta tion, would at once be classical on the strength of such congruity 

between content and form. On the contrary, in classical art the peculiarity 

of the content consists in its being itself the concrete Idea, and as such the 

concretely spiritual, for it is the spiritual alone which is the truly inner [self]. 

Consequently, to suit such a content we must try to find out what in nature 

belongs to the spiritual in and for itself. The original Concept itself it must be 

which invented the shape for concrete spirit, so that now the subjective 

Concept— here the spirit of art— has merely found this shape and made it, as 

a natural shaped existent, appropriate to free individual spirituality. This 

shape, which the Idea as spiritual— indeed as individually determinate 

spirituality— assumes when it is to proceed out into a temporal manifestation, 

is the human form. Of course personification and anthropomorphism have 

often been maligned as a degradation of the spiritual, but in so far as art’s task 

is to bring the spiritual before our eyes in a sensuous manner, it must get 

involved in this anthropomorphism, since spirit appears sensuously in a satisfying 

way only in its body. The transmigration of souls 5 is in this respect an 

abstract idea, and physiology should have made it one of its chief propositions 

that life in its development had necessarily to proceed to the human form as 

the one and only sensuous appearance appropriate to spirit. 

But the human body in its forms counts in classical art no longer as a 

merely sensuous existent, but only as the existence and natural shape of the 

spirit, and it must therefore be exempt from all the deficiency of the purely 

sensuous and from the contingent finitude of the phenomenal world. While 

in this way the shape is purified in order to express in itself a content adequate 

to itself, on the other hand, if the correspondence of meaning and 

shape is to be perfect, the spirituality, which is the content, must be of such 

a kind that it can express itself completely in the natural human form, without 

towering beyond and above this expression in sensuous and bodily terms. 

Therefore here the spirit is at once determined as par tic u lar and human, 

not as purely absolute and eternal, since in this latter sense it can proclaim 

and express itself only as spirituality. 

This last point in its turn is the defect which brings about the dissolution 

of the classical art- form and demands a transition to a higher form, the 

third, namely the romantic. 

5. Reincarnation, belief in which was widespread in Greek antiquity; it began with Greek Orphic cults 

and followers of the pre- Socratic phi los o pher Pythagoras (6th c. b.c.e.).


(c) The romantic form of art cancels again the completed unification of 

the Idea and its reality, and reverts, even if in a higher way, to that difference 

and opposition of the two sides which in symbolic art remained 

unconquered. The classical form of art has attained the pinnacle of what 

illustration by art could achieve, and if there is something defective in it, 

the defect is just art itself and the restrictedness of the sphere of art. This 

restrictedness lies in the fact that art in general takes as its subjectmatter 

the spirit (i.e. the universal, infinite and concrete in its nature) in a sensuously 

concrete form, and classical art presents the complete unification of 

spiritual and sensuous existence as the correspondence of the two. But in 

this blending of the two, spirit is not in fact represented in its true nature. 

For spirit is the infinite subjectivity of the Idea, which as absolute inwardness 

cannot freely and truly shape itself outwardly on condition of remaining 

moulded into a bodily existence as the one appropriate to it. 6 

Abandoning this [classical] principle, the romantic form of art cancels the 

undivided unity of classical art because it has won a content which goes 

beyond and above the classical form of art and its mode of expression. This 

content— to recall familiar ideas— coincides with what Christianity asserts 

of God as a spirit, in distinction from the Greek religion which is the essential 

and most appropriate content for classical art. In classical art the concrete 

content is implicitly the unity of the divine nature with the human, a 

unity which, just because it is only immediate and implicit, is adequately 

manifested also in an immediate and sensuous way. The Greek god is the 

object of naïve intuition and sensuous imagination, and therefore his shape 

is the bodily shape of man. The range of his power and his being is individual 

and par tic u lar. Contrasted with the individual he is a substance and 

power with which the individual’s inner being is only implicitly at one but 

without itself possessing this oneness as inward subjective knowledge. Now 

the higher state is the knowledge of that implicit unity which is the content 

of the classical art- form and is capable of perfect pre sen ta tion in bodily 

shape. But this elevation of the implicit into selfconscious knowledge introduces 

a tremendous difference. It is the infinite difference which, for example, 

separates man from animals. Man is an animal, but even in his animal 

functions, he is not confined to the implicit, as the animal is; he becomes 

conscious of them, recognizes them, and lifts them, as, for instance, the process 

of digestion, into selfconscious science. In this way man breaks the 

barrier of his implicit and immediate character, so that precisely because he 

knows that he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge 

of himself as spirit. 

Now if in this way what was implicit at the previous stage, the unity of 

divine and human nature, is raised from an immediate to a known unity, the 

true element for the realization of this content is no longer the sensuous 

immediate existence of the spiritual in the bodily form of man, but instead 

the inwardness of selfconsciousness. Now Christianity brings God before our 

imagination as spirit, not as an individual, par tic u lar spirit, but as absolute 

in spirit and in truth. For this reason it retreats from the sensuousness of 

imagination into spiritual inwardness and makes this, and not the body, the 

6. In other words, thought is “inwardness” in the 

sense that thoughts are not outside one another 

in the way that parts of a body are. That is why the 

spirit cannot find an adequate embodiment in 

things but only in thoughts, or at least only in the 

inner life [Hegel’s note].


medium and the existence of truth’s content. Thus the unity of divine and 

human nature is a known unity, one to be realized only by spiritual knowing 

and in spirit. The new content, thus won, is on this account not tied to sensuous 

pre sen ta tion, as if that corresponded to it, but is freed from this immediate 

existence which must be set down as negative, overcome, and reflected 

into the spiritual unity. In this way romantic art is the self- transcendence of 

art but within its own sphere and in the form of art itself. 

We may, therefore, in short, adhere to the view that at this third stage the 

subjectmatter of art is free concrete spirituality, which is to be manifested as 

spirituality to the spirituality inward. In conformity with this subjectmatter, 

art cannot work for sensuous intuition. Instead it must, on the one hand, 

work for the inwardness which coalesces with its object simply as if with 

itself, for subjective inner depth, for reflective emotion, for feeling which, as 

spiritual, strives for freedom in itself and seeks and finds its reconciliation 

only in the inner spirit. This inner world constitutes the content of the 

romantic sphere and must therefore be represented as this inwardness and in 

the pure appearance of this depth of feeling. Inwardness celebrates its triumph 

over the external and manifests its victory in and on the external itself, 

whereby what is apparent to the senses alone sinks into worthlessness. 

On the other hand, however, this romantic form too, like all art, needs an 

external medium for its expression. Now since spirituality has withdrawn 

into itself out of the external world and immediate unity therewith, the sensuous 

externality of shape is for this reason accepted and represented, as in 

symbolic art, as something inessential and transient; and the same is true 

of the subjective finite spirit and will, right down to the particularity and 

caprice of individuality, character, action, etc., of incident, plot, etc. The 

aspect of external existence is consigned to contingency and abandoned to 

the adventures devised by an imagination whose caprice can mirror what is 

present to it, exactly as it is, just as readily as it can jumble the shapes of the 

external world and distort them grotesquely. For this external medium has 

its essence and meaning no longer, as in classical art, in itself and its own 

sphere, but in the heart which finds its manifestation in itself instead of in 

the external world and its form of reality, and this reconciliation with itself it 

can preserve or regain in every chance, in every accident that takes in de pendent 

shape, in all misfortune and grief, and indeed even in crime. 

Thereby the separation of Idea and shape, their indifference and inadequacy 

to each other, come to the fore again, as in symbolic art, but with this 

essential difference, that, in romantic art, the Idea, the deficiency of which 

in the symbol brought with it deficiency of shape, now has to appear perfected 

in itself as spirit and heart. Because of this higher perfection, it is not 

susceptible of an adequate union with the external, since its true reality and 

manifestation it can seek and achieve only within itself. 

This we take to be the general character of the symbolic, classical, and 

romantic forms of art, as the three relations of the Idea to its shape in the 

sphere of art. They consist in the striving for, the attainment, and the transcendence 

of the Ideal as the true Idea of beauty. 

1835–38

556 

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

1770 –1850 

“I am not a critic,” William Wordsworth stated in 1830, “and set little value upon 

the art. The preface which I wrote long ago to my own Poems I was put upon to 

write by the urgent entreaties of a friend, and heartily regret I ever had anything to 

do with it; though I do not reckon the principles then advanced erroneous.” Wordsworth 

defined himself as a poet above all, and he is less prolific and gifted as a literary 

theorist and critic than his friend samuel taylor Coleridge. Nevertheless, the 

preface that he wrote for the second edition of their book Lyrical Ballads (1800) is 

one of the most important documents in En glish criticism. 

Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the En glish Lake District. 

His mother died when he was eight; his father, an attorney, died less than 

six years later. Wordsworth was educated first at Hawkshead Grammar School, 

Westmorland, a boarding school noted for its training in mathematics and classics, 

and then at Cambridge University (1787– 91), spending July– October 1790 

on a walking tour of Eu rope. In France he was caught up in the excitement that 

followed the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and he became a fervent republican 

sympathizer. 

Wordsworth’s guardians wanted him to become an Anglican minister, but he 

persuaded them to support another twelve months of residence in France. When he 

was forced to return home in December 1792 by the threat of war between France 

and En gland, Wordsworth left behind the pregnant Annette Vallon; he supported 

her and their daughter in later years. 

In 1793 Wordsworth’s first works of poetry were published, Descriptive Sketches 

and An Eve ning Walk. In 1795 a legacy of £900 from a friend gave him the freedom 

to pursue a career as a poet. At this time he was living with his sister Dorothy; in 

1797 they moved to Alfoxden in Somerset, with Coleridge (whom the poet had met 

in September 1795) a short distance away. There Wordsworth began to write the 

lyric and dramatic poems that many readers judge to be the central achievement of 

his career. The twentiethcentury critic northrop frye connects the poet’s innovative 

descriptions to social and po liti cal critique: “In Wordsworth the existing social 

and educational structure is artificial, full of inert custom and hypocrisy. Nature is 

a better teacher than books, and one finds one’s lost identity with nature in moments 

of feeling in which one is penetrated by the sense of nature’s ‘huge and mighty 

forms’ ” (quoting Wordsworth’s Prelude, 1.398). 

Wordsworth’s early compositions, and his creative partnership with Coleridge, 

resulted in September 1798 in the anonymous publication of Lyrical Ballads. The 

volume opened with Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” and closed with Wordsworth’s 

“Tintern Abbey”; all but three of the intervening poems were Wordsworth’s. A new 

edition of Lyrical Ballads, incorporating Wordsworth’s Preface and many new poems, 

was issued in 1800; this edition gave Wordsworth’s name on the title page but not 

Coleridge’s (whose “Ancient Mariner” was moved back to become the penultimate 

poem in the collection). In the Preface, Wordsworth declared that the book’s object 

was “to choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe 

them . . . in a selection of language really used by men, . . . tracing in them . . . the 

primary laws of our nature.” Still another edition was published in 1802, and it was 

reprinted in 1805. 

In later de cades, Wordsworth not only wrote new poems but also revised (not 

always for the better) his earlier work. A collected edition, which includes many of 

his best poems and two critical essays, was published in 1815. His collections culminated 

in the six- volume edition of 1849– 50. In these years the poet enjoyed both 

personal happiness— marrying Mary Hutchinson in 1802 and winning recognition

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH / 557 

as a national figure (he was named poet laureate in 1843)— and painful losses, 

including the death at sea of his favorite brother in 1805, a long and never wholly 

ended estrangement from Coleridge, the deaths of two of his children in 1812, and 

the physical and mental decline of his sister Dorothy that began in the 1830s. An 

even earlier loss was of his liberal ideals, much to the dismay of such younger poets 

as Byron, Keats, and shelley. Wordsworth was horrified by the bloody aftermath 

of the French Revolution and alarmed by the rise of the French military leader and 

emperor Napoleon; he became increasingly orthodox in his po liti cal, social, and 

religious beliefs. 

The critic harold bloom has said that in dramatizing the movements of the 

individual consciousness, Wordsworth made “the poet’s own subjectivity” the “prevalent 

subject” of poetry. Wordsworth spurred writers to break free from the authority 

of neoclassical rules and conventions and to find inspiration instead in the 

emotions, experiences, and speech of ordinary persons. In valuing naturalness and 

spontaneity, Wordsworth was proposing not that poets abandon literary craft but 

that poetry should begin with acts of self- expression and self- exploration. There is 

much truth in the familiar generalization that Romantic poets are visionary, evocative 

describers of nature— its scenes, settings, landscapes. But the movement outward 

into the natural world is one dimension of an interior journey or quest into 

what Wordsworth called “the hiding- places of man’s power.” M. H. Abrams concisely 

explains this fundamental change, in his classic study The Mirror and the 

Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953): 

The paramount cause of poetry is not, as in Aristotle, a formal cause, determined 

primarily by the human actions and qualities imitated; nor, as in neoclassic 

criticism a final cause, the effect intended upon the audience; but 

instead an efficient cause— the impulse within the poet of feelings and desires 

seeking expression, or the compulsion of the “creative” imagination which, like 

God the creator, has its internal source of motion. 

A number of the formulations in the preface have become widely known and are 

permanently linked to Wordsworth’s name— for example, that the modern poems 

included in Lyrical Ballads fit to “metrical arrangement a selection of the real language 

of men in a state of vivid sensation,” and that “good poetry is the spontaneous 

overflow of powerful feelings,” “tak[ing] its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” 

Yet, as W. J. B. Owen and other scholars have noted, Wordsworth is less 

original than his bold tone and manner suggest; much of what he says about figurative 

language, poetic diction, and the relationship between poetry and prose draws 

on an array of eighteenthcentury En glish writings on emotion, knowledge, and 

aesthetic theory. That we remember Wordsworth’s words, not those of his sources, 

testifies both to the eloquence of his prose and to its association with a magnificent 

series of poems. 

In his criticism, and in the Preface especially, Wordsworth seeks to explain and 

defend his own literary practice; in this respect, he is akin to fellow poets john 

Dryden and t. s. eliot and the novelist henry james, whose criticism fabricates 

frameworks through which their creative endeavors should be understood and appreciated. 

Like them, Wordsworth possesses a sharp sense of literary history and tradition; 

where he differs is in his refusal or failure to make the interpretation and 

evaluation of writers and texts an integral part of his literary project and identity. 

Overall his criticism— found in prefaces for his books of poems, a few essays, sentences 

and paragraphs in letters, and tossed- off opinions and asides in conversations 

with friends and acquaintances— is not impressive, nor are his judgments compelling. 

He misunderstood and devalued alexander pope, samuel johnson, Goethe, 

and Byron and failed to perceive the genius of Thomas Carlyle and ralph waldo 

emerson. As he admitted himself, he was not much interested in the writing of his 

contemporaries; he cared little for novels, despite living in a period when the novel

558 / WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

as a genre was coming to a new prominence. Instead, Wordsworth’s mission is to 

return to basic, timeless truths— and thus he raises and confronts such questions 

as “What is a Poet?” and “To whom does he address himself?” 

Like many important theoretical works by creative writers, Wordsworth’s Preface 

is not always in accord with his actual practice. In the Biographia Literaria (1817), 

Coleridge makes exactly this point and states further that Wordsworth asserts 

without proof that the language of rural folk has a richer reality than that of city 

dwellers. There are other overemphases, ambiguities, and contradictions in Wordsworth’s 

arguments as well. He stresses that poetry heals and restores the feelings of 

persons; but when one reviews his poetry and prose as a whole, particularly that of 

his later career, his point becomes hard to grasp: does Wordsworth mean that poetry 

will lead to a regenerated society, or that it will accommodate readers to their society 

as it is? Despite Wordsworth’s insistence that the poet engage and employ the 

language “really used by men,” and that such language is best located among those 

living a “low and rustic life,” two of his own greatest literary heroes, as the scholar 

René Wellek has pointed out, were Spenser and Milton—“the most learned, even 

bookish poets of the En glish tradition.” 

The Preface is to some extent a po liti cal text as well as a literary position paper. 

Wordsworth’s desire to select “incidents and situations from common life” blends 

into poetry the demo cratic sentiments that the French Revolution had inspired in 

him in the early 1790s. By advocating “the real language of men,” Wordsworth cuts 

against the neoclassical view that the language of poetry must be more elevated than 

everyday speech. The rebelliousness in this stance helps us understand why the 

Romantic critic and essayist William Hazlitt connected Wordsworth’s verse with “the 

revolutionary movement of our age”: “His Muse,” Hazlitt said, “is a levelling one.” By 

directing attention to ballads, folklore, and other materials usually deemed nonliterary 

or unpoetical, Wordsworth expands the range of subjects for poetry. He honors 

children and common men and women, and even criminals and idiots: his poetry 

does not bestow dignity on them but expresses the dignity they already possess. 

Wordsworth was actively concerned about the pressures that impinge on the lives 

of those living in newly industrialized cities, the pressures that threaten to reduce 

the mind “to a state of almost savage torpor” and that lead individuals to immerse 

themselves in reports and stories of sensational incidents. Here he looks forward to 

the opposition between high and mass or pop u lar cultures that modern critics such 

as raymond Williams later explored. Insofar as the Preface establishes the writer 

as an adversary to pop u lar culture and the always- accelerating trends in social and 

cultural life, Wordsworth anticipates themes articulated by writers ranging from 

Shelley to D. H. Lawrence. The poet, he maintains in an important appendix added 

in 1802, “is the rock of defense of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying 

everywhere with him relationship and love.” Moreover, as he discusses in some 

detail, poets in the future will be obliged to defend the worth of their activity 

against that of the scientists. This is a struggle to which matthew Arnold, later in 

the nineteenth century, and I. A. Richards and the New Critics, in the twentieth 

century, return with even greater urgency. 

bibliography 

A new complete edition, under the general editorship of Stephen Parrish, is being 

published by Cornell (1975–). For the criticism and related prose writings, see Prose 

Works, edited by W. J. B. Owen and J. M. Smyser (3 vols., 1974). Collections of Wordsworth’s 

critical prose include The Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth, edited 

by Markham L. Peacock (1950), which presents 450 pages of primary source quotations 

divided into three categories— subjects, authors, and works, plus Wordsworth 

on his own works; Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth, edited by Paul M. Zall 

(1966); and Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, edited by W. J. B. Owen (1974). A good

Preface to Lyrical Ballads / 559 

single- volume edition of the poetry and prose is William Wordsworth, in the Oxford 

Authors Series, edited by Stephen Gill (1984). 

The standard biography, William Wordsworth: A Biography, is by Mary Moorman 

(2 vols., 1957– 65), but Stephen Gill’s William Wordsworth: A Life (1989) and Juliet 

Barker’s Wordsworth: A Life (2000) are also valuable. On the poet’s early adulthood, 

see Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (1998). 

See also Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Early Years, 1770– 1799 

(1967) and Wordsworth: The Chronology of the Middle Years, 1800– 1815 (1975). For 

intellectual and literary contexts, consult Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 

1770– 1799 (1993) and Wordsworth’s Reading, 1800– 1815 (1995). 

For an excellent study of Wordsworth’s Preface as well as an edition of the text, 

see Wordsworth’s Preface to “Lyrical Ballads,” edited by W. J. B. Owen (1957). Also 

insightful is Owen’s Wordsworth as Critic (1969). There is an extensive body of 

scholarship on the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge and its importance 

for literary theory and criticism. Among the best books on this topic are Lucy 

Newlyn, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the Language of Allusion (1986); Theresa M. 

Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (1988); Paul Magnuson, Coleridge and 

Wordsworth: A Lyrical Dialogue (1988); Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: 

The Radical Years (1988); and Susan Eilenberg, Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, 

Coleridge, and Literary Possession (1992). David Rosen, Power, Plain En glish, 

and the Rise of Modern Poetry (2006), offers a stimulating account of the influence 

of Wordsworth’s poetic theory and practice on the work of William Butler Yeats, 

T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden. 

See also three collections of essays: The Age of William Wordsworth, edited by 

Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (1987); Romantic Revolutions: Criticism 

and Theory, edited by Kenneth R. Johnston (1990); and Wordsworth in Context, 

edited by Pauline Fletcher and John Murphy (1992). For further background and 

bibliography, see the relevant entries in The En glish Romantic Poets: A Review of 

Research and Criticism (ed. Frank Jordan, 1985), and British Romantic Poets, 1789– 

1832, first and second series (ed. John R. Greenfield, 1990). Literature of the Romantic 

Period: A Bibliographical Guide, edited by Michael O’Neill (1998), is valuable for 

the study of Wordsworth and his contemporaries. See also An Annotated Critical 

Bibliography of William Wordsworth by Keith Hanley and David Barron (1995). The 

list of primary and secondary sources included in William Wordsworth, The Major 

Works, edited by Stephen Gill (rev. ed., 2000) is also helpful. 

Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems 

(1802) 1 

The first Volume of these Poems has already been submitted to general 

perusal. It was published, as an experiment, which, I hoped, might be of 

some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection 

of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of 

plea sure and that quantity of plea sure may be imparted, which a Poet may 

rationally endeavour to impart. 

I had formed no very inaccurate estimate of the probable effect of those 

Poems: I flattered myself that they who should be pleased with them would 

1. This preface first appeared in the second edition 

of Lyrical Ballads, expanded to two volumes 

and dated 1800. For an edition published in 1802, 

Wordsworth revised the preface (he made more 

revisions for subsequent editions) and added an 

appendix; the important additions to the 1800 

text are here given in brackets.


read them with more than common plea sure: and, on the other hand, I was 

well aware, that by those who should dislike them they would be read with 

more than common dislike. The result has differed from my expectation in 

this only, that I have pleased a greater number, than I ventured to hope I 

should please. 

For the sake of variety, and from a consciousness of my own weakness, 

I was induced to request the assistance of a Friend, 2 who furnished me with 

the Poems of the ancient mariner, the foster- mother’s tale, the nightingale, 

and the Poem entitled love. I should not, however, have requested 

this assistance, had I not believed that the Poems of my Friend would in a 

great mea sure have the same tendency as my own, and that, though there 

would be found a difference, there would be found no discordance in the 

colours of our style; as our opinions on the subject of poetry do almost 

entirely coincide. 

Several of my Friends are anxious for the success of these Poems from a 

belief, that, if the views with which they were composed were indeed realized, 

a class of Poetry would be produced, well adapted to interest mankind 

permanently, and not unimportant in the multiplicity, and in the quality of 

its moral relations: and on this account they have advised me to prefix a systematic 

defence of the theory, upon which the poems were written. But I was 

unwilling to undertake the task, because I knew that on this occasion the 

Reader would look coldly upon my arguments, since I might be suspected of 

having been principally influenced by the selfish and foolish hope of reasoning 

him into an approbation of these par tic u lar Poems: and I was still more 

unwilling to undertake the task, because, adequately to display my opinions, 

and fully to enforce my arguments, would require a space wholly disproportionate 

to the nature of a preface. For to treat the subject with the clearness 

and coherence, of which I believe it susceptible, it would be necessary to give 

a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country, and to 

determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which, again, would not 

be determined, without pointing out, in what manner language and the 

human mind act and react on each other, and without retracing the revolutions, 

not of literature alone, but likewise of society itself. I have therefore 

altogether declined to enter regularly upon this defence; yet I am sensible, 

that there would be some impropriety in abruptly obtruding upon the Public, 

without a few words of introduction, Poems so materially different from 

those, upon which general approbation is at present bestowed. 

It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a formal 

engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association; 

that he not only thus apprizes the Reader that certain classes of ideas and 

expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully 

excluded. This exponent or symbol held forth by metrical language must 

in different areas of literature have excited very different expectations: for 

example, in the age of Catullus, Terence and Lucretius, and that of Statius 

or Claudian; 3 and in our own country, in the age of Shakespeare and Beau- 

2. samuel taylor coleridge (1772– 1834), 

En glish poet and critic. 

3. Wordsworth names Roman poets in different 

genres, before and after the common era (and thus 

writing in “Golden” vs. “Silver” Latin): Catullus 

(84– 54 b.c.e.), lyric poet; Terence (ca. 190– 159 

b.c.e.), comic dramatist; Lucretius (ca. 94– 55 

b.c.e.), didactic poet; Statius (45– 96 c.e.), epic 

poet; and Claudian (d. ca. 404 c.e.), an Alexandrian 

whose Latin poetry represents the end of the 

classical tradition.


mont and Fletcher, and that of Donne and Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. 4 I 

will not take upon me to determine the exact import of the promise which 

by the act of writing in verse an Author, in the present day, makes to his 

Reader; but I am certain, it will appear to many persons that I have not fulfilled 

the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily contracted. [They who 

have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many 

modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no 

doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: 

they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what 

species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.] 

I hope therefore the Reader will not censure me, if I attempt to state what 

I have proposed to myself to perform; and also, (as far as the limits of a preface 

will permit) to explain some of the chief reasons which have determined 

me in the choice of my purpose: that at least he may be spared any unpleasant 

feeling of disappointment, and that I myself may be protected from the 

most dishonourable accusation which can be brought against an Author, 

namely, that of an indolence which prevents him from endeavouring to ascertain 

what is his duty, or, when his duty is ascertained, prevents him from 

performing it. 

The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these Poems 

was to [chuse incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or 

describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language 

really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain 

colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to 

the mind in an unusual way; and, further, and above all, to make these 

incidents and situations interesting] by tracing in them, truly though not 

ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the 

manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Low and rustic 

life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions 

of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less 

under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because 

in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater 

simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and 

more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate 

from those elementary feelings; and, from the necessary character of rural 

occupations, are more easily comprehended; and are more durable; and 

lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with 

the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. The language, too, of these 

men is adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, 

from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men 

hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language 

is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and 

the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the 

influence of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple 

and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of 

repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far 

4. Wordsworth names three En glish dramatists— 

Shakespeare (1564– 1616), Francis Beaumont (ca. 

1584– 1616), and John Fletcher (1579– 1625); and 

four poets— John Donne (1572– 1631), Abraham 

Cowley (1618– 1667), john dryden (1631– 1700), 

and alexander pope (1688– 1744). As their dates 

suggest, he focuses here less on chronology than 

on style.


more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for 

it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves 

and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies 

of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, 

in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own 

creation. 5 

I cannot, however, be insensible of the present outcry against the triviality 

and meanness both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries 

have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and 

I acknowledge that this defect, where it exists, is more dishonourable to the 

Writer’s own character than false refinement or arbitrary innovation, 

though I should contend at the same time that it is far less pernicious in the 

sum of its consequences. From such verses the Poems in these volumes will 

be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of them 

has a worthy purpose. Not that I mean to say, that I always began to write 

with a distinct purpose formally conceived; but I believe that my habits of 

meditation have so formed my feelings, as that my descriptions of such 

objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with 

them a purpose. If in this opinion I am mistaken, I can have little right to 

the name of a Poet. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful 

feelings: but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be 

attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man, who 

being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought 

long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and 

directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our 

past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives 

to each other we discover what is really important to men, so, by 

the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected 

with important subjects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much 

sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced, that, by obeying blindly 

and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, 

and utter sentiments, of such a nature and in such connection with each 

other, that the understanding of the being to whom we address ourselves, if 

he be in a healthful state of association, must necessarily be in some degree 

enlightened, and his affections ameliorated. 

I have said that each of these poems has a purpose. I have also informed 

my Reader what this purpose will be found principally to be: namely, to 

illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a 

state of excitement. But, speaking in language somewhat more appropriate, 

it is to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great 

and simple affections of our nature. This object I have endeavoured in these 

short essays to attain by various means; by tracing the maternal passion 

through many of its more subtle windings, as in the poems of the idiot boy 

and the mad mother; by accompanying the last struggles of a human being, 

at the approach of death, cleaving in solitude to life and society, as in the 

Poem of the forsaken Indian; by showing, as in the Stanzas entitled we 

are seven, the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our 

5. It is worth while here to observe that the affecting parts of Chaucer [ca. 1343– 1400] are almost always 

expressed in language pure and universally intelligible even to this day [Wordsworth’s note].


notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion; or by displaying 

the strength of fraternal, or to speak more philosophically, of moral 

attachment when early associated with the great and beautiful objects of 

nature, as in the brothers; or, as in the Incident of simon lee, by placing 

my Reader in the way of receiving from ordinary moral sensations another 

and more salutary impression than we are accustomed to receive from 

them. It has also been part of my general purpose to attempt to sketch characters 

under the influence of less impassioned feelings, as in the two april 

mornings, the fountain, the old man travelling, the two thieves, &c. 

characters of which the elements are simple, belonging rather to nature 

than to manners, such as exist now, and will probably always exist, and which 

from their constitution may be distinctly and profitably contemplated. I will 

not abuse the indulgence of my Reader by dwelling longer upon this subject; 

but it is proper that I should mention one other circumstance which 

distinguishes these Poems from the pop u lar Poetry of the day; it is this, 

that the feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, 

and not the action and situation to the feeling. My meaning will be 

rendered perfectly intelligible by referring my Reader to the Poems entitled 

poor susan and the childless father, particularly to the last Stanza of 

the latter Poem. 

I will not suffer a sense of false modesty to prevent me from asserting, 

that I point my Reader’s attention to this mark of distinction, far less for the 

sake of these par tic u lar Poems than from the general importance of the 

subject. The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of 

being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and 

he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not 

know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above 

another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore 

appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is 

one of the best ser vices in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; 

but this ser vice, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For 

a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a 

combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting 

it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. 

The most effective of these causes are the great national events which 

are daily taking place, 6 and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, 

where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary 

incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence 7 hourly gratifies. 

To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical 

exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable 

works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and 

Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German 

Tragedies, 8 and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.— When I 

6. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic 

Wars, primarily between France and Great Britain 

(1799– 1815), that grew out of it and out of the 

rise to power of the French general Napoléon 

Bonaparte (1769– 1821), later emperor (1804– 15). 

7. Information, news (daily newspapers were 

spreading rapidly in En gland). 

8. German melodramas by authors such as 

August von Kotzebue (1761– 1819); in Jane Austen’s 

novel Mansfi eld Park (1814), the Bertram 

family performs Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ 

Vows, which is based on von Kotzebue’s Das kind 

der Lieber. “Frantic novels”: Gothic novels, such 

as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe 

and The Monk (1796) by M. G. Lewis.


think upon this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation, I am almost 

ashamed to have spoken of the feeble effort with which I have endeavoured 

to counteract it; and, reflecting upon the magnitude of the general evil, I 

should be oppressed with no dishonorable melancholy, had I not a deep 

impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human 

mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects 

that act upon it, which are equally inherent and indestructible; and did I 

not further add to this impression a belief, that the time is approaching when 

the evil will be systematically opposed, by men of greater powers, and with 

far more distinguished success. 

Having dwelt thus long on the subjects and aim of these Poems, I shall 

request the Reader’s permission to apprize him of a few circumstances relating 

to their style, in order, among other reasons, that I may not be censured 

for not having performed what I never attempted. [The Reader will find that 

personifications of abstract ideas rarely occur in these volumes; and, I hope, 

are utterly rejected as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it 

above prose. I have proposed to myself to imitate, and, as far as is possible, 

to adopt the very language of men; and assuredly such personifications do 

not make any natural or regular part of that language. They are, indeed, a 

figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of 

them as such; but I have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical 

device of style, or as a family language which Writers in metre seem to lay 

claim to by prescription.] I have wished to keep my Reader in the company 

of flesh and blood, persuaded that by so doing I shall interest him. I am, 

however, well aware that others who pursue a different track may interest 

him likewise; I do not interfere with their claim, I only wish to prefer a different 

claim of my own. There will also be found in these volumes little of 

what is usually called poetic diction; I have taken as much pains to avoid it 

as others ordinarily take to produce it; this I have done for the reason 

already alleged, to bring my language near to the language of men, and further, 

because the plea sure which I have proposed to myself to impart is of a 

kind very different from that which is supposed by many persons to be the 

proper object of poetry. I do not know how, without being culpably par tic u- 

lar, I can give my Reader a more exact notion of the style in which I wished 

these poems to be written than by informing him that I have at all times 

endeavoured to look steadily at my subject, consequently, I hope that there is 

in these Poems little falsehood of description, and that my ideas are expressed 

in language fitted to their respective importance. Something I must have 

gained by this practice, as it is friendly to one property of all good poetry, 

namely good sense; but it has necessarily cut me off from a large portion 

of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been 

regarded as the common inheritance of Poets. I have also thought it expedient 

to restrict myself still further, having abstained from the use of many 

expressions, in themselves proper and beautiful, but which have been foolishly 

repeated by bad Poets, till such feelings of disgust are connected with 

them as it is scarcely possible by any art of association to overpower. 

If in a Poem there should be found a series of lines, or even a single line, 

in which the language, though naturally arranged, and according to the 

strict laws of metre, does not differ from that of prose, there is a numerous 

class of critics, who, when they stumble upon these prosaisms, as they call


them, imagine that they have made a notable discovery, and exult over the 

Poet as over a man ignorant of his own profession. Now these men would 

establish a canon of criticism which the Reader will conclude he must 

utterly reject, if he wishes to be pleased with these volumes. And it would be 

a most easy task to prove to him, that not only the language of a large portion 

of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, 

except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good 

prose, but likewise that some of the most interesting parts of the best poems 

will be found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is well written. 

The truth of this assertion might be demonstrated by innumerable passages 

from almost all the poetical writings, even of Milton himself. I have not 

space for much quotation; but, to illustrate the subject in a general manner, 

I will here adduce a short composition of Gray, 9 who was at the head of those 

who, by their reasonings, have attempted to widen the space of separation 

betwixt Prose and Metrical composition, and was more than any other man 

curiously elaborate in the structure of his own poetic diction. 

In vain to me the smiling mornings shine, 

And reddening Phoebus 1 lifts his golden fire: 

The birds in vain their amorous descant join, 

Or chearful fields resume their green attire. 

These ears, alas! for other notes repine; 

A different object do these eyes require; 

My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine; 

And in my breast the imperfect joys expire; 

Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, 

And newborn plea sure brings to happier men; 

The fields to all their wonted tribute bear; 

To warm their little loves the birds complain. 

I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, 

And weep the more because I weep in vain. 

It will easily be perceived that the only part of this Sonnet which is of any 

value is the lines printed in Italics: it is equally obvious, that, except in the 

rhyme, and in the use of the single word ‘fruitless’ for fruitlessly, which is so 

far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect differ from that of 

prose. 

[By the foregoing quotation I have shewn that the language of Prose may 

yet be well adapted to Poetry; and I have previously asserted that a large 

portion of the language of every good poem can in no respect differ from 

that of good Prose. I will go further. I do not doubt that it may be safely 

affirmed, that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between 

the language of prose and metrical composition.] We are fond of tracing the 

resemblance between Poetry and Painting, 2 and, accordingly, we call them 

Sisters: but where shall we find bonds of connection sufficiently strict to 

9. Thomas Gray (1716– 1771); the poem quoted is 

“Sonnet on the Death of Richard West” (1775; 

West was a friend of Gray’s at Eton). Gray, in a 

letter to West, had maintained that “the language 

of the age is never the language of poetry.” 

1. Apollo, Roman and Greek god of the sun, here 

identified with the sun. 

2. A topic examined, for example, by the poets and 

critics horace, Ars Poetica (ca. 10 b.c.e.); Dryden, 

A Parallel of Poetry and Painting (1695); sir philip 

sidney, The Defence of Poesy (1595); Pope, An 

Essay on Criticism (1711); gotthold ephraim 

lessing, Laocöon (1766); and samuel johnson, 

Idler, no. 34 (1758).


typify the affinity betwixt metrical and prose composition? They both speak 

by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed 

may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and 

almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry 3 sheds no 

tears ‘such as Angels weep,’ 4 but natural and human tears; she can boast of 

no celestial Ichor 5 that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; 

the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both. 

If it be affirmed that rhyme and metrical arrangement of themselves constitute 

a distinction which overturns what I have been saying on the strict 

affinity of metrical language with that of prose, and paves the way for other 

artificial distinctions which the mind voluntarily admits, 6 [I answer that the 

language of such Poetry as I am recommending is, as far as is possible, a 

selection of the language really spoken by men; that this selection, wherever 

it is made with true taste and feeling, will of itself form a distinction far 

greater than would at first be imagined, and will entirely separate the composition 

from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life; and, if metre be 

superadded thereto, I believe that a dissimilitude will be produced altogether 

sufficient for the gratification of a rational mind. What other distinction 

would we have? Whence is it to come? And where is it to exist? Not, 

surely, where the Poet speaks through the mouths of his characters: it cannot 

be necessary here, either for elevation of style, or any of its supposed 

ornaments; for, if the Poet’s subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, 

and upon fit occasion, lead him to passions the language of which, if selected 

truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alive 

with meta phors and figures. I forbear to speak of an incongruity which 

would shock the intelligent Reader, should the Poet interweave any foreign 

splendour of his own with that which the passion naturally suggests: it is 

sufficient to say that such addition is unnecessary. And, surely, it is more 

probable that those passages, which with propriety abound with meta phors 

and figures, will have their due effect, if, upon other occasions where the 

passions are of a milder character, the style also be subdued and temperate. 

But, as the plea sure which I hope to give by the Poems I now present to 

the Reader must depend entirely on just notions upon this subject, and, as 

it is in itself of the highest importance to our taste and moral feelings, I 

cannot content myself with these detached remarks. And if, in what I am 

about to say, it shall appear to some that my labour is unnecessary, and that 

I am like a man fighting a battle without enemies, I would remind such 

persons that, what ever may be the language outwardly holden 7 by men, a 

practical faith in the opinions which I am wishing to establish is almost 

unknown. If my conclusions are admitted, and carried as far as they must 

be carried if admitted at all, our judgments concerning the works of the 

greatest Poets both ancient and modern will be far different from what they 

3. I here use the word “Poetry” (though against 

my own judgment) as opposed to the word Prose, 

and synonymous with metrical composition. But 

much confusion has been introduced into criticism 

by this contradistinction of Poetry and 

Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of 

Poetry and Matter of Fact, or Science. The only 

strict antithesis to Prose is Metre; nor is this, in 

truth, a strict antithesis; because lines and passages 

of metre so naturally occur in writing prose, 

that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, 

even if it were desirable [Wordsworth’s note]. 

4. From John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), 1.620. 

5. In Greek mythology, the fluid that flows in the 

veins of the gods. 

6. Here begins the longest and most important 

addition made in 1802; it contains 9 paragraphs. 

7. Held.


are at present, both when we praise, and when we censure: and our moral 

feelings influencing, and influenced by these judgments will, I believe, be 

corrected and purified. 

Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, I ask what is meant 

by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And 

what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a 

man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and 

tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more 

comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a 

man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more 

than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate 

similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings- on of the Universe, 

and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. 

To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other 

men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in 

himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced 

by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy 

which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions 

produced by real events, than any thing which, from the motions of their 

own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves; whence, 

and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing 

what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings 

which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in 

him without immediate external excitement. 

But, what ever portion of this faculty we may suppose even the greatest 

Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt but that the language which it will 

suggest to him, must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that which is 

uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of those passions, certain 

shadows of which the Poet thus produces, or feels to be produced, in 

himself. However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character 

of a Poet, it is obvious, that, while he describes and imitates passions, his 

situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the freedom 

and power of real and substantial action and suffering. So that it will be the 

wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings 

he describes, nay, for short spaces of time perhaps, to let himself slip 

into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings 

with theirs; modifying only the language which is thus suggested to him, by 

a consideration that he describes for a par tic u lar purpose, that of giving 

plea sure. Here, then, he will apply the principle on which I have so much 

insisted, namely, that of selection; on this he will depend for removing what 

would otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion; he will feel that 

there is no necessity to trick out or elevate nature: and, the more industriously 

he applies this principle, the deeper will be his faith that no words, 

which his fancy or imagination can suggest, will be to be compared with 

those which are in the emanations of reality and truth. 

But it may be said by those who do not object to the general spirit of these 

remarks, that, as it is impossible for the Poet to produce upon all occasions 

language as exquisitely fitted for the passion as that which the real passion 

itself suggests, it is proper that he should consider himself as in the situation 

of a translator, who deems himself justified when he substitutes excellences


of another kind for those which are unattainable by him; and endeavours 

occasionally to surpass his original, in order to make some amends for the 

general inferiority to which he feels that he must submit. But this would be 

to encourage idleness and unmanly despair. Further, it is the language of 

men who speak of what they do not understand; who talk of Poetry as of a 

matter of amusement and idle plea sure; who will converse with us as gravely 

about a taste for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent 

as a taste for Rope- dancing, or Frontiniac 8 or Sherry. Aristotle, I have been 

told, hath said, that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: 9 it is so: its 

object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not 

standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; 

truth which is its own testimony, which gives strength and divinity to 

the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. 

Poetry is the image of man and nature. The obstacles which stand in the 

way of the fidelity of the Biographer and Historian, and of their consequent 

utility, are incalculably greater than those which are to be encountered by 

the Poet who has an adequate notion of the dignity of his art. The Poet 

writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving 

immediate plea sure to a human Being possessed of that information which 

may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an 

astronomer or a natural phi los o pher, but as a Man. Except this one restriction, 

there is no object standing between the Poet and the image of things; 

between this, and the Biographer and Historian there are a thousand. 

Nor let this necessity of producing immediate plea sure be considered as a 

degradation of the Poet’s art. It is far otherwise. It is an ac know ledg ment of 

the beauty of the universe, an ac know ledg ment the more sincere, because it 

is not formal, but indirect; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the 

world in the spirit of love: further, it is a homage paid to the native and 

naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of plea sure, by which 

he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves. 1 We have no sympathy but what 

is propagated by plea sure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we 

sympathize with pain it will be found that the sympathy is produced and 

carried on by subtle combinations with plea sure. We have no knowledge, 

that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of par tic u lar 

facts, but what has been built up by plea sure, and exists in us by plea sure 

alone. The Man of Science, 2 the Chemist and Mathematician, what ever difficulties 

and disgusts they may have had to struggle with, know and feel this. 

However painful may be the objects with which the Anatomist’s knowledge 

is connected, he feels that his knowledge is plea sure; and where he has no 

plea sure he has no knowledge. What then does the Poet? He considers man 

and the objects that surround him as acting and reacting upon each other, 

so as to produce an infinite complexity of pain and plea sure; he considers 

man in his own nature and in his ordinary life as contemplating this with 

a certain quantity of immediate knowledge, with certain convictions, intuitions, 

and deductions which by habit become of the nature of intuitions; he 

8. A sweet wine. 

9. See aristotle, Poetics 9, 1451b: “poetry is at 

once more like philosophy and more worth while 

than history, since poetry tends to make general 

statements, while those of history are par tic u lar.” 

1. Compare St. Paul’s declaration that in God “we 

live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17.28). 

2. Wordsworth may have had in mind in par tic u- 

lar the En glish chemist Humphrey Davy (1778– 

1829), who had lectured at the Royal Institution 

in London on January 21, 1802.


considers him as looking upon this complex scene of ideas and sensations, 

and finding every where objects that immediately excite in him sympathies 

which, from the necessities of his nature, are accompanied by an overbalance 

of enjoyment. 

To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these 

sympathies in which without any other discipline than that of our daily life 

we are fitted to take delight, the Poet principally directs his attention. He 

considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind 

of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of 

nature. And thus the Poet, prompted by this feeling of plea sure which 

accompanies him through the whole course of his studies, converses with 

general nature with affections akin to those, which, through labour and 

length of time, the Man of Science has raised up in himself, by conversing 

with those par tic u lar parts of nature which are the objects of his studies. 

The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of Science is plea sure; but the 

knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our 

natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual 

acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting 

us with our fellow- beings. The Man of Science seeks truth as a 

remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: 

the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices 

in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is 

the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression 

which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically may it be said of 

the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, ‘that he looks before and after.’ 3 

He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, 

carry ing every where with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of 

soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of 

things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet 

binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, 

as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of the 

Poet’s thoughts are every where; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is 

true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere 

of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of 

all knowledge— it is as immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of Men 

of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in 

our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet 

will sleep then no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the 

steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but 

he will be at his side, carry ing sensation into the midst of the objects of the 

Science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or 

Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it 

can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be 

familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the 

followers of these respective Sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material 

to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come 

when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to 

put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine 

3. Hamlet (ca. 1600), 4.4.36 (“Looking before and after”).


spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, 

as a dear and genuine inmate of the house hold of man.— It is not, then, to 

be supposed that any one, who holds that sublime notion of Poetry which I 

have attempted to convey, will break in upon the sanctity and truth of his 

pictures by transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavour to excite 

admiration of himself by arts, the necessity of which must manifestly depend 

upon the assumed meanness of his subject. 

What I have thus far said applies to Poetry in general; but especially to 

those parts of composition where the Poet speaks through the mouths of his 

characters; and upon this point it appears to have such weight that I will 

conclude, there are few persons of good sense, who would not allow that the 

dramatic parts of composition are defective, in proportion as they deviate 

from the real language of nature, and are coloured by a diction of the Poet’s 

own, either peculiar to him as an individual Poet, or belonging simply to 

Poets in general, to a body of men who, from the circumstance of their compositions 

being in metre, it is expected will employ a par tic u lar language. 

It is not, then, in the dramatic parts of composition that we look for this 

distinction of language; but still it may be proper and necessary where the 

Poet speaks to us in his own person and character. To this I answer by referring 

my Reader to the description which I have before given of a Poet. 

Among the qualities which I have enumerated as principally conducing to 

form a Poet, is implied nothing differing in kind from other men, but only in 

degree. The sum of what I have there said is, that the Poet is chiefly distinguished 

from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without 

immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such 

thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner. But these passions 

and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and 

feelings of men. And with what are they connected? Undoubtedly with our 

moral sentiments and animal sensations, and with the causes which excite 

these; with the operations of the elements and the appearances of the visible 

universe; with storm and sun- shine, with the revolutions of the seasons, 

with cold and heat, with loss of friends and kindred, with injuries and 

resentments, gratitude and hope, with fear and sorrow. These, and the like, 

are the sensations and objects which the Poet describes, as they are the sensations 

of other men, and the objects which interest them. The Poet thinks 

and feels in the spirit of the passions of men. How, then, can his language 

differ in any material degree from that of all other men who feel vividly and 

see clearly? It might be proved that it is impossible. But supposing that this 

were not the case, the Poet might then be allowed to use a peculiar language 

when expressing his feelings for his own gratification, or that of men like 

himself. But Poets do not write for Poets alone, but for men. Unless therefore 

we are advocates for that admiration which depends upon ignorance, and 

that plea sure which arises from hearing what we do not understand, the 

Poet must descend from this supposed height, and, in order to excite rational 

sympathy, he must express himself as other men express themselves. To 

this it may be added, that while he is only selecting from the real language 

of men, or, which amounts to the same thing, composing accurately in the 

spirit of such selection, he is treading upon safe ground, and we know what 

we are to expect from him. Our feelings are the same with respect to metre; 

for, as it may be proper to remind the Reader,] the distinction of metre is


regular and uniform, and not like that which is produced by what is usually 

called poetic diction, arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices upon which 

no calculation what ever can be made. In the one case, the Reader is utterly 

at the mercy of the Poet respecting what imagery or diction he may choose 

to connect with the passion, whereas, in the other, the metre obeys certain 

laws, to which the Poet and Reader both willingly submit because they are 

certain, and because no interference is made by them with the passion but 

such as the concurring testimony of ages has shown to heighten and improve 

the plea sure which coexists with it. 

It will now be proper to answer an obvious question, namely, Why, professing 

these opinions, have I written in verse? To this, in addition to such 

answer as is included in what I have already said, I reply in the first place, 

because, however I may have restricted myself, there is still left open to me 

what confessedly constitutes the most valuable object of all writing, whether 

in prose or verse, the great and universal passions of men, the most general 

and interesting of their occupations, and the entire world of nature, from 

which I am at liberty to supply myself with endless combinations of forms 

and imagery. Now, supposing for a moment that what ever is interesting in 

these objects may be as vividly described in prose, why am I to be condemned, 

if to such description I have endeavoured to superadd the charm 

which, by the consent of all nations, is acknowledged to exist in metrical 

language? To this, by such as are unconvinced by what I have already said, it 

may be answered, that a very small part of the plea sure given by Poetry 

depends upon the metre, and that it is injudicious to write in metre, unless 

it be accompanied with the other artificial distinctions of style with which 

metre is usually accompanied, and that by such deviation more will be lost 

from the shock which will be thereby given to the Reader’s associations, 

than will be counterbalanced by any plea sure which he can derive from the 

general power of numbers. 4 In answer to those who still contend for the 

necessity of accompanying metre with certain appropriate colours of style in 

order to the accomplishment of its appropriate end, and who also, in my 

opinion, greatly underrate the power of metre in itself, it might perhaps, as 

far as relates to these Poems, have been almost sufficient to observe, that 

poems are extant, written upon more humble subjects, and in a more naked 

and simple style than I have aimed at, which poems have continued to give 

plea sure from generation to generation. Now, if nakedness and simplicity be 

a defect, the fact here mentioned affords a strong presumption that poems 

somewhat less naked and simple are capable of affording plea sure at the 

present day; and, what I wished chiefly to attempt, at present, was to justify 

myself for having written under the impression of this belief. 

But I might point out various causes why, when the style is manly, and 

the subject of some importance, words metrically arranged will long continue 

to impart such a plea sure to mankind as he who is sensible of the extent of 

that plea sure will be desirous to impart. The end of Poetry is to produce 

excitement in co- existence with an overbalance of plea sure. Now, by the 

supposition, excitement is an unusual and irregular state of the mind; ideas 

and feelings do not in that state succeed each other in accustomed order. 

But, if the words by which this excitement is produced are in themselves 

4. Metrical language.


powerful, or the images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected 

with them, there is some danger that the excitement may be carried 

beyond its proper bounds. Now the co- presence of something regular, something 

to which the mind has been accustomed in various moods and in a 

less excited state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering and restraining 

the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling, [and of feeling not 

strictly and necessarily connected with the passion. This is unquestionably 

true, and hence, though the opinion will at first appear paradoxical, from 

the tendency of metre to divest language in a certain degree of its reality, 

and thus to throw a sort of half consciousness of unsubstantial existence 

over the whole composition, there can be little doubt but that more pathetic 

situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of 

pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially 

in rhyme, than in prose. The metre of the old Ballads is very artless; 

yet they contain many passages which would illustrate this opinion, and, I 

hope, if the following Poems be attentively perused, similar instances will 

be found in them.] This opinion may be further illustrated by appealing to 

the Reader’s own experience of the reluctance with which he comes to the 

re- perusal of the distressful parts of Clarissa Harlowe, or the Gamester. 5 

While Shakespeare’s writings, in the most pathetic scenes, never act upon 

us as pathetic beyond the bounds of pleasure— an effect which, in a much 

greater degree than might at first be imagined, is to be ascribed to small, 

but continual and regular impulses of pleas ur able surprise from the metrical 

arrangement.— On the other hand (what it must be allowed will much 

more frequently happen) if the Poet’s words should be incommensurate 

with the passion, and inadequate to raise the Reader to a height of desirable 

excitement, then, (unless the Poet’s choice of his metre has been grossly 

injudicious) in the feelings of plea sure which the Reader has been accustomed 

to connect with metre in general, and in the feeling, whether chearful 

or melancholy, which he has been accustomed to connect with that 

par tic u lar movement of metre, there will be found something which will 

greatly contribute to impart passion to the words, and to effect the complex 

end which the Poet proposes to himself. 

If I had undertaken a systematic defence of the theory upon which these 

poems are written, it would have been my duty to develope the various 

causes upon which the plea sure received from metrical language depends. 

Among the chief of these causes is to be reckoned a principle which must 

be well known to those who have made any of the Arts the object of accurate 

reflection; I mean the plea sure which the mind derives from the perception 

of similitude in dissimilitude. This principle is the great spring of 

the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder. From this principle the 

direction of the sexual appetite, and all the passions connected with it, take 

their origin: it is the life of our ordinary conversation; and upon the accuracy 

with which similitude in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude 

are perceived, depend our taste and our moral feelings. It would not have 

been a useless employment to have applied this principle to the consideration 

of metre, and to have shown that metre is hence enabled to afford 

5. The Gamester (1753), a tragedy by Edward Moore 

(1712–1757), about gambling. Clarissa Harlowe: an 

epistolary novel (1747– 48) by Samuel Richardson 

(1689–1761); the title character is abducted and 

raped, and she dies of grief.


much plea sure, and to have pointed out in what manner that plea sure is 

produced. But my limits will not permit me to enter upon this subject, and 

I must content myself with a general summary. 

I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: 

it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is 

contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity disappears, and 

an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, 

is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this 

mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to 

this it is carried on; but the emotion, of what ever kind and in what ever 

degree, from various causes is qualified by various pleasures, so that in 

describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the 

mind will upon the whole be in a state of enjoyment. Now, if Nature be 

thus cautious in preserving in a state of enjoyment a being thus employed, 

the Poet ought to profit by the lesson thus held forth to him, and ought 

especially to take care, that what ever passions he communicates to his 

Reader, those passions, if his Reader’s mind be sound and vigorous, should 

always be accompanied with an overbalance of plea sure. Now the music of 

harmonious metrical language, the sense of difficulty overcome, and the 

blind association of plea sure which has been previously received from 

works of rhyme or metre of the same or similar construction, an indistinct 

perception perpetually renewed of language closely resembling that of real 

life, and yet, in the circumstance of metre, differing from it so widely, all 

these imperceptibly make up a complex feeling of delight, which is of the 

most important use in tempering the painful feeling which will always be 

found intermingled with powerful descriptions of the deeper passions. This 

effect is always produced in pathetic and impassioned poetry; while, in 

lighter compositions, the ease and gracefulness with which the Poet manages 

his numbers are themselves confessedly a principal source of the 

gratification of the Reader. I might perhaps include all which it is necessary 

to say upon this subject by affirming, what few persons will deny, that, of 

two descriptions, either of passions, manners, or characters, each of them 

equally well executed, the one in prose and the other in verse, the verse will 

be read a hundred times where the prose is read once. We see that Pope, by 

the power of verse alone, has contrived to render the plainest common 

sense interesting, and even frequently to invest it with the appearance of 

passion. In consequence of these convictions I related in metre the Tale of 

goody blake and harry gill, which is one of the rudest of this collection. 

I wished to draw attention to the truth, that the power of the human imagination 

is sufficient to produce such changes even in our physical nature as 

might almost appear miraculous. The truth is an important one; the fact 

(for it is a fact) is a valuable illustration of it. And I have the satisfaction of 

knowing that it has been communicated to many hundreds of people who 

would never have heard of it, had it not been narrated as a Ballad, and in a 

more impressive metre than is usual in Ballads. 

Having thus explained a few of the reasons why I have written in verse, 

and why I have chosen subjects from common life, and endeavoured to 

bring my language near to the real language of men, if I have been too minute 

in pleading my own cause, I have at the same time been treating a subject 

of general interest; and it is for this reason that I request the Reader’s


permission to add a few words with reference solely to these par tic u lar 

poems, and to some defects which will probably be found in them. I am sensible 

that my associations must have sometimes been par tic u lar instead of 

general, and that, consequently, giving to things a false importance, sometimes 

from diseased impulses I may have written upon unworthy subjects; 

but I am less apprehensive on this account, than that my language may frequently 

have suffered from those arbitrary connections of feelings and ideas 

with par tic u lar words and phrases, from which no man can altogether protect 

himself. Hence I have no doubt, that, in some instances, feelings even of 

the ludicrous may be given to my Readers by expressions which appeared to 

me tender and pathetic. Such faulty expressions, were I convinced they were 

faulty at present, and that they must necessarily continue to be so, I would 

willingly take all reasonable pains to correct. But it is dangerous to make 

these alterations on the simple authority of a few individuals, or even of certain 

classes of men; for where the understanding of an Author is not convinced, 

or his feelings altered, this cannot be done without great injury to 

himself: for his own feelings are his stay and support, and, if he sets them 

aside in one instance, he may be induced to repeat this act till his mind loses 

all confidence in itself, and becomes utterly debilitated. To this it may be 

added, that the Reader ought never to forget that he is himself exposed to the 

same errors as the Poet, and perhaps in a much greater degree: for there can 

be no presumption in saying, that it is not probable he will be so well 

acquainted with the various stages of meaning through which words have 

passed, or with the fickleness or stability of the relations of par tic u lar ideas to 

each other; and above all, since he is so much less interested in the subject, 

he may decide lightly and carelessly. 

Long as I have detained my Reader, I hope he will permit me to caution 

him against a mode of false criticism which has been applied to Poetry in 

which the language closely resembles that of life and nature. Such verses 

have been triumphed over in parodies of which Dr. Johnson’s stanza is a fair 

specimen. 

‘I put my hat upon my head, 

And walk’d into the Strand, 

And there I met another man 

Whose hat was in his hand.’ 6 

Immediately under these lines I will place one of the most justly admired 

stanzas of the ‘Babes in the Wood.’ 7 

‘These pretty Babes with hand in hand 

Went wandering up and down; 

But never more they saw the Man 

Approaching from the Town.’ 

In both these stanzas the words, and the order of the words, in no respect 

differ from the most unimpassioned conversation. There are words in both, 

6. Printed in the London Magazine, April 1785, 

parodying the ballad The Hermit of Warkworth 

(1771), by Thomas Percy. The Strand: a business 

street in central London. 

7. A pop u lar name for the old ballad “The Children 

in the Wood,” which tells of two children 

cruelly treated by a wicked uncle. It is included 

in Thomas Percy’s collection Reliques of Ancient 

En glish Poetry (3 vols., 1765), which Wordsworth 

valued highly.


for example, ‘the Strand,’ and ‘the Town,’ connected with none but the most 

familiar ideas; yet the one stanza we admit as admirable, and the other as a 

fair example of the superlatively contemptible. Whence arises this difference? 

Not from the metre, not from the language, not from the order of the 

words; but the matter expressed in Dr. Johnson’s stanza is contemptible. 

The proper method of treating trivial and simple verses, to which Dr. Johnson’s 

stanza would be a fair parallelism, is not to say, This is a bad kind of 

poetry, or This is not poetry; but This wants sense; it is neither interesting 

in itself, nor can lead to any thing interesting; the images neither originate 

in that sane state of feeling which arises out of thought, nor can excite 

thought or feeling in the Reader. This is the only sensible manner of dealing 

with such verses. Why trouble yourself about the species till you have 

previously decided upon the genus? Why take pains to prove that an ape is 

not a Newton, 8 when it is self- evident that he is not a man? 

I have one request to make of my Reader, which is, that in judging these 

Poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection 

upon what will probably be the judgment of others. How common is it to 

hear a person say, ‘I myself do not object to this style of composition, or this 

or that expression, but to such and such classes of people it will appear 

mean or ludicrous.’ This mode of criticism, so destructive of all sound 

unadulterated judgment, is almost universal: I have therefore to request, 

that the Reader would abide in de pen dently by his own feelings, and that if 

he finds himself affected he would not suffer such conjectures to interfere 

with his plea sure. 

If an Author by any single composition has impressed us with respect for 

his talents, it is useful to consider this as affording a presumption, that, on 

other occasions where we have been displeased, he nevertheless may not 

have written ill or absurdly; and, further, to give him so much credit for this 

one composition as may induce us to review what has displeased us with 

more care than we should otherwise have bestowed upon it. This is not only 

an act of justice, but, in our decisions upon poetry especially, may conduce 

in a high degree to the improvement of our own taste: for an accurate taste 

in poetry, and in all the other arts, as Sir Joshua Reynolds 9 has observed, is 

an acquired talent, which can only be produced by thought, and a long continued 

intercourse with the best models of composition. This is mentioned, 

not with so ridiculous a purpose as to prevent the most inexperienced Reader 

from judging for himself, (I have already said that I wish him to judge for 

himself;) but merely to temper the rashness of decision, and to suggest, that, 

if Poetry be a subject on which much time has not been bestowed, the judgment 

may be erroneous; and that in many cases it necessarily will be so. 

I know that nothing would have so effectually contributed to further the 

end which I have in view, as to have shewn of what kind the plea sure is, and 

how that plea sure is produced, which is confessedly produced by metrical 

composition essentially different from that which I have here endeavoured 

to recommend: for the Reader will say that he has been pleased by such 

8. Sir Isaac Newton (1642– 1727), En glish scientist 

and mathematician. 

9. Portrait paint er, essayist, and lecturer (1723– 

1792), author of annual Discourses (1769– 90) on 

the arts delivered to students at the Royal Academy 

in London. See Discourse XII: “The habit of contemplating 

and brooding over the ideas of great 

geniuses, till you find yourself warmed by the contact, 

is the true method of forming an artist- like 

mind.”


composition; and what can I do more for him? The power of any art is limited; 

and he will suspect, that, if I propose to furnish him with new friends, 

it is only upon condition of his abandoning his old friends. Besides, as I have 

said, the Reader is himself conscious of the plea sure which he has received 

from such composition, composition to which he has peculiarly attached the 

endearing name of Poetry; and all men feel an habitual gratitude, and something 

of an honorable bigotry for the objects which have long continued to 

please them; we not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in that par ticu 

lar way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased. There is a host of 

arguments in these feelings; and I should be the less able to combat them 

successfully, as I am willing to allow, that, in order entirely to enjoy the 

Poetry which I am recommending, it would be necessary to give up much of 

what is ordinarily enjoyed. But, would my limits have permitted me to point 

out how this plea sure is produced, I might have removed many obstacles, 

and assisted my Reader in perceiving that the powers of language are not so 

limited as he may suppose; and that it is possible that poetry may give other 

enjoyments, of a purer, more lasting, and more exquisite nature. This part of 

my subject I have not altogether neglected; but it has been less my present 

aim to prove, that the interest excited by some other kinds of poetry is less 

vivid, and less worthy of the nobler powers of the mind, than to offer reasons 

for presuming, that, if the object which I have proposed to myself were adequately 

attained, a species of poetry would be produced, which is genuine 

poetry; in its nature well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and likewise 

important in the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations. 

From what has been said, and from a perusal of the Poems, the Reader 

will be able clearly to perceive the object which I have proposed to myself: he 

will determine how far I have attained this object; and, what is a much more 

important question, whether it be worth attaining: and upon the decision of 

these two questions will rest my claim to the approbation of the public. 

Appendix to the Preface (1802) 

As perhaps I have no right to expect from a Reader of an Introduction to a 

volume of Poems that attentive perusal without which it is impossible, imperfectly 

as I have been compelled to express my meaning, that what I have said 

in the Preface should throughout be fully understood, I am the more anxious 

to give an exact notion of the sense in which I use the phrase poetic 

diction; and for this purpose I will here add a few words concerning the origin 

of the phraseology which I have condemned under that name.— The earliest 

Poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; 

they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language 

was daring, and figurative. In succeeding times, Poets, and men ambitious 

of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and 

desirous of producing the same effect, without having the same animating 

passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of those figures of speech, 

and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently 

applied them to feelings and ideas with which they had no natural connection 

whatsoever. A language was thus insensibly produced, differing materially 

from the real language of men in any situation. The Reader or Hearer of 

this distorted language found himself in a perturbed and unusual state of 

mind: when affected by the genuine language of passion he had been in a


perturbed and unusual state of mind also: in both cases he was willing that 

his common judgment and understanding should be laid asleep, and he had 

no instinctive and infallible perception of the true to make him reject the 

false; the one served as a passport for the other. The agitation and confusion 

of mind were in both cases delightful, and no wonder if he confounded the 

one with the other, and believed them both to be produced by the same, or 

similar causes. Besides, the Poet spake to him in the character of a man to 

be looked up to, a man of genius and authority. Thus, and from a variety of 

other causes, this distorted language was received with admiration; and 

Poets, it is probable, who had before contented themselves for the most part 

with misapplying only expressions which at first had been dictated by real 

passion, carried the abuse still further, and introduced phrases composed 

apparently in the spirit of the original figurative language of passion, yet 

altogether of their own invention, and distinguished by various degrees of 

wanton deviation from good sense and nature. 

It is indeed true that the language of the earliest Poets was felt to differ 

materially from ordinary language, because it was the language of extraordinary 

occasions; but it was really spoken by men, language which the Poet 

himself had uttered when he had been affected by the events which he 

described, or which he had heard uttered by those around him. To this language 

it is probable that metre of some sort or other was early superadded. 

This separated the genuine language of Poetry still further from common 

life, so that whoever read or heard the poems of these earliest Poets felt 

himself moved in a way in which he had not been accustomed to be moved 

in real life, and by causes manifestly different from those which acted upon 

him in real life. This was the great temptation to all the corruptions which 

have followed: under the protection of this feeling succeeding Poets constructed 

a phraseology which had one thing, it is true, in common with the 

genuine language of poetry, namely, that it was not heard in ordinary conversation; 

that it was unusual. But the first Poets, as I have said, spake a 

language which, though unusual, was still the language of men. This circumstance, 

however, was disregarded by their successors; they found that 

they could please by easier means: they became proud of a language which 

they themselves had invented, and which was uttered only by themselves; 

and, with the spirit of a fraternity, they arrogated it to themselves as their 

own. In pro cess of time metre became a symbol or promise of this unusual 

language, and whoever took upon him to write in metre, according as he 

possessed more or less of true poetic genius, introduced less or more of this 

adulterated phraseology into his compositions, and the true and the false 

became so inseparably interwoven that the taste of men was gradually perverted; 

and this language was received as a natural language; and at length, 

by the influence of books upon men, did to a certain degree really become 

so. Abuses of this kind were imported from one nation to another, and with 

the progress of refinement this diction became daily more and more corrupt, 

thrusting out of sight the plain humanities of nature by a motley masquerade 

of tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics, and enigmas. 

It would be highly interesting to point out the causes of the plea sure given 

by this extravagant and absurd language: but this is not the place; it depends 

upon a great variety of causes, but upon none perhaps more than its influence 

in impressing a notion of the peculiarity and exaltation of the Poet’s 

character, and in flattering the Reader’s self- love by bringing him nearer to a


sympathy with that character; an effect which is accomplished by unsettling 

ordinary habits of thinking, and thus assisting the Reader to approach to 

that perturbed and dizzy state of mind in which if he does not find himself, 

he imagines that he is balked of a peculiar enjoyment which poetry can, and 

ought to bestow. 

The sonnet which I have quoted from Gray, in the Preface, except the lines 

printed in Italics, consists of little else but this diction, though not of the 

worst kind; and indeed, if I may be permitted to say so, it is far too common 

in the best writers, both antient and modern. Perhaps I can in no way, by 

positive example, more easily give my Reader a notion of what I mean by the 

phrase poetic diction than by referring him to a comparison between the metrical 

paraphrases which we have of passages in the old and new Testament, 

and those passages as they exist in our common Translation. See Pope’s ‘Messiah’ 

throughout, Prior’s ‘Did sweeter sounds adorn my flowing tongue,’ 1 &c. 

&c. ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels,’ &c. &c. See 1st 

Corinthians, chapter 13th. By way of immediate example, take the following 

of Dr. Johnson: 2 

‘Turn on the prudent Ant thy heedless eyes, 

Observe her labours, Sluggard, and be wise; 

No stern command, no monitory voice, 

Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice; 

Yet, timely provident, she hastes away 

To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day; 

When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain, 

She crops the harvest and she stores the grain. 

How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours, 

Unnerve thy vigour, and enchain thy powers? 

While artful shades thy downy couch enclose, 

And soft solicitation courts repose, 

Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight, 

Year chases year with unremitted flight, 

Till want now following, fraudulent and slow, 

Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambushed foe.’ 

From this hubbub of words pass to the original. ‘Go to the Ant, thou Sluggard, 

consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or 

ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. 

How long wilt thou sleep, O Sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy 

sleep? Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep. 

So shall thy poverty come as one that travaileth, and thy want as an armed 

man.’ Proverbs, chap. 6th. 

One more quotation and I have done. It is from Cowper’s verses 3 supposed 

to be written by Alexander Selkirk: 

‘Religion! what trea sure untold 

Resides in that heavenly word! 

1. “Charity. A Paraphrase on the Thirteenth 

Chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians” 

(1703), by Matthew Prior (1664– 1721). “Messiah”: 

a “sacred eclogue” (1712), imitating Virgil’s 

Latin Eclogue 4 (ca. 37 b.c.e.). 

2. “The Ant” (1766). 

3. “Verses Supposed to be Written by Alexander 

Selkirk” (1782), stanzas 4– 5, by William Cowper 

(1731– 1800). Selkirk (1676– 1721), a Scottish 

sailor who lived from 1704 to 1709 on an uninhabited 

island off the coast of Chile.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE / 579 

More precious than silver and gold, 

Or all that this earth can afford. 

But the sound of the church- going bell 

These valleys and rocks never heard, 

Ne’er sighed at the sound of a knell, 

Or smiled when a sabbath appear’d. 

Ye winds, that have made me your sport, 

Convey to this desolate shore 

Some cordial endearing report 

Of a land I must visit no more. 

My Friends, do they now and then send 

A wish or a thought after me? 

O tell me I yet have a friend, 

Though a friend I am never to see.’ 

I have quoted this passage as an instance of three different styles of composition. 

The first four lines are poorly expressed; some Critics would call the 

language prosaic; the fact is, it would be bad prose, so bad, that it is scarcely 

worse in metre. The epithet ‘church- going’ applied to a bell, and that by so 

chaste 4 a writer as Cowper, is an instance of the strange abuses which Poets 

have introduced into their language till they and their Readers take them as 

matters of course, if they do not single them out expressly as objects of 

admiration. The two lines ‘Ne’er sighed at the sound,’ &c. are, in my opinion, 

an instance of the language of passion wrested from its proper use, and, 

from the mere circumstance of the composition being in metre, applied 

upon an occasion that does not justify such violent expressions; and I should 

condemn the passage, though perhaps few Readers will agree with me, as 

vicious poetic diction. The last stanza is throughout admirably expressed: it 

would be equally good whether in prose or verse, except that the Reader has 

an exquisite plea sure in seeing such natural language so naturally connected 

with metre. The beauty of this stanza tempts me here to add a sentiment 

which ought to be the pervading spirit of a system, detached parts of which 

have been imperfectly explained in the Preface,— namely, that in proportion 

as ideas and feelings are valuable, whether the composition be in prose or in 

verse, they require and exact one and the same language. 

4. Austere, ornament- free. 

1800, 1802 

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

1772–1834 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge has been praised as the premier En glish literary intellectual 

of his era and as the first modern critic, a writer who sought to integrate literary 

analysis with the insights of other disciplines and who labored (with less than

580 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 

complete success) to give literary criticism a philosophical foundation. But he has 

also been dismissed and derided in hostile tones rarely found in academic commentary. 

Was Coleridge a great original thinker? He drew on many eighteenthcentury 

and contemporary authors, particularly German idealist and Romantic phi los o- 

phers and critics, including immanuel kant, friedrich von schiller, Friedrich 

and A. W. Schlegel, and Friedrich von Schelling— and some scholars have commended 

him for introducing the best of German thought to an En glish readership. 

Less charitably, though with some reason, others have termed these literary debts, 

references, and borrowings to be nothing more than plagiarisms. 

Coleridge has also been rebuked and mocked for the ambitious projects he proposed, 

launched, but left undone: an eight- to ten- volume history of literature, an 

epic poem on the origin of evil, and so on. He had extraordinary literary gifts, but 

was an undisciplined author who failed to make full use of his exceptional talents— 

as he himself knew well. Coleridge wrote in his copy of his book The Statesman’s 

Manual (1816) that while he had produced a number of significant works, he stood 

in the world’s eyes as “the wild eccentric Genius that has published nothing but 

fragments & splendid Tirades.” With the possible exception of the Biographia Literaria 

(1817) and a handful of poems, none of his works holds together as an effective 

whole. Yet as a writer, and as a speaker (we have ample rec ords of his conversations 

and lectures), he was, and still is, brilliantly impressive and stimulating. 

Coleridge was born the son of the vicar of Ottery St. Mary, a small town in southwest 

En gland; but at age nine, following the death of his father, he was sent to 

school in London, attending Christ’s Hospital as a charity student. In 1791 he 

enrolled in Jesus College, Cambridge University; two years later, plagued by debts, 

he enlisted in the Fifteenth Light Dragoons under the alias Silas Tomkyn Comberbache 

(S.T.C.). He was soon rescued from this mistake by his family and returned 

to the university, but he left in December 1794 without completing his degree. 

In June 1794, while on a walking tour, Coleridge met the poet Robert Southey at 

Oxford, and the two concocted a plan for a “pantisocracy” (a society ruled by 

equals). They decided on a location (in Pennsylvania) and on the twelve men who, 

with their wives, would create this agricultural commune; but the only action taken 

was Coleridge’s engagement (made necessary by the scheme) to Sara Fricker, the 

sister of Southey’s fiancée. Though the plan collapsed, he married her in 1795. 

In late 1794 Coleridge’s first published poetry appeared— sonnets addressed to 

contemporary po liti cal radicals such as William Godwin and Joseph Priestley. In 

1795 he worked as a journalist and lectured in Bristol on politics, religion, and history. 

Most scholars believe that he there first met william wordsworth, beginning 

an intense friendship that soon led to the most significant collaboration in 

En glish literary history. By May 1796 Coleridge was calling Wordsworth “a very 

dear friend of mine, who is in my opinion the best poet of the age,” and his own first 

collection of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, had just been published. In December, 

Coleridge and his wife Sara settled in Nether Stowey, and soon thereafter 

Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved nearby, to Alfoxden. Beginning in mid- 

1797 Coleridge and Wordsworth worked together on Lyrical Ballads, which they 

published anonymously in September 1798. Among the works of this period, 

Coleridge’s high point as a poet, are “This Lime- Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Rime 

of the Ancient Mariner,” “Frost at Midnight,” “Fears in Solitude,” “The Nightingale,” 

part I of “Christabel,” and probably the fragment “Kubla Khan” as well. 

Leaving his wife and two children behind, Coleridge accompanied the Wordsworths 

to Germany in September 1798, where he read and absorbed the philosophical 

and literary speculations of Kant, Schelling, the Schlegels, and Schiller 

(whose work he later translated). 

On his return to En gland in mid- 1799, Coleridge wrote po liti cal articles and 

made plans (unrealized) for a biography of the German critic and dramatist got-


thold ephraim lessing and for a major book on Romantic metaphysics. The 

Coleridges followed the Wordsworths to the Lake District in 1800; and although 

the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) appeared with only Wordsworth’s name 

on the title page and with a long preface by Wordsworth that ignored Coleridge’s 

poems, the men remained close. But Coleridge’s personal life was in disarray. 

Already indifferent to his wife, he had fallen in love with Sara Hutchinson, whose 

sister, Mary, Wordsworth would marry in 1802; even worse, he had become dependent 

on laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol, widely used to treat a number of 

disorders). Leaving his family behind, Coleridge spent two years traveling the 

Mediterranean and working in Malta; but he returned to En gland in 1806 still an 

addict. He lived for some months with the Wordsworths, and the relationship grew 

strained; the men finally broke on bitter terms in 1810. 

Under the circumstances, Coleridge was surprisingly productive. In 1809 and 

1810, he wrote and published The Friend, a periodical that ran for twenty- eight 

issues; and between 1808 and 1819, he lectured frequently on politics, religion, 

education, philosophy, and literature, offering especially incisive commentaries on 

Shakespeare and Milton. During the period from June to September 1815, he 

focused on the Biographia Literaria, which he dictated rather than wrote. From 

spring 1816 until his death in 1834, Coleridge lived in Highgate, a northern suburb 

of London, with and under the care of Dr. James Gillman, who helped control his 

drug addiction. 

By this time known as the “Sage of Highgate,” Coleridge published Christabel and 

Other Poems (1816); the first volume of his collected poems, Sibylline Leaves (1817; 

expanded 1828, 1834); and his Poetical Works (3 vols., 1828; 2d ed., 1829; 3d ed., 

1834). His major prose works are Lay Sermons (1816, 1817), essays on national education 

and the structure of an organic society; Biographia Literaria (1817); “Treatise 

on Method” (included in the three- volume edition of The Friend, 1818); Aids to 

Reflection (1825; 2d ed., 1831); and On the Constitution of the Church and State 

(1829; 2d ed., 1830), in which he proposed the establishment of teachers, scholars, 

and priests as an in de pen dent estate of the realm, “the clerisy.” In addition, Table 

Talk (edited by his nephew Henry Coleridge, 1836), which displays his skills in conversation; 

Literary Remains (1836), which contains an account of his 1818– 19 lectures 

on “the history of philosophy” and the “general course of literature”; and Anima 

Poetae (1895), selections from his notebooks, all appeared after his death. 

Coleridge frequently professed a commitment to system, logic, and method, but 

his own practice time and again resists global theories and highly elaborated schemes 

and structures. It is the penetrating phrase or sentence, the powerful paragraph of 

speculation, and the shrewd, suggestive judgment that reveal Coleridge at his best. 

Still, for En glish and American critics in the early twentieth century, especially I. 

A. Richards, cleanth brooks, and other New Critics, the central Coleridge text is 

Biographia Literaria, where they found and built on Coleridge’s theory of the imagination, 

his exposition of organic unity, and his treatment of poetry as the reconciliation 

of opposites. 

Biographia Literaria, a hastily assembled work, mixes modes and genres. It includes 

autobiography, philosophy, literary theory, and analytical literary criticism, as well 

as a memoir of Wordsworth, a study of his poems, and a critique of his theory of 

poetic diction. At the center of Coleridge’s project is his inquiry into and defense of 

the imagination. Coleridge’s account, distinguishing between “fancy” and “imagination,” 

lacks the splendor and breadth of percy bysshe shelley’s tribute to the 

imagination in the Defence of Poetry (written 1821; see below) as “the great instrument 

of moral good,” but it has exercised a greater influence on later literary theory 

and criticism. Coleridge speaks first of the “primary” imagination: the “living power” 

of God, in the eternal act of creation, it is also the power of creation in each person. 

The “secondary” imagination echoes the primary; in conjunction with the will and


understanding, it dissolves in order to re- create, making whole and harmonizing as 

a “synthetic and magical power.” Fancy, in contrast, merely associates “fixities and 

definites.” 

This is an intriguing, if elusive, theory, over which commentators have puzzled. 

But the real importance of Coleridge’s words is their departure from eighteenthcentury 

neoclassical theory. samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary (1765), offers “fancy” 

as one of the definitions of “imagination”; that Coleridge makes a distinction between 

the two has important implications for his conception of the poet and the poem. 

Neoclassical critics such as alexander pope and Johnson could exempt only a great 

genius like Shakespeare from external rules of literary decorum, insisting that others 

rely on deliberate craft; but for Coleridge the creative work of every poet springs from 

an imaginative power at once available for analysis yet mysterious in its sources. He 

sees a poem as organic, true to itself, acquiring its shape like a plant from a seed and 

thereby growing according to its own internal law of development. 

Coleridge’s theory of the primary and secondary imagination honors the creative 

capacity of persons while remaining steadfast to the primacy of God; even more, 

Coleridge implies that each re- creative act that a poet performs is an act of worship. 

As modern scholars have pointed out, Coleridge was the most devout of all 

the major Romantic writers; his Christian faith is central to all his work. He sees 

“a similar union of the universal and the individual” in religion and in the fine 

arts. Yet implicit in Coleridge’s theory of the imagination are both difficulty and 

failure, which take on added bleakness in this context. When he sets the imagination 

in contrast to a world of “essentially fixed and dead objects,” does he mean 

that God has made a world that is dead— at least until awakened or renewed by a 

creative act? 

Coleridge makes a similar distinction in his commentaries on allegory and symbol 

in The Statesman’s Manual. Allegory, he indicates, is mechanical and formulaic, 

part of the larger problem of our degenerate age of triumphant “mechanic” philosophy; 

but symbol is organically unified, fusing the par tic u lar and the general, the 

temporal and the eternal. This distinction is crucial for Coleridge, yet, as paul de 

man argues in “The Rhetoric of Temporality” (1969), his arguments do not sustain 

it: the more that Coleridge explores the distinction, the more he complicates and 

blurs its terms. Some of his best- known poetry (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 

“Kubla Khan,” “Christabel”) has invited allegorical interpretation. 

Coleridge’s emphasis on the power of the imagination is at odds with much contemporary 

theory and historical and cultural criticism, which is suspicious of 

claims that appear to give certain individuals the power to create new worlds out of 

nothing but their imagination. The New Historicist stephen greenblatt speaks, 

for example, not of the imaginative power and prowess of the author but of “social 

energy”; and it is true that Coleridge pays little attention to the social networks of 

signification in which an author’s work takes shape. But recent theorists, reacting 

perhaps too sweepingly against the idea of the author as a Romantic genius, have 

tended to undervalue the creative power of the individual author, the agent of the 

imagination who, as Coleridge says of Shakespeare, demonstrates his authority and 

skill “not only in the general construction, but in all the detail.” 

bibliography 

Primary sources include The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, general 

editor Kathleen Coburn (16 vols. to date, 1969–), published by the Bollingen Foundation 

and Princeton University Press, superbly edited and with comprehensive 

introductions; The Collected Letters, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs (6 vols., 1956– 71); 

and Selected Letters, edited by H. J. Jackson (1987). Also illuminating are The Notebooks, 

edited by Kathleen Coburn (5 vols. to date, 1957–). Collections of Coleridge’s 

criticism include Shakespearean Criticism (2 vols., 1930) and Miscellaneous Criti-


cism (1936), both edited by T. M. Raysor. See also Coleridge on the Seventeenth 

Century, edited by Roberta Florence Brinkley (1955), and Writings on Shakespeare: 

A Selection of the Essays, Notes, and Lectures, edited by Terence Hawkes (1959). A 

compilation of Coleridge’s prose, or ga nized by theme, is Coleridge’s Responses: 

Selected Writings on Literary Criticism, the Bible, and Nature, edited by John Beer 

et al. (3 vols., 2008). 

Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (1968), is a fine introduction to the life and 

works; two volumes by Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772– 1804 (1989) 

and Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804– 1834 (1999) constitute the best biography. 

Rosemary Ashton, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography (1996), 

is astute. Adam Sisman’s The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge (2006) is an 

engaging biographical and intellectual overview. Norman Fruman, Coleridge: The 

Damaged Archangel (1971), assembles the evidence of Coleridge’s plagiarisms. 

The best point of departure for studying Coleridge’s criticism is the Biographia 

Literaria. See especially the editions by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, vol. 7 

of the Bollingen Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1983), and by John Shawcross (2 vols., 

1907). Scholarly studies of Biographia Literaria include Kathleen M. Wheeler, 

Sources, Pro cesses, and Methods in Coleridge’s “Biographia Literaria” (1980); Catherine 

Miles Wallace, The Design of “Biographia Literaria” (1983); and Coleridge’s 

“Biographia Literaria”: Text and Meaning, edited by Frederick Burwick (1989), which 

presents fourteen essays on major themes of the text and on its style, sources, significance 

for the history of Romanticism, and connections to contemporary literary 

theory. For critical responses to Coleridge to the year 1900, consult Coleridge: The 

Critical Heritage, edited by J. R. de J. Jackson (2 vols., 1970– 91). 

There are many fine books on Coleridge’s literary theory: J. A. Appleyard, 

Coleridge’s Philosophy of Literature: The Development of a Concept of Poetry, 1791– 

1819 (1965); Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (1969), which 

includes cogent chapters on Coleridge’s plagiarisms and pantheist beliefs; J. R. de J. 

Jackson, Method and Imagination in Coleridge’s Criticism (1969); J. Robert Barth, 

The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition (1977); and Jerome 

C. Christensen, Coleridge’s Blessed Machine of Language (1981). On Coleridge’s 

theories of literary language and poetic diction, see Emerson R. Marks, Coleridge 

on the Language of Verse (1981), a treatment of Coleridge’s interest in language “as 

an artistic medium”; Timothy Corrigan, Coleridge, Language, and Criticism (1982); 

Paul Hamilton, Coleridge’s Poetics (1983), an insightful study of Coleridge’s significant 

influence on post- Romantic literary criticism; James C. McKusick, Coleridge’s 

Philosophy of Language (1986); and A. C. Goodson, Verbal Imagination: Coleridge 

and the Language of Modern Criticism (1988), which relates Coleridge’s theory of 

poetry to the development of modern literary criticism. 

For bibliographies, see Samuel Taylor Coleridge: An Annotated Bibliography of 

Criticism and Scholarship, edited by Richard and Josephine Haven and Maurianne 

Adams (2 vols., 1976– 83), which covers work to 1939. See also Jefferson D. Caskey 

and Melinda M. Capper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Selective Bibliography of Criticism, 

1935– 1977 (1978). A guide to further reading can be found in The Cambridge 

Companion to Coleridge, edited by Lucy Newlyn (2002), as well as cogent essays 

on Coleridge’s criticism, philosophy, and po liti cal and religious thought.


From Biographia Literaria 1 

From Part I 

From chapter 1 

* * * 

As the result of all my reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, 

deeming them to comprize the conditions and criteria of poetic style; 

first, that not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with 

the greatest plea sure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of 

essential poetry. Second, that what ever lines can be translated into other 

words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either 

in sense, or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious 2 in their 

diction. Be it however observed, that I excluded from the list of worthy feelings, 

the plea sure derived from mere novelty, in the reader, and the desire of 

exciting wonderment at his powers in the author. Oftentimes since then, in 

perusing French tragedies, I have fancied two marks of admiration at the end 

of each line, as hieroglyphics of the author’s own admiration at his own cleverness. 

Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous under- current 

of feeling; it is every where present, but seldom any where as a separate 

excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more difficult 

to push a stone out from the pyramids with the bare hand, than to alter 

a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakspeare, (in their most 

important works at least) without making the author say something else, or 

something worse, than he does say. One great distinction, I appeared to 

myself to see plainly, between, even the characteristic faults of our elder 

poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to 

Cowley, 3 we find the most fantastic out- of- the- way thoughts, but in the most 

pure and genuine mother En glish; in the latter, the most obvious thoughts, in 

language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed 

the passion, and passionate flow of poetry, to the subtleties of intellect, and to 

the starts of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken 

and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made 

up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart 

to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery. 

* * * 


* * * 

This excellence, 4 which in all Mr. Wordsworth’s writings is more or less predominant, 

and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no sooner felt, 

than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me first to suspect, 

1. The full title is Biographia Literaria; Or, Biographical 

Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. 

Footnotes by Coleridge have been omitted 

from this selection. 

2. Defective. 

3. Abraham Cowley (1618– 1667), En glish satirist, 

poet, and essayist. John Donne (1572– 1631), 

En glish poet. Both wrote so- called metaphysical 

poetry, reliant on complex meta phors and images. 

4. Coleridge has just claimed that it is the mark of 

genius “to represent familiar objects so as to 

awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling 

concerning them.” A considerable portion of the 

Biographia Literaria is devoted to a critical analysis 

of the En glish poet william wordsworth 

(1770– 1850), Coleridge’s friend and collaborator.

Biographia Literaria / 585 

(and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate 

marks, functions, and effects matured my conjecture into full conviction) 

that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, 

instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names with one 

meaning, or at furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same 

power. It is not, I own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the 

Greek Phantasia, than the Latin Imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all 

societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious 

good sense working progressively to desynonymize 5 those words originally of 

the same meaning, which the conflux of dialects had supplied to the more 

homogeneous languages, as the Greek and German: and which the same 

cause, joined with accidents of translation from original works of different 

countries, occasion in mixt languages like our own. The first and most 

important point to be proved is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are 

confused under one and the same word, and (this done) to appropriate that 

word exclusively to one meaning, and the synonyme (should there be one) to 

the other. But if (as will be often the case in the arts and sciences) no synonyme 

exists, we must either invent or borrow a word. In the present instance 

the appropriation had already begun, and been legitimated in the derivative 

adjective: Milton 6 had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If 

therefore I should succeed in establishing the actual existences of two faculties 

generally different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. 

To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the 

term imagination; while the other would be contra- distinguished as fancy. 

Now were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no less grounded in 

nature, than that of delirium from mania, or Otway’s 

from Shakespeare’s 

Lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber, 7 

What! have his daughters brought him to this pass? 8 

or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements; 9 the theory of the fine 

arts, and of poetry in par tic u lar, could not, I thought, but derive some additional 

and important light. It would in its immediate effects furnish a torch 

of guidance to the philosophical critic; and ultimately to the poet himself. In 

energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power; and from 

directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive 

in the production. To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate 

without loss of originality. 


* * * 

The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary 

imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all 

5. To differentiate in meaning words previously 

synonymous (so defined by the Oxford En glish 

Dictionary, which gives this as the first use of the 

word). 

6. John Milton (1608– 1674) was a contemporary 

of but far greater poet than Cowley. 

7. Venice Preserved (1682), 5.2.151, by Thomas 

Otway (1652– 1685). Coleridge uses the word 

“lobsters” where Otway had written “laurels.” 

8. King Lear (ca. 1604– 05), 3.4.61 (Shakespeare 

begins the line “What, has”). 

9. That is, Lear’s address to the storm, 3.2.1– 9, 

13– 23.


human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act 

of creation in the infinite I am. 1 The secondary I consider as an echo of 

the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the 

primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the 

mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re- create; 

or where this pro cess is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles 

to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as 

objects) are essentially fixed and dead. 

Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities 

and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated 

from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified 

by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word 

choice. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials 

ready made from the law of association. 

* * * 

From Part II 

chapter 14 

During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, 2 our 

conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the 

power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the 

truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying 

colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light 

and shade, which moon- light or sunset diffused over a known and familiar 

landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These 

are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do 

not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In one, 

the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the 

excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the 

dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, 

supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every 

human being who, from what ever source of delusion, has at any time believed 

himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to 

be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such, 

as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative 

and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present 

themselves. 

In this idea originated the plan of the “Lyrical Ballads;” in which it was 

agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters 

supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward 

nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for 

these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the 

moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other 

hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty 

to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, 

1. See Exodus 3.14: “And God said unto Moses, I 

Am That I Am.” 

2. In 1797– 98 Coleridge was living at Nether 

Stowey and Wordsworth was nearby at Alfoxden, 

in southwest En gland.


by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing 

it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible 

trea sure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity 

and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and 

hearts that neither feel nor understand. 3 

With this view I wrote the “Ancient Mariner,” and was preparing among 

other poems, the “Dark Ladie,” and the “Christabel,” in which I should have 

more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt. But 

Mr. Wordsworth’s industry had proved so much more successful, and the 

number of his poems so much greater, 4 that my compositions, instead of 

forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter. 

Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, 

in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which is characteristic of 

his genius. In this form the “Lyrical Ballads” were published; and were presented 

by him, as an experiment, 5 whether subjects, which from their nature 

rejected the usual ornaments and extra- colloquial style of poems in general, 

might not be so managed in the language of ordinary life as to produce the 

pleas ur able interest, which it is the peculiar business of poetry in impart. To 

the second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which notwithstanding 

some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was understood 

to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to 

reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of style that were not 

included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) 

called the language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in 

which it was impossible to deny the presence of original genius, however 

mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long continued 

controversy. 6 For from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed 

heresy I explain the inveteracy and in some instances, I grieve to say, the 

acrimonious passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by 

the assailants. 

Had Mr. Wordsworth’s poems been the silly, the childish things, which 

they were for a long time described as being; had they been really distinguished 

from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of language 

and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more than 

what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them; they must 

have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough 7 of oblivion, and have 

dragged the preface along with them. But year after year increased the number 

of Mr. Wordsworth’s admirers. They were found too not in the lower 

classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young men of strong sensibility 

and meditative minds; and their admiration (inflamed perhaps in some 

degree by opposition) was distinguished by its intensity, I might almost say, 

by its religious fervour. These facts, and the intellectual energy of the author, 

which was more or less consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even 

3. See Isaiah 6.9– 10. 

4. Wordsworth wrote 19 of the 23 poems in the 

first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798). 

5. See the brief advertisement to the first edition 

of Lyrical Ballads: “The majority of the following 

poems are to be considered as experiments. They 

were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how 

far the language of conversation in the middle 

and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes 

of poetic plea sure.” 

6. That is, the controversy that arose over Wordsworth’s 

theory and practice of poetry, especially 

in hostile essays by the critic Francis Jeffrey 

(1773–1850) in the Edinburgh Review. See Wordsworth, 

Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800; above). 

7. Soft, muddy ground.


boisterously denied, meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, 

and of alarm at their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which 

would of itself have borne up the poems by the violence, with which it 

whirled them round and round. With many parts of this preface in the sense 

attributed to them and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorise, I 

never concurred; but on the contrary objected to them as erroneous in principle, 

and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other parts of the 

same preface, and to the author’s own practice in the greater number of the 

poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth in his recent collection has, I find, 

degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end of his second volume, to be 

read or not at the reader’s choice. 8 But he has not, as far as I can discover, 

announced any change in his poetic creed. At all events, considering it as 

the source of a controversy, in which I have been honored more, than I 

deserve, by the frequent conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient 

to declare once for all, in what points I coincide with his opinions, and 

in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render myself intelligible 

I must previously, in as few words as possible, explain my ideas, first, of a 

poem; and secondly, of poetry itself, in kind, and in essence. 

The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it 

is the privilege of the phi los o pher to preserve himself constantly aware, that 

distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, 

we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the 

technical pro cess of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore 

them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually coexist; and this 

is the result of philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose 

composition; the difference therefore must consist in a different combination 

of them, in consequence of a different object proposed. According to 

the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination. It is 

possible, that the object may be merely to facilitate the recollection of any 

given facts or observations by artificial arrangement; and the composition 

will be a poem, merely because it is distinguished from prose by metre, or 

by rhyme, or by both conjointly. In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute 

the name of a poem to the well known enumeration of the days in the 

several months; 

Thirty days hath September, 

April, June, and November, &c. 

and others of the same class and purpose. And as a par tic u lar plea sure is 

found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities, all compositions 

that have this charm superadded, what ever be their contents, may be 

entitled poems. 

So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents supplies 

an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose may be 

the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and demonstrable, as 

in works of science; or of facts experienced and recorded, as in history. 

Plea sure, and that of the highest and most permanent kind, may result from 

the attainment of the end; but it is not itself the immediate end. In other 

8. For Poems (2 vols., 1815), Wordsworth moved the preface for Lyrical Ballads to an appendix and wrote 

a new preface and “supplementary” essay.


works the communication of plea sure may be the immediate purpose; and 

though truth, either moral or intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet 

this will distinguish the character of the author, not the class to which the 

work belongs. Blest indeed is that state of society, in which the immediate 

purpose would be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in 

which no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the Bathyllus even of 

an Anacreon, or the Alexis of Virgil, 9 from disgust and aversion! 

But the communication of plea sure may be the immediate object of a 

work not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high 

degree attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere superaddition 

of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? 

The answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain 

in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. 1 If metre be superadded, 

all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be such, 

as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each part, which an 

exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are calculated to 

excite. The final definition then, so deduced, may be thus worded. A poem 

is that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by 

proposing for its immediate object plea sure, not truth; and from all other 

species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing 

to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct 

gratification from each component part. 

Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants 

attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few instances 

has this been more striking, than in disputes concerning the present subject. 

If a man chooses to call every composition a poem, which is rhyme, or 

mea sure, or both, I must leave his opinion uncontroverted. The distinction 

is at least competent to characterize the writer’s intention. If it were subjoined, 

that the whole is likewise entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a 

series of interesting reflections, I of course admit this as another fit ingredient 

of a poem, and an additional merit. But if the definition sought for be 

that of a legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the parts of which 

mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing 

with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical 

arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the ultimate 

judgement of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a just poem, on 

the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distichs, 2 each of which absorbing 

the whole attention of the reader to itself disjoins it from its context, 

and makes it a separate whole, instead of an harmonizing part; and on the 

other hand, to an unsustained composition, from which the reader collects 

rapidly the general result unattracted by the component parts. The reader 

should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse 

of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the 

pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. 

9. The Roman poet (70– 19 b.c.e.) whose Eclogue 

2 (ca. 37 b.c.e.) is the shepherd Corydon’s lovesick 

address to the male slave Alexis. Bathyllus: a 

beautiful boy of Samos to whom several odes of 

the Greek lyric poet Anacreon (b. ca. 570 b.c.e.) 

are addressed. 

1. Coleridge’s editors cite samuel johnson, 

Rambler, no. 154 (1751): “That which hopes to 

resist the blast of malignity, and stand firm 

against the attacks of time, must contain in itself 

some original principle of growth.” 

2. Paired lines (in Greek and Latin verse, such 

couplets do not rhyme).


Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of 

intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step 

he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects 

the force which again carries him onward. Precipitandus est liber spiritus, 3 

says Petronius Arbiter most happily. The epithet, liber, here balances the 

preceding verb; and it is not easy to conceive more meaning condensed in 

fewer words. 

But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem, we 

have still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of Plato, and Bishop 

Taylor, and the Theoria Sacra of Burnet, 4 furnish undeniable proofs that 

poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even without the 

contradistinguishing objects of a poem. The first chapter of Isaiah (indeed 

a very large proportion of the whole book) is poetry in the most emphatic 

sense: yet it would be not less irrational than strange to assert, that pleasure, 

and not truth, was the immediate object of the prophet. In short, 

what ever specific import we attach to the word, poetry, there will be found 

involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length neither 

can be, or ought to be, all poetry. Yet if an harmonious whole is to be 

produced, the remaining parts must be preserved in keeping with the 

poetry; and this can be no otherwise effected than by such a studied selection 

and artificial arrangement, as will partake of one, though not a peculiar, 

property of poetry. And this again can be no other than the property of 

exciting a more continuous and equal attention, than the language of prose 

aims at, whether colloquial or written. 

My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the 

word, have been in part anticipated in the preceding disquisition on the 

fancy and imagination. 5 What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, 

what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the 

other. For it is a distinction resulting from the poetic genius itself, which 

sustains and modifies the images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet’s own 

mind. The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man 

into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according 

to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, 

that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and 

magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of 

imagination. This power, first put in action by the will and understanding, 

and retained under their irremissive, 6 though gentle and unnoticed, controul 

(laxis effertur habenis) 7 reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation 

of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, 

with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the 

representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar 

objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; 

judgement ever awake and steady self- possession, with enthusiasm and feeling 

profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural 

and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; 

3. The free spirit must be hurried onward (Latin); 

from Satyricon 118, a novel by the Roman writer 

Petronius Arbiter (1st c. c.e.). Liber means “free.” 

4. Thomas Burnet (1635– 1735), an En glish clergyman 

who wrote Telluris Theoria Sacra (1681, 

The Sacred Theory of the Earth). Jeremy Taylor 

(1613– 1667), Anglican religious writer whose sermons 

Coleridge esteemed. On the Greek phi los o- 

pher plato (ca. 427– ca. 347 b.c.e.), see above. 

5. In chapter 4. 

6. Unremitting. 

7. It is exalted with loose reins (Latin).

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY / 591 

and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. “Doubtless,” 

as Sir John Davies 8 observes of the soul (and his words may with 

slight alteration be applied, and even more appropriately to the poetic 

imagination.) 

Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns 

Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, 

As fire converts to fire the things it burns, 

As we our food into our nature change. 

From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, 

And draws a kind of quintessence from things; 

Which to her proper nature she transforms 

To bear them light, on her celestial wings. 

Thus does she, when from individual states 

She doth abstract the universal kinds; 

Which then re- clothed in divers names and fates 

Steal access through our senses to our minds. 

Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, 

motion its life, and imagination the soul that is every where, and in each; 

and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole. 

1817 

8. En glish poet (1569– 1626). Coleridge slightly misquotes his poem Nosce Teipsum (1599; the title 

means “know thyself”), which explores the theme of immortality and the nature of the soul. 

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

1792–1822 

Like the American poet Walt Whitman, Percy Bysshe Shelley has been revered by 

many readers for his haunting lyrics and, even more, for the radical views he 

expresses in both his poetry and prose. But more than any other nineteenthcentury 

poet, he came in for relentless and mean- spirited abuse at the hands of major modernist 

poets and critics, including t. s. eliot, F. R. Leavis, john crowe ransom, 

and Allen Tate. For them, Shelley represented everything that modern poetry was 

seeking to move beyond, and they pummeled him time and again for (as they saw it) 

the intersecting weaknesses of his poetry and his character: dreaminess, arrogance, 

self- absorption, irresponsibility. They judged his personal conduct offensive and his 

verse marred by muddled imagery and confused symbolism. Writing in 1950, the 

critic Leslie Fiedler reflected: “The only way to find out if a poet is immortal is to 

kill him; Milton and Wordsworth slain have risen; Cowley and Shelley are rotting 

in their tombs.” Shelley seemed no more likely to recover his prestige than did the 

third- tier metaphysical poet with whom he was paired. 

This downgrading of Shelley was already under way in the nineteenth century. In 

Essays in Criticism (1865, 1888), matthew arnold first declared that “the right 

sphere for Shelley’s genius was the sphere of music, not of poetry,” and later called 

him a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in

592 / PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

vain.” And in Literary Studies (1884), the editor and essayist Walter Bagehot concluded: 

“He floats away into an imaginary Elysium or an expected Utopia; beautiful 

and excellent, of course, but having nothing in common with the absolute laws of 

the present world.” This tone seemed to be justified by Shelley himself, who, for 

example, observed to his friend Edward Trelawny: “When my brain gets heated 

with thought it soon boils and throws off images and words faster than I can skim 

them off.” 

But Shelley’s words to Trelawny bear witness to his creative energy and exhilaration, 

to his yearning to break free from constraint. Shelley’s commitment to personal 

and social freedom perhaps provides the best context for understanding and 

valuing his writing. His poetry and prose attacked social and po liti cal tyranny, 

assailing the ways in which law and religion functioned to support an oppressive 

state. In phrasing that anticipated ralph waldo emerson’s in Nature (1836), “The 

American Scholar” (1837), and other seminal American Transcendentalist texts, 

Shelley declared: “Let us believe in a kind of optimism in which we are our own 

gods” (letter, 1819). As he once said, he sought to call attention to the “else unfelt 

oppressions of this earth” (“Julian and Maddalo,” line 450), that is, to make readers 

feel the nature and depth of human oppression and lift them to a higher conception 

of possibility. In doing this, he was performing the special office of the poet. 

Shelley was born the son of a wealthy squire (and member of Parliament) near 

Horsham in Sussex, En gland. He was educated first at Syon House Academy, in 

Brentford, a western suburb of London, and then at Eton, the largest and most 

famous of En gland’s public (i.e., endowed boarding) schools, where he was dubbed 

“mad Shelley” for his antics and “Eton atheist” for his skeptical views on religion. 

Imaginative and rebellious, he was already writing prose and poems while in his 

teens. He entered University College, Oxford University, in 1810; there he read 

such radical authors as William Godwin, author of the Enquiry concerning Po liti cal 

Justice (1793), and Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man (1791– 92) and The 

Age of Reason (1793). 

In March 1811, because Shelley had coauthored an empiricist pamphlet, The Necessity 

of Atheism, which he then mailed to the bishops and heads of the colleges at 

Oxford, he was expelled from the university. His life became even more scandalous 

when he eloped to Edinburgh, Scotland, with sixteen- year- old Harriet Westbrook. 

This action, together with his refusal to renounce the pamphlet, caused a breach with 

his family that cost Shelley his inheritance. 

After their marriage in August 1811, the young couple spent the next three years 

in En gland and Ireland, moving often. Shelley corresponded with Godwin, wrote 

addresses and proposals on such topics as Catholic emancipation, and was kept 

under watch by the civil authorities. His first important poem, Queen Mab, which 

exhibits his radical views on both religion and conventional morality, was privately 

printed in 1831. He wrote and lectured on a host of other subjects as well, from 

freedom of the press to vegetarianism. During this time, Harriet bore two children; 

but she and Shelley grew estranged. 

When Shelley fell in love with Mary Godwin, the sixteen- year- old daughter of 

William Godwin and the En glish writer and reformer mary wollstonecraft, he 

acted according to his views on the primacy of love. Leaving his family behind, in 

1814 he traveled to France with Mary (and her fifteen- year- old half- sister, Jane 

“Claire” Clairmont). After travels in France, Switzerland, and Germany, they 

returned to London; in spring 1815 Mary gave birth to a daughter who died prematurely, 

and in 1816 she bore a son, William. In Switzerland, with the Romantic poet 

Lord Byron as their companion during the summer of 1816, Mary began her famous 

novel Frankenstein while Percy worked on such major philosophical poems as 

“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc.” They married, despite their 

objections to the institution of marriage, after Harriet drowned herself in 1816. 

Harriet’s parents quickly secured a decree declaring Shelley unfit to have custody

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY / 593 

of his and Harriet’s children, who were placed in foster care at his expense. In 

spring 1818 he left En gland for Italy, where he spent the rest of his life with Mary, 

their three children (two of whom died, within a nine- month period in 1818– 19), 

Claire Clairmont, and her daughter (whose father was Byron). 

While in Pisa, Shelley lived amid a circle of writers and adventurers, including 

Byron and Edward Trelawny. In April 1822 he moved to the village of Lerici on the 

Gulf of Spezia, and there he wrote a number of his best lyrics and vivid letters. 

Caught in a sudden storm while in a boat with his friend Edward Williams, he 

drowned in July 1822. Shelley left unfinished a po liti cal drama and “The Triumph 

of Life,” a dream allegory that has figured significantly in contemporary criticism 

and theory (e.g., see the essays by harold bloom, paul de man, jacques derrida, 

and others in Deconstruction and Criticism, 1997). 

Shelley matters in literary history above all for his poetry, but his prose works are 

often powerful and remain undervalued. The best (and best- known) of them is A 

Defence of Poetry, which he wrote in response to his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s 

“Four Ages of Poetry” (1820). Peacock presents a satiric, witty survey of the historical 

rise and decline of poetry that draws a parallel between the classical and modern 

periods. He traces En glish poetry’s movement from the iron age of song, to the golden 

age of Shakespeare, then to the silver age of alexander pope, and, finally, to the 

brass age of his Romantic contemporaries, whose work consists, he says, of “rant,” 

“whining,” and “cant.” In reply, Shelley honors the activity of the poet and emphasizes 

that poetry has increased, rather than diminished, in importance in the modern era. 

Many of the ideas he presents are familiar, deriving from plato and, especially, from 

sir philip sidney’s Defence of Poesy (1595), which Shelley read as he prepared and 

planned his own work. Shelley gives them a fervent Romantic cast, particularly in the 

glowing images and passionate rhythms of his Defence’s final passages. 

Peacock and Shelley had met in 1812, and they visited and corresponded with one 

another often. After Peacock’s “Four Ages” appeared, Shelley wrote in a letter, January 

1821, that he planned “an answer” to it: “It is very clever but, I think, very false.” 

On March 21, he sent Peacock the first part of an essay meant to be its “antidote.” In 

the original plan for the Defence, Shelley included a number of references to Peacock, 

but most of these were omitted when the text was prepared for publication after 

his death. Originally, too, the Defence was to have three parts: a general defense of 

poetry and its role in society, a survey of the development of En glish poetry, and a 

discussion of the literature of the day. Only the first part was completed. 

Despite being an incomplete piece that draws on and adapts his own earlier 

writings— the prefaces to The Revolt of Islam and Prometheus Unbound, “Discourse 

on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks” (which prefaced his translation of Plato’s 

Symposium), “Essay on Christianity,” the first two chapters of A Philosophical View 

of Reform, and “Essay on the Devil”— the Defence is held together by the force of 

Shelley’s personality and his literary and po liti cal convictions. Poetry, says Shelley, 

combines wisdom with delight; it is a source of plea sure; and it inculcates virtue, as 

readers seek to imitate the noble traits of character that Homer portrays in his 

heroes. Poetry kindles the sympathetic imagination, enabling us to locate ourselves 

“in the place of another”; it thereby unites individuals by breaking down the differences 

among them. It is so closely linked to the society from which it rises that its 

health serves as a barometer of society’s health. It counterbalances the ascendant 

sciences of calculation and accumulation, which exacerbate in e qual ity and selfishness. 

It is a universal spiritual force of evanescent inspiration, superseding logic and 

will and possessing prophetic power. At a memorable moment Shelley even envisions 

literature as one great poem that all poets have built up since time began. 

There are tensions, even contradictions, in Shelley’s text that his powerful prose 

cannot reconcile or explain. Thus, on the one hand, he presents much historical 

commentary on ancient Greek and Roman literary genres and on the literature of 

later periods. But, on the other hand, his highest flights of rhetoric pay tribute to


the power of poetry to transcend history. There is a gap between the kind of historical 

particularity that Shelley provides in his running literary and cultural comments 

and the general function that he assigns to poetry as “something divine” that 

“enlarges the circumference of the imagination.” 

In addition, Shelley’s claims for the special qualities of the poet are problematic 

in his own terms. In exalting poets as the “best and happiest minds,” the “unacknowledged 

legislators of the World,” he paradoxically reinvokes the social distinctions, 

the ranking of persons, the law- giving from on high, that his works challenge. 

There may be a darker dimension to the vital, vigorous rhetoric that Shelley mobilizes 

in defense of literature. As raymond williams remarks in Culture and Society 

(1958), Shelley means the word unacknowledged to imply poets’ importance— their 

great (albeit almost invisible) sociopo liti cal work. But the term also carries “the felt 

helplessness of a generation” as “a culture now dominated by science and industry 

[fails] to bestow upon poets the ‘ac know ledg ment’ that they merit.” Williams also 

points out the mixed implications of Shelley’s language about poets: their special 

high status both distinguishes and marginalizes them, separating them from the 

community to which Shelley insists they contribute so much. 

The poet, Shelley maintains, is a power working for social and moral 

transformation— the chief influence in civilizing the community. Yet the poet, he 

also says, is “a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude 

with sweet sounds.” Shelley’s forthright testimonies on behalf of poetry and the 

tensions and contradictions that his rhetoric attempts to surmount continue to fascinate 

the Defence’s readers. 

bibliography 

For Shelley’s prose, primary sources include The Prose Works, edited by E. B. Murray 

(1 vol. to date, 1993–), and The Letters, edited by Frederick L. Jones (2 vols., 

1964). For a single- volume collection that includes critical essays, see Shelley’s 

Poetry and Prose, edited by Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (1977). Other 

resources include Shelley and His Circle, 1773– 1822, edited by Kenneth Neill Cameron 

(10 vols., 1961– 2002), which presents the manuscripts by Shelley, his family, 

friends, and literary acquaintances held in the New York Public Library; it contains 

important critical and contextual commentary. The standard biographical work has 

long been Newman Ivey White, Shelley (2 vols., 1940), but a recent contender to 

replace it is James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography (2008). Kenneth Neill 

Cameron, in The Young Shelley (1950) and Shelley: The Golden Years (1974), is 

informative on the poet’s radical po liti cal views. Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit 

(1974), gives a good sense of the person behind the poetry and prose. On Shelley’s 

relationship to another great revolutionary poet, see Ian Gilmour, The Making of 

the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Time (2002). 

On Shelley’s literary theory, consult Fanny Delisle, A Study of Shelley’s “A Defence 

of Poetry”: A Textual and Critical Evaluation (2 vols., 1974). Among the many studies 

of Shelley’s poetic theory and practice are Harold Bloom, Shelley’s Mythmaking 

(1959); Earl Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (1971); William Keach, Shelley’s 

Style (1984), which deals well with Shelley’s complex and contradictory attitudes 

toward language; and Jerrold E. Hogle, Shelley’s Pro cess: Radical Transference and 

the Development of His Major Works (1988). On the relationships between literature 

and politics in Shelley’s life and works, see Timothy Clark, Embodying Revolution: 

The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (1989); Michael O’Neill, The Human Mind’s Imaginings: 

Conflict and Achievement in Shelley’s Poetry (1989); David Duff, Romance 

and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (1994); and Timothy Morton, 

Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (1994). Stuart 

Peterfreund, Shelley among Others: The Play of the Intertext and the Idea of Language 

(2002), explicates Shelley’s philosophy of language; and Cian Duffy, Shelley

A Defence of Poetry / 595 

and the Revolutionary Sublime (2005), examines Shelley’s engagement with British 

and French discourse on the sublime in an era of radical po liti cal change. 

Helpful on trends in Shelley scholarship are Shelley: The Critical Heritage, edited 

by James E. Barcus (1975); Deconstruction and Criticism, by Harold Bloom et al. 

(1979), which offers a series of exemplary deconstructive readings of “The Triumph 

of Life”; Essays on Shelley, edited by Miriam Allott (1982); The New Shelley: Later 

Twentieth- Century Views, edited by G. Kim Blank (1991); and Shelley: Poet and Legislator 

of the World, edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (1996). For bibliography, 

look to Clement Dunbar, Bibliography of Shelley Studies: 1823– 1950 (1976), 

and Shelley Studies, 1950– 1984: An Annotated Bibliography (1986). The Cambridge 

Companion to Shelley, edited by Timothy Morton (2006), provides a good bibliography 

on philosophy and politics, poems and poetics, and other important topics in 

Shelley’s life and work. 

From A Defence of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay 

Entitled “The Four Ages of Poetry” 1 

* * * 

Poetry is ever accompanied with plea sure: all spirits on which it falls, open 

themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight. In the 

infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors are fully 

aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine and unapprehended 

manner, beyond and above consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations 

to contemplate and mea sure the mighty cause and effect in all the 

strength and splendour of their union. 2 Even in modern times, no living 

poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgement 

upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his 

peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many 

generations. A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer 

its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by 

the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, 

yet know not whence or why. The poems of Homer and his contemporaries 

were the delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that 

social system which is the column upon which all succeeding civilization 

has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human 

character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened 

to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector and Ulysses: 3 the truth 

and beauty of friendship, patriotism and persevering devotion to an object, 

were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations: the sentiments of 

the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such 

great and lovely impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and 

from imitation they identified themselves with the objects of their admiration. 

Nor let it be objected, that these characters are remote from moral 

1. “The Four Ages of Poetry” (1820), by Thomas 

Love Peacock (1785– 1866), En glish writer and 

satirist. 

2. This emphasis on the plea sure given by poetry 

echoes sir philip sidney’s Defence of Poesy (1595). 

See also william wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical 

Ballads (1800): “Nor let this necessity of producing 

immediate plea sure be considered as a degradation 

of the Poet’s art. It is far otherwise.” 

3. Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey. Achilles and 

Hector are the greatest warriors (Greek and Trojan, 

respectively) of the Iliad. These poems are the 

earliest Greek epics (ca. 8th c. b.c.e.).


perfection, and that they can by no means be considered as edifying patterns 

for general imitation. Every epoch under names more or less specious 

has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is the naked Idol of the worship of a 

semi- barbarous age; and Self- deceit is the veiled Image of unknown evil 

before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices 

of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations must 

be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of 

their beauty. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear them 

around his soul, as he may the antient armour or the modern uniform 

around his body; whilst it is easy to conceive a dress more graceful than 

either. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed by its 

accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to 

the very disguise, and indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which 

it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions will express themselves 

through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest 

class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked 

truth and splendour; and it is doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, 

etc., be not necessary to temper this planetary music 4 for mortal ears. 

The whole objection however of the immorality of poetry rests upon a 

misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral 

improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry 

has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and 

domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and 

despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But Poetry 

acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself 

by rendering it the receptable of a thousand unapprehended combinations 

of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and 

makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar: it reproduces all that 

it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian 5 light stand 

thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as 

memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all 

thoughts and actions with which it coexists. The great secret of morals is 

Love: or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves 

with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. 6 

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he 

must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and 

pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of 

moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting 

upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination 

by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power 

of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and 

which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh 

food. Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature 

of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A Poet therefore 

would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which 

4. The music of the spheres: the beautiful sound 

said to be made by the movements of the planets. 

5. Paradisiacal. According to classical mythology, 

after death the blessed dwell in the Elysian Fields. 

6. Editors have noted the influence here of plato’s 

Symposium (ca. 384 b.c.e.), which Shelley 

himself translated. He rendered one of its key 

sentences “Love, therefore, and every thing else 

that desires anything, desires that which is absent 

and beyond his reach, that which it has not, that 

which is not itself, that which it wants.”


are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which 

participate in neither. By this assumption of the inferior office of interpreting 

the effect, in which perhaps after all he might acquit himself but imperfectly, 

he would resign the glory in a participation in the cause. There was 

little danger that Homer, or any of the eternal poets, should have so far 

misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest 

dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, 

as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, 7 have frequently affected a moral aim, 

and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree 

in which they compel us to advert to this purpose. 

Homer and the cyclic poets 8 were followed at a certain interval by the 

dramatic and lyrical Poets of Athens, who flourished contemporaneously 

with all that is most perfect in the kindred expressions of the poetical faculty; 

architecture, painting, music, the dance, sculpture, philosophy, and 

we may add the forms of civil life. For although the scheme of Athenian 

society was deformed by many imperfections 9 which the poetry existing in 

Chivalry and Christianity have erased from the habits and institutions of 

modern Eu rope; yet never at any other period has so much energy, beauty, 

and virtue, been developed: never was blind strength and stubborn form so 

disciplined and rendered subject to the will of man, or that will less repugnant 

to the dictates of the beautiful and the true, as during the century 

which preceded the death of Socrates. 1 Of no other epoch in the history of 

our species have we rec ords and fragments stamped so visibly with the 

image of the divinity in man. But it is Poetry alone, in form, in action, or in 

language, which has rendered this epoch memorable above all others, and 

the store house of examples to everlasting time. For written poetry existed at 

the epoch simultaneously with the other arts, and it is an idle enquiry to 

demand which gave and which received the light, which all as from a common 

focus have scattered over the darkest periods of succeeding time. We 

know no more of cause and effect than a constant conjunction of events: 

Poetry is ever found to coexist with what ever other arts contribute to the 

happiness and perfection of man. I appeal to what has already been established 

to distinguish between the cause and the effect. 

It was at the period here adverted to, that the Drama had its birth; and 

however a succeeding writer may have equalled or surpassed those few great 

specimens of the Athenian drama which have been preserved to us, it is 

indisputable that the art itself never was understood or practised according 

to the true philosophy of it, as at Athens. For the Athenians employed language, 

action, music, painting, the dance, and religious institutions, to produce 

a common effect in the repre sen ta tion of the highest idealisms of 

passion and of power; each division in the art was made perfect in its kind by 

artists of the most consummate skill, and was disciplined into a beautiful 

proportion and unity one towards another. On the modern stage a few only 

of the elements capable of expressing the image of the poet’s conception are 

employed at once. We have tragedy without music and dancing; and music 

7. Edmund Spenser (1552– 1599), En glish poet. 

Euripides (ca. 485– ca. 406 b.c.e.), Greek tragedian. 

Lucan (39– 65 c.e.), Roman poet. Torquato 

Tasso (1544– 1595), Italian poet. 

8. Poets after Homer who filled out the story of 

the Trojan War. 

9. That is, slavery and the second- class status of 

women (Shelley explicitly names these “imperfections” 

below). 

1. That is, the 5th century b.c.e., the golden age 

of Athenian politics and art (the phi los o pher 

Socrates was put to death in 399 b.c.e.).


and dancing without the highest impersonations of which they are the fit 

accompaniment, and both without religion and solemnity. Religious institution 

has indeed been usually banished from the stage. Our system of divesting 

the actor’s face of a mask, on which the many expressions appropriated 

to his dramatic character might be moulded into one permanent and 

unchanging expression, is favourable only to a partial and inharmonious 

effect; it is fit for nothing but a monologue, where all the attention may be 

directed to some great master of ideal mimicry. The modern practice of 

blending comedy with tragedy, though liable to great abuse in point of practice, 

is undoubtedly an extension of the dramatic circle; but the comedy 

should be as in King Lear, universal, ideal, and sublime. It is perhaps the 

intervention of this principle which determines the balance in favour of 

King Lear against the Œdipus Tyrannus or the Agamemnon, or, if you will, 

the trilogies with which they are connected; 2 unless the intense power of the 

choral poetry, especially that of the latter, should be considered as restoring 

the equilibrium. King Lear, if it can sustain this comparison, may be judged 

to be the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world; in 

spite of the narrow conditions to which the poet was subjected by the ignorance 

of the philosophy of the Drama which has prevailed in modern Eu rope. 

Calderon 3 in his religious Autos has attempted to fulfill some of the high 

conditions of dramatic repre sen ta tion neglected by Shakespeare; such as the 

establishing a relation between the drama and religion, and the accommodating 

them to music and dancing; but he omits the observation of conditions 

still more important, and more is lost than gained by a substitution of the 

rigidly- defined and ever- repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the 

living impersonations of the truth of human passion. 

But we digress.— The Author of the Four Ages of Poetry has prudently 

omitted to dispute on the effect of the Drama upon life and manners. For, if 

I know the knight by the device of his shield, I have only to inscribe Philoctetes 

4 or Agamemnon or Othello upon mine to put to flight the giant sophisms 

which have enchanted him, as the mirror of intolerable light, though 

on the arm of one of the weakest of the Paladins, 5 could blind and scatter 

whole armies of necromancers and pagans. The connexion of scenic exhibitions 

with the improvement or corruption of the manners of men, has been 

universally recognized: in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in 

its most perfect and universal form has been found to be connected with 

good and evil in conduct and habit. The corruption which has been imputed 

to the drama as an effect, begins, when the poetry employed in its constitution, 

ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the periods of the 

growth of the one and the decline of the other have not corresponded with 

an exactness equal to any other example of moral cause and effect. 

The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its 

perfection, coexisted with the moral and intellectual greatness of the age. 

2. Sophocles’ “trilogy” (the plays were not performed 

together) is Oedipus Rex (ca. 430 b.c.e.), 

Oedipus Coloneus (ca. 401), and Antigone (ca. 

441); Aeschylus’s Oresteian trilogy (458) comprises 

Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The 

Eumenides. King Lear was first performed ca. 

1605. 

3. Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600– 1681), Spanish 

dramatist and poet; after he became a priest in 

1651, he wrote only autos sacramentales, one- act 

religious dramas (usually allegorical). 

4. Greek hero in the Trojan War and the subject of 

many tragedies; that by Sophocles (ca. 409 b.c.e.) 

survives. 

5. The twelve peers of the court of Charlemagne 

(742– 814), king of the Franks and found er of the 

first western Eu ro pe an empire after the fall of 

Rome.


The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which the spectator 

beholds himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that 

ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of 

all that he loves, admires, and would become. The imagination is enlarged 

by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their 

conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections 

are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror and sorrow; 6 and an 

exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into 

the tumult of familiar life; even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all 

its contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable 

agencies of nature; error is thus divested of its wilfulness; men can 

no longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. In a drama of the highest 

order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather selfknowledge 

and self- respect. Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, 

unless reflected upon that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues 

to express poetry, is as a prismatic and many- sided mirror, which 

collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces 

them from the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with 

majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with 

the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall. 

But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with 

that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the form of the great masterpieces 

of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of the 

kindred arts; and often the very form misunderstood: or a weak attempt to 

teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral truths; and 

which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or 

weakness with which the author in common with his auditors are infected. 

Hence what has been called the classical and domestic drama. Addison’s 

“Cato” 7 is a specimen of the one; and would it were not superfluous to cite 

examples of the other! To such purposes Poetry cannot be made subservient. 

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard 

that would contain it. And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of 

this nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment 

and passion: which, divested of imagination, are other names for caprice 

and appetite. The period in our own history of the grossest degradation of 

the drama is the reign of Charles II 8 when all forms in which poetry had 

been accustomed to be expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly 

power over liberty and virtue. Milton 9 stood alone illuminating an age 

unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating principle pervades all the 

forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry ceases to be expressed upon them. 

Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from 

self- complacency and triumph instead of plea sure; malignity, sarcasm and 

contempt, succeed to sympathetic merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile. 

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, 

6. One interpretation of aristotle’s idea of 

“catharsis” in tragedy, expressed in Poetics 6, 

1449b (see above). 

7. The pop u lar neoclassical tragedy (1713) about 

the Roman statesman Cato by the En glish poet 

and essayist joseph addison (1672– 1719). 

8. King of En gland (1630– 1685; reigned 1660–85) 

during the Restoration, a period with a reputation 

for dissoluteness and frivolity. 

9. The poet John Milton (1608– 1674) was a supporter 

of the Puritan Revolution and a defender 

of the execution of Charles I (king of En gland 

from 1625 to 1649).


becomes, from the very veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: 

it is a monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings forth new 

food, which it devours in secret. 

The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of 

expression of poetry are susceptible of being combined than any other, the 

connexion of poetry and social good is more observable in the drama than 

in what ever other form: and it is indisputable that the highest perfection of 

human society has ever corresponded with the highest dramatic excellence; 

and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it 

has once flourished, is a mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction 

of the energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as Machiavelli 

1 says of po liti cal institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, 

if men should arise capable of bringing back the drama to its principles. 

And this is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all language, 

institution and form, require not only to be produced but to be sustained: 

the office and character of a poet participates in the divine nature 

as regards providence, no less than as regards creation. 

Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance first of the Macedonian, 

2 and then of the Roman arms were so many symbols of the extinction 

or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. The bucolic writers, 3 

who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Egypt, were the 

latest representatives of its most glorious reign. Their poetry is intensely 

melodious: like the odour of the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit 

with excess of sweetness; whilst the poetry of the preceding age was as a 

meadow- gale of June which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the 

field, and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own which endows 

the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic and 

erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, 

music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners and institutions which 

distinguished the epoch to which we now refer. Nor is it the poetical faculty 

itself, or any misapplication of it, to which this want of harmony is to be 

imputed. An equal sensibility to the influence of the senses and the affections 

is to be found in the writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former especially 

has clothed sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. 

Their superiority over these succeeding writers consists in the presence of 

those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not in the 

absence of those which are connected with the external; their incomparable 

perfection consists in an harmony of the union of all. It is not what the erotic 

writers have, but what they have not, in which their imperfection consists. It 

is not inasmuch as they were Poets, but inasmuch as they were not Poets, 

that they can be considered with any plausibility as connected with the corruption 

of their age. Had that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them 

the sensibility to plea sure, passion and natural scenery, which is imputed to 

them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved. 

1. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469– 1527), Italian 

po liti cal phi los o pher; he discusses po liti cal institutions 

in The Prince (1513), published in 1532, 

and The Discourses (ca. 1518). 

2. Alexander the Great (356– 323 b.c.e.), king of 

Macedonia, whose conquests extended to Egypt 

and India. 

3. Greek pastoral poets, who wrote of shepherds 

and country folk; the first was Theocritus (ca. 

300– ca. 260 b.c.e.) followed by Moschus (active 

ca. 150 b.c.e.) and Bion (active ca. 100 b.c.e.).


For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to plea sure; and 

therefore it is corruption. It begins at the imagination and the intellect as at 

the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralyzing venom, through the 

affections into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which 

sense hardly survives. At the approach of such a period, Poetry ever addresses 

itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is 

heard, like the footsteps of Astræa, 4 departing from the world. Poetry ever 

communicates all the plea sure which men are capable of receiving: it is ever 

still the light of life; the source of what ever of beautiful, or generous, or true 

can have place in an evil time. It will readily be confessed that those among 

the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria who were delighted with 

the poems of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel and sensual than the remnant 

of their tribe. But corruption must have utterly destroyed the fabric of human 

society before Poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that chain have 

never been entirely disjoined, which descending through the minds of many 

men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a magnet the invisible 

effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates and sustains the 

life of all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at once of its 

own and of social renovation. And let us not circumscribe the effects of the 

bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of those to whom 

it was addressed. They may have perceived the beauty of those immortal 

compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are more 

finely or ga nized, or born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to 

that great poem, which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great 

mind, have built up since the beginning of the world. 

The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in antient 

Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life never seem to have been 

perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans appear to have 

considered the Greeks as the selectest trea suries of the selectest forms of 

manners and of nature, and to have abstained from creating in mea sured 

language, sculpture, music or architecture, anything which might bear a 

par tic u lar relation to their own condition, whilst it should bear a general one 

to the universal constitution of the world. But we judge from partial evidence; 

and we judge perhaps partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, 5 

all great poets, have been lost. Lucretius is in the highest, and Virgil 6 in a 

very high sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of the expressions of the latter 

is as a mist of light which conceals from us the intense and exceeding 

truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy 7 is instinct with poetry. Yet Horace, 

Catullus, Ovid, 8 and generally the other great writers of the Virgilian age, 

4. The goddess of justice. She dwelled on earth 

during the Golden Age but was driven into heaven 

during the Iron Age by humanity’s evil ways. See 

Ovid, Metamorphoses (ca. 10 c.e.), 1.149– 50; 

Juvenal, Satire 6.19– 20 (ca. 116 c.e.). 

5. All pre- Augustan writers, whose work survives 

only in fragments: Ennius (239– 169 b.c.e.), author 

of tragedies, comedies, prose, and an epic on 

Roman history, Annales; Varro (116– 27 b.c.e.), 

the greatest scholar among the Romans, who 

wrote or edited hundreds of books (one on the 

Latin language survives in part, together with a 

volume of a work on farm management); Pacuvius 

(220– ca. 130 b.c.e.), author of tragedies and 

satires; and Accius (170– ca. 90 b.c.e.), author of 

tragedies and a 9- book poem on the history of 

literature, Didascalica. 

6. Author (70– 19 b.c.e.) of the Aeneid, generally 

considered the greatest Latin epic. Lucretius (ca. 

94– 55 b.c.e.), phi los o pher and author of a didactic 

Epicurean poem, On the Nature of Things. 

7. Roman historian (59 b.c.e.– 17 c.e.). 

8. Author (43 b.c.e.– 17 c.e.) of love poetry, fictional 

love letters, and the mock- heroic Metamorphoses. 

horace (65– 8 b.c.e.), author of odes, 

satires, epistles, and the Ars Poetica (see above). 

Catullus (ca. 84– ca. 54 b.c.e.), author of lyric 

love poetry and elegy.


saw man and nature in the mirror of Greece. The institutions also and the 

religion of Rome were less poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is 

less vivid than the substance. Hence poetry in Rome, seemed to follow 

rather than accompany the perfection of po liti cal and domestic society. The 

true Poetry of Rome lived in its institutions; for what ever of beautiful, true 

and majestic they contained could have sprung only from the faculty which 

creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus, the death of 

Regulus; 9 the expectation of the Senators, in their godlike state, of the victorious 

Gauls; the refusal of the Republic to make peace with Hannibal after 

the battle of Cannae, 1 were not the consequences of a refined calculation 

of the probable personal advantage to result from such a rhythm and order 

in the shews of life, to those who were at once the poets and the actors of the 

immortal dramas. The imagination beholding the beauty of this order, created 

it out of itself according to its own idea: the consequence was empire, 

and the reward ever- living fame. These things are not the less poetry, quia 

carent vate sacro. 2 They are the episodes of the cyclic poem written by Time 

upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the 

theatre of everlasting generations with their harmony. 

At length the antient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the 

circle of its revolution. And the world would have fallen into utter anarchy 

and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors of the 

Christian and Chivalric systems of manners and religion, who created forms 

of opinion and action never before conceived; which, copied into the 

imaginations of men, became as generals to the bewildered armies of their 

thoughts. It is foreign to the present purpose to touch upon the evil produced 

by these systems: except that we protest, on the ground of the principles 

already established, that no portion of it can be imputed to the poetry 

they contain. 

It is probable that the astonishing poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon 

and Isaiah 3 had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his 

disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers of 

this extraordinary person, are all instinct with the most vivid poetry. But 

his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a certain period after 

the prevalence of a system of opinions founded upon those promulgated by 

him, the three forms into which Plato had distributed the faculties of 

mind 4 underwent a sort of apotheosis, and became the object of the worship 

of the civilized world. Here it is to be confessed that “Light seems to 

thicken,” and 

9. Marcus Atilius Regulus (d. ca. 249 b.c.e.): 

Roman general who, though himself held by the 

Carthaginians, persuaded the Roman Senate not 

to ransom him and the other soldiers; he returned 

to Carthage and died in captivity (perhaps tortured 

to death; see Horace, Odes 3.5). Marcus 

Furius Camillus (d. ca. 365 b.c.e.), the second 

found er of Rome, who managed the city’s military 

and po liti cal recovery after the Gallic invasion 

of 387 / 6 b.c.e. 

1. Village in Apulia where in 216 b.c.e. the 

Romans suffered a major defeat by Hannibal, the 

great Carthaginian general (247– 183 / 2 b.c.e.); 

the Romans ultimately won the war, however. 

2. Because they lack a sacred poet (Latin); from 

Horace, Odes 4.9.28. 

3. Job and Isaiah were once regarded as the 

authors of the books of the Bible given their 

names; Moses is traditionally credited with writing 

the entire Torah (the first five books of the 

Bible); David was thought to have composed most 

of the Psalms; Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and the 

Song of Solomon were ascribed to Solomon. 

4. Plato divided the human soul into three parts: 

the desiring, the rational, and the spirited (see 

Republic 4.439d– 444a).


The crow makes wing to the rooky wood, 

Good things of day begin to droop and drowze, 

And night’s black agents to their preys do rouze. 5 

But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of this 

fierce chaos! how the World, as from a resurrection, balancing itself on the 

golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its yet unwearied 

flight into the Heaven of time. Listen to the music, unheard by outward ears, 

which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind, nourishing its everlasting course 

with strength and swiftness. 

The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and institutions 

of the Celtic conquerors of the Roman empire, 6 outlived the darkness 

and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory, and 

blended themselves into a new fabric of manners and opinion. It is an error 

to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian doctrines or the 

predominance of the Celtic nations. What ever of evil their agencies may 

have contained sprung from the extinction of the poetical principle, connected 

with the progress of despotism and superstition. Men, from causes 

too intricate to be here discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their 

own will had become feeble, and yet they were its slaves, and thence the 

slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty and fraud, characterised 

a race amongst whom no one was to be found capable of creating in 

form, language, or institution. The moral anomalies of such a state of society 

are not justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected 

with them, and those events are most entitled to our approbation which could 

dissolve it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot distinguish 

words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have been incorporated 

into our pop u lar religion. 

It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry of the 

Christian and Chivalric systems began to manifest themselves. The principle 

of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in his Republic, as 

the theoretical rule of the mode in which the materials of plea sure and of 

power produced by the common skill and labour of human beings ought to 

be distributed among them. The limitations of this rule were asserted by 

him to be determined only by the sensibility of each, or the utility to result 

to all. Plato, following the doctrines of Timæus and Pythagoras, 7 taught 

also a moral and intellectual system of doctrine comprehending at once the 

past, the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged the 

sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, 

in its abstract purity, became the exoteric expression of the esoteric 

doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the 

Celtic nations with the exhausted population of the South, impressed upon 

it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and institutions. The 

result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes included in it; for 

it may be assumed as a maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any 

other without incorporating into itself a portion of that which it supersedes. 

5. Macbeth (ca. 1606), 3.2.51– 54, slightly misquoted. 

6. The Germanic tribes of northern Eu rope. 

7. Greek phi los o pher and mathematician (ca. 6th 

b.c.e.). Timaeus: a Pythagorean, perhaps a fictional 

character, who is the key speaker in Plato’s 

Timaeus.


The abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of 

women from a great part of the degrading restraints of antiquity were among 

the consequences of these events. 

The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest po liti cal hope 

that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. The freedom of women 

produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a religion, the idols of 

whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and the 

Muses 8 had been endowed with life and motion and had walked forth 

among their worshippers; so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants 

of a diviner world. The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became 

wonderful and heavenly; and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of 

Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and 

language were the instrument of their art: “Galeotto fù il libro, e chi lo 

scrisse.” 9 The Provençal Trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch, 1 whose 

verses are as spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the 

delight which is in the grief of Love. It is impossible to feel them without 

becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous 

to explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with 

these sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous, and 

wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. Dante 

understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. His Vita 

Nuova 2 is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it 

is the idealized history of that period, and those intervals of his life which 

were dedicated to love. His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise and the gradations 

of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns 

himself to have ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most 

glorious imagination of modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly 

reversed the judgement of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the 

“Divine Drama,” in the mea sure of the admiration which they accord to the 

Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. 3 The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting 

love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the antients, has 

been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated world; 

and the music has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still 

drown the dissonance of arms and superstition. At successive intervals, 

Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, 4 and the great 

writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting as it 

were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality 

and force. The true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which 

human kind is distributed has become less misunderstood; and if the error 

which confounded diversity with in e qual ity of the powers of the two sexes 

has become partially recognized in the opinions and institutions of modern 

Eu rope, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which Chivalry was the 

law, and poets the prophets. 

8. In Greek mythology, 9 daughters of Memory 

who preside over the arts and all intellectual pursuits. 

Apollo: Greek and Roman god of poetry. 

9. Gallehaut was the book and he who wrote it 

(Italian). From dante alighieri, Inferno (1321), 

5.137. 

1. Francesco Petrarca (1304– 1374), Italian poet 

and scholar. “Provençal”: the language of southern 

France. The troubadours of the south, 12th- 

and 13th- century poets, were the first to celebrate 

chivalric and courtly love. 

2. New Life (ca. 1293), poetry and prose that tell 

of Dante’s love for Beatrice. 

3. The 3 books of Dante’s Divine Comedy. 


French phi los o pher and po liti cal theorist. 

Ludovico Ariosto (1474– 1533), Italian epic poet.


The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the 

stream of time, which unites the modern and antient world. The distorted 

notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealized, 

are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through 

eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a difficult question to determine how 

far they were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in their 

minds between their own creeds and that of the people. Dante at least 

appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by placing Riphæus, whom Virgil 

calls justissimus unus, in Paradise, 5 and observing a most heretical caprice 

in his distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton’s poem contains 

within itself a philosophical refutation of that system of which, by a strange 

and natural antithesis, it has been a chief pop u lar support. Nothing can 

exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed 

in Paradise Lost. 6 It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been 

intended for the pop u lar personification of evil. Implacable hate, patient 

cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish 

on an enemy, these things are evil; and although venial in a slave are not to 

be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat 

in one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his conquest in the victor. 

Milton’s Dev il as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres 

in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of 

adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph 

inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken 

notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with 

the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has 

so far violated the pop u lar creed (if this shall be judged to be a violation) as 

to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Dev il. And 

this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the 

supremacy of Milton’s genius. He mingled as it were the elements of human 

nature, as colours upon a single pallet, and arranged them into the composition 

of his great picture according to the laws of epic truth; that is, according 

to the laws of that principle by which a series of actions of the external 

universe and of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy 

of succeeding generations of mankind. The Divina Commedia and 

Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic form; 

and when change and time shall have added one more superstition to the 

mass of those which have arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators 

will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Eu rope, 

only not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity 

of genius. 

Homer was the first, and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the second 

poet the series of whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to 

the knowledge, and sentiment, and religion, and po liti cal conditions of the 

age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it, developing itself in 

correspondence with their development. For Lucretius had limed the wings 

5. Dante makes the Trojan warrior Riphaeus the 

only pagan in Paradise (see Paradiso, canto 20). 

Justissimus unus: the one most just [who was 

among the Trojans]; Virgil, Aeneid 2.426– 27. 

6. Shelley echoes the Romantic poet William 

Blake: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when 

he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of 

Dev ils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and 

of the Dev ils party without knowing it,” and 

“Energy is Eternal Delight” (The Marriage of 

Heaven and Hell, 1790). Paradise Lost was published 

in 1667.


of his swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty 

which ill became his genius, had affected the fame of an imitator even 

whilst he created anew all that he copied; and none among the flock of 

mock- birds, though their notes were sweet, Apollonius Rhodius, Quintus 

Calaber Smyrnæus, Nonnus, Lucan, Statius, or Claudian, 7 have sought 

even to fulfil a single condition of epic truth. Milton was the third Epic 

Poet. For if the title of epic in its highest sense be refused to the Æneid, 

still less can it be conceded to the Orlando Furioso, the Gerusalemme Liberata, 

the Lusiad, or the Fairy Queen. 8 

Dante and Milton were both deeply penetrated with the antient religion 

of the civilized world; and its spirit exists in their poetry probably in the 

same proportion as its forms survived in the unreformed worship of modern 

Eu rope. The one preceded and the other followed the Reformation at 

almost equal intervals. Dante was the first religious reformer, and Luther 9 

surpassed him rather in the rudeness and acrimony, than in the boldness of 

his censures of papal usurpation. Dante was the first awakener of entranced 

Eu rope: he created a language in itself music and persuasion out of a chaos 

of inharmonious barbarisms. He was the congregator of those great spirits 

who presided over the resurrection of learning; the Lucifer 1 of that starry 

flock which in the thirteenth century shone forth from republican Italy, as 

from a heaven, into the darkness of the benighted world. His very words are 

instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable 

thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant 

with a lightning which has yet found no conductor. All high poetry is infinite; 

it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. Veil after 

veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never 

exposed. A great Poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters of 

wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its 

divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another 

and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source 

of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight. 

The age immediately succeeding to that of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, 

2 was characterized by a revival of painting, sculpture, music, and architecture. 

Chaucer caught the sacred inspiration, and the superstructure of 

En glish literature is based upon the materials of Italian invention. 

But let us not be betrayed from a defence into a critical history of Poetry 

and its influence on Society. Be it enough to have pointed out the effects of 

poets, in the large and true sense of the word, upon their own and all succeeding 

times and to revert to the partial instances cited as illustrations of 

an opinion the reverse of that attempted to be established in the Four Ages 

of Poetry. 

7. Classical epic poets of varying quality, the first 

three writing in Greek and the others in Latin: 

Apollonius (3d c. b.c.e.), author of the Argonautica; 

Quintus Smyrnaeus (4th c. c.e.), author of a 

sequel to Homer’s Iliad; Nonnus (5th c. c.e.), 

author of the 48- book Dionysiaca; Lucan, author 

of the Civil War; Statius (ca. 45– 96 c.e.), author 

of the epic Thebais; and Claudian (d. 404 c.e.), a 

Greek- speaking Alexandrian whose poetry, including 

an unfinished epic, The Rape of Proserpina, 

marked the end of the classical tradition in Latin 

poetry. 

8. Shelley names epics by, respectively, Ariosto 

(1516, 1532), Tasso (1581), the Portuguese Luis 

Vaz de Camões (1572), and Spenser (1590, 1596). 

9. Martin Luther (1483– 1546), German theologian 

and reformer, found er of the Reformation. 

1. Literally, “light bearer” (Latin), the morning 

star. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lucifer is the leader 

of the revolt of the angels against God, and is 

called Satan after his fall. 

2. giovanni boccaccio (1313– 1375), Italian 

writer and poet.


But poets have been challenged to resign the civic crown to reasoners and 

mechanists on another plea. It is admitted that the exercise of the imagination 

is most delightful, but it is alleged that that of reason is more useful. 

Let us examine as the grounds of this distinction, what is here meant by 

Utility. 3 Plea sure or good in a general sense, is that which the consciousness 

of a sensitive and intelligent being seeks, and in which when found it acquiesces. 

There are two kinds of plea sure, one durable, universal, and permanent; 

the other transitory and par tic u lar. Utility may either express the 

means of producing the former or the latter. In the former sense, what ever 

strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds 

spirit to sense, is useful. But the meaning in which the Author of the Four 

Ages of Poetry seems to have employed the word utility is the narrower one 

of banishing the importunity of the wants of our animal nature, the surrounding 

men with security of life, the dispersing the grosser delusions of 

superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance among 

men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage. 

Undoubtedly the promoters of utility in this limited sense, have their 

appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of poets, and copy the 

sketches of their creations into the book of common life. They make space, 

and give time. Their exertions are of the highest value so long as they confine 

their administration of the concerns of the inferior powers of our 

nature within the limits due to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic 

destroys gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the French 

writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations 

of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the po liti cal œconomist combines, 

labour, let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence 

with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do 

not tend, as they have in modern En gland, to exasperate at once the 

extremes of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, “To him 

that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that 

he hath shall be taken away.” 4 The rich have become richer, and the poor 

have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla 

and Charybdis 5 of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must 

ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty. 

It is difficult to define plea sure in its highest sense; the definition involving 

a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable defect of 

harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently 

connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being. 

Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of 

an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends 

on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the plea sure 

which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is 

inseparable from the sweetest melody. The plea sure that is in sorrow is 

3. Shelley replies here to the followers of Jeremy 

Bentham (1748– 1832), En glish social reformer 

and phi los o pher, the found er of utilitarianism; 

he claimed that all conduct and legislation should 

aim at “the greatest happiness of the greatest 

number,” and formulated a calculus of plea sure. 

Peacock argues in “The Four Ages of Poetry”: 

“[Poetry] can never make a phi los o pher nor a 

statesman nor in any class of life a useful or rational 

man. It cannot claim the slightest share in 

any one of the comforts or utilities of life.” 

4. Mark 4.25. 

5. That is, two equal dangers. In Greek mythology, 

Scylla and Charybdis are two monsters (who 

become a rock and whirl pool, respectively) that 

endanger sailors between Sicily and Italy.


sweeter than the plea sure of plea sure itself. And hence the saying, “It is 

better to go to the house of mourning, than to the house of mirth.” 6 Not 

that this highest species of plea sure is necessarily linked with pain. The 

delight of love and friendship, the extacy of the admiration of nature, the 

joy of the perception and still more of the creation of poetry is often wholly 

unalloyed. 

The production and assurance of plea sure in this highest sense is true 

utility. Those who produce and preserve this plea sure are Poets or poetical 

phi los o phers. 

The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, 7 and their 

disciples, in favour of oppressed and deluded humanity, are entitled to the 

gratitude of mankind. Yet it is easy to calculate the degree of moral and 

intellectual improvement which the world would have exhibited, had they 

never lived. A little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or 

two; and perhaps a few more men, women, and children, burnt as heretics. 

We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the 

abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. 8 But it exceeds all imagination to conceive 

what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither 

Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, 

nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo 9 had never 

been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of 

the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of 

antient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the 

religion of the antient world had been extinguished together with its belief. 

The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, 

have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences, and 

that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which 

it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and 

creative faculty itself. 

We have more moral, po liti cal and historical wisdom, than we know how 

to reduce into practise; we have more scientific and œconomical knowledge 

than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it 

multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the 

accumulation of facts and calculating pro cesses. There is no want of knowledge 

respecting what is wisest and best in morals, government, and po litical 

œconomy, or at least, what is wiser and better than what men now 

practise and endure. But we let “I dare not wait upon I would, like the poor 

cat i’ the adage.” 1 We want 2 the creative faculty to imagine that which we 

know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want 

6. Ecclesiastes 7.2. 

7. I follow the classification adopted by the author 

of the Four Ages of Poetry. But Rousseau was 

essentially a poet. The others, even Voltaire, were 

mere reasoners [Shelley’s note]. John Locke 

(1632– 1704), En glish phi los o pher. david hume 

(1711– 1776), Scottish empiricist phi los o pher, 

historian, and economist. Edward Gibbon (1737– 

1794), En glish historian best known as the 

author of The History of the Decline and Fall of 

the Roman Empire (6 vols., 1776– 88). Voltaire: 

pen name of François- Marie Arouet (1694– 

1778), French writer and phi los o pher. These figures 

are apparently linked by their opposition, in 

different degrees, to Christianity. 

8. The Spanish Inquisition, the harsh Roman 

Catholic tribunal for suppressing heresy, was 

established in 1478; it was not definitively abolished 

until the 1820 revolution led by reformist 

army officers. 

9. Michelangelo [Buonarroti] (1475– 1564), Italian 

Re nais sance sculptor, paint er, and architect. 

Francis Bacon (1561– 1626), En glish phi los o pher 

and essayist. Raphael: Raffaello Sanzio (1483– 

1520), master paint er of the Italian Re nais sance. 

1. Macbeth, 1.7.44– 45. 

2. Lack.


the poetry of life: our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten 

more than we can digest. The cultivation of those sciences which have 

enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for 

want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the 

internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a 

slave. To what but a cultivation of the mechanical arts in a degree disproportioned 

to the presence of the creative faculty, which is the basis of all 

knowledge, is to be attributed the abuse of all invention for abridging and 

combining labour, to the exasperation of the in e qual ity of mankind? From 

what other cause has it arisen that the discoveries which should have lightened, 

have added a weight to the curse imposed on Adam? 3 Poetry, and the 

principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and 

the Mammon 4 of the world. 

The functions of the poetical faculty are twofold; by one it creates new 

materials of knowledge, and power and plea sure; by the other it engenders 

in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain 

rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. The 

cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from 

an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the 

materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating 

them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too 

unwieldy for that which animates it. 

Poetry is indeed something divine. 5 It is at once the centre and circumference 

of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to 

which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom 

of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that 

which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, 

and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of 

the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and 

bloom of things; it is as the odour and the colour of the rose to the texture of 

the elements which compose it, as the form and the splendour of unfaded 

beauty to the secrets of anatomy and corruption. What were Virtue, Love, 

Patriotism, Friendship &c.— what were the scenery of this beautiful Universe 

which we inhabit— what were our consolations on this side of the 

grave— and what were our aspirations beyond it— if Poetry did not ascend to 

bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl- winged faculty 

of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be 

exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will 

compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind in creation 

is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant 

wind, awakens to transitory brightness: this power arises from within, like 

the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the 

conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or 

its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and 

force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when com- 

3. That is, the need to labor for a living; imposed 

on Adam because he and Eve ate the forbidden 

fruit of the tree of knowledge: “In the sweat of 

thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return 

unto the ground” (Genesis 3.19). 

4. The personification of avarice and lust for 

worldly gain; according to Matthew 6.24 and 

Luke 16.13, it is impossible to serve both God 

and Mammon. 

5. Compare Sidney’s reference, in The Defence of 

Poesy, to poetry as “a divine gift.”


position begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious 

poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble 

shadow of the original conception of the poet. I appeal to the greatest Poets 

of the present day, whether it be not an error to assert that the finest passages 

of poetry are produced by labour and study. The toil and the delay 

recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a 

careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connexion of 

the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture of conventional 

expressions; a necessity only imposed by a limitedness of the poetical faculty 

itself. For Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed 

it in portions. We have his own authority also for the Muse having “dictated” 

to him the “unpremeditated song,” 6 and let this be an answer to those 

who would allege the fifty- six various readings of the first line of the Orlando 

Furioso. Compositions so produced are to poetry what mosaic is to painting. 

This instinct and intuition of the poetical faculty is still more observable in 

the plastic and pictorial arts: a great statue or picture grows under the power 

of the artist as a child in the mother’s womb, and the very mind which 

directs the hands in formation is incapable of accounting to itself for the 

origin, the gradations, or the media of the pro cess. 

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and 

best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling 

sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own 

mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but 

elevating and delightful beyond all expression; so that even in the desire and 

the regret they leave, there cannot but be plea sure, participating as it does in 

the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner 

nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over a sea, 

which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as on the 

wrinkled sand which paves it. These and corresponding conditions of being 

are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the 

most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at 

war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and 

friendship is essentially linked with these emotions; and whilst they last, self 

appears as what it is, an atom to a Universe. Poets are not only subject to 

these experiences as spirits of the most refined or ga ni za tion, but they can 

colour all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this etherial world; 

a word, a trait in the repre sen ta tion of a scene or a passion, will touch the 

enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these 

emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus 

makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests 

the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations 7 of life, and veiling 

them or in language or in form sends them forth among mankind, bearing 

sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide— abide, 

because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which 

they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations 

of the divinity in man. 

Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is 

most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed: it marries 

6. Paradise Lost 9.20– 24. 7. Dark intervals.


exultation and horror, grief and plea sure, eternity and change; it subdues to 

union under its light yoke all irreconcilable things. It transmutes all that 

it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is 

changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it 

breathes; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters 

which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the 

world, and lays bare the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its 

forms. 

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. 

“The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of 

heaven.” 8 But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the 

accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured 

curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it 

equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants 

of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common 

universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our 

inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of 

our being. 9 It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that 

which we know. It creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated 

in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. It 

justifies that bold and true word of Tasso—Non merita nome di creatore, se 

non Iddio ed il Poeta. 1 

A Poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, plea sure, virtue 

and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and 

the most illustrious of men. As to his glory, let Time be challenged to declare 

whether the fame of any other institutor of human life be comparable to that 

of a poet. That he is the wisest, the happiest, and the best, inasmuch as he is 

a poet, is equally incontrovertible: the greatest poets have been men of the 

most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence, and, if we could 

look into the interior of their lives, the most fortunate of men: and the exceptions, 

as they regard those who possessed the poetic faculty in a high yet 

inferior degree, will be found on consideration to confirm rather than destroy 

the rule. Let us for a moment stoop to the arbitration of pop u lar breath, and 

usurping and uniting in our own persons the incompatible characters of 

accuser, witness, judge and executioner, let us decide without trial, testimony, 

or form, that certain motives of those who are “there sitting where we 

dare not soar” 2 are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, 

that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, 

that Lord Bacon was a peculator, 3 that Raphael was a libertine, that 

Spenser was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject 

to cite living poets, but Posterity has done ample justice to the great names 

now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust 

in the balance; if their sins “were as scarlet, they are now white as snow”; they 

8. Satan’s defiant assertion in Paradise Lost 

1.254– 55, slightly misquoted. 

9. Shelley echoes samuel taylor coleridge in 

Biographia Literaria (1817), chap. 14, which 

describes Wordsworth’s method as “awakening 

the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, 

and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders 

of the world before us; an inexhaustible trea sure, 

but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity 

and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see 

not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither 

feel nor understand.” 

1. No one deserves the name of creator except 

God and the Poet (Italian). From Pierantonio Serassi’s 

Life of Torquato Tasso (1785). 

2. Paradise Lost 4.829, slightly misquoted. 

3. Embezzler.


have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer Time. 

Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime 

have been confused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; 

consider how little is, as it appears— or appears, as it is: look to your own 

motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged. 4 

Poetry, as has been said, in this respect differs from logic, that it is not 

subject to the controul of the active powers of the mind, and that its birth 

and recurrence has no necessary connexion with consciousness or will. It is 

presumptuous to determine that these are the necessary conditions of all 

mental causation, when mental effects are experienced insusceptible of 

being referred to them. The frequent recurrence of the poetical power, it is 

obvious to suppose, may produce in the mind an habit of order and harmony 

correlative with its own nature and with its effects upon other minds. 

But in the intervals of inspiration, and they may be frequent without being 

durable, a poet becomes a man, and is abandoned to the sudden reflux of 

the influences under which others habitually live. But as he is more delicately 

or ga nized than other men, and sensible to pain and plea sure, both 

his own and that of others, in a degree unknown to them, he will avoid the 

one and pursue the other with an ardour proportioned to this difference. 

And he renders himself obnoxious to calumny, when he neglects to observe 

the circumstances under which these objects of universal pursuit and flight 

have disguised themselves in one another’s garments. 

But there is nothing necessarily evil in this error, and thus cruelty, envy, 

revenge, avarice, and the passions purely evil, have never formed any portion 

of the pop u lar imputations on the lives of poets. 

I have thought it most favourable to the cause of truth to set down these 

remarks according to the order in which they were suggested to my mind by 

a consideration of the subject itself, instead of following that of the treatise 

that excited me to make them public. Thus although devoid of the formality 

of a polemical reply; if the view they contain be just, they will be found to 

involve a refutation of the Four Ages of Poetry, so far at least as regards the 

first division of the subject. I can readily conjecture what should have moved 

the gall of the learned and intelligent author of that paper; I confess myself 

like him unwilling to be stunned by the Theseids of the hoarse Codri 5 of the 

day. Bavius and Mævius 6 undoubtedly are, as they ever were, insufferable 

persons. But it belongs to a philosophical critic to distinguish rather than 

confound. 

The first part of these remarks has related to Poetry in its elements and 

principles; and it has been shewn, as well as the narrow limits assigned them 

would permit, that what is called poetry, in a restricted sense, has a common 

source with all other forms of order and of beauty according to which the 

materials of human life are susceptible of being arranged, and which is 

poetry in an universal sense. 

4. Shelley repeatedly echoes the Bible in this passage. 

Their errors have been weighed in the balance: 

Daniel 5.27; dust of the balance: Isaiah 

40.15; were as scarlet: Isaiah 1.18; washed in the 

blood: Revelation 7.14; the mediator: Hebrews 

9.15, 12.24; judge not: Matthew 7.1. 

5. Juvenal begins Satire 1 by complaining about 

the Theseid (i.e., an epic poem on Theseus, the 

chief hero of Attica in ancient Greek legend) of 

“hoarse Codrus.” 

6. Mediocre Latin poets (1st c. b.c.e.) satirized 

by Virgil (Eclogue 3); Horace’s Epode 10 is an 

attack on Maevius.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON / 613 

The second part will have for its object an application of these principles 

to the present state of the cultivation of Poetry, and a defence of the attempt 

to idealize the modern forms of manners and opinion, and compel them into 

a subordination to the imaginative and creative faculty. For the literature of 

En gland, an energetic development of which has ever preceded or accompanied 

a great and free development of the national will, has arisen as it were 

from a new birth. In spite of the low- thoughted envy which would undervalue 

contemporary merit, our own will be a memorable age in intellectual 

achievements, and we live among such phi los o phers and poets as surpass 

beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle 

for civil and religious liberty. 7 The most unfailing herald, companion, and 

follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in 

opinion or institution, is Poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of 

the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions 

respecting man and nature. The persons in whom this power resides, 

may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent 

correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. 

But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, the 

Power which is seated upon the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to 

read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without 

being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. 

They mea sure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature 

with a comprehensive and all- penetrating spirit, and they are themselves 

perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations, for it is less their 

spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants 8 of an unapprehended 

inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts 

upon the present, the words which express what they understand not; the 

trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire: the influence 

which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of 

the World. 

1821 1840 

7. That is, the En glish Civil War (1642– 46, 

1648–49). 

8. Interpreters of sacred mysteries. 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

1803–1882 

“Emerson is God,” declared the literary theorist harold bloom in an interview in 

1993, in perhaps the most extravagant testimony yet to Emerson’s impact on American 

literature and culture. Lecturer, poet, and essayist, and the leading exponent 

of New En gland Transcendentalism, Emerson’s advocacy of self- reliance and nonconformity 

inspired American writers of his own time— notably, Henry David Thoreau, 

Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman— and later. Emerson 

was significant as well for En glish and Eu ro pe an intellectuals and phi los o phers,

614 / RALPH WALDO EMERSON 

including George Eliot (1819– 1880) and friedrich nietz sche (1844– 1900), and 

for the American phi los o phers William James (1842– 1910) and John Dewey (1859– 

1952). A radical thinker and a shaper of striking sentences and aphorisms, Emerson 

made claims for himself (and, by extension, for readers) as daring as Bloom makes 

for Emerson. “The simplest person who in his integrity worships God,” Emerson 

affirms in his essay “The Over- Soul,” “becomes God.” 

In Nature (1836), the lecture “The American Scholar” (1837), the Address before 

the Harvard Divinity School (1838), and two volumes of Essays (1841, 1844), Emerson 

announced and articulated nearly all of the central themes of Transcendentalism 

and, at the same time, subjected them to critique. He encouraged readers and 

audiences to feel the exaltation of their highest potential, to trust instinct and intuition 

(the signs of God’s presence in persons), and to perceive Nature as a rich 

realm of truths more profound than any that human social orders made available. 

He expressed these themes in provocative, allusive prose, which proceeds with a 

rich if frequently discontinuous rhythm. At the same time, with regular selfquestioning 

he maintained that there was no Transcendentalist party and no “pure” 

Transcendentalism at all. 

Emerson attended the Boston Latin School and Harvard College (1817– 21). While 

at Harvard, he began keeping a journal, and its stock of allusions, commentaries on 

his reading, and reflections on persons and events became the “Savings Bank”— 

annotated, cross- referenced, indexed— for his lectures, essays, and books. After 

graduation, Emerson taught school and then entered the Harvard Divinity School to 

prepare for the ministry, taking up a position at Boston’s Second Unitarian Church 

in 1829. In September 1829 Emerson married the seventeen- year- old Ellen Louisa 

Tucker, but her health was poor, and she died from tuberculosis in February 1831. 

Biographers have suggested that Emerson’s grief led him to question his Unitarian 

faith, but his doubts about conventional Christian beliefs and his “antiquated” 

profession had been present in his journals and sermons for years. Later, he 

remarked that if his teachers at the Harvard Divinity School had been aware of his 

true thoughts and feelings, they would not have allowed him to graduate. In October 

1832, saying he could no longer administer the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, 

Emerson resigned as minister of his Boston church. He explained, “It is my desire 

to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart.” 

In December 1832, Emerson traveled to Eu rope, and during his nine months 

abroad he met william wordsworth, samuel taylor coleridge, and the Scottishborn 

essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, with whom he corresponded for half a 

century. After returning to the United States, he lectured on natural history, biography, 

and history; settled in Concord, Massachusetts; remarried (Lydia Jackson in 

1835); and worked on his first book, Nature, published anonymously (and at his own 

expense) in September 1836. Other important texts of this de cade include “The 

American Scholar” and the Divinity School address, in which Emerson attacked 

religious tradition, doctrine, and the ministry for denying men and women the possibility 

for authentic self- discovery and religious fulfillment. “I think no man can go 

with his thoughts about him into one of our churches,” he contended in the address, 

“without feeling that what hold the public worship had on men is gone, or going.” 

In the 1830s Emerson said, “I am a poet. . . . That is my nature & vocation,” and 

he produced a number of difficult, gnomic poems that were collected in Poems 

(1847). But his real distinction lay in essays, journals, and books of cultural criticism 

and philosophy. Most scholars now agree that Emerson’s best work is in the Essays, 

pointing especially to “History,” “Self- Reliance,” “The Over- Soul,” “Circles,” “The 

Poet,” and “Experience.” He followed the lectures and essays of the 1830s and 1840s 

with a series of books: Representative Men (1850), which contains studies of plato, 

Goethe, and others; En glish Traits (1856), a shrewd work of social criticism in which 

Emerson examines En glish life, tradition, and culture; and The Conduct of Life

RALPH WALDO EMERSON / 615 

(1860), based on lectures he had presented in 1851 and including three major philosophical 

pieces—“Fate,” “Power,” and “Illusions.” 

Emerson played an active role in the meetings of the Transcendental Club, which 

the Unitarian clergyman F. H. Hedge or ga nized in 1836 for the “exchange of 

thought among those interested in the new views in philosophy, theology, and literature.” 

Like the other Transcendentalists, Emerson believed that all of creation is 

one, that men and women are inherently good, that intuition is the source of truth, 

and that individual perception illuminates and structures the world. “Nothing is at 

last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” Emerson professed, and this view 

led him to criticize the traditions, beliefs, and practices of the past that restricted 

the intellectual and moral development of persons in the present. God dwells 

within, according to Emerson, and thus each person should, he said early and late, 

establish an “original relation to the universe.” 

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke had argued 

that the senses produce a register of impressions of the physical world on the blank 

tablet (the tabula rasa) of the mind; the understanding transforms them into 

abstractions and complex ideas. Emerson disagreed. Drawing on the writings of 

immanuel kant and, even more, Coleridge (the Biographia Literaria, 1817, and the 

religious and philosophical treatise Aids to Reflection, 1825), Emerson made 

“understanding”— the pro cess by which the mind gathers the evidence of the senses 

and converts it into knowledge of the external world— subordinate to “reason,” 

which he defined as the intuitive perception of truth. In Nature, Emerson affirmed, 

“I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; the currents of the Universal Being 

circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” 

Emerson’s reference to “Universal Being” points to the American version of Neoplatonism 

that he espoused. Each person must seek to regain communion with 

“Universal Being” or (Emerson’s terms vary) Nature or Spirit. When it is lost, 

human beings view themselves as (and behave as if they were) isolated, powerless, 

alienated, corrupt. When it is restored, they sense their wholeness and enjoy a 

thrilling power and in de pen dence. This ecstatic feeling, Emerson suggests, is precious 

and precarious, astonishing and invigorating yet difficult for human beings to 

sustain. His philosophy is one of constant striving, of working to perfect and empower 

the self. Those (including henry james) who take it for easy optimism are mistaken. 

In “Fate,” Emerson emphasizes that “Nature is no sentimentalist,— does not cosset 

or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind 

drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.” And in 

“The Poet,” he pictures the imaginative seer as liberating us from ordinary life, 

which is characterized as miserable and prisonlike. 

Our selections demonstrate Emerson’s centrality for literary theory, philosophy 

(especially American pragmatism), and cultural criticism. The first, an excerpt 

from “The American Scholar,” presents Emerson’s mobile, and somewhat unnerving, 

account of the reading pro cess. Truth, he suggests, does not lie in great books 

waiting for readers to extract it. “Creative reading,” the right kind of reading, is 

instead the result of the truth that readers bring with them— a claim that would 

reemerge in the reader- response criticism of the 1970s and 1980s (without crediting 

Emerson). Reading should inspire us, Emerson states; but the genuine scholar, 

he implies, is occupied with reading only when there is nothing better to do. He is 

more concerned with writing, arguing that “each age must write its own books. . . . 

The books of an older period will not fit this.” Emerson calls for truth- seekers— 

persons who look within themselves rather than in books for truth and who bear 

witness to their spiritual discoveries in books of their own. 

As Emerson makes clear in “The Poet” (1844), our second selection, the writer 

reports passionately on personal experiences that will stimulate readers embarked 

on their own spiritual and intellectual journeys. All experience is meaningful; no


“sensual fact” (that is, nothing that is perceived by the senses) lacks spiritual significance. 

The special office of the “poet” (i.e., the imaginative writer) is to be alert 

to the meanings that saturate all of existence; all persons have the potential to be 

poets (which is one way in which the poet is “representative”), but those who actually 

become poet- geniuses are “sovereign”: they are potentates, emperors, liberating 

gods. Though Emerson found percy bysshe shelley “wholly unaffecting,” his 

grand vision of the poet’s powers is akin to Shelley’s in A Defence of Poetry (written 

1821; see above). In Emerson’s view, the more faithful the poet is to Nature, to 

Nature’s harmonies, the better will be his or her art. Overall, he pays little attention 

to craft, style, technique. For Emerson, a poem is defined by a thought that is “passionately 

alive,” not by its pattern of rhyme or meter or structure; he explicitly puts 

content before form. 

Through most of the essay, Emerson speaks in universal terms; but toward its 

end, his commitment to literary and cultural nationalism becomes clear. He beckons 

for American poets who will take as a basis for their verse the facts, the experiences, 

and the sweep of the land itself. Though he honors the great writers of the 

past and of other lands, he emphasizes that present- day citizens of the new nation 

cannot find inspiration in them. He admits, however, “I look in vain for the poet 

whom I describe.” 

Emerson appeals for a literature that is American and modern, and at moments 

he anticipates major twentiethcentury theorists and practitioners of literary modernism. 

t. s. eliot and Ezra Pound, for example, would seem to share Emerson’s 

belief that the poet makes things new: “The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, 

gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a 

tongue into every dumb and inanimate object.” But the Romantic cast of Emerson’s 

arguments ultimately made him more a foe than a friend for the modernists, with 

important exceptions (such as Gertrude Stein and Robert Frost). Eliot, in particularly 

strong terms, rejected the concept of the poet as inspired sage or spiritual seer 

and reaffirmed the sobering significance of tradition (see “Tradition and the Individual 

Talent,” 1919; below). The immersion in the literature of the past that Eliot 

believed necessary for poets to find the stimulus for literary work of their own 

would have struck Emerson as a postponement of the individual’s direct endeavor 

to hearken to the voice within, to the inner light (a phrase that Eliot despised). 

For Emerson, what counts is who the poet is, which suggests why as a reader he 

preferred biography and history to poetry and fiction. He valued books that recounted 

a gifted individual’s quest for freedom, power, and great achievement. Writing in 

his journal on January 10, 1832, he noted: “The difficulty is that we do not make a 

world of our own but fall into institutions already made & have to accommodate 

ourselves to them to be useful at all.” Harold Bloom exaggerated when he called 

Emerson “God,” but some critics have proposed, without exaggeration, that there 

was no truly American writing before Emerson, and that his presence has influenced 

everything written since. 

bibliography 

The standard editions are The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by 

Robert Spiller et al. (7 vols. to date, 1971–); The Early Lectures, edited by Stephen 

Whicher, Robert Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams (3 vols., 1959– 72); Journals and 

Miscellaneous Notebooks, edited by William H. Gilman et al. (16 vols., 1960– 84); and 

Letters, edited by Ralph L. Rusk (6 vols., 1939). For excellent single- volume collections 

(which include annotations), consult Emerson’s Literary Criticism, edited by Eric W. 

Carlson (1979), and Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Richard Poirier, in the Oxford 

Authors series (1990). For more wide- ranging selections, see the Emerson volumes in 

the Library of America series, especially Essays and Lectures (1983). For selections 

from the journals, refer to Emerson in His Journals, edited by Joel Porte (1982).

The American Scholar / 617 

Ralph L. Rusk’s Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1949) remains a basic starting 

point. Biographies have also been written by Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A 

Biography (1981), and John McAleer, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter 

(1984). Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), explores Emerson’s 

career as an American scholar, reader, and writer. Another keen study that 

combines biography and literary analysis, and that explores Emerson’s work as a 

poet, essayist, literary critic and theorist, religious thinker, and phi los o pher, is 

Lawrence Buell, Emerson (2003). For an account of Emerson’s friends and contemporaries, 

see Carlos Baker, Emerson among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait (1996). 

For incisive commentaries on Emerson’s style and strategies as a writer, turn to 

Warner Berthoff, introduction to his edition of Nature (1968); Alfred Kazin, An 

American Pro cession (1984); Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian 

Reflections (1984); and Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (1992). 

Many books have been written on Emerson; particularly worthy of attention are 

Barbara L. Packer, Emerson’s Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (1982), 

an analysis of Emerson’s uses of language; Julie Ellison, Emerson’s Romantic Style 

(1984); Irving Howe, The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of 

Emerson (1986), a suggestive book that relates Emerson to his contemporaries; 

David Van Leer, Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (1986), a cogent 

investigation of Emerson’s theory of knowledge; Richard A. Grusin, Transcendentalist 

Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible (1991), 

which is helpful on religious contexts; Merton M. Sealts, Emerson on the Scholar 

(1992); George J. Stack, Nietz sche and Emerson: An Elective Affinity (1992), an argument 

for the German phi los o pher’s deep indebtedness to Emerson’s ideas; Christina 

Zwarg, Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (1995); 

Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida 

(1995), a rewarding meditation on Emerson’s significance for twentiethcentury philosophy; 

and Pamela Schirmeister, Less Legible Meanings: Between Poetry and Philosophy 

in the Work of Emerson (1999), which scrutinizes Emerson’s conception of 

the act of reading and his literary and cultural project for American letters. Also 

valuable are Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Joel Myerson 

(1992), and Critical Essays on Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Robert E. Burkholder 

and Joel Myerson (1983). 

Joel Myerson has prepared a bibliography of Emerson’s writings, Ralph Waldo 

Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography (1982), and, with Robert E. Burkholder, two 

bibliographies of secondary sources: A Secondary Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson 

(1985) and Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1980– 

1991 (1994). Albert J. Von Frank, An Emerson Chronology (1994), is an indispensable 

reference. 

From The American Scholar 1 

* * * 

The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar is the mind of the 

Past,— in what ever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that 

mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and 

perhaps we shall get at the truth,— learn the amount of this influence more 

conveniently,— by considering their value alone. 

1. First published as a pamphlet, with the title An 

Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Society, at 

Cambridge, August 31, 1837. Emerson chose the 

title “The American Scholar” when it was republished 

in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (1849).


The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into 

him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his 

own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him life; it went out from him 

truth. It came to him short- lived actions; it went out from him immortal 

thoughts. It came to him business; it went from him poetry. It was dead 

fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it 

now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from 

which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing. 

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the pro cess had gone, of transmuting 

life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so 

will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite 

perfect. As no air- pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither 

can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable 

from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, 

in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the 

second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each 

generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit 

this. 

Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the 

act of creation, the act of thought, is transferred to the record. The poet 

chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. 

The writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled the book is 

perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly the 

book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted 

mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having 

once so opened, having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes 

an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it 

by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start 

wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. 

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept 

the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, 2 have given; forgetful 

that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they 

wrote these books. 

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the booklearned 

class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the 

human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate 3 with the world and 

the soul. Hence the restorers of readings, the emendators, 4 the bibliomaniacs 

of all degrees. 

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What 

is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are 

for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped 

by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a 

system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every 

man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although in almost 

all men obstructed and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth 

2. Sir Francis Bacon (1561– 1626), En glish statesman 

and writer, whose works include The 

Advancement of Learning (1605). Cicero (106– 43 

b.c.e.), Roman orator and statesman. John Locke 

(1632– 1704), En glish phi los o pher, author of An 

Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). 

3. In prerevolutionary France, the common people 

(the first estate or po liti cal order was the clergy, 

the second the nobility). 

4. Editors of texts.

The American Scholar / 619 

and utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius; not the privilege of 

here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence 

it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of 

any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,— 

let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. 

But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his 

hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. What ever talents may be, if the man 

create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his;— cinders and smoke there 

may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative 

actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of 

no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind’s own 

sense of good and fair. 

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another 

mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude, 

inquest, and self- recovery, and a fatal disser vice is done. Genius is 

always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over- influence. The literature of 

every nation bears me witness. The En glish dramatic poets have Shakspearized 

now for two hundred years. 

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. 

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the 

scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious 

to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings. But when 

the intervals of darkness come, as come they must,— when the sun is hid 

and the stars withdraw their shining,— we repair to the lamps which were 

kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. 

We hear, that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, “A fig tree, looking 

on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.” 

It is remarkable, the character of the plea sure we derive from the best 

books. They impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the 

same reads. We read the verses of one of the great En glish poets, of Chaucer, 

of Marvell, of Dryden, 5 with the most modern joy,— with a plea sure, I 

mean, which is in great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their 

verses. There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, 

who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that 

which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and 

said. But for the evidence thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of 

the identity of all minds, we should suppose some preëstablished harmony, 

some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for 

their future wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay up food before 

death for the young grub they shall never see. 

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of 

instincts, to underrate the Book. We all know, that as the human body can 

be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of 

shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and 

heroic men have existed who had almost no other information than by the 

printed page. I only would say that it needs a strong head to bear that diet. 

One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, “He that would 

5. john dryden (1631– 1700), poet, dramatist, and critic. Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343– 1400), author of 

The Canterbury Tales. Andrew Marvell (1621– 1678), poet and satirist.


bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the 

Indies.” 6 There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the 

mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of what ever book we read 

becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, 

and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what 

is always true, that as the seer’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy 

days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. 

The discerning will read, in his Plato 7 or Shakspeare, only that least part,— 

only the authentic utterances of the oracle;— all the rest he rejects, were it 

never so many times Plato’s and Shakspeare’s. 

Of course there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. 

History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in 

like manner, have their indispensable office,— to teach elements. But they 

can only highly serve us when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they 

gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and by 

the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and 

knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. 

Gowns and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail 

the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this, and our American 

colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every 

year. 

* * * 

1837, 1849 

The Poet 

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste are often persons who have acquired 

some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination 

for what ever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, 

and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are 

selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of 

dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their 

knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some 

limited judgment of color or form, which is exercised for amusement or for 

show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty as it lies in 

the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the 

instant dependence of form upon soul. There is no doctrine of forms in our 

philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan to be carried 

about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the 

organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to 

other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence 

of the material world on thought and volition. Theologians think it a 

pretty air- castle to talk of the spiritual meaning of a ship or a cloud, of a 

city or a contract, but they prefer to come again to the solid ground of his- 

6. Emerson likely found this proverb in James 

Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), in 

the conversation for April 17, 1778. 

7. On the Greek phi los o pher plato (ca. 427– ca. 

347 b.c.e.), see above.

The Poet / 621 

torical evidence; and even the poets are contented with a civil and conformed 

manner of living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe 

distance from their own experience. But the highest minds of the world 

have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or shall I say the qua druple 

or the centuple or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous 

fact; Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, 

1 and the masters of sculpture, picture and poetry. For we are not pans 

and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch- bearers, but children of 

the fire, 2 made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted and at two or 

three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth, that the 

fountains whence all this river of Time and its creatures floweth are intrinsically 

ideal and beautiful, draws us to the consideration of the nature and 

functions of the Poet, or the man of Beauty; to the means and materials he 

uses, and to the general aspect of the art in the present time. 

The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is representative. He 

stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his 

wealth, but of the common wealth. The young man reveres men of genius, 

because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he is. They receive of the 

soul as he also receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the 

eye of loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at 

the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries by truth and by his 

art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will draw all men 

sooner or later. For all men live by truth and stand in need of expression. In 

love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our 

painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression. 

Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate expression is 

rare. I know not how it is that we need an interpreter, but the great majority 

of men seem to be minors, who have not yet come into possession of their 

own, or mutes, who cannot report the conversation they have had with 

nature. There is no man who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in 

the sun and stars, earth and water. These stand and wait 3 to render him a 

peculiar ser vice. But there is some obstruction or some excess of phlegm 4 

in our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect. Too 

feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists. Every touch 

should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist that he could report in 

conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in our experience, the rays or 

appulses 5 have sufficient force to arrive at the senses, but not enough to 

reach the quick and compel the reproduction of themselves in speech. The 

poet is the person in whom these powers are in balance, the man without 

impediment, who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses 

the whole scale of experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of 

being the largest power to receive and to impart. 

For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear 

under different names in every system of thought, whether they be called 

1. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688– 1772), Swedish 

mystic and scientist. Orpheus: legendary Greek 

poet to whom hymns and fragments were attributed. 

Empedocles (ca. 493– ca. 433 b.c.e.), Heraclitus 

(active ca. 500 b.c.e.), and plato (ca. 

427– ca. 347 b.c.e.): Greek phi los o phers. Plutarch 

(ca. 50– ca. 120 c.e.), Greek biographer and historian. 

dante alighieri (1265– 1321), Italian poet, 

author of The Divine Comedy. 

2. A phrase derived from Heraclitus, who used fire 

to symbolize the pro cess of change. 

3. See John Milton, “When I Consider How My 

Light Is Spent” (written ca. 1652; published 

1673): “They also serve who only stand and wait” 

(line 14). 

4. One of the four “humors” of early physiology; 

said to cause sluggishness and lethargy. 

5. Energetic motion toward something.


cause, operation and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; 6 or, 

theologically, the Father, the Spirit and the Son; but which we will call 

here the Knower, the Doer and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the 

love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty. These three 

are equal. Each is that which he is, essentially, so that he cannot be surmounted 

or analyzed, and each of these three has the power of the others 

latent in him and his own, patent. 

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, 

and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted or adorned, but 

is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful 

things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not 

any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is 

infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and 

activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, 

overlooking the fact that some men, namely poets, are natural sayers, sent 

into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those 

whose province is action but who quit it to imitate the sayers. But Homer’s 

words are as costly and admirable to Homer as Agamemnon’s victories are 

to Agamemnon. 7 The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as 

they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be 

spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, 

secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a paint er, or 

as assistants who bring building- materials to an architect. 

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely 

or ga nized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we 

hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose 

ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and 

thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these 

cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become 

the songs of the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as 

it is reasonable, and must as much appear as it must be done, or be known. 

Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words 

are also actions, and actions are a kind of words. 

The sign and credentials of the poet are that he announces that which no 

man foretold. He is the true and only doctor; 8 he knows and tells; he is the 

only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he 

describes. He is a beholder of ideas and an utterer of the necessary and 

causal. For we do not speak now of men of poetical talents, or of industry 

and skill in metre, but of the true poet. I took part in a conversation the 

other day concerning a recent writer of lyrics, 9 a man of subtle mind, whose 

head appeared to be a music- box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and whose 

skill and command of language we could not sufficiently praise. But when 

the question arose whether he was not only a lyrist but a poet, we were 

obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man. He 

does not stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the 

6. Three Roman gods: king of the gods (Jove), 

god of the dead and ruler of the underworld 

(Pluto), and god of the sea (Neptune). 

7. Commander of the Greek army in Homer’s 

epic poem the Iliad (ca. 8th c. b.c.e.). 

8. Teacher. 

9. Perhaps the En glish poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson 

(1809– 1892).


line, 1 running up from a torrid base through all the climates of the globe, 

with belts of the herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but 

this genius is the landscape- garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains 

and statues, with well- bred men and women standing and sitting 

in the walks and terraces. We hear, through all the varied music, the groundtone 

of conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not 

the children of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is 

primary. 

For it is not metres, but a metre- making argument that makes a poem,— a 

thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it 

has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The 

thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis 

the thought is prior to the form. The poet has a new thought; he has a 

whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all 

men will be the richer in his fortune. For the experience of each new age 

requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet. I 

remember when I was young how much I was moved one morning by tidings 

that genius had appeared in a youth who sat near me at table. He had left his 

work and gone rambling none knew whither, and had written hundreds of 

lines, but could not tell whether that which was in him was therein told; he 

could tell nothing but that all was changed,— man, beast, heaven, earth and 

sea. How gladly we listened! how credulous! Society seemed to be compromised. 

We sat in the aurora of a sunrise which was to put out all the stars. 

Boston seemed to be at twice the distance it had the night before, or was 

much farther than that. Rome,— what was Rome? Plutarch and Shakspeare 

were in the yellow leaf, 2 and Homer no more should be heard of. It is much 

to know that poetry has been written this very day, under this very roof, by 

your side. What! that wonderful spirit has not expired! These stony moments 

are still sparkling and animated! I had fancied that the oracles were all 

silent, 3 and nature had spent her fires; and behold! all night, from every 

pore, these fine auroras have been streaming. Every one has some interest in 

the advent of the poet, and no one knows how much it may concern him. We 

know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our 

interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new 

person, may put the key into our hands. Of course the value of genius to us 

is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes 

and adds. Mankind in good earnest have availed so far in understanding 

themselves and their work, that the foremost watchman on the peak 

announces his news. It is the truest word ever spoken, and the phrase will be 

the fittest, most musical, and the unerring voice of the world for that time. 

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal 

event in chronology. Man, never so often deceived, still watches for the 

arrival of a brother who can hold him steady to a truth until he has made it 

his own. With what joy I begin to read a poem which I confide in as an inspiration! 

And now my chains are to be broken; I shall mount above these 

1. The equator. Chimborazo: a mountain in 

Ec ua dor, in the Andes range. 

2. See the words of Macbeth, in Macbeth (ca. 

1606), 5.3.23– 24; “My way of life / Is fall’n into 

the sere, the yellow leaf.” See also George Gordon, 

Lord Byron, “On This Day I Complete My 

Thirty- sixth Year” (1824): “My days are in the yellow 

leaf” (line 5). 

3. See John Milton, “On the Morning of Christ’s 

Nativity” (1645): “The oracles are dumb” (line 

173).


clouds and opaque airs in which I live,— opaque, though they seem 

transparent,— and from the heaven of truth I shall see and comprehend my 

relations. That will reconcile me to life and renovate nature, to see trifles 

animated by a tendency, and to know what I am doing. Life will no more be 

a noise; now I shall see men and women, and know the signs by which they 

may be discerned from fools and satans. This day shall be better than my 

birthday: then I became an animal; now I am invited into the science of the 

real. Such is the hope, but the fruition is postponed. Oftener it falls that this 

winged man, who will carry me into the heaven, whirls me into mists, then 

leaps and frisks about with me as it were from cloud to cloud, still affirming 

that he is bound heavenward; and I, being myself a novice, am slow in perceiving 

that he does not know the way into the heavens, and is merely bent 

that I should admire his skill to rise like a fowl or a flying fish, a little way 

from the ground or the water; but the all- piercing, all- feeding and ocular air 

of heaven that man shall never inhabit. I tumble down again soon into my 

old nooks, and lead the life of exaggerations as before, and have lost my faith 

in the possibility of any guide who can lead me thither where I would be. 

But, leaving these victims of vanity, let us, with new hope, observe how 

nature, by worthier impulses, has insured the poet’s fidelity to his office of 

announcement and affirming, namely by the beauty of things, which becomes 

a new and higher beauty when expressed. Nature offers all her creatures to 

him as a picture- language. Being used as a type, a second wonderful value 

appears in the object, far better than its old value; as the carpenter’s stretched 

cord, if you hold your ear close enough, is musical in the breeze. “Things 

more excellent than every image,” says Jamblichus, 4 “are expressed through 

images.” Things admit of being used as symbols because nature is a symbol, 

in the whole, and in every part. Every line we can draw in the sand has 

expression; and there is no body without its spirit or genius. All form is an 

effect of character; all condition, of the quality of the life; all harmony, of 

health; and for this reason a perception of beauty should be sympathetic, 

or proper only to the good. The beautiful rests on the foundations of the 

necessary. 

The soul makes the body, as the wise Spenser teaches:— 

“So every spirit, as it is more pure, 

And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 

So it the fairer body doth procure 

To habit in, and it more fairly dight, 

With cheerful grace and amiable sight. 

For, of the soul, the body form doth take, 

For soul is form, and doth the body make.” 5 

Here we find ourselves suddenly not in a critical speculation but in a holy 

place, and should go very warily and reverently. We stand before the secret of 

the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety. 

The Universe is the externization of the soul. Wherever the life is, that 

bursts into appearance around it. Our science is sensual, and therefore 

superficial. The earth and the heavenly bodies, physics and chemistry, we 

4. Iamblichus (ca. 250– ca. 325 c.e.), Neoplatonic 

phi los o pher of Syria; Emerson read his Life of 

Pythagoras. 

5. “An Hymne in Honour of Beautie” (1596), 

lines 127– 33, by the En glish poet Edmund 

Spenser (1552– 1599).


sensually treat, as if they were self- existent; but these are the retinue of that 

Being we have. “The mighty heaven,” said Proclus, 6 “exhibits, in its transfigurations, 

clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions; being 

moved in conjunction with the unapparent periods of intellectual natures.” 

Therefore science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, 

keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or the state of science is an 

index of our selfknowledge. Since every thing in nature answers to a moral 

power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark it is because the corresponding 

faculty in the observer is not yet active. 

No wonder then, if these waters be so deep, that we hover over them with 

a religious regard. The beauty of the fable proves the importance of the 

sense; to the poet, and to all others; or, if you please, every man is so far a 

poet as to be susceptible of these enchantments of nature; for all men have 

the thoughts whereof the universe is the celebration. I find that the fascination 

resides in the symbol. Who loves nature? Who does not? Is it only poets, 

and men of leisure and cultivation, who live with her? No; but also hunters, 

farmers, grooms and butchers, though they express their affection in their 

choice of life and not in their choice of words. The writer wonders what the 

coachman or the hunter values in riding, in horses and dogs. It is not superficial 

qualities. When you talk with him he holds these at as slight a rate as 

you. His worship is sympathetic; he has no definitions, but he is commanded 

in nature by the living power which he feels to be there present. No imitation 

or playing of these things would content him; he loves the earnest of the 

north wind, of rain, of stone and wood and iron. A beauty not explicable is 

dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. It is nature the symbol, 

nature certifying the supernatural, body overflowed by life which he worships 

with coarse but sincere rites. 

The inwardness and mystery of this attachment drive men of every class 

to the use of emblems. The schools of poets and phi los o phers are not more 

intoxicated with their symbols than the populace with theirs. In our po litical 

parties, compute the power of badges and emblems. See the great ball 

which they roll from Baltimore to Bunker Hill! 7 In the po liti cal pro cessions, 

Lowell goes in a loom, and Lynn in a shoe, and Salem in a ship. Witness the 

cider- barrel, the log- cabin, the hickory- stick, the palmetto, 8 and all the cognizances 

of party. See the power of national emblems. Some stars, lilies, 

leopards, a crescent, a lion, an ea gle, or other figure which came into credit 

God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind on a fort at 

the ends of the earth, shall make the blood tingle under the rudest or the 

most conventional exterior. The people fancy they hate poetry, and they 

are all poets and mystics! 

Beyond this universality of the symbolic language, we are apprised of the 

divineness of this superior use of things, whereby the world is a temple 

whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures and commandments of the 

6. Greek Neoplatonic phi los o pher (412– 485 c.e.). 

7. In the Charlestown section of Boston. This 

stunt was undertaken by the Whig Party for their 

candidate William Henry Harrison during the 

presidential campaign in 1840 to illustrate that 

year’s slogan, “Keep the ball a-rolling.” Emerson 

then associates each Massachusetts town with its 

major product. 

8. Emerson names symbols closely associated 

with politicians of the 1830s: the cider barrel and 

log cabin, with William Henry Harrison; the 

hickory stick, with “Old Hickory,” Andrew Jackson 

(Demo cratic president, 1829– 37); and the 

palmetto, with John C. Calhoun (Jackson’s vice 

president), who was from South Carolina (the 

“palmetto state”).


Deity,— in this, that there is no fact in nature which does not carry the 

whole sense of nature; and the distinctions which we make in events and in 

affairs, of low and high, honest and base, disappear when nature is used as 

a symbol. Thought makes everything fit for use. The vocabulary of an omniscient 

man would embrace words and images excluded from polite conversation. 

What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes 

illustrious, spoken in a new connection of thought. The piety of the Hebrew 

prophets purges their grossness. 9 The circumcision is an example of the 

power of poetry to raise the low and offensive. Small and mean things serve 

as well as great symbols. The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, 

the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men; just as 

we choose the smallest box or case in which any needful utensil can be carried. 

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited 

mind as it is related of Lord Chatham that he was accustomed to read in 

Bailey’s 1 Dictionary when he was preparing to speak in Parliament. The 

poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. 

Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a 

few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. 

We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols 

we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not 

need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new 

relation is a new word. Also we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, 

so expressing our sense that the evils of the world are such only to the 

evil eye. In the old mythology, mythologists observe, defects are ascribed to 

divine natures, as lameness to Vulcan, blindness to Cupid, 2 and the like,— 

to signify exuberances. 

For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes 

things ugly, the poet, who re- attaches things to nature and the Whole,— 

re- attaching even artificial things and violation of nature, to nature, by a 

deeper insight,— disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers 

of poetry see the factory- village and the railway, and fancy that the 

poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not 

yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the 

great Order not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web. 

Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of 

cars she loves like her own. Besides, in a centred mind, it signifies nothing 

how many mechanical inventions you exhibit. Though you add millions, 

and never so surprising, the fact of mechanics has not gained a grain’s 

weight. The spiritual fact remains unalterable, by many or by few particulars; 

as no mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the 

sphere. A shrewd country- boy goes to the city for the first time, and the complacent 

citizen is not satisfied with his little wonder. It is not that he does 

not see all the fine houses and know that he never saw such before, but he 

disposes of them as easily as the poet finds place for the railway. The chief 

value of the new fact is to enhance the great and constant fact of Life, 

9. Emerson may have in mind such passages as 

Ezekiel’s comparison of Jerusalem to a harlot (15) 

and his description of the city’s sins (22). 

1. Nathan (or Nathaniel) Bailey (d. 1742), lexicographer 

and philologist, author of An Universal 

Etymological En glish Dictionary (1721). Lord 

Chatham, William Pitt (1708– 1778), En glish 

statesman and orator. 

2. The Roman god of love, son of Venus. Vulcan: 

the Roman god of fire and metalworking.


which can dwarf any and every circumstance, and to which the belt of 

wampum and the commerce of America are alike. 

The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is 

he who can articulate it. For though life is great, and fascinates and absorbs; 

and though all men are intelligent of 3 the symbols through which it is 

named; yet they cannot originally use them. We are symbols and inhabit symbols; 

workmen, work, and tools, words and things, birth and death, all are 

emblems; but we sympathize with the symbols, and being infatuated with 

the eco nom ical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The 

poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes 

their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and 

inanimate object. He perceives the in de pen dence of the thought on the symbol, 

the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity 4 of the symbol. As 

the eyes of Lyncæus 5 were said to see through the earth, so the poet turns 

the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and pro cession. 

For through that better perception he stands one step nearer to things, and 

sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that 

within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a 

higher form; and following with his eyes the life, uses the forms which 

express that life, and so his speech flows with the flowing of nature. All the 

facts of the animal economy, sex, nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are 

symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there a 

change and reappear a new and higher fact. He uses forms according to the 

life, and not according to the form. This is true science. The poet alone 

knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation and animation, for he does not stop 

at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain or meadow 

of space was strown with these flowers we call suns and moons and stars; 

why the great deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for in every 

word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought. 

By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer or Language- maker, naming 

things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, 

and giving to every one its own name and not another’s, thereby rejoicing 

the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary. The poets made 

all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we 

must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of 

our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and 

obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the 

first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to 

have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone 

of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, 

so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their 

secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the 

poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than 

any other. This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown 

out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature is a certain selfregulated 

motion or change; and nature does all things by her own hands, 

3. Acquainted with, versed in. 

4. Transience, lack of enduring qualities. “Accidency”: 

accidental or chance character. 

5. In Greek mythology, the seaman with the 

keenest eyesight among those who sailed with 

Jason in quest of the Golden Fleece. See Apollonius 

of Rhodes (3d c. b.c.e.), Argonautica 1.155.


and does not leave another to baptize her but baptizes herself; and this 

through the metamorphosis again. I remember that a certain poet 6 described 

it to me thus:— 

Genius is the activity which repairs the decays of things, whether wholly 

or partly of a material and finite kind. Nature, through all her kingdoms, 

insures herself. Nobody cares for planting the poor fungus; so she shakes 

down from the gills of one agaric countless spores, any one of which, being 

preserved, transmits new billions of spores to- morrow or next day. The new 

agaric of this hour has a chance which the old one had not. This atom of 

seed is thrown into a new place, not subject to the accidents which destroyed 

its parent two rods off. She makes a man; and having brought him to ripe 

age, she will no longer run the risk of losing this wonder at a blow, but she 

detaches from him a new self, that the kind may be safe from accidents to 

which the individual is exposed. So when the soul of the poet has come to 

ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or 

songs,— a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the 

accidents of the weary kingdom of time; a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad 

with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came) which 

carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. 

These wings are the beauty of the poet’s soul. The songs, thus flying immortal 

from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, 

which swarm in far greater numbers and threaten to devour them; but these 

last are not winged. At the end of a very short leap they fall plump down and 

rot, having received from the souls out of which they came no beautiful 

wings. But the melodies of the poet ascend and leap and pierce into the 

deeps of infinite time. 

So far the bard taught me, using his freer speech. But nature has a higher 

end, in the production of new individuals, than security, namely ascension, 

or the passage of the soul into higher forms. I knew in my younger days the 

sculptor who made the statue of the youth which stands in the public garden. 

He was, as I remember, unable to tell directly what made him happy or 

unhappy, but by wonderful indirections he could tell. He rose one day, 

according to his habit, before the dawn, and saw the morning break, grand 

as the eternity out of which it came, and for many days after, he strove to 

express this tranquillity, and lo! his chisel had fashioned out of marble the 

form of a beautiful youth, Phosphorus, 7 whose aspect is such that it is said 

all persons who look on it become silent. The poet also resigns himself to his 

mood, and that thought which agitated him is expressed, but alter idem, 8 in 

a manner totally new. The expression is organic, or the new type which 

things themselves take when liberated. As, in the sun, objects paint their 

images on the ret i na of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole 

universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in his mind. 

Like the metamorphosis of things into higher organic forms is their change 

into melodies. Over everything stands its dæmon or soul, and, as the form of 

6. Emerson himself, in his journal, paraphrasing 

Plato. 

7. The Greek personification of the morning star 

(literally, “light- bearer”), sometimes represented 

as a youth bearing a torch. 

8. A second self (Latin).


the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a 

melody. The sea, the mountain- ridge, Niagara, and every flower- bed, pre- exist, 

or super- exist, in pre- cantations, 9 which sail like odors in the air, and when 

any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them and endeavors 

to write down the notes without diluting or depraving them. 1 And herein 

is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind’s faith that the poems are a corrupt 

version of some text in nature with which they ought to be made to 

tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated 

nodes of a seashell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. 

The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a 

rough ode, without falsehood or rant; a summer, with its harvest sown, 

reaped and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed 

parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, 

glide into our spirits, and we participate the invention of nature? 

This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very 

high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being 

where and what it sees; by sharing the path or circuit of things through 

forms, and so making them translucid to others. The path of things is silent. 

Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they will not suffer; a lover, 

a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature,— him they will suffer. The 

condition of true naming, on the poet’s part, is his resigning himself to the 

divine aura 1 which breathes through forms, and accompanying that. 

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond 

the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new 

energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature 

of things; that beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a 

great public power on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his 

human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through 

him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, 

his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the 

plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only 

when he speaks somewhat wildly, or “with the flower of the mind;” 2 not 

with the intellect used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all 

ser vice and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or as the 

ancients 3 were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone but with 

the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveller who has lost his way throws 

his reins on his horse’s neck and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find 

his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this 

world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are 

opened for us into nature; the mind flows into and through things hardest 

and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. 

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, 

opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or what ever other procurers 

of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they 

9. Enchantments, foretellings. 

1. Gentle breeze; intangible quality, atmosphere. 

2. A translation of a Greek phrase from the 

“Chaldean Oracles” (2d c. c.e., though attributed 

to the Persian religious leader and prophet Zoroaster, 

ca. 7th c. b.c.e.), selections from which 

appeared in the Transcendentalist journal, The 

Dial, in 1844. Others have noted as a source The 

True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), by 

the En glish Neoplatonist Ralph Cudworth. 

(1617–1688) 

3. The Neoplatonists Plotinus (ca. 204 / 5– 70 c.e.) 

and Proclus (412–485 c.e.)


can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end 

they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, 

travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal 

intoxication,— which are several coarser or finer quasi- mechanical substitutes 

for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming 

nearer to the fact. These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a 

man, to his passage out into free space, and they help him to escape the 

custody of that body in which he is pent up, and of that jail- yard of individual 

relations in which he is enclosed. Hence a great number of such as were 

professionally expressers of Beauty, as paint ers, poets, musicians and actors, 

have been more than others wont to lead a life of plea sure and indulgence; 

all but the few who received the true nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode 

of attaining freedom, as it was an emancipation not into the heavens but 

into the freedom of baser places, they were punished for that advantage they 

won, by a dissipation and deterioration. But never can any advantage be 

taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of 

the Creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine. The sublime 

vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. 

That is not an inspiration, which we owe to narcotics, but some counterfeit 

excitement and fury. Milton says 4 that the lyric poet may drink wine and live 

generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods and their descent 

unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not ‘Dev il’s 

wine,’ but God’s wine. It is with this as it is with toys. We fill the hands and 

nurseries of our children with all manner of dolls, drums and horses; withdrawing 

their eyes from the plain face and sufficing objects of nature, the 

sun and moon, the animals, the water and stones, which should be their 

toys. So the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low that the common 

influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of 

the sunlight; the air should suffice for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy 

with water. That spirit which suffices quiet hearts, which seems to come 

forth to such from every dry knoll of sere grass, from every pine stump and 

half- imbedded stone on which the dull March sun shines, comes forth to the 

poor and hungry, and such as are of simple taste. If thou fill thy brain with 

Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy 

jaded senses with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of 

wisdom in the lonely waste of the pine woods. 

If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. 

The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of 

symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. 

We seem to be touched by a wand which makes us dance and run about 

happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar 

into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, 5 fables, oracles and all 

poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new 

sense, and found within their world another world, or nest of worlds; for, 

the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. I will not now 

consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and the mathematics, 

which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every definition; as when 

Aristotle defines space to be an immovable vessel in which things are 

4. In Elegy VI (1629), lines 55– 78. 5. Figures of speech.


contained; 6 — or when Plato defines a line to be a flowing point; or figure to 

be a bound of solid; 7 and many the like. What a joyful sense of freedom we 

have when Vitruvius 8 announces the old opinion of artists that no architect 

can build any house well who does not know something of anatomy. When 

Socrates, in Charmides, tells us that the soul is cured of its maladies by 

certain incantations, and that these incantations are beautiful reasons, 

from which temperance is generated in souls; when Plato calls the world an 

animal, and Timæus affirms that the plants also are animals; or affirms a 

man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his head, upward; 

and, as George Chapman, following him, writes, 

“So in our tree of man, whose nervie root 

Springs in his top;”— 

when Orpheus speaks of hoariness as “that white flower which marks 

extreme old age;” when Proclus calls the universe the statue of the intellect; 

when Chaucer, in his praise of ‘Gentilesse,’ compares good blood in mean 

condition to fire, which, though carried to the darkest house betwixt this and 

the mount of Caucasus, will yet hold its natural office and burn as bright as 

if twenty thousand men did it behold; when John saw, in the Apocalypse, 

the ruin of the world through evil, and the stars fall from heaven as the fig 

tree casteth her untimely fruit; when Æsop reports the whole cata logue of 

common daily relations through the masquerade of birds and beasts; 9 — we 

take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence and its versatile habit 

and escapes, as when the gypsies say of themselves “it is in vain to hang 

them, they cannot die.” 1 

The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for the 

title of their order, “Those who are free throughout the world.” They are 

free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service 

at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward when we 

arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in 

books excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed 

and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors 

and the public and heeds only this one dream which holds him like an 

insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and 

histories and criticism. All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, 

Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, 2 or 

any other who introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, 

dev ils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate 

we have of departure from routine, and that here is a new witness. That 

6. aristotle (384– 322 b.c.e.), Physics 4. 

7. Plato, Meno 76. 

8. Roman engineer and architect (1st c. b.c.e.), 

best known for his work On Architecture. 

9. In the allusion- filled preceding lines, Emerson’s 

references to calling the world “an animal” and to 

“plants also are animals” are taken from Plato’s 

dialogues Charmides (157) and Timaeus (30, 77); 

George Chapman (1559– 1634), an En glish poet 

and translator of Homer, wrote the lines quoted in 

the dedication to Prince Henry at the beginning 

of his translation; Chaucer’s praise of “gentilesse” 

is in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” (ca. 1400), lines 

1139– 45; for John’s vision, see Revelation 6.13; 

Aesop wrote his beast fables in the 6th century 

b.c.e. 

1. George Borrow, The Zincali; or, An Account of 

the Gypsies of Spain (1842). 

2. Lorenz Oken (1779– 1851), German naturalist 

and mystic phi los o pher. Pythagoras (6th c. b.c.e.), 

Greek phi los o pher and mathematician. Paracelsus 

(1493– 1541), German alchemist and writer 

on occult subjects. Henricus Cornelius Agrippa 

van Nettesheim (1486– 1535), German physician 

and magician. Girolamo Cardano (1501– 1576), 

Italian physician, astrologer, and mathematician. 

Johann Kepler (1571– 1630), German astronomer. 

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775– 

1854), German phi los o pher.


also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the 

world like a ball in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how 

mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power 

to sap and upheave nature; how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, 

enter and disappear like threads in tapestry of large figure and many 

colors; dream delivers us to dream, and while the drunkenness lasts we will 

sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence. 

There is good reason why we should prize this liberation. The fate of the 

poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow- storm, perishes in a drift 

within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man. On 

the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are miserably dying. The inaccessibleness 

of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you 

come near to it; you are as remote when you are nearest as when you are 

farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore 

we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode or 

in an action or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He 

unlocks our chains and admits us to a new scene. 

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as it 

must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a mea sure of intellect. 

Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which ascend to 

that truth that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses it as his exponent. 

3 Every verse or sentence possessing this virtue will take care of its 

own immortality. The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few 

imaginative men. 

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The poet 

did not stop at the color or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he 

rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new 

thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last 

nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon 

becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular 

and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not 

as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake 

of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one. The morningredness 

happens to be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, 4 and 

comes to stand to him for truth and faith; and, he believes, should stand for 

the same realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the 

symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller polishing 

a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally good to the 

person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held lightly, and be 

very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use. And 

the mystic must be steadily told,— All that you say is just as true without the 

tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of 

this trite rhetoric,— universal signs, instead of these village symbols,— and 

we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all 

religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was 

at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language. 

3. The means through which his beliefs are 

expounded. 

4. Jakob Böhme (1575– 1624), German theosophist 

and mystic, author of Aurora: The Day- 

Spring, or, Dawning of the Day in the East: or, 

Morning- Redness in the Rising of the Sun.


Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands eminently for the 

translator of nature into thought. I do not know the man in history to whom 

things stood so uniformly for words. Before him the metamorphosis continually 

plays. Everything on which his eye rests, obeys the impulses of 

moral nature. The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. When some of 

his angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig which they held blossomed in 

their hands. The noise which at a distance appeared like gnashing and 

thumping, on coming nearer was found to be the voice of disputants. The 

men in one of his visions, seen in heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and 

seemed in darkness; but to each other they appeared as men, and when the 

light from heaven shone into their cabin, they complained of the darkness, 

and were compelled to shut the window that they might see. 

There was this perception in him which makes the poet or seer an object 

of awe and terror, namely that the same man or society of men may wear one 

aspect to themselves and their companions, and a different aspect to higher 

intelligences. Certain priests, whom he describes as conversing very learnedly 

together, appeared to the children who were at some distance, like dead 

horses; and many the like misappearances. 5 And instantly the mind inquires 

whether these fishes under the bridge, yonder oxen in the pasture, those 

dogs in the yard, are immutably fishes, oxen and dogs, or only so appear to 

me, and perchance to themselves appear upright men; and whether I appear 

as a man to all eyes. The Brahmins 6 and Pythagoras propounded the same 

question, and if any poet has witnessed the transformation he doubtless 

found it in harmony with various experiences. We have all seen changes as 

considerable in wheat and caterpillars. He is the poet and shall draw us with 

love and terror, who sees through the flowing vest the firm nature, and can 

declare it. 

I look in vain for the poet whom I describe. We do not with sufficient 

plainness or sufficient profoundness address ourselves to life, nor dare we 

chaunt our own times and social circumstance. If we filled the day with bravery, 

we should not shrink from celebrating it. Time and nature yield us many 

gifts, but not yet the timely man, the new religion, the reconciler, whom all 

things await. Dante’s praise is that he dared to write his autobiography in 

colossal cipher, or into universality. 7 We have yet had no genius in America, 

with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, 

and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of 

the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the 

Middle Age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, 

Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest 

on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of 

Delphi, 8 and are as swiftly passing away. Our log- rolling, our stumps and 

their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes and Indians, our boats and our repudiations, 

9 the wrath of rogues and the pusillanimity of honest men, the 

northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon and 

Texas, are yet unsung. Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography 

5. Each chapter of Swedenborg’s Apocalypse 

Revealed (1766) concludes with “Memorable Revelations.” 

6. Members of the highest Hindu caste, from 

which priests and religious teachers are drawn. 

7. In Dante’s epic Divine Comedy, the poet himself 

plays a first- person role. 

8. The site in Greece of the most important oracle 

of Apollo. 

9. Refusals to pay debts. “Log- rolling”: the 

exchange of po liti cal favors. “Stumps”: speech 

platforms. “Boats”: some editors print “boasts.”


dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres. If I have not 

found that excellent combination of gifts in my countrymen which I seek, 

neither could I aid myself to fix the idea of the poet by reading now and then 

in Chalmers’s collection of five centuries of En glish poets. 1 These are wits 

more than poets, though there have been poets among them. But when we 

adhere to the ideal of the poet, we have our difficulties even with Milton and 

Homer. Milton is too literary, and Homer too literal and historical. 

But I am not wise enough for a national criticism, and must use the old 

largeness a little longer, to discharge my errand from the muse to the poet 

concerning his art. 

Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths or methods are ideal 

and eternal, though few men ever see them; not the artist himself for years, 

or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. The paint er, the sculptor, 

the composer, the epic rhapsodist, the orator, all partake one desire, 

namely to express themselves symmetrically and abundantly, not dwarfishly 

and fragmentarily. They found or put themselves in certain conditions, as, 

the paint er and sculptor before some impressive human figures; the orator 

into the assembly of the people; and the others in such scenes as each has 

found exciting to his intellect; and each presently feels the new desire. He 

hears a voice, he sees a beckoning. Then he is apprised, with wonder, what 

herds of dæmons hem him in. He can no more rest; he says, with the old 

paint er, “By God it is in me and must go forth of me.” He pursues a beauty, 

half seen, which flies before him. The poet pours out verses in every solitude. 

Most of the things he says are conventional, no doubt; but by and by he 

says something which is original and beautiful. That charms him. He would 

say nothing else but such things. In our way of talking we say ‘That is yours, 

this is mine;’ but the poet knows well that it is not his; that it is as strange 

and beautiful to him as to you; he would fain hear the like eloquence at 

length. Once having tasted this immortal ichor, 2 he cannot have enough of 

it, and as an admirable creative power exists in these intellections, it is of the 

last importance that these things get spoken. What a little of all we know is 

said! What drops of all the sea of our science are baled 3 up! and by what 

accident it is that these are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature! 

Hence the necessity of speech and song; hence these throbs and heartbeatings 

in the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end namely that 

thought may be ejaculated as Logos, 4 or Word. 

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say ‘It is in me, and shall out.’ Stand there, 

balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and 

strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream- power which every night 

shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by 

virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. 

Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise 

and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, 

his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures by pairs and by tribes 

pour into his mind as into a Noah’s ark, to come forth again to people a new 

1. Alexander Chalmers (1759– 1834), Scottish 

biographer and journalist, compiled The Works of 

the En glish Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper (21 

vols., 1810). 

2. In Greek myth, the blood of the gods. Emerson 

may mean nectar, the drink of the gods. 

3. Bailed. 

4. Word (Greek), the term used in John 1.1: “In 

the beginning was the word.”


world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration or for the combustion 

of our fireplace; not a mea sure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if 

wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and 

Raphael, 5 have obviously no limits to their works except the limits of their 

lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render 

an image of every created thing. 

O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures, and not in 

castles or by the sword- blade any longer. The conditions are hard, but equal. 

Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know 

any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt 

take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled from the world by 

funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding 

tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also 

that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that 

others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen and shall represent all 

courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding 

actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded 

to the Capitol or the Exchange. 6 The world is full of renunciations and 

apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a 

long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan 7 has protected his 

well- beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they 

shall console thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to rehearse 

the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old shame before the holy ideal. 

And this is the reward; that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions 

of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome 

to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the whole land for thy 

park and manor, the sea for thy bath and navigation, without tax and without 

envy; the woods and the rivers thou shalt own, and thou shalt possess 

that wherein others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true landlord! sealord! 

air- lord! Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day 

and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or 

sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever 

are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love,— 

there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldst 

walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune 

or ignoble. 

1844 

5. Raffaello Sanzio (1483– 1520), Italian paint er. 

6. The stock exchange. 

7. Greek god of the woods and fields.

636 

EDGAR ALLAN POE 

1809–1849 

Edgar Allan Poe is a writer most American critics love to hate— or hate to love. In 

France, on the other hand, Poe has been considered a writer of genius by admirers 

from charles baudelaire to jacques lacan. Is this discrepancy a sign that the 

French lack the finesse in En glish that the Americans possess? Or does it say something 

about two very different concepts of poetic language? 

The American poet James Russell Lowell wrote in his Fable for Critics (1848): 

There comes Poe, with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge, 

Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge, 

Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, 

In a way to make people of common sense damn meters, 

Who has written some things quite the best of their kind, 

But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind. 

For American readers, this view of Poe as excessively calculating exists side by side 

with a view of Poe as completely lacking control: he is seen as either sick (alcoholic, 

melancholic, necrophilic, impotent) or dissolute (alcoholic, immoral, untrustworthy, 

untruthful). Was it precisely this combination of craft and transgression 

that appealed to a poet like Baudelaire? Lowell was certainly right about one thing: 

genius or madman, visionary or drunk, seer or trickster, excessively in control or 

excessively out of control, Edgar Allan Poe was not made to please “people of common 

sense.” 

Born in Boston to the traveling actors David and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, Edgar lost 

both his father (who disappeared) and his mother (who died) by his third birthday. 

Edgar Poe was renamed “Edgar Allan” when he entered the home of the childless 

Frances and John Allan, although they never legally adopted him. As a self- made 

prosperous merchant in Richmond, Virginia, John Allan had little in common with 

his brilliant foster child, and the financial support he gave was always fraught and 

conditional. Edgar entered the University of Virginia in 1826 (a year after classes 

began at the college founded by Thomas Jefferson); but in an attempt to supplement 

his insufficient allowance, he gambled, lost money, and, when John Allan refused to 

make good the debt, left the university. Enlisting in the army in Boston under the 

name “Edgar A. Perry,” he managed to pursue a double career: as a poet (his first 

book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was signed “by a Bostonian”) and as a military 

man. He asked for John Allan’s financial help in attending the West Point military 

academy (grudgingly given) and in publishing his second book (denied); Edgar no 

sooner enrolled than deliberately got himself expelled in 1831 for disobeying 

orders. 

Breaking with John Allan, Poe took up residence in Baltimore with the remnants 

of the Poe family: his father’s mother, his older brother, his paternal aunt Maria 

Clemm, and her eight- year- old daughter, Virginia (whom he married in 1836, when 

she was not quite fourteen). He began submitting tales to writing contests and rose 

through the ranks of the Southern Literary Messenger, penning biting book reviews 

that increased the journal’s circulation. His fierce originality and his desire for an 

American literary tradition not based on the “puffery” by which reviewers were 

expected to promote all American authors attracted both notice and misgivings: 

within two years he became the editor of the journal and then, in 1837, was fired. 

His would- be Southernness and his resentment of the Northern literary coteries 

through which writer’s reputations were usually made gave him little tolerance for 

Northern ideals. He recoiled against literary didacticism in part out of irritation 

with the self- satisfactions of Northern abolitionist literature.

EDGAR ALLAN POE / 637 

In 1838, still shy of his twentieth birthday, Poe wrote and published a novel, The 

Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and collected his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque 

a year later. Moving to Philadelphia and then to New York, he was a prolific 

reviewer for Graham’s Magazine, the Broadway Review, and other journals. He 

became a pop u lar success for two of his most unlikely feats of writing: his hoax 

about a balloon journey across the Atlantic and his poem “The Raven.” “The Raven” 

is based on a combination of absurdity and inevitability: a bereaved lover admits a 

black bird into his chamber on a stormy night and, receiving from the bird an unexpected 

answer to a question, asks it whether he will ever see his beloved again: the 

bird can only repeat the same word, “nevermore.” The poem was written in 1842; 

Poe’s wife Virginia had just burst a blood vessel while singing and was to die of 

tuberculosis in 1847. Critics have thus noted the biographical sources of the poem 

in Poe’s anticipated mourning, but Poe tells a very different story about the poem’s 

origins in our selection, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846). 

In demand as a writer and lecturer, Poe attempted to raise money to start a new 

journal called The Stylus, which had been a dream of his since 1843. But he often 

alienated even those close to him with his intermittent drinking, his ner vous depression, 

his delusions of persecution, and his campaigns against plagiarism (his accusations 

against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in par tic u lar lost him the friendship of 

Lowell, for whom Poe’s “sheer fudge” probably included false accusations). He died 

of “congestion of the brain” at age forty. 

Fated even beyond the grave to depend on the resources of those who lacked 

benevolence toward him, Poe owed his negative posthumous reputation to the editorial 

skills and moral perspectives of his literary executor, Rufus Griswold. Griswold 

told Poe’s story as a cautionary tale fit for a temperance tract: it was a life full of 

promise, ruined by drink and the lack of a moral compass. With the pathological 

base of Poe’s genius established, the diagnostic strain of American criticism later 

moved to psychoanalysis: now Poe was not morally bankrupt but mad, a patient 

etherized upon the table of necrophilia, repetition, and impotence. In 1926 Joseph 

Wood Krutch published Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius, a psychoanalytical 

study typical of this early phase of Freudian criticism. 

But in mid- nineteenth- century France, it was the poets who noticed him. Charles 

Baudelaire was immediately smitten by the image of a poet rejected and misunderstood 

in his own country. He translated many of Poe’s tales and introduced Poe to a 

privileged audience quite inclined to find value in what ever the small- minded, puritanical, 

and mediocre Americans could not understand. 

Baudelaire’s young admirer, the French poet stéphane mallarmé, who claimed 

to have learned En glish only to read Poe, went on to translate the poems, which 

Baudelaire had largely left untranslated. Baudelaire and Mallarmé found in Poe a 

theory of poetry that privileged the aesthetic over the moral, the beautiful over the 

true, and artistic effect over authorial intention. “The Philosophy of Composition,” 

published shortly after the success of “The Raven,” is Poe’s account of how he composed 

the poem “backwards” through sheer calculation. Often considered a mystification 

when read as a record of how Poe actually wrote “The Raven,” the essay 

became for Baudelaire and Mallarmé (and later, for roman jakobson, who inherited 

Poe through the French symbolists) a superb analysis of its poetic language. In Poe’s 

explanations, words and even letters— the signifier, not the signified— take the lead 

in creating the poetic effect. Like the intentionless repetition of a word by a bird 

made oracular only by the obsessed listener, the network of relations created by 

words alone is filled with meaning only by the reader. None of the essay’s causal 

explanations can be taken at face value, but what Poe calls the “air of consequence” 

created by treating effects as causes situates the author’s intention in the poem’s 

design rather than in his own experience or sentiment. Which does not, of course, 

prevent readers from attributing a morbid state of mourning to the author, whose 

calculations are seen— perhaps rightly— as covering over raw feeling.

638 / EDGAR ALLAN POE 

In the Freudian Marie Bonaparte’s Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1933; 

trans. 1949), the French poetic tradition met the psychoanalytic interpretation, and 

the status of Poe’s poetry was lifted from symptom to dream. Later, in Jacques 

Lacan’s celebrated “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’ ” (1966), Poe the patient was 

fully promoted to the position of analyst, ingeniously demonstrating, both in that 

story and in the mechanical repetitions depicted in “The Raven,” an understanding 

of what freud would call the “repetition compulsion.” 

In a way, the two sides of Poe cannot be dissociated. Exploring the vast gap and 

tension between the unconscious and the intellect, Poe would never have gone so far 

if he had not known both madness and fabrication. What is seen as Poe’s individual 

pathology, indeed, is often the revelation of aesthetic drives that are usually explained 

in another way. When Poe proclaims, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” that “the 

death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the 

world,” the generalization sounds pathological— until one remembers the many dead 

women in poetry whose authors cover up their attraction to the image by seeming 

only to lament it. In his stress on beauty, originality, and intense emotion, Poe is very 

much part of Romanticism; but in his emphasis on literary technique and construction; 

on details of meter, rhyme, and sound effects; and on fine calibration of scene, 

tone, and suspense, he is very much a forerunner of the modernism and its related 

formalism to come. 

bibliography 

Poe wrote in a surprising variety of literary genres: poems, fantastic tales designed 

to explore what Freud would call “the uncanny,” detective stories (a genre he seems 

to have invented), novels, reviews, and literary theory. For a good collection of Poe’s 

literary theory and criticism, see the interesting short collection edited by Leonard 

Cassuto, Edgar Allan Poe: Literary Theory and Criticism (1999). For more extensive 

collections, see the Library of America volume titled Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and 

Reviews (1984), with selections, notes, and a useful chronology by G. R. Thompson. 

Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Robert L. Hough (1965), and Selections 

from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by F. C. Prescott (1981), 

are also useful. Kenneth Silverman’s Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never- Ending 

Remembrance (1991) and Arthur Hobson Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe (1941; reprint, 

1997) are towering full- length biographies. For a more recent brief life, see Peter 

Ackroyd’s Poe: A Life Cut Short (2008). For an appreciation of broader biographical 

issues, the two essays on the history of Poe biography in A Companion to Poe Studies 

(ed. Eric W. Carlson, 1996) are indispensable, as is A Poe Log: A Documentary 

Life of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, (1987). 

For a book- length study of Poe’s criticism, see Robert D. Jacobs’s Poe: Journalist 

and Critic (1969). For good general collections of essays, see Critical Essays on Edgar 

Allan Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlson (1987), and The Cambridge Companion to Edgar 

Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes (2002). Recent American work on poetic theory, 

race, gender, and historical context is found in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, 

edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (1995), which alludes to the earlier 

The French Face of Edgar Allan Poe, by Patrick Quinn (1954). The texts generated 

around Jacques Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’ ”— authored by Lacan, 

Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, and others— are collected in The Purloined Poe 

(ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, 1988). And Roman Jakobson’s essay 

on “The Raven” is in his Language and Literature (1987). For bibliographies, see J. 

Lasley Dameron and Irby B. Cauthen Jr., Edgar Allan Poe: A Bibliography of Criticism, 

1827– 1967 (1974); Esther Hyneman, Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography of 

Books and Articles in En glish (1974); Leona Rasmussen, Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated 

Bibliography (1978); and the Cambridge Companion.

639 

The Philosophy of Composition 

Charles Dickens, in a note now lying before me, alluding to an examination I 

once made of the mechanism of “Barnaby Rudge,” 1 says—“By the way, are 

you aware that Godwin wrote his ‘Caleb Williams’ 2 backwards? He first 

involved his hero in a web of difficulties, forming the second volume, and 

then, for the first, cast about him for some mode of accounting for what had 

been done.” 

I cannot think this the precise mode of procedure on the part of Godwin— 

and indeed what he himself acknowledges, 3 is not altogether in accordance 

with Mr. Dickens’ idea— but the author of “Caleb Williams” was too good an 

artist not to perceive the advantage derivable from at least a somewhat similar 

pro cess. Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must 

be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen. 

It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its 

indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and 

especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention. 

There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story. 

Either history affords a thesis— or one is suggested by an incident of the 

day— or, at best, the author sets himself to work in the combination of striking 

events to form merely the basis of his narrative— designing, generally, to 

fill in with description, dialogue, or autorial comment, what ever crevices of 

fact, or action, may, from page to page, render themselves apparent. 

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality 

always in view— for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with 

so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest— I say to myself, in 

the first place, “Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the 

heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall 

I, on the present occasion, select?” Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly 

a vivid effect, I consider whether it can best be wrought by incident or 

tone— whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or 

by peculiarity both of incident and tone— afterward looking about me (or 

rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me 

in the construction of the effect. 

I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by 

any author who would— that is to say, who could— detail, step by step, the 

pro cesses by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of 

completion. Why such a paper has never been given to the world, I am much 

at a loss to say— but, perhaps, the autorial vanity has had more to do with the 

omission than any one other cause. Most writers— poets in especial— prefer 

having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy— an 

ecstatic intuition 4 — and would positively shudder at letting the public take a 

peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought— 

at the true purposes seized only at the last moment— at the innumerable 

1. An 1841 novel by Dickens (1812– 1870), the 

most pop u lar En glish novelist of the 19th century. 

Published serially, it presents a murder 

mystery whose solution Poe tried to guess from 

the early installments. 

2. A 1794 novel by the En glish po liti cal theorist 

William Godwin (1756– 1836). 

3. In his preface to the 1832 edition. 

4. A critical allusion to ralph waldo emerson’s 

essay “The Poet” (1844).


glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view— at the fully 

matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable— at the cautious selections 

and rejections— at the painful erasures and interpolations— in a word, 

at the wheels and pinions— the tackle for scene- shifting—the step- ladders 

and demon- traps—the cock’s feathers, the red paint and the black patches, 

which, in ninety- nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of 

the literary histrio. 5 

I am aware, on the other hand, that the case is by no means common, in 

which an author is at all in condition to retrace the steps by which his conclusions 

have been attained. In general, suggestions, having arisen pell- mell, 

are pursued and forgotten in a similar manner. 

For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the repugnance alluded 

to, nor, at any time, the least difficulty in recalling to mind the progressive 

steps of any of my compositions; and, since the interest of an analysis, or 

reconstruction, such as I have considered a desideratum, is quite in de pendent 

of any real or fancied interest in the thing analyzed, it will not be 

regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the modus operandi by 

which some one of my own works was put together. I select “The Raven,” 6 

as the most generally known. It is my design to render it manifest that no 

one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition— 

that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision 

and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem. 

Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance— or say 

the necessity— which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing 

a poem that should suit at once the pop u lar and the critical taste. 

We commence, then, with this intention. 

The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary work is too 

long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the 

im mensely important effect derivable from unity of impression— for, if two 

sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like 

totality is at once destroyed. But since, ceteris paribus, no poet can afford to 

dispense with any thing that may advance his design, it but remains to be 

seen whether there is, in extent, any advantage to counterbalance the loss 

of unity which attends it. Here I say no, at once. What we term a long poem 

is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones 7 — that is to say, of brief poetical 

effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as 

it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, 

through a psychal necessity, brief. For this reason, at least one half of the 

“Paradise Lost” 8 is essentially prose— a succession of poetical excitements 

interspersed, inevitably, with corresponding depressions— the whole being 

deprived, through the extremeness of its length, of the vastly important 

artistic element, totality, or unity, of effect. 

It appears evident, then, that there is a distinct limit, as regards length, 

to all works of literary art— the limit of a single sitting— and that, although 

in certain classes of prose composition, such as “Robinson Crusoe,” 9 (demand- 

5. Actor (Latin). 

6. Still Poe’s best- known poem (1845). 

7. Poe apparently has in mind the long, didactic 

poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807– 

1882), an im mensely pop u lar American poet. 

8. Long Christian epic (1667) by the En glish poet 

John Milton. 

9. A 1719 novel by the En glish writer Daniel 

Defoe; because it is episodic, recounting the 

“Life and adventures” of the title character, it 

need not be unified.

The Philosophy of Composition / 641 

ing no unity,) this limit may be advantageously overpassed, it can never 

properly be overpassed in a poem. Within this limit, the extent of a poem 

may be made to bear mathematical relation to its merit— in other words, to 

the excitement or elevation— again in other words, to the degree of the true 

poetical effect which it is capable of inducing; for it is clear that the brevity 

must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect:— this, with 

one proviso— that a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the 

production of any effect at all. 

Holding in view these considerations, as well as that degree of excitement 

which I deemed not above the pop u lar, while not below the critical, taste, I 

reached at once what I conceived the proper length for my intended poem— 

a length of about one hundred lines. It is, in fact, a hundred and eight. 

My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or effect, to be 

conveyed: and here I may as well observe that, throughout the construction, 

I kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work universally appreciable. 

I should be carried too far out of my immediate topic were I to demonstrate 

a point upon which I have repeatedly insisted, and which, with the 

poetical, stands not in the slightest need of demonstration— the point, I 

mean, that Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. 1 A few words, 

however, in elucidation of my real meaning, which some of my friends have 

evinced a disposition to misrepresent. That plea sure which is at once the 

most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in 

the contemplation of the beautiful. When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, 

they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect— they refer, 

in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul— not of intellect, or 

of heart— upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence 

of contemplating “the beautiful.” Now I designate Beauty as the 

province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects 

should be made to spring from direct causes— that objects should be attained 

through means best adapted for their attainment— no one as yet having 

been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation alluded to, is most 

readily attained in the poem. Now the object, Truth, or the satisfaction of 

the intellect, and the object, Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, 

although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable 

in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness 

(the truly passionate will comprehend me) which are absolutely antagonistic 

to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, or pleas ur able elevation, 

of the soul. It by no means follows from any thing here said, that passion, or 

even truth, may not be introduced, and even profitably introduced, into a 

poem— for they may serve in elucidation, or aid the general effect, as do 

discords in music, by contrast— but the true artist will always contrive, first, 

to tone them into proper subservience to the predominant aim, and, secondly, 

to enveil them, as far as possible, in that Beauty which is the atmosphere 

and the essence of the poem. 

Regarding, then, Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the 

tone of its highest manifestation— and all experience has shown that this 

1. Poe’s view of Beauty as universally pleasing 

was loosely derived from the German phi los o pher 

immanuel kant (1724– 1804), probably via the 

En glish poet and critic samuel taylor coleridge 

(1772– 1834).


tone is one of sadness. Beauty of what ever kind, in its supreme development, 

invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the 

most legitimate of all the poetical tones. 

The length, the province, and the tone, being thus determined, I betook 

myself to ordinary induction, with the view of obtaining some artistic 

piquancy which might serve me as a key- note in the construction of the 

poem— some pivot upon which the whole structure might turn. In carefully 

thinking over all the usual artistic effects— or more properly points, in the 

theatrical sense— I did not fail to perceive immediately that no one had 

been so universally employed as that of the refrain. The universality of its 

employment sufficed to assure me of its intrinsic value, and spared me the 

necessity of submitting it to analysis. I considered it, however, with regard 

to its susceptibility of improvement, and soon saw it to be in a primitive 

condition. As commonly used, the refrain, or burden, not only is limited to 

lyric verse, but depends for its impression upon the force of monotone— 

both in sound and thought. The plea sure is deduced solely from the sense 

of identity— of repetition. I resolved to diversify, and so vastly heighten, the 

effect, by adhering, in general, to the monotone of sound, while I continually 

varied that of thought: that is to say, I determined to produce continuously 

novel effects, by the variation of the application of the refrain— the 

refrain itself remaining, for the most part, unvaried. 

These points being settled, I next bethought me of the nature of my 

refrain. Since its application was to be repeatedly varied, it was clear that 

the refrain itself must be brief, for there would have been an insurmountable 

difficulty in frequent variations of application in any sentence of 

length. In proportion to the brevity of the sentence, would, of course, be 

the facility of the variation. This led me at once to a single word as the best 

refrain. 

The question now arose as to the character of the word. Having made up my 

mind to a refrain, the division of the poem into stanzas was, of course, a corollary: 

the refrain forming the close to each stanza. That such a close, to have 

force, must be sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis, admitted no 

doubt: and these considerations inevitably led me to the long o as the most 

sonorous vowel, in connection with r as the most producible consonant. 

The sound of the refrain being thus determined, it became necessary to 

select a word embodying this sound, and at the same time in the fullest 

possible keeping with that melancholy which I had predetermined as the 

tone of the poem. In such a search it would have been absolutely impossible 

to overlook the word “Nevermore.” In fact, it was the very first which presented 

itself. 

The next desideratum was a pretext for the continuous use of the one 

word “nevermore.” In observing the difficulty which I at once found in 

inventing a sufficiently plausible reason for its continuous repetition, I did 

not fail to perceive that this difficulty arose solely from the pre- assumption 

that the word was to be so continuously or monotonously spoken by a 

human being— I did not fail to perceive, in short, that the difficulty lay in 

the reconciliation of this monotony with the exercise of reason on the part 

of the creature repeating the word. Here, then, immediately arose the idea 

of a non- reasoning creature capable of speech; and, very naturally, a parrot, 

in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by


a Raven, as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with 

the intended tone. 

I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven— the bird of ill omen— 

monotonously repeating the one word, “Nevermore,” at the conclusion of 

each stanza, in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred 

lines. Now, never losing sight of the object supremeness, or perfection, at all 

points, I asked myself—“Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the 

universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death— was 

the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most 

poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, 

here also, is obvious—“When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, 

then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the 

world— and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic 

are those of a bereaved lover.” 

I had now to combine the two ideas; of a lover lamenting his deceased 

mistress and a Raven continuously repeating the word “Nevermore”— I had 

to combine these, bearing in mind my design of varying, at every turn, the 

application of the word repeated; but the only intelligible mode of such combination 

is that of imagining the Raven employing the word in answer to the 

queries of the lover. And here it was that I saw at once the opportunity 

afforded for the effect on which I had been depending— that is to say, the 

effect of the variation of application. I saw that I could make the first query 

propounded by the lover— the first query to which the Raven should reply 

“Nevermore”— that I could make this first query a commonplace one— the 

second less so— the third still less, and so on— until at length the lover, 

startled from his original nonchalance by the melancholy character of the 

word itself— by its frequent repetition— and by a consideration of the ominous 

reputation of the fowl that uttered it— is at length excited to superstition, 

and wildly propounds queries of a far different character— queries 

whose solution he has passionately at heart— propounds them half in superstition 

and half in that species of despair which delights in selftorture— 

propounds them not altogether because he believes in the prophetic or 

demoniac character of the bird (which, reason assures him, is merely repeating 

a lesson learned by rote) but because he experiences a phrenzied pleasure 

in so modeling his questions as to receive from the expected “Nevermore” 

the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow. Perceiving the 

opportunity thus afforded me— or, more strictly, thus forced upon me in the 

progress of the construction— I first established in mind the climax, or concluding 

query— that to which “Nevermore” should be in the last place an 

answer— that in reply to which this word “Nevermore” should involve the 

utmost conceivable amount of sorrow and despair. 

Here then the poem may be said to have its beginning— at the end, where 

all works of art should begin— for it was here, at this point of my preconsiderations, 

that I first put pen to paper in the composition of the stanza: 

“Prophet,” said I, “thing of evil! prophet still if bird or dev il! 

By that heaven that bends above us— by that God we both adore, 

Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aidenn. 2 

2. Arabic term for paradise, Adn (Eden).


It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore— 

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.” 

Quoth the raven “Nevermore.” 

I composed this stanza, at this point, first that, by establishing the climax, 

I might the better vary and graduate, as regards seriousness and 

importance, the preceding queries of the lover— and, secondly, that I might 

definitely settle the rhythm, the metre, and the length and general arrangement 

of the stanza— as well as graduate the stanzas which were to precede, 

so that none of them might surpass this in rhythmical effect. Had I been 

able, in the subsequent composition, to construct more vigorous stanzas, I 

should, without scruple, have purposely enfeebled them, so as not to interfere 

with the climacteric effect. 

And here I may as well say a few words of the versification. My first object 

(as usual) was originality. The extent to which this has been neglected, in 

versification, is one of the most unaccountable things in the world. Admitting 

that there is little possibility of variety in mere rhythm, it is still clear 

that the possible varieties of metre and stanza are absolutely infinite— and 

yet, for centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of 

doing, an original thing. The fact is, originality (unless in minds of very 

unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. 

In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a 

positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention 

than negation. 

Of course, I pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or metre of the 

“Raven.” The former is trochaic— the latter is octameter acatalectic, alternating 

with heptameter catalectic 3 repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, 

and terminating with tetrameter catalectic. Less pedantically— the feet 

employed throughout (trochees) consist of a long syllable followed by a 

short: the first line of the stanza consists of eight of these feet— the second 

of seven and a half (in effect two- thirds)—the third of eight— the fourth of 

seven and a half— the fifth the same— the sixth three and a half. Now, each 

of these lines, taken individually, had been employed before, and what 

originality the “Raven” has, is in their combination into stanza; nothing 

even remotely approaching this combination has ever been attempted. The 

effect of this originality of combination is aided by other unusual, and some 

altogether novel effects, arising from an extension of the application of 

the principles of rhyme and alliteration. 

The next point to be considered was the mode of bringing together the 

lover and the Raven— and the first branch of this consideration was the 

locale. For this the most natural suggestion might seem to be a forest, or 

the fields— but it has always appeared to me that a close circumscription of 

space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident:— it has the 

force of a frame to a picture. It has an indisputable moral power in keeping 

concentrated the attention, and, of course, must not be confounded with 

mere unity of place. 

I determined, then, to place the lover in his chamber— in a chamber rendered 

sacred to him by memories of her who had frequented it. The room is 

3. Lacking a syllable in the last foot (thus a line 

of 7 1 ⁄2 feet, as Poe explains). “Trochaic”: based 

on a metrical foot of the pattern long- short, or 

stressed- unstressed. “Acatalectic”: complete in 

its syllables (literally, “not catalectic”).


represented as richly furnished— this in mere pursuance of the ideas I have 

already explained on the subject of Beauty, as the sole true poetical thesis. 

The locale being thus determined, I had now to introduce the bird— and 

the thought of introducing him through the window, was inevitable. The 

idea of making the lover suppose, in the first instance, that the flapping of 

the wings of the bird against the shutter, is a “tapping” at the door, originated 

in a wish to increase, by prolonging, the reader’s curiosity, and in a 

desire to admit the incidental effect arising from the lover’s throwing open 

the door, finding all dark, and thence adopting the half- fancy that it was the 

spirit of his mistress that knocked. 

I made the night tempestuous, first, to account for the Raven’s seeking 

admission, and secondly, for the effect of contrast with the (physical) serenity 

within the chamber. 

I made the bird alight on the bust of Pallas, 4 also for the effect of contrast 

between the marble and the plumage— it being understood that the bust 

was absolutely suggested by the bird— the bust of Pallas being chosen, first, 

as most in keeping with the scholarship of the lover, and, secondly, for the 

sonorousness of the word, Pallas, itself. 

About the middle of the poem, also, I have availed myself of the force of 

contrast, with a view of deepening the ultimate impression. For example, 

an air of the fantastic— approaching as nearly to the ludicrous as was 

admissible— is given to the Raven’s entrance. He comes in “with many a 

flirt and flutter.” 

Not the least obeisance made he— not a moment stopped or stayed he, 

But with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door. 

In the two stanzas which follow, the design is more obviously carried 

out:— 

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling 

By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, 

“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven thou,” I said, “art sure no craven, 

Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the nightly shore— 

Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian 5 shore!” 

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.” 

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, 

Though its answer little meaning— little relevancy bore; 

For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being 

Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door— 

Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door, 

With such name as “Nevermore.” 

The effect of the dénouement being thus provided for, I immediately drop 

the fantastic for a tone of the most profound seriousness:— this tone commencing 

in the stanza directly following the one last quoted with the line, 

But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only, etc. 

4. A title of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, 

the arts, and war. 

5. Of or pertaining to Pluto, Roman god of the 

underworld.


From this epoch the lover no longer jests— no longer sees any thing even 

of the fantastic in the Raven’s demeanor. He speaks of him as a “grim, 

ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore,” and feels the “fiery eyes” 

burning into his “bosom’s core.” This revolution of thought, or fancy, on the 

lover’s part, is intended to induce a similar one on the part of the reader— to 

bring the mind into a proper frame for the dénouement— which is now 

brought about as rapidly and as directly as possible. 

With the dénouement proper— with the Raven’s reply, “Nevermore,” to 

the lover’s final demand if he shall meet his mistress in another world— the 

poem, in its obvious phase, that of a simple narrative, may be said to have its 

completion. So far, every thing is within the limits of the accountable— of 

the real. A raven, having learned by rote the single word “Nevermore,” and 

having escaped from the custody of its own er, is driven, at midnight, through 

the violence of a storm, to seek admission at a window from which a light 

still gleams— the chamber- window of a student, occupied half in poring over 

a volume, half in dreaming of a beloved mistress deceased. The casement 

being thrown open at the fluttering of the bird’s wings, the bird itself perches 

on the most con ve nient seat out of the immediate reach of the student, who, 

amused by the incident and the oddity of the visiter’s demeanor, demands of 

it, in jest and without looking for a reply, its name. The raven addressed, 

answers with its customary word, “Nevermore”— a word which finds immediate 

echo in the melancholy heart of the student, who, giving utterance 

aloud to certain thoughts suggested by the occasion, is again startled by the 

fowl’s repetition of “Nevermore.” The student now guesses the state of the 

case, but is impelled, as I have before explained, by the human thirst for selftorture, 

and in part by superstition, to propound such queries to the bird as 

will bring him, the lover, the most of the luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated 

answer “Nevermore.” With the indulgence, to the utmost extreme, of 

this selftorture, the narration, in what I have termed its first or obvious 

phase, has a natural termination, and so far there has been no overstepping 

of the limits of the real. 

But in subjects so handled, however skilfully, or with however vivid an 

array of incident, there is always a certain hardness or nakedness, which 

repels the artistical eye. Two things are invariably required— first, some 

amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some 

amount of suggestiveness— some under current, however indefinite of meaning. 

It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a work of art so much of 

that richness (to borrow from colloquy a forcible term) which we are too fond 

of confounding with the ideal. It is the excess of the suggested meaning— it 

is the rendering this the upper instead of the under current of the theme— 

which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind) the so called 

poetry of the so called transcendentalists. 6 

Holding these opinions, I added the two concluding stanzas of the poem— 

their suggestiveness being thus made to pervade all the narrative which has 

preceded them. The under current of meaning is rendered first apparent in 

the lines— 

6. A group of 19th- century writers and phi los o- 

phers in New En gland; they viewed the individual 

soul as corresponding directly with the 

universe (thus eliminating language) and they 

located the truest source of knowledge in intuition, 

not experience. Emerson was one of the 

foremost Transcendentalists.

KARL MARX and FRIEDRICH ENGELS / 647 

“Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” 

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore!” 

It will be observed that the words, “from out my heart,” involve the first 

meta phorical expression in the poem. They, with the answer, “Nevermore,” 

dispose the mind to seek a moral in all that has been previously narrated. 

The reader begins now to regard the Raven as emblematical— but it is not 

until the very last line of the very last stanza, that the intention of making 

him emblematical of Mournful and Never- ending Remembrance is permitted 

distinctly to be seen: 

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, 

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; 

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, 

And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; 

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor 

Shall be lifted— nevermore. 

1846 

KARL MARX 

FRIEDRICH ENGELS 

1818–1883 1820–1895 

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are central figures in the history of literary criticism 

and theory and in the development of cultural studies, though neither produced 

a body of literary- critical work. The young Marx wrote lyrics, attempted 

drama and fiction, and read deeply in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury German 

philosophy and aesthetics, and the writings of Marx and Engels often refer 

to and quote literature from classical Greek drama to the novels of Charles Dickens. 

But as economic historians, social theorists, and revolutionaries seeking to 

change the world, their main work lay elsewhere, and their direct contributions to 

literary criticism are scattered and uneven. Yet perhaps this incompleteness makes 

their comments and observations about literature and criticism all the more suggestive, 

giving a long line of twentiethcentury writers— including györgy lukács, 

Bertolt Brecht, walter benjamin, gayatri spivak, and fredric jameson— much 

speculative and interpretive leeway in developing their own Marxist theories of 

literature. 

To many it may seem perverse to study Marxist theory today, given the collapse 

between 1989 and 1991 of Communist governments in the Soviet Union and in the 

nations of Eastern Eu rope. But we must clearly distinguish between Marx and 

Engels as social theorists, phi los o phers, historians, and cultural critics and as revolutionaries— 

or, more accurately, as revolutionaries under whose name Communist 

leaders and parties seized power. The fall of par tic u lar regimes, “Marxist” more 

in name than in ideas, does little to lessen the impact of Marx’s relentless, fascinated, 

shocked (and shocking) examination of capitalism and its costs to the men 

and women caught in its grasp. In brilliant passages such as our selection from 

Capital (1867) on the working day, his skillfully modulated prose can be powerfully 

moving.

648 / KARL MARX and FRIEDRICH ENGELS 

For literary and cultural criticism, the seminal passage by Marx appears in his 

preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Po liti cal Economy (1858– 59, excerpted 

below). Here, Marx emphasizes that he is concerned primarily with the “material 

conditions of life,” the “economic structure of society.” On this “foundation . . . rises 

a legal and po liti cal superstructure”; moreover, “The mode of production of material 

life conditions the social, po liti cal and intellectual life pro cess in general. It is not 

the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their 

social being that determines their consciousness.” This formulation raises a number 

of questions: To what degree is consciousness socially and eco nom ical ly “determined”? 

What is the role of human agency? How closely connected are the base and 

the superstructure, and can the latter— which includes intellectual work and cultural 

institutions— affect the former? In the twentieth century, both Louis Althusser 

and Raymond Williams were later to wrestle directly with these questions. 

The answers of Marx and Engels waver. As a famous passage (excerpted below) 

from the Grundrisse (1857– 58, Foundations or Outlines) suggests, Marx found it 

difficult to explain the relationship between Greek art and the society within which 

it arose. Engels, too, recognized the limitations of the base / superstructure model. 

In a letter to Joseph Bloch (our final selection), Engels maintains that “According to 

the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history 

is the production and reproduction of real life,” insisting that economics is not the 

only determinant and leaving room for the influence of “human minds.” 

Marx was born in Trier, Prus sia (a region now part of Germany), the son of a Jewish 

lawyer who had converted to Protestantism to protect his job. Marx studied at 

the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena, receiving his doctorate in April 1841 for a 

thesis on the Greek phi los o phers Democritus and Epicurus. In 1842 he edited a 

radical newspaper in Cologne, but the German authorities, angered by his criticisms, 

forced him to resign in 1843. He then traveled to Paris, where he and Engels, 

whom he had met in Cologne, began their collaboration. Engels, born in Barmen, in 

western Germany, was the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer; in the 1840s, he 

managed a factory in En gland that his father owned, and his horror at the harsh 

economic and social conditions in Manchester led him to write The Condition of the 

Working Class in En gland in 1844 (1845). Engels later said that as he and Marx 

worked together in Paris, their “agreement in all theoretical fields became obvious.” 

Marx and Engels’s joint work in the 1840s includes The Holy Family (1845) and 

The German Ideology (not published until 1932). In these texts, and in Marx’s 

polemical pamphlet The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), they sought to prove that economic 

and social forces shape human consciousness. This materialism was meant to 

displace the idealist view that, conversely, human consciousness shapes economic 

and social forces and forms. They based their interpretation of reality on dialectical 

materialism, believing that all change results from the constant conflict arising from 

the oppositions inherent in all ideas, movements, and events. They further argued 

that the internal tensions and contradictions in capitalism would lead inevitably to 

its demise. 

Also important are Marx’s writings collected in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 

of 1844 (1932; trans. 1959), which contain much of his most passionate, 

incisive thinking about industrial conditions and the nature of consciousness under 

capitalism and present an excellent entry point into Marxist cultural analysis. 

Building on the work of the German phi los o pher Ludwig Feuerbach, author of The 

Essence of Christianity (1841), Marx is especially concerned here with the origin 

and impact of alienation. The industrial capitalist economy, says Marx, “alienates” 

individuals from the work that they do; unable to control their own labor, which 

they must “give” (sell) to another, they lack control and knowledge of themselves 

and never achieve their full human potential. However much they resent their situation, 

they believe— that is, they are conditioned to believe— that it cannot be

KARL MARX and FRIEDRICH ENGELS / 649 

changed, and that ultimately they have only themselves to blame for their discontent 

and failures. 

Marx and Engels’s most significant publication of the de cade appeared in London 

in 1848: Manifesto of the Communist Party (soon known by and reprinted with the 

shorter title The Communist Manifesto). In this intense pamphlet Marx (who did 

the bulk of the writing) describes the triumphs of capitalism; the creation of a 

world market, world literature, and cosmopolitanism; the misery that capitalism 

imposes on the masses; the class struggle between the exploiters (own ers) and the 

exploited (workers); the connection of people primarily via cash; the inevitability of 

revolution; and the dawn of a new, class- free society. Though specifically commissioned 

to state the principles and objectives of the Communist League (a secret 

or ga ni za tion composed primarily of German emigrés), it quickly became the position 

paper of militant working- class movements everywhere. 

Because of his po liti cal writing and activity, Marx was expelled from both France 

and Germany in the late 1840s; in May 1849 he settled with his family in London. 

There, supported by Engels but nonetheless often in poverty, he resided for the 

remainder of his life. His major works during these de cades are the Grundrisse, a 

manuscript of some 800 printed pages (1857– 58, published 1939– 41); the multivolume 

Theories of Surplus Value (1860s, published 1905– 10); and above all Das Kapital, 

volume 1 of which appeared in 1867 (trans. 1886), with volumes 2 and 3, edited 

by Engels, published posthumously in 1885 and 1894 (trans. 1907, 1909). Marx also 

wrote many articles for newspapers in the United States and Eu rope. Engels’s writings 

include Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (1878, usually referred to 

as Anti- Dühring), parts of which later appeared as a summary of the basics of 

socialism titled Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1892); The Origin of the Family, 

Private Property, and the State (1884); and Dialectics of Nature (1925). 

A literary theorist and critic reading Marx and Engels may raise questions that 

the texts do not answer. What roles do writers, critics, and intellectuals play? Do 

they illuminate for workers the nature of capitalist exploitation, or do they act at 

the ser vice of those who already and best understand their true circumstances? 

Should writers be free to state the social and po liti cal facts as they see them, or 

must the goal of working- class revolution always shape their work— and if so, who 

sets the limits? 

Marx has a simple but powerful reply: the answers will come only when the contradictions 

within capitalism produce them. Capitalism has no remedy for the worst 

social and economic problems that it creates and that will eventually rend it asunder. 

Marx is certain that capitalism will end, and why: but no one can know exactly 

what the roles of intellectuals and critics will be, and what the new society will look 

like, until the force of historical necessity brings them into being. 

Meanwhile, Marxist critics have work to perform, practicing a discipline linked 

to the goal of radical social change. Thus they must approach literature, literary 

education, criticism, and theory as integral parts of economic and social life. In 

The German Ideology, as our selection indicates, Marx and Engels emphasize that 

we must study real men and women and real pro cesses, not what has typically been 

said or thought by and about them. 

Marx promotes “ideology critique,” that is, the demystifying exposure of how 

class interests operate through cultural forms, whether po liti cal or legal, religious 

or philosophical, educational or literary. It is the nature of ideology to conceal the 

reality of class struggle from our perception and consciousness; and insofar as 

working- class people unconsciously absorb bourgeois values, they are unwitting 

carriers of “false consciousness.” 

The term ideology rarely appears in Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital, but it is 

implicit in many of Marx’s formulations of the difference between the surface and 

reality of capitalist society. Marxist critics are expected to investigate the systemic


masking of the real methods and consequences of existing socioeconomic arrangements. 

Sometimes, however, Marx uses the term differently, as when he declares in 

A Contribution to the Critique of Po liti cal Economy that we grow aware of and fight 

the conflict between classes in “ideological forms.” 

Later Marxists have developed both the positive and negative senses of ideology. 

One dominant line of inquiry follows from the writings of antonio gramsci, who 

in his Prison Notebooks (published 1945– 75) describes ideology as “the terrain on 

which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.”; he explores 

how a privileged social class can achieve cultural “hegemony,” the manufactured 

assent to its beliefs and practices won peacefully through ideology. This concept of 

hegemony, developed by the British Marxist Raymond Williams (especially in Marxism 

and Literature, 1977) and by those he has influenced (notably stuart hall and 

dick hebdige), has become fundamental to cultural studies. Critics use it in studying 

classic texts, the relationships and differences between canonical and noncanonical 

literature, pop u lar culture, the media, education, and publishing— all outlets 

for ideology. 

The power of ideology to mask and obscure is also at work in what Marx calls 

“the fetishism of commodities,” which he discusses in our first selection from Capital. 

Under capitalism, human relations are increasingly characterized by more or 

less thoroughgoing alienation, monetization, and commodification. Relationships 

between workers and own ers, buyers and sellers, are mediated through the things 

produced. These commodities become objects of fetishism— seeming to have an 

objective existence of their own that obscures the individual labor involved in their 

production. By being exchanged, they acquire a seemingly inherent value distinct 

from their use value or physical properties. 

As a social and cultural theory, Marxism demands of its followers ongoing critical 

scrutiny and selfquestioning of its own basic texts, which are suggestive but sometimes 

flawed and often incomplete. Marx and Engels underestimated, for example, 

the extraordinary power of capitalism to turn back and absorb opposition, and 

apparently they overlooked the damaging overstatements and reductiveness that mar 

their arguments. Moreover, though Marx was acutely responsive to the economic 

and po liti cal situation of workers, he appears incapable of actually seeing and making 

imaginative contact with them and their families, of conveying how they live, 

think, and feel. Even in his most illuminating work, Marx often mirrors the dehumanizing 

tendencies that his radical critiques of capitalism condemn. Individuals 

matter most to him as embodiments of ideas, as components of systems— a form of 

thinking that the best novelists of his time, such as Dickens and Balzac, brilliantly 

exposed and corrected. 

On the “material conditions of life” and the “economic structure of society,” Marx 

and Engels are sharp and compelling; on the subject of the creative and critical consciousness 

of persons and cultures, they falter. For foundational Marxist interpretations 

of cultural life, one must look instead to the work of such later theorists and 

critics as w. e. b. du bois, edmund wilson (in his writings of the 1930s), theodor 

adorno, C. L. R. James, and Raymond Williams. They built upon but went beyond 

the insights that Marx and Engels provide, and their critical projects drew from the 

literary texts and cultural traditions that Marx and Engels admired but never fully 

engaged. 

bibliography 

The En glish translation of the collected works of Marx and Engels fills fifty volumes, 

Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works (1975– 2005). The best single- volume 

editions are David McLellan’s Karl Marx: Selected Writings (1977) and Robert C. 

Tucker’s Marx- Engels Reader (2d ed., 1978). For Marx’s letters, see Correspondence, 

edited by Saul K. Padover (1979). Helpful introductions to Marx’s life and writings 

include David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (1973); Isaiah Berlin, Karl

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 / 651 

Marx: His Life and Environment (4th ed., 1978); and Francis Wheen, Karl Marx 

(1999). On Engels, see Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class 

(1974), an excellent work of cultural history; W. O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich 

Engels (1976); Terrell Carver, Engels (1981), a good overview; and Carver, Marx and 

Engels: The Intellectual Relationship (1983). 

There is a vast secondary literature on Marx and Engels’s views on literature and 

criticism and on the long line of theorists and critics who belong to the Marxist tradition. 

Essay collections provide a good starting point: see Radical Perspectives in the 

Arts, edited by Lee Baxandall (1972); Marxism and Art: Writings in Aesthetics and 

Criticism, edited by Berel Lang and Forrest Williams (1972); Marxism and Art: Essays 

Classic and Contemporary, edited by Maynard Solomon (1973); Karl Marx and Frederick 

Engels on Literature and Art: A Selection of Writings, edited by Lee Baxandall 

and Stefan Morawski (1974); and Marxists on Literature: An Anthology, edited by David 

Craig (1975). More up- to- date are Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism, edited 

by Francis Mulhern (1992), and Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader, edited by Terry 

Ea gleton and Drew Milne (1996). See also Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Ernst 

Bloch (1977), and Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson 

and Lawrence Grossberg (1988). Also stimulating are the essays included in Marxist 

Shakespeares, edited by Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (2001). 

On the history of Marx and Engels’s interest in and response to literature, Peter 

Demetz’s Marx, Engels, and the Poets: Origins of Marxist Literary Criticism (1967) 

and S. S. Prawer’s Karl Marx and World Literature (1976) are informative. A concise 

and pop u lar survey of Marxist literary criticism is Terry Ea gleton, Marxism and 

Literary Criticism (1976). Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (1979), deals well 

with Rus sian formalism and Marxist theory and criticism; and Fredric Jameson, 

Marxism and Form: Twentieth- Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971), 

examines several leading twentiethcentury intellectuals influenced by Marx’s writings. 

In The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) and Ideology: An Introduction (1991), 

Ea gleton studies the meanings and implications of two key terms in Marxist criticism, 

ideology and aesthetics. Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, edited 

by Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (2002), also merits attention. 

On the relationships between Marxism and recent theories of literature and 

criticism, consult Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation 

(1982); John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (1986); and Scott Wilson, 

Cultural Materialism: Theory and Practice (1995). Dated but worth consulting are 

Lee Baxandall, Marxism and Aesthetics: A Selective Annotated Bibliography (1968), 

and Chris Bullock and David Peck, Guide to Marxist Literary Criticism (1980). 

There is a helpful, concise bibliography in Richard Schmitt’s Introduction to Marx 

and Engels: A Critical Reconstruction (2d ed., 1997). See also Cecil L. Eubanks, 

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: An Analytical Bibliography (2d ed., 1984), and the 

bibliography included in David McLellan, Karl Marx: A Biography (4th ed., 2006). 

From Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 1 

* * * 

We have proceeded from the premises of po liti cal economy. 2 We have 

accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the 

separation of labour, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and 

rent of land— likewise division of labour, competition, the concept of 

1. Translated by Martin Milligan. 

2. The 19th- century social science concerned 

with the relations between po liti cal and economic 

pro cesses (now often separated into po liti cal science 

and economics).


exchange- value, etc. On the basis of po liti cal economy itself, in its own 

words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and 

becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; 3 that the wretchedness 

of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his 

production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of 

capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible 

form; that finally the distinction between capitalist and land- rentier, 4 

like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory- worker, disappears 

and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes— the 

property-owners and the propertyless workers. 

Po liti cal economy proceeds from the fact of private property, but it does 

not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulae the material 

pro cess through which private property actually passes, and these formulae it 

then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws— i.e., it does not demonstrate 

how they arise from the very nature of private property. Po liti cal 

economy does not disclose the source of the division between labour and 

capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship 

of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the 

ultimate cause; i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to evolve. Similarly, 

competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. 

As to how far these external and apparently fortuitous circumstances 

are but the expression of a necessary course of development, po liti cal economy 

teaches us nothing. We have seen how, to it, exchange itself appears to 

be a fortuitous fact. The only wheels which po liti cal economy sets in motion 

are avarice and the war amongst the avaricious— competition. 

Precisely because po liti cal economy does not grasp the connections 

within the movement, it was possible to counterpose, for instance, the doctrine 

of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft- liberty 

to the doctrine of the corporation, the doctrine of the division of landed 

property to the doctrine of the big estate— for competition, craft- liberty 

and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only 

as fortuitous, premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, the corporation, 

and feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and natural 

consequences. 

Now, therefore, we have to grasp the essential connection between private 

property, avarice, and the separation of labour, capital and landed 

property; between exchange and competition, value and the devaluation of 

men, monopoly and competition, etc.; the connection between this whole 

estrangement and the money- system. 

Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the po liti cal 

economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition 

explains nothing. He merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous 

distance. He assumes in the form of fact, of an event, what he is supposed to 

deduce— namely, the necessary relationship between two things— between, 

for example, division of labour and exchange. Theology in the same way 

explains the origin of evil by the fall of man: that is, it assumes as a fact, in 

historical form, what has to be explained. 

3. Because labor itself is sold to others, and at a 

very low price. 

4. One who lives on income from land, stocks, or 

bonds.

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 / 653 

We proceed from an actual economic fact. 

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the 

more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an 

ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the 

increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the 

devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it 

produces itself and the worker as a commodity— and does so in the proportion 

in which it produces commodities generally. 

This fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces— 

labour’s product— confronts it as something alien, as a power in de pen dent 

of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been congealed 

in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. 

Labour’s realization is its objectification. In the conditions dealt with by 

po liti cal economy this realization of labour appears as loss of reality for the 

workers; objectification as loss of the object and object- bondage; appropriation 

as estrangement, as alienation. 

So much does labour’s realization appear as loss of reality that the worker 

loses reality to the point of starving to death. So much does objectification 

appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most 

necessary not only for his life but for his work. Indeed, labour itself becomes 

an object which he can get hold of only with the greatest effort and with the 

most irregular interruptions. So much does the appropriation of the object 

appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer 

can he possess and the more he falls under the dominion of his product, 

capital. 

All these consequences are contained in the definition that the worker is 

related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For on this premise 

it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the 

alien objective world becomes which he creates over- against himself, the 

poorer he himself— his inner world— becomes, the less belongs to him as his 

own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he 

retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life 

no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, 

the greater is the worker’s lack of objects. What ever the product of his 

labour is, he is not. Therefore the greater this product, the less is he himself. 

The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour 

becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, in depen 

dently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power of its own 

confronting him; it means that the life which he has conferred on the object 

confronts him as something hostile and alien. 

Let us now look more closely at the objectifi cation, at the production of 

the worker; and therein at the estrangement, the loss of the object, his 

product. 

The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous 

external world. It is the material on which his labor is manifested, in which 

it is active, from which and by means of which it produces. 

But just as nature provides labor with the means of life in the sense that 

labour cannot live without objects on which to operate, on the other hand, 

it also provides the means of life in the more restricted sense— i.e., the means 

for the physical subsistence of the worker himself.


Thus the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world, 

sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life in the double 

respect: first, that the sensuous external world more and more ceases to be 

an object belonging to his labour— to be his labour’s means of life; and secondly, 

that it more and more ceases to be means of life in the immediate 

sense, means for the physical subsistence of the worker. 

Thus in this double respect the worker becomes a slave of his object, 

first, in that he receives an object of labour, i.e., in that he receives work; 

and secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. Therefore, it enables 

him to exist, first, as a worker; and, second, as a physical subject. The 

extremity of this bondage is that it is only as a worker that he continues to 

maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject 

that he is a worker. 

(The laws of po liti cal economy express the estrangement of the worker 

in his object thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; 

the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy 

he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes 

the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the 

worker; the mightier labour becomes, the more powerless becomes the 

worker; the more ingenious labour becomes, the duller becomes the worker 

and the more he becomes nature’s bondsman.) 

Po liti cal economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of 

labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) 

and production. It is true that labour produces for the rich wonderful 

things— but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces— but 

for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty— but for the worker, deformity. It 

replaces labour by machines— but some of the workers it throws back to a 

barbarous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into machines. It 

produces intelligence— but for the worker idiocy, cretinism. 

The direct relationship of labour to its produce is the relationship of the 

worker to the objects of his production. The relationship of the man of means 

to the objects of production and to production itself is only a consequence of 

this first relationship— and confirms it. We shall consider this other aspect 

later. 

When we ask, then, what is the essential relationship of labour we are 

asking about the relationship of the worker to production. 

Till now we have been considering the estrangement, the alienation of the 

worker only in one of its aspects, i.e., the worker’s relationship to the products 

of his labour. But the estrangement is manifested not only in the result 

but in the act of production— within the producing activity itself. How 

would the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were 

it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from 

himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity of production. 

If then the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be 

active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the 

estrangement of the object of labour is merely summarized the estrangement, 

the alienation, in the activity of labour itself. 

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour? 

First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong 

to his essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself

The German Ideology / 655 

but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely 

his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. 

The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work 

feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is 

working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; 

it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a 

means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the 

fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned 

like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a 

labour of self- sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of 

labour for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone 

else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but 

to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, 

of the human brain and the human heart, operates in de pen dently 

of the individual— that is, operates on him as an alien, divine or diabolical 

activity— in the same way the worker’s activity is not his spontaneous activity. 

It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self. 

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be 

freely active in any but his animal functions— eating, drinking, procreating, 

or at most in his dwelling and in dressing- up, etc.; and in his human 

functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is 

animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. 

* * * 

1844 1932 

From The German Ideology 1 

* * * 

The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active 

in a definite way enter into these definite social and po liti cal relations. 

Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, 

and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social 

and po liti cal structure with production. The social structure and the State 

are continually evolving out of the life pro cess of definite individuals, but of 

individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people’s imagination, 

but as they really are; i.e., as they operate, produce materially, and 

hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions 

in de pen dent of their will. 

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly 

interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, 

the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of 

men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. 2 

The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, 

laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the 

1. Translated by S. Ryazanskaya, based on an 

earlier translation by W. Lough. 

2. That is, the actions that human beings take in 

their relationship to the productive forces of 

their society.


producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.— real, active men, as they are 

conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the 

intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness 

can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of 

men is their actual life- process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances 

appear upside- down as in a camera obscura, 3 this phenomenon arises 

just as much from their historical life- process as the inversion of objects on 

the ret i na does from their physical life- process. 

In direct contrast to German philosophy 4 which descends from heaven to 

earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out 

from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, 

imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from 

real, active men, and on the basis of their real life- process we demonstrate 

the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life- process. 

The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of 

their material life- process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material 

premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and 

their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance 

of in de pen dence. They have no history, no development; but men, 

developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, 

along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their 

thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. 

In the first method of approach the startingpoint is consciousness taken as 

the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is 

the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely 

as their consciousness. 

This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the 

real premises and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are 

men, not in any fantastic isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically 

perceptible pro cess of development under definite conditions. As soon 

as this active life- process is described, history ceases to be a collection of 

dead facts as it is with the empiricists 5 (themselves still abstract), or an 

imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists. 

Where speculation ends— in real life— there real, positive science begins: 

the repre sen ta tion of the practical activity, of the practical pro cess of development 

of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge 

has to take its place. 

* * * 

1845–46 1932 

3. Literally, “dark chamber” (Latin): an apparatus 

invented in the 17th century consisting of a darkened 

box with an aperture (usually a lens) through 

which an image is projected (inverted) on the 

opposite wall. 

4. That is, idealism, which holds that reality and 

knowledge derive not from perceptions but from 

ideas or the workings of the human mind or spirit; 

idealists include immanuel kant (1724– 1804) 

and georg wilhelm friedrich hegel (1770– 

1831). 

5. Those who believe that experiences, especially 

of the senses, are the only sources of knowledge; 

for example, david hume (1711– 1776).

657 

From The Communist Manifesto 1 

A spectre is haunting Europe— the spectre of Communism. All the Powers 

of old Eu rope have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: 

Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, 2 French Radicals and German 

police- spies. 

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic 

by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled 

back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced 

opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries? 

Two things result from this fact. 

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all Eu ro pe an Powers to be 

itself a Power. 

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole 

world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery 

tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself. 

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, 

3 and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the En glish, 

French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages. 

I. Bourgeois and Proletarians 4 

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. 

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild- master 5 and 

journeyman, 6 in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition 

to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open 

fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary re- constitution of 

society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. 

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated 

arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social 

rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the 

Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guildmasters, journeymen, apprentices, 

serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations. 

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal 

society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established 

new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of 

the old ones. 

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive 

feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms: Society as a whole 

1. Originally titled Manifesto of the Communist 

Party. This En glish text was edited by Engels. 

2. François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (1787– 

1874), French statesman and historian who supported 

the idea of a constitutional monarchy. 

Klemens, Wenzel, Prince von Metternich (1773– 

1859), Austrian statesman and foreign minister, 

who worked to suppress nationalist and pop u lar 

constitutional movements. 

3. Members of the Communist League (an international 

association made up mostly of German 

emigrés) met in November 1847; they commissioned 

the writing of the Manifesto. 

4. By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern 

Capitalists, own ers of the means of social production 

and employers of wage- labour. By proletariat, 

the class of modern wagelabourers who, 

having no means of production of their own, are 

reduced to selling their labour- power in order to 

live [Engels’s note]. 

5. Guild- master, that is, a full member of a guild, 

a master within, not a head of a guild [Engels’s 

note]. 

6. A skilled artisan, not yet a full member of a 

guild, who works for master artisans rather than 

for himself.


is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great 

classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. 

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers 7 of the 

earliest towns. From these burgesses 8 the first elements of the bourgeoisie 

were developed. 

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, 9 opened up fresh 

ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East- Indian and Chinese markets, 

the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the 

means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to 

navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the 

revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. 

The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was 

monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants 

of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guildmasters 

were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division 

of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face 

of division of labour in each single workshop. 

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even 

manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised 

industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the 

giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial 

millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. 

Modern industry has established the world- market, for which the discovery 

of America paved the way. This market has given an im mense development 

to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development 

has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as 

industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion 

the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background 

every class handed down from the Middle Ages. 

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a 

long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production 

and of exchange. 

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a 

corresponding po liti cal advance of that class. An oppressed class under the 

sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self- governing association in the 

medieval commune; 1 here in de pen dent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), 

there taxable “third estate” 2 of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, 

in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi- feudal 

or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in 

fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at 

last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world- market, 

conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive po liti cal 

sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing 

the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. 

7. Privileged middle class. 

8. Citizens. 

9. The Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of 

Africa. 

1. This was the name given their urban communities 

by the townsmen of Italy and France, after 

they had purchased or wrested their initial rights 

of self- government from their feudal lords 

[Engels’s note]. 

2. The common people in France (the first estate 

or po liti cal order was the clergy, the second the 

nobility).

The Communist Manifesto / 659 

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. 

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all 

feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley 

feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining 

no other nexus between man and man than naked self- interest, than callous 

“cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, 

of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine 3 sentimentalism, in the icy water 

of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, 

and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up 

that single, unconscionable freedom— Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, 

veiled by religious and po liti cal illusions, it has substituted naked, 

shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. 

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured 

and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, 

the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wagelabourers. 

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and 

has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. 

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display 

of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists 4 so much admire, found 

its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to 

show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far 

surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it 

has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of 

nations and crusades. 

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments 

of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them 

the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in 

unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all 

earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted 

disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation 

distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast- frozen 

relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, 

are swept away, all new- formed ones become antiquated before they can 

ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at 

last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his 

relations with his kind. 

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the 

bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, 

settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. 

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world- market given a 

cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To 

the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry 

the national ground on which it stood. All old- established national industries 

have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by 

new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for 

all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw 

3. Materialist middleclass; the term also is used 

by matthew arnold, “The Function of Criticism 

at the Present Time” (1864; see below). 

4. Reactionaries.


material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose 

products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. 

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find 

new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and 

climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self- sufficiency, 

we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of 

nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual 

creations of individual nations become common property. National 

one- sidedness and narrow- mindedness become more and more impossible, 

and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world 

literature. 

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, 

by the im mensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even 

the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities 

are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese 

walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners 

to capitulate. 5 It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt 

the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it 

calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In 

one word, it creates a world after its own image. 

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has 

created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared 

with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population 

from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent 

on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi- barbarian countries dependent 

on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the 

East on the West. 

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered 

state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has 

agglomerated population, centralised means of production, and has concentrated 

property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was 

po liti cal centralisation. In de pen dent, or but loosely connected provinces, 

with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became 

lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, 

one national class- interest, one frontier and one customs- tariff. 

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created 

more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding 

generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, 

application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam- navigation, railways, 

electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, 

canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground— what 

earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered 

in the lap of social labour? 

* * * 

1848, 1888 

5. China unsuccessfully fought the Opium Wars (1839– 42, 1856– 60) to prevent the expansion of Western 

trade.

661 

From Grundrisse 1 

* * * 

In the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering 

are out of all proportion to the general development of society, hence 

also to the material foundation, the skeletal structure as it were, of its or gani 

za tion. For example, the Greeks compared to the moderns or also Shakespeare. 

It is even recognized that certain forms of art, e.g. the epic, can no 

longer be produced in their world epoch- making, classical stature as soon as 

the production of art, as such, begins; that is, that certain significant forms 

within the realm of the arts are possible only at an undeveloped stage of 

artistic development. If this is the case with the relation between different 

kinds of art within the realm of the arts, it is already less puzzling that it is 

the case in the relation of the entire realm to the general development of 

society. The difficulty consists only in the general formulation of these contradictions. 

As soon as they have been specified, they are already clarified. 

Let us take e.g. the relation of Greek art and then of Shakespeare to the 

present time. It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal 

of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations 

on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is 

based possible with self- acting mule spindles 2 and railways and locomotives 

and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., 

Jupiter against the lightning rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? 3 

All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature 

in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the 

advent of real mastery over them. What becomes of Fama 4 alongside Printing 

House Square? Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, i.e. nature and 

the social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the 

pop u lar imagination. This is its material. Not any mythology what ever, i.e. 

not an arbitrarily chosen unconsciously artistic reworking of nature (here 

meaning everything objective, hence including society). Egyptian mythology 

could never have been the foundation or the womb of Greek art. But, in 

any case, a mythology. Hence, in no way a social development which excludes 

all mythological, all mythologizing relations to nature; which therefore 

demands of the artist an imagination not dependent on mythology. 

From another side, is Achilles 5 possible with powder and lead? Or the 

Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not 

the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the 

printer’s bar, 6 hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish? 

1. Translated by Martin Nicolaus, who sometimes 

includes clarifying words in brackets: the 

title, usually left untranslated, means “outlines” 

or “foundations.” 

2. Machines used in spinning, invented in the 

late 18th century. 

3. A major investment bank in France during the 

Second Empire (1852– 70), against which Marx 

pits Hermes, Greek god of commerce and invention. 

The other two (Roman) gods are similarly 

paired: Vulcan, god of metalworking, with a commercial 

firm and Jupiter, supreme god and wielder 

of the thunderbolt, with a lightning rod. 

4. Rumor (Latin), a Roman personification; she 

repeated what ever she heard until everyone knew 

it. 

5. The greatest of the Greek warriors at Troy, and 

the focus of Homer’s Iliad (ca. 8th c. b.c.e.). 

6. Lever used to screw down the flat plate of a 

manual printing press (the German word used 

here, Preßbengel, can also mean printing in general). 

“The muse”: goddess presiding over the arts 

and intellectual pursuits, traditionally invoked by 

epic poets as an aid to memory.


But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic 

are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is 

that they still afford us artistic plea sure and that in a certain respect they 

count as a norm and as an unattainable model. 

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he 

not find joy in the child’s naiveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce 

its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch 

come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood 

of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, 

exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. 

Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were 

normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the 

undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is 

inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions 

under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return. 

1857–58 1939–42 

From Preface to A Contribution to the 

Critique of Po liti cal Economy 

* * * 

The first work which I undertook for a solution of the doubts which assailed 

me was a critical review of the Hegelian philosophy of right, a work the introduction 

to which appeared in 1844 in the Deutsch- Französische Jahrbücher, 1 

published in Paris. My investigation led to the result that legal relations as 

well as forms of state are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the 

so- called general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots 

in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, following the 

example of the En glishmen and Frenchmen of the eigh teenth century, combines 

under the name of “civil society,” that, however, the anatomy of civil 

society is to be sought in po liti cal economy. The investigation of the latter, 

which I began in Paris, I continued in Brussels, whither I had emigrated in 

consequence of an expulsion order of M. Guizot. 2 The general result at which 

I arrived and which, once won, served as a guiding thread for my studies, can 

be briefly formulated as follows: In the social production of their life, men 

enter into definite relations that are indispensable and in de pen dent of their 

will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development 

of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of 

production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, 

on which rises a legal and po liti cal superstructure and to which correspond 

definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of 

material life conditions the social, po liti cal and intellectual life pro cess in 

general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, 

1. German- French Yearbook. The German philos 

o pher georg wilhelm friedrich hegel 

(1770– 1831) described his po liti cal philosophy in 

the Philosophy of Right (1821); Marx’s essay was 

“Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy 

of Right.” 

2. François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (1787– 

1874), French statesman and historian who supported 

the idea of a constitutional monarchy; he 

was the chief power in the government between 

1840 and 1848.

Capital, Volume 1 / 663 

on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a 

certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society 

come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or— what is but a 

legal expression for the same thing— with the property relations within which 

they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive 

forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of 

social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire 

im mense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering 

such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material 

transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be 

determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, po liti cal, 

religious, aesthetic or philosophic— in short, ideological forms in which men 

become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an 

individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of 

such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, 

this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material 

life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and 

the relations of production. No social order ever perishes before all the productive 

forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher 

relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their 

existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind 

always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the 

matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only 

when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in 

the pro cess of formation. In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern 

bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs 

in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production 

are the last antagonistic form of the social pro cess of production— antagonistic 

not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social 

conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces 

developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions 

for the solution of that antagonism. 3 This social formation brings, therefore, 

the prehistory of human society to a close. 

* * * 

1859 

From Capital, Volume 1 1 

From Chapter 1. Commodities 

section 4. the fetishism of commodities and 

the secret thereof 

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. 

Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding 

in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in 

3. That is, socialism— the final “mode of production,” 

which is in the pro cess of emerging 

through the class struggle of the bourgeoisie and 

proletarians. 

1. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward 

Aveling, and edited by Engels.


use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the 

point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or 

from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as 

clear as noon- day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials 

furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The 

form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all 

that, the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. But, so 

soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. 

It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all 

other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain 

grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table- turning” ever was. 

The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in 

their use- value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of the determining 

factors of value. For, in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of 

labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are 

functions of the human organism, and that each such function, what ever 

may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, 

nerves, muscles, &c. Secondly, with regard to that which forms the groundwork 

for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that 

expenditure, or the quantity of labour, it is quite clear that there is a palpable 

difference between its quantity and quality. In all states of society, the 

labourtime that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily 

be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different 

stages of development. And lastly, from the moment that men in any way 

work for one another, their labour assumes a social form. 

Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, 

so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form 

itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by 

their products all being equally values; the mea sure of the expenditure of 

labour- power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the 

quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally, the mutual relations 

of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms 

itself, take the form of a social relation between the products. 

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the 

social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character 

stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers 

to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social 

relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their 

labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, 

social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible 

by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by 

us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective 

form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is 

at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the 

external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical 

things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the 

things quâ commodities, and the value- relation between the products of 

labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connexion 

with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. 

There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in


their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, 

to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist- enveloped regions 

of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain 

appear as in de pen dent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation 

both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities 

with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which 

attaches itself to the products of labour, 2 so soon as they are produced as 

commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of 

commodities. 

This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis 

has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces 

them. 

As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because 

they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals 

who carry on their work in de pen dently of each other. The sum total of 

the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. 

Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other 

until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s 

labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other 

words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of 

society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes 

directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between 

the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour 

of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations 

between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations 

between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being 

exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform 

social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. 

This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically 

important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that 

useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their 

character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, 

during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer 

acquires socially a twofold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite 

useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its 

place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a 

social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other 

hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, 

only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private 

labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour 

of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalisation 

of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an 

abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common 

denominator, viz., expenditure of human labour- power or human labour in 

the abstract. The twofold social character of the labour of the individual 

appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which 

2. By analogy with religious fetishism, the attribution 

of magical or divine power to objects. 

Similarly, according to Marx, we impute to commodities 

a life of their own (and a seemingly 

inherent value). We treat as relations between 

people what are in fact relations between commodities 

and people, thereby attributing human 

powers to things.


are impressed upon that labour in everyday practice by the exchange of 

products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being 

socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not 

only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his par tic u- 

lar labour has of being the equal of all other par tic u lar kinds of labour, 

takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products 

of labour, have one common quality, viz., that of having value. 

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each 

other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles 

of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an 

exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we 

also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon 

them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does 

not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts 

every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher 

the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to 

stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. 

The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as 

they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in 

their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development 

of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the 

social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the 

products themselves. The fact, that in the par tic u lar form of production 

with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific 

social character of private labour carried on in de pen dently, consists in the 

equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, 

which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value— this 

fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred 

to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science 

of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered. 

What, first of all, practically concerns producers when they make in 

exchange, is the question, how much of some other product they get for their 

own? in what proportions the products are exchangeable? When these proportions 

have, by custom, attained a certain stability, they appear to result 

from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and 

two ounces of gold appear as naturally to be of equal value as a pound of 

gold and a pound of iron in spite of their different physical and chemical 

qualities appear to be of equal weight. The character of having value, when 

once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting 

and reacting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary 

continually, in de pen dently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. 

To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, 

which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. It requires a fully 

developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience 

alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of 

private labour, which are carried on in de pen dently of each other, and yet as 

spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labour, are continually 

being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society 

requires them. And why? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever 

fluctuating exchange- relations between the products, the labourtime


socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an overriding 

law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls 

about our ears. The determination of the magnitude of value by labourtime 

is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative 

values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere 

accidentality from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, 

yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place. 

Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his 

scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of 

their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, 3 with the results 

of the pro cess of development ready to hand before him. The characters that 

stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary 

preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the 

stability of natural, self- understood forms of social life, before man seeks to 

decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, 

but their meaning. Consequently it was the analysis of the prices of commodities 

that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and 

it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to 

the establishment of their characters as values. It is, however, just this ultimate 

money- form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead 

of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations 

between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in 

a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human 

labour, the absurdity of the statement is self- evident. Nevertheless, when the 

producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is 

the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express 

the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of 

society in the same absurd form. 

The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are 

forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations 

of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production 

of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and 

necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the 

form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms 

of production. 

Since Robinson Crusoe’s 4 experiences are a favourite theme with po liti cal 

economists, let us take a look at him on his island. Moderate though he be, 

yet some few wants he has to satisfy, and must therefore do a little useful 

work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats, fishing 

and hunting. Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they 

are a source of plea sure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation. 

In spite of the variety of his work, he knows that his labour, what ever 

its form, is but the activity of one and the same Robinson, and consequently, 

that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour. Necessity 

itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between his different 

kinds of work. Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general 

3. After the feast (Latin); after the fact, too late. 

4. The hero and title character of Daniel Defoe’s 

1719– 20 novel, an En glish sailor shipwrecked for 

24 years on a small tropical island. He is discussed 

by some po liti cal economists— including 

Adam Smith (1723– 1790) and Jean- Jacques Rousseau 

(1712– 1778)—who base their analyses of 

production on the solitary in de pen dent worker.


activity than another, depends on the difficulties, greater or less as the case 

may be, to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. This our 

friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, 

and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true- born Briton, to 

keep a set of books. His stock- book contains a list of the objects of utility that 

belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production; and lastly, of 

the labourtime that definite quantities of those objects have, on an average, 

cost him. All the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this 

wealth of his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible 

without exertion, even to Mr. Sedley Taylor. 5 And yet those relations contain 

all that is essential to the determination of value. 

Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson’s island bathed in light to 

the Eu ro pe an middle ages shrouded in darkness. Here, instead of the in depen 

dent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, 

laymen and clergy. Personal dependence here characterises the social 

relations of production just as much as it does the other spheres of life 

organised on the basis of that production. But for the very reason that personal 

dependence forms the groundwork of society, there is no necessity 

for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their 

reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of ser vices in 

kind and payments in kind. Here the par tic u lar and natural form of labour, 

and not, as in a society based on production of commodities, its general 

abstract form is the immediate social form of labour. Compulsory labour is 

just as properly mea sured by time, as commodity- producing labour, but 

every serf knows that what he expends in the ser vice of his lord, is a definite 

quantity of his own personal labour- power. The tithe to be rendered to 

the priest is more matter of fact than his blessing. No matter, then, what we 

may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves 

in this society, the social relations between individuals in the per for mance 

of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, 

and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products 

of labour. 

For an example of labour in common or directly associated labour, we 

have no occasion to go back to that spontaneously developed form which we 

find on the threshold of the history of all civilised races. We have one close 

at hand in the patriarchal industries of a peasant family, that produces corn, 

cattle, yarn, linen, and clothing for home use. These different articles are, as 

regards the family, so many products of its labour, but as between themselves, 

they are not commodities. The different kinds of labour, such as tillage, 

cattle tending, spinning, weaving and making clothes, which result in 

the various products, are in themselves, and such as they are, direct social 

functions, because functions of the family, which, just as much as a society 

based on the production of commodities, possesses a spontaneously developed 

system of division of labour. The distribution of the work within the 

family, and the regulation of the labourtime of the several members, depend 

as well upon differences of age and sex as upon natural conditions varying 

with the seasons. The labour- power of each individual, by its very nature, 

5. A Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (1834– 1920), who wrote both about musical sounds and 

harmony and about the relationship between capital and labor.


operates in this case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour- power 

of the family, and therefore, the mea sure of the expenditure of individual 

labour- power by its duration, appears here by its very nature as a social character 

of their labour. 

Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free 

individuals, carry ing on their work with the means of production in common, 

in which the labour- power of all the different individuals is consciously 

applied as the combined labour- power of the community. All the 

characteristics of Robinson’s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, 

that they are social, instead of individual. Everything produced by 

him was exclusively the result of his own personal labour, and therefore 

simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our community is a 

social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and 

remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means 

of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently 

necessary. The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive 

organisation of the community, and the degree of historical development 

attained by the producers. We will assume, but merely for the sake of a 

parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual 

producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labourtime. 

Labour- time would, in that case, play a double part. Its apportionment 

in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion 

between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the 

community. On the other hand, it also serves as a mea sure of the portion of 

the common labour borne by each individual, and of his share in the part of 

the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations 

of the individual producers, with regard both to their labour and to its products, 

are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard 

not only to production but also to distribution. 

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society 

based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general 

enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as 

commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour 

to the standard of homogeneous human labour— for such a society, Christianity 

with its cultus 6 of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, 

Protestantism, Deism, 7 &c., is the most fitting form of religion. In 

the ancient Asiatic and other ancient modes of production, we find that the 

conversion of products into commodities, and therefore the conversion of 

men into producers of commodities, holds a subordinate place, which, however, 

increases in importance as the primitive communities approach nearer 

and nearer to their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist in 

the ancient world only in its interstices, like the gods of Epicurus in the Intermundia, 

8 or like Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social 

organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely 

simple and transparent. But they are founded either on the immature 

6. Care of; adoration, worship (Latin). 

7. Belief in a supreme being as the source of existence 

that rejects the supernatural doctrines of 

Christianity and the influence or revelation of 

God in the universe, stressing instead the importance 

of reason and ethical conduct. 

8. The spaces between the worlds (Latin). Epicurus: 

Greek phi los o pher (341– 270 b.c.e.), who held 

that the gods had nothing to do with human 

affairs.


development of man individually, who has not yet severed the umbilical cord 

that unites him with his fellowmen in a primitive tribal community, or upon 

direct relations of subjection. They can arise and exist only when the development 

of the productive power of labour has not risen beyond a low stage, and 

when, therefore, the social relations within the sphere of material life, 

between man and man, and between man and Nature, are correspondingly 

narrow. This narrowness is reflected in the ancient worship of Nature, and in 

the other elements of the pop u lar religions. The religious reflex of the real 

world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations 

of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable 

relations with regard to his fellowmen and to Nature. 

The life- process of society, which is based on the pro cess of material production, 

does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production 

by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance 

with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain 

material groundwork or set of conditions of existence which in their turn 

are the spontaneous product of a long and painful pro cess of development. 

Po liti cal Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and 

its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has 

never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its 

product and labourtime by the magnitude of that value. These formulæ, 

which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakeable letters that they belong 

to a state of society, in which the pro cess of production has the mastery 

over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulæ appear to the 

bourgeois intellect to be as much a self- evident necessity imposed by Nature 

as productive labour itself. Hence forms of social production that preceded 

the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as 

the Fathers of the Church 9 treated pre- Christian religions. 

To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in 

commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics 

of labour, is shown, amongst other ways, by the dull and tedious quarrel 

over the part played by Nature in the formation of exchange- value. Since 

exchange- value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of 

labour bestowed upon object, Nature has no more to do with it, than it has 

in fixing the course of exchange. 

The mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity, 

or is produced directly for exchange, is the most general and most 

embryonic form of bourgeois production. It therefore makes its appearance 

at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating and characteristic 

manner as now- a-days. Hence its Fetish character is comparatively 

easy to be seen through. But when we come to more concrete forms, 

even this appearance of simplicity vanishes. Whence arose the illusions of 

the monetary system? To it gold and silver, when serving as money, did not 

represent a social relation between producers but were natural objects with 

strange social properties. And modern economy, which looks down with 

such disdain on the monetary system, does not its superstition come out as 

clear as noon- day, whenever it treats of capital? How long is it since econ- 

9. Early Christian writers who established Christian doctrine before the 8th century.


omy discarded the physiocratic illusion, that rents grow out of the soil and 

not out of society? 1 

But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another example 

relating to the commodity- form. Could commodities themselves speak, they 

would say: Our use- value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of 

us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our 

natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we 

are nothing but exchange- values. Now listen how those commodities speak 

through the mouth of the economist. “Value”—(i.e., exchange- value) “is a 

property of things, riches”—(i.e., use- value) “of man. Value, in this sense, 

necessarily implies exchanges, riches do not.” “Riches” (use- value) “are the 

attribute of men, value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community 

is rich, a pearl or a diamond is valuable. . . . A pearl or a diamond is 

valuable” as a pearl or diamond. So far no chemist has ever discovered 

exchange- value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economic discoverers of 

this chemical element, who by- the- by lay special claim to critical acumen, 

find however that the use- value of objects belongs to them in de pen dently of 

their material properties, while their value, on the other hand, forms a part 

of them as objects. What confirms them in this view, is the peculiar circumstance 

that the use- value of objects is realised without exchange, by 

means of a direct relation between the objects and man, while, on the other 

hand, their value is realised only by exchange, that is, by means of a social 

pro cess. Who fails here to call to mind our good friend, Dogberry, who 

informs neighbour Seacoal, that, “To be a well- favoured man is the gift of 

fortune; but reading and writing comes by Nature.” 2 

From Chapter 10. The Working- Day 

section 5. the struggle for a normal workingday. 

compulsory laws for the extension of the workingday from 

the middle of the 14th to the end of the 17th century 

“What is a workingday? What is the length of time during which capital may 

consume the labour- power whose daily value it buys? How far may the 

workingday be extended beyond the working- time necessary for the reproduction 

of labour- power itself?” It has been seen that to these questions capital 

replies: the workingday contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of 

the few hours of repose without which labour- power absolutely refuses its 

ser vices again. Hence it is self- evident that the labourer is nothing else, his 

whole life through, than labour- power, that therefore all his disposable time 

is by nature and law labourtime, to be devoted to the self- expansion of capital. 

Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of 

social functions and for social intercourse, for the free- play of his bodily and 

mental activity, even the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of 

Sabbatarians!)— moonshine! 3 But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its 

1. The Physiocrats, late- 18th- century French 

economists who were proponents of free trade, 

believed that agriculture is the source of all 

wealth. 

2. Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing (ca. 

1598), 3.3.13– 14 (slightly misquoted). Dogberry 

is a comic character, the commander of the 

watch; Seacoal is one of the watchman. 

3. Nonsense, foolishness. Sabbatarians: those 

who favor strict observance of the Sabbath.


were- wolf hunger for surpluslabour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but 

even the merely physical maximum bounds of the workingday. It usurps the 

time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals 

the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles 4 

over a meal- time, incorporating it where possible with the pro cess of production 

itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production, 

as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It 

reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment 

of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an 

organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the normal maintenance 

of the labour- power which is to determine the limits of the workingday; 

it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour- power, no matter 

how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be, which is to determine the 

limits of the labourers’ period of repose. Capital cares nothing for the length 

of life of labour- power. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum 

of labour- power, that can be rendered fluent in a workingday. It attains this 

end by shortening the extent of the labourer’s life, as a greedy farmer snatches 

increased produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility. 

The capitalistic mode of production (essentially the production of surplusvalue, 

5 the absorption of surpluslabour), produces thus, with the extension 

of the workingday, not only the deterioration of human labour- power by 

robbing it of its normal, moral and physical, conditions of development and 

function. It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this 

labour- power itself. It extends the labourer’s time of production during a 

given period by shortening his actual lifetime. 

But the value of the labour- power includes the value of the commodities 

necessary for the reproduction of the worker, or for the keeping up of the 

working- class. If then the unnatural extension of the workingday, that capital 

necessarily strives after in its unmea sured passion for self- expansion, 

shortens the length of life of the individual labourer, and therefore the duration 

of his labour- power, the forces used up have to be replaced at a more 

rapid rate and the sum of the expenses for the reproduction of labour- power 

will be greater; just as in a machine the part of its value to be reproduced 

every day is greater the more rapidly the machine is worn out. It would seem 

therefore that the interest of capital itself points in the direction of a normal 

workingday. 

The slave- owner buys his labourer as he buys his horse. If he loses his slave, 

he loses capital that can only be restored by new outlay in the slave- mart. But 

“the rice- grounds of Georgia, or the swamps of the Mississippi may be fatally 

injurious to the human constitution; but the waste of human life which the 

cultivation of these districts necessitates, is not so great that it cannot be 

repaired from the teeming preserves of Virginia and Kentucky. Considerations 

of economy, moreover, which, under a natural system, afford some 

security for human treatment by identifying the master’s interest with the 

slave’s preservation, when once trading in slaves is practised, become reasons 

for racking to the uttermost the toil of the slave; for, when his place can at 

4. Haggles. 

5. The difference between the amount of capital 

needed to produce something and the amount of 

capital that product is worth; it is created from 

labor power.


once be supplied from foreign preserves, the duration of his life becomes a 

matter of less moment than its productiveness while it lasts. It is accordingly 

a maxim of slave management, in slave- importing countries, that the most 

effective economy is that which takes out of the human chattel in the shortest 

space of time the utmost amount of exertion it is capable of putting forth. It is 

in tropical culture, where annual profits often equal the whole capital of plantations, 

that negro life is most recklessly sacrificed. It is the agriculture of the 

West Indies, which has been for centuries prolific of fabulous wealth, that has 

engulfed millions of the African race. It is in Cuba, at this day, whose revenues 

are reckoned by millions, and whose planters are princes, that we see in 

the servile class, the coarsest fare, the most exhausting and unremitting toil, 

and even the absolute destruction of a portion of its numbers every year.” 6 

Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur. 7 For slave- trade read labour- market, 

for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural districts of En gland, 

Scotland, and Wales, for Africa, Germany. We heard how over- work thinned 

the ranks of the bakers in London. Nevertheless, the London labour- market 

is always over- stocked with German and other candidates for death in the 

bakeries. Pottery, as we saw, is one of the shortest- lived industries. Is there 

any want therefore of potters? Josiah Wedgwood, 8 the inventor of modern 

pottery, himself originally a common workman, said in 1785 before the 

House of Commons that the whole trade employed from 15,000 to 20,000 

people. In the year 1861 the population alone of the town centres of this 

industry in Great Britain numbered 101,302. “The cotton trade has existed 

for ninety years . . . It has existed for three generations of the En glish race, 

and I believe I may safely say that during that period it has destroyed nine 

generations of factory operatives.” 9 * * * 

What experience shows to the capitalist generally is a constant excess of 

population, i.e., an excess in relation to the momentary requirements of 

surpluslabour- absorbing capital, although this excess is made up of generations 

of human beings stunted, short- lived, swiftly replacing each other, 

plucked, so to say, before maturity. And, indeed, experience shows to the intelligent 

observer with what swiftness and grip the capitalist mode of production, 

dating, historically speaking, only from yesterday, has seized the vital 

power of the people by the very root— shows how the degeneration of the 

industrial population is only retarded by the constant absorption of primitive 

and physically uncorrupted elements from the country— shows how even 

the country labourers, in spite of fresh air and the principle of natural selection, 

that works so powerfully amongst them, and only permits the survival of 

the strongest, are already beginning to die off. Capital that has such good 

reasons for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers that surround it, 

is in practice moved as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation 

and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the 

earth into the sun. In every stock- jobbing swindle every one knows that some 

time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the 

head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and 

6. Quoted from J. E. Cairnes, The Slave Power 

(London, 1862). 

7. Once the name has been changed, the story is 

told about you (Latin); from horace (65– 8 

b.c.e.), Satires 1.1.69– 70. 

8. Noted En glish potter (1730– 1795). 

9. Quoted from a speech delivered in the House 

of Commons, April 27, 1863. The following ellipsis 

is the translators’.


placed it in safety. Après moi le déluge! 1 is the watchword of every capitalist 

and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or 

length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. To the 

outcry as to the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the 

torture of over- work, it answers: Ought these to trouble us since they increase 

our profits? But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend 

on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out 

the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive 

laws having power over every individual capitalist. 

The establishment of a normal workingday is the result of centuries of 

struggle between capitalist and labourer. The history of this struggle shows 

two opposed tendencies. Compare, e.g., the En glish factory legislation of 

our time with the En glish Labour Statutes from the 14th century to well 

into the middle of the 18th. Whilst the modern Factory Acts 2 compulsorily 

shortened the workingday, the earlier statutes tried to lengthen it by compulsion. 

Of course the pretensions of capital in embryo— when, beginning 

to grow, it secures the right of absorbing a quantum sufficit 3 of surpluslabour, 

not merely by the force of economic relations, but by the help of the 

State— appear very modest when put face to face with the concessions that, 

growling and struggling, it has to make in its adult condition. It takes centuries 

ere the “free” labourer, thanks to the development of capitalistic 

production, agrees, i.e., is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole 

of his active life, his very capacity for work, for the price of the necessaries 

of life, his birthright for a mess of pottage. 4 Hence it is natural that the 

lengthening of the work- day, which capital, from the middle of the 14th to 

the end of the 17th century, tries to impose by State- measures on adult 

labourers, approximately coincides with the shortening of the workingday 

which, in the second half of the 19th century, has here and there been 

effected by the State to prevent the coining of children’s blood into capital. 

That which today, e.g., in the State of Massachusetts, until recently the 

freest State of the North- American Republic, has been proclaimed as the 

statutory limit of the labour of children under 12, 5 was in En gland, even in 

the middle of the 17th century, the normal workingday of able- bodied artisans, 

robust labourers, athletic blacksmiths. 

* * * 

1867 

From Letter from Friedrich Engels to Joseph Bloch 1 

London, September 21– 22, 1890 

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining 

element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More 

1. After me the flood (French); an old French 

proverb, often attributed to Louis XV or his mistress, 

Madame de Pompadour, after the 1757 

defeat of the French and Austrian armies in the 

battle of Rossbach. 

2. Series of mea sures, passed beginning in 1819, 

intended to improve working conditions (particularly 

for children and women workers). 

3. Sufficient quantity (Latin). 

4. As the hungry Esau sold his birthright to his 

brother Jacob; Genesis 25.29– 34. 

5. That is, a 10- hour day (the law passed in 1842). 

1. A socialist (1871– 1936), who in the 1890s was 

a student at the University of Berlin. The translator 

is not named.

Letter from Friedrich Engels to Joseph Bloch / 675 

than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists 

this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, 

he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. 

The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure: 

po liti cal forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions 

established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., 

juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in 

the brains of the participants, po liti cal, juristic, philosophical theories, religious 

views and their further development into systems of dogmas, also 

exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in 

many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction 

of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that 

is, of things and events, whose inner connection is so remote or so impossible 

of proof that we can regard it as nonexistent, as negligible) the economic 

movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application 

of the theory to any period of history one chose would be easier than the 

solution of a simple equation of the first degree. 

We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite 

assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately 

decisive. But the po liti cal ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which 

haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one. The 

Prus sian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic 

causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among 

the many small states of North Germany, Brandenburg 2 was specifically 

determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying 

the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference 

between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above 

all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prus sia, and 

hence with international po liti cal relations— which were indeed also decisive 

in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power). Without making oneself 

ridiculous it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics 

the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin 

of the High German consonant shifts, 3 which widened the geo graph i cal 

wall of partition, formed by the mountains from the Sudetic range to the 

Taunus, 4 to the extent of a regular fissure across all Germany. 

In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final 

result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which 

each again has been made what it is by a host of par tic u lar conditions of 

life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of 

parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant— the historical 

event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which 

works as a whole, unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual 

wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something 

that no one willed. Thus past history proceeds in the manner of a natural 

pro cess and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the 

2. Region that became the core of the kingdom of 

Prus sia (1701– 1871) and of the German Empire 

(1871– 1918). 

3. Linguistic changes (ca. 500– 700 c.e.) that distinguish 

the German of central and southern Germany 

(High German, the official dialect) from the 

speech of northern Germany (Low German); for 

example, hopen (to hope) becomes in High German 

hoffen, and Plante (plant) becomes Pflanze. 

4. A mountain range in southwest central Germany. 

“The Sudetic range”: the Sudetes, mountains 

between the Czech Republic and Poland.

676 / CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 

fact that individual wills— of which each desires what he is impelled to by 

his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances 

(either his own personal circumstances or those of society in 

general)— do not attain what they want, but are merged into a collective 

mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that their value is 

equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to 

this degree involved in it. 

I would furthermore ask you to study this theory from its original sources 

and not at secondhand; it is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote anything 

in which it did not play a part. But especially The Eigh teenth Brumaire of 

Louis Bonaparte is a most excellent example of its application. There are also 

many allusions in Capital. 5 Then may I also direct you to my writings: Herr 

Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End 

of Classical German Philosophy, 6 in which I have given the most detailed 

account of historical materialism which, as far as I know, exists. 

Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger 

people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We 

had to emphasise the main principle vis-à- vis our adversaries, who denied it, 

and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to allow the 

other elements involved in the interaction to come into their rights. But when 

it was a case of presenting a section of history, that is, of a practical application, 

it was a different matter and there no error was possible. Unfortunately, 

however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood 

a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they 

have mastered its main principles, and even those not always correctly. And I 

cannot exempt many of the more recent “Marxists” from this reproach, for 

the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too. 

* * * 

1890 

5. Vol. 1 was published in 1867, vols. 2 and 3 in 

1893 and 1894; The Eigh teenth Brumaire first 

appeared in 1852. 

6. Published in 1886; Dühring’s Revolution in 

Science, now known as Anti- Dühring, was published 

in 1877– 78. 

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE 

1821–1867 

Charles Baudelaire, who wanted to include the right to contradict oneself among 

the Rights of Man, made self- contradiction into a quintessentially modern form of 

poetics. But his canonization as a major poet would have surprised both him and 

his contemporaries. Although his book Les Fleurs du mal (1857, The Flowers of 

Evil) is now considered a masterpiece, it had an inauspicious start. The volume 

explicitly addresses a “hypocritical reader” who will not want the self- image the 

poems depict. The book’s notorious 1857 obscenity trial (which required Baudelaire 

to remove six poems and pay a fine) seemed to enact the rejection the poems

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE / 677 

predicted, but it also lent the author’s celebrity an unseemly luster. Few of Baudelaire’s 

friends could have foreseen a time when he would be hailed as a genius. And 

even they would not have guessed how many roles literary historians would assign 

to him. 

Viewed by contemporaries as a late, de cadent Romantic or as a Parnassian lover 

of art for art’s sake, Baudelaire is often described as the found er of what would later 

be known as symbolism, especially in his theory of “universal analogy” and in his 

early sonnet “Correspondances.” But what was peculiarly modern about Baudelaire 

was perhaps best described by one of his last editors, who called him “that strange 

classic of nonclassical things,” or by the poet Paul Claudel (1868– 1955), who said 

he combined “the style of Racine with the style of a journalist of the Second 

Empire.” Theorists of Romanticism, Parnassianism, symbolism, modernism and 

even realism have all claimed him as a key figure, but in very different— sometimes 

antithetical— ways. It is hard to imagine a more fitting tribute to Baudelaire’s practice 

of self- contradiction. 

Baudelaire’s father, François, was a sixty- year- old ex- priest and widower when he 

married Caroline Dufaÿs, a penniless orphan, who was twenty- six. When François 

died in 1827, he left Caroline with a twenty- two- year- old son, Alphonse, from his 

first marriage, along with her own five- year- old son, Charles. Charles later fondly 

remembered his mother as a beautiful widow whom he had all to himself during 

this period, but in 1828 she married a handsome army officer, Jacques Aupick, in 

some haste. It is not known when, or whether, Charles ever learned of the birth of 

his stillborn half- sister in December 1828. 

Jacques Aupick’s career in the military was remarkably successful; he was promoted 

to general on the same day that Charles passed the baccalauréat exam (despite 

having been expelled from his Pa ri sian high school earlier in 1839 for swallowing 

rather than surrendering a note from a classmate). For the next two years, Baudelaire 

lived a bohemian life among artists and students, wrote poetry, contracted 

gonorrhea and sizable debts, and generally enjoyed life. His stepfather and halfbrother, 

however, foreseeing only ruin from his failure to establish himself professionally, 

paid his debts, borrowed money from his patrimony, and sent him on what 

was planned as a one- year voyage to India to separate him from “the slippery streets 

of Paris” (as Aupick put it) before he turned twenty- one. Baudelaire did indeed journey 

around Africa as far as Réunion Island, but caught a return ship there back to 

France. Though it failed to protect Charles’s future bank account, the trip provided 

him with a different kind of capital: a store of poetic images and themes he was to 

draw on in his poetry. 

Once back in Paris, Baudelaire fell in love with a beautiful mixed- race Antillean 

actress named Jeanne Duval. Along with his brief liaisons with other women, the 

poet maintained a complicated, tempestuous, sometimes domestic relationship with 

Jeanne for most of his life. When he turned twenty- one he came into the inheritance 

left him by his father— the interest from which would have given him an annual 

income of 2,400 francs (approximately the starting salary for a typical civil ser vice 

job)— and quickly spent half of it. His mother, alarmed at the speed with which his 

funds were disappearing, imposed a legal mediator between him and what remained. 

For the next twenty years, Baudelaire’s correspondence with editors and colleagues 

rec ords his attempts to earn money through his writings, while the frequent letters 

he sent to his mother express both his desire to play on her maternal sympathies and 

his rage against the permanent infantilization his financial situation imposed. In 

March 1866 he suffered a stroke, undoubtedly caused by advanced syphilis, while 

on an unsuccessful lecture tour in Belgium. The stroke left him partially paralyzed 

and aphasic, able to utter only the single word “crénom!” (from sacré nom de Dieu! or 

“holy name of God!”). He died in a Paris clinic seventeen months later, his mother by 

his side.


Baudelaire’s first publications were Salons, reviews of the annual art exhibit at 

the Louvre museum. Unlike other rebels against society who were frequently supported 

by the same bourgeois world they scorned, Baudelaire was fully aware of the 

often perverse and hated interde pen den cy between artists and patrons, beginning 

his Salon of 1845 by describing the economic purpose of such annual shows: “One 

must please those on whose resources one wants to live.” In 1847 he discovered the 

work of the American poet edgar allan poe (1809– 1849), whom he considered a 

fellow martyr to bourgeois values. Paradoxically, his translations of Poe would earn 

Baudelaire more money than all his other works put together; his introductions to 

the translations create a portrait of poetic genius that still shapes the French view 

of Poe to this day. He tried his hand at theater, wrote about drugs and addictions, 

published often contradictory theoretical essays in reviews, and started to publish 

his poetry; but Les Fleurs du mal did not appear until 1857, just months after the 

death of Jacques Aupick. When the volume drew legal charges of immorality, he 

removed the six “condemned” poems and published a new edition. The offending 

poems all dealt with female— particularly lesbian— sexuality (an early title of Les 

Fleurs du mal had been Les Lesbiennes). Baudelaire joined his contemporary Théophile 

Gautier and others in using lesbianism to get at the nature of art for art’s sake. 

His descriptions of female sexuality were considered not only immoral but a sign of 

“realism,” then a term of condemnation for works exposing frank, unidealized, and 

unpleasant realities. When, in 1949, the ban was finally lifted, the poems were 

defended on the grounds that they were symbolic, not realistic. 

In everything he wrote (or sometimes in two equal and opposite texts), Baudelaire 

depicted a human nature profoundly at odds with itself. In the first section of Les 

Fleurs du mal, titled “Spleen et Idéal,” the poet is torn between an aspiration toward 

an ideal (“Idéal”) that can neither be realized nor renounced, and an attraction to 

degradation (“Spleen”) that can neither be accepted nor denied. Spleen, an En glish 

term used by eighteenthcentury poets to mean “melancholy,” here designates 

“depression,” “boredom,” “disgust,” “abjection,” “sin,” and even “materiality.” Baudelaire’s 

poetic speaker becomes addicted to his torture, desiring what he flees and 

fleeing what he desires while remaining excruciatingly aware of his impossible position, 

which then becomes the subject of the poems. 

In his later work, this metaphysical, aesthetic, or psychological self- division is 

subject to a further force of estrangement: the historical pro cess. In the second 

edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1861), Baudelaire added a section called “Tableaux 

Parisiens” (“Pa ri sian Scenes”). Responding to the reconstructions of Paris undertaken 

during the Second Empire, Baudelaire wrote (in his poem “Le Cygne”): “Paris 

is changing, but nothing in my melancholy has budged. . . . The form of a city changes 

faster, alas, than the heart of a man.” The anachronistic relationship between man 

and his desires is exacerbated by the speed of modernization. Even alienation does 

not have a permanent form. It is this divided perception of modernity— not a simple 

pro cess of change but something partly unchanging and partly fleeting, partly eternal 

and partly historical— that Baudelaire discusses in our selection, “The Paint er of 

Modern Life” (1863). 

“The Paint er of Modern Life,” first published in the widely circulated newspaper 

Le Figaro, sketches out an unpre ce dented theory of modern aesthetics. Many later 

critics have felt that the essay should have been about Édouard Manet, with whom 

Baudelaire was soon to become friends— and who they take to be the true “paint er 

of modern life”— in preference to Constantin Guys, a minor nineteenthcentury 

draftsman whom history has almost forgotten. But Baudelaire begins his essay with 

a plea for minor artists, indicating that what he appreciated in Guys was his lack of 

monumentality— the speed of his sketches, the almost photographic accuracy of 

his reportage (although Baudelaire scorned photography itself), and perhaps even 

his ephemerality. Guys captured for Baudelaire the aesthetics of the flâneur— an

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE / 679 

idler on the city streets, filled with curiosity but without goal or interest, made possible 

by the growth of modern commodity culture and display. 

In his long essay, Baudelaire describes two complementary paradigms for the artist: 

the flâneur, who gives himself over to the crowd (Baudelaire calls it a “saintly 

prostitution of the soul” in his prose poem “Crowds”), and the dandy, who holds 

himself aloof and unmoved. While the flâneur is contextualized by new practices of 

shopping on the city streets, the dandy resists the promiscuity of buying and selling 

in general. In his recoil from vulgarity and commerce, the dandy personifies the 

stance of aristocracy, searching for distinction as opposed to the “leveling” that 

Baudelaire associates with democracy. Baudelaire’s “modernity” is thus deeply 

opposed to the postrevolutionary economic modernization that also informs it. 

Both the flâneur and the dandy contrast sharply with, but owe part of their appeal 

to, femininity. In section XI, “In Praise of Cosmetics,” Baudelaire goes so far as to 

see makeup— a sign of theater as well as a sign of femininity— as a paradigm for art. 

In a violent put- down of the Romantic idealization of nature, he claims that nature 

can only counsel crime and self- interest, while everything good is a product of 

restraint and calculation. Hence cosmetics should not try to recover the artlessness 

of youth (“Nature”), but should frankly seek the beauty of artifice (“Art”). The implication 

for the modern artist is that everything of value comes through culture, not 

nature, and that to pretend otherwise leads to a distorted and distorting idealization 

of a nature that never existed. 

Baudelaire thus forged “The Paint er of Modern Life” out of a clash between nostalgia 

for lost aristocratic values and fascination with the contemporary street life 

of commodity culture. In his poetry and in his prose, he was able to distill from the 

shocks and chance encounters of the changing city a radically new poetics. Those 

“slippery streets of Paris” so feared by Jacques Aupick became, for Baudelaire and 

perhaps for modern art in general, the very substance of modernity. 

bibliography 

Baudelaire’s prose works were collected after his death and published in two volumes, 

Curiosités esthétiques (1868) and L’Art romantique (1869). An excellent En glish 

edition of the main texts is available in two volumes, translated by Jonathan Mayne: 

Art in Paris, 1845– 1862 (1965) and The Paint er of Modern Life and Other Essays 

(1965). Baudelaire wryly captures his own addictions in On Wine and Hashish (1851; 

trans. 2002), translated by Andrew Brown. Shorter prose selections can be found in 

My Heart Laid Bare, edited by Peter Quennell, translated by Norman Cameron 

(1950); Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, translated by Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis 

E. Hyslop Jr. (1964); and Baudelaire: Writings on Art and Artists, translated by P. E. 

Charvet (1972). Baudelaire, by Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler (1987; trans. 1989), 

is a rich and meticulously researched biography. 

Margaret Gilman’s study, Baudelaire the Critic (1943), provides the classic introduction 

to Baudelaire’s critical writings. Criticism of Baudelaire was for a long time 

influenced by Théophile Gautier’s 1868 introduction to the third edition of Les Fleurs 

du mal. Gautier’s Baudelaire was a lover of artifice, an adherent of art for art’s sake. A 

good sampling of critical essays in this mode can be found in Henri Peyre’s Baudelaire: 

A Collection of Critical Essays (1962). Early readers took Baudelaire at his word 

and lamented the bad luck that had given him such a mediocre mother, such a difficult 

financial situation, and such impossible desires. A study by Jean- Paul Sartre, 

Baudelaire (1946; trans. 1949), reversed this view: Sartre treated Baudelaire as a man 

who had gotten exactly what he wanted, including the appearance of having wanted 

something else. Another important critical perspective on Baudelaire’s modernity 

took shape in the writings of Walter Benjamin, a number of which were published in 

En glish as Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1973). His 

study of Baudelaire was part of an im mense project on the Paris Arcades, which was


finally published as Das Passagen- Werk (1982; trans. 1999, The Arcades Project). This 

work by Benjamin is essential for an understanding of what is modern about Baudelaire. 

Also of interest is Benjamin’s The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles 

Baudelaire, edited with informative notes by Michael Jennings (2006). 

T. J. Clark’s Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers 

(1984) takes its title, if little else, from Baudelaire and analyzes art in Paris as if 

Baudelaire had written about Manet. For more explicit discussions of Baudelaire 

and modern aesthetics, see David Carrier’s High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the 

Origins of Modernist Painting (1996) and J. A. Hiddleston’s Baudelaire and the Art of 

Memory (1999). Of the many contemporary critical studies, four worth noting focus 

on Baudelaire’s modernity: essays by Paul de Man in Blindness and Insight (1971) 

and The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984); Timothy Raser, A Poetics of Art Criticism: 

The Case of Baudelaire (1989); Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the 

Memory Crisis (1993); and Susan Blood, Baudelaire and the Aesthetics of Bad Faith 

(1997). And finally, an excellent and wide- ranging collection of essays directly 

addressing Baudelaire’s modernity can be found in Baudelaire and the Poetics of 

Modernity, edited by Patricia A. Ward (2001). The annotated bibliography in David 

Baguley’s Critical Bibliography of French Literature (1994) is excellent, as are the 

annual bibliographical updates published by the W. T. Bandy Center for Baudelaire 

and Modern French Studies at Vanderbilt University. 

From The Paint er of Modern Life 1 

From I. Beauty, Fashion, and Happiness 

The world— and even the world of artists— is full of people who can go to the 

Louvre, 2 walk rapidly, without so much as a glance, past rows of very interesting, 

though secondary, pictures, to come to a rapturous halt in front of a Titian 

or a Raphael 3 — one of those that have been most pop u lar ized by the 

engraver’s art; then they will go home happy, not a few saying to themselves, 

‘I know my Museum.’ Just as there are people who, having once read Bossuet 

and Racine, 4 fancy that they have mastered the history of literature. 

Fortunately from time to time there come forward righters of wrong, critics, 

amateurs, curious enquirers, to declare that Raphael, or Racine, does 

not contain the whole secret, and that the minor poets too have something 

good, solid and delightful to offer; and finally that however much we may 

love general beauty, as it is expressed by classical poets and artists, we are 

no less wrong to neglect par tic u lar beauty, the beauty of circumstance and 

the sketch of manners. 

It must be admitted that for some years now the world has been mending 

its ways a little. The value which collectors today attach to the delightful 

coloured engravings of the last century proves that a reaction has set in in 

the direction where it was required; Debucourt, the Saint- Aubins 5 and many 

others have found their places in the dictionary of artists who are worthy of 

study. But these represent the past: my concern today is with the painting of 

1. Translated by Jonathan Mayne. 

2. The national art museum of France, in Paris. 

3. Two famous Italian Re nais sance paint ers, 

Tiziano Vecellio (ca. 1488– 1576) and Raffaello 

Santi (1483– 1520). 

4. Jean Racine (1639– 1699), quintessential 

French neoclassical playwright. Jacques- Bénigne 

Bossuet (1627– 1704), French bishop and neoclassical 

writer. 

5. The brothers Charles (1721– 1786) and Gabriel 

(1724– 1780) de Saint- Aubin, along with Philibert- 

Louis Debucourt (1755– 1832), were graphic artists 

and paint ers (as was Baudelaire’s father).

The Paint er of Modern Life / 681 

manners of the present. The past is interesting not only by reason of the 

beauty which could be distilled from it by those artists for whom it was the 

present, but also precisely because it is the past, for its historical value. It is 

the same with the present. The plea sure which we derive from the repre senta 

tion of the present is due not only to the beauty with which it can be 

invested, but also to its essential quality of being present. 

* * * 

This is in fact an excellent opportunity to establish a rational and historical 

theory of beauty, in contrast to the academic theory of an unique 

and absolute beauty; to show that beauty is always and inevitably of a double 

composition, although the impression that it produces is single— for the 

fact that it is difficult to discern the variable elements of beauty within the 

unity of the impression invalidates in no way the necessity of variety in its 

composition. Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose 

quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial 

element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, 

the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions. Without this second element, 

which might be described as the amusing, enticing, appetizing icing on 

the divine cake, the first element would be beyond our powers of digestion 

or appreciation, neither adapted nor suitable to human nature. I defy anyone 

to point to a single scrap of beauty which does not contain these two 

elements. 

Let me instance two opposite extremes in history. In religious art the 

duality is evident at the first glance; the ingredient of eternal beauty reveals 

itself only with the permission and under the discipline of the religion to 

which the artist belongs. In the most frivolous work of a sophisticated artist 

belonging to one of those ages which, in our vanity, we characterize as civilized, 

the duality is no less to be seen; at the same time the eternal part of 

beauty will be veiled and expressed if not by fashion, at least by the par tic u- 

lar temperament of the artist. The duality of art is a fatal consequence of the 

duality of man. Consider, if you will, the eternally subsisting portion as the 

soul of art, and the variable element as its body. That is why Stendhal 6 — an 

impertinent, teasing, even a disagreeable critic, but one whose impertinences 

are often a useful spur to reflection— approached the truth more closely 

than many another when he said that ‘Beauty is nothing else but a promise 

of happiness.’ This definition doubtless overshoots the mark; it makes Beauty 

far too subject to the infinitely variable ideal of Happiness; it strips Beauty 

too neatly of its aristocratic quality: but it has the great merit of making a 

decided break with the academic error. 

I have explained these things more than once before. 7 And these few 

lines will already have said enough on the subject for those who have a 

taste for the diversions of abstract thought. I know, however, that the majority 

of my own countrymen at least have but little inclination for these, and 

I myself am impatient to embark upon the positive and concrete part of my 

subject. 

6. Pen name of Marie Henri Beyle (1783– 1842), 

French novelist and critic; the quotation is from 

De l’amour (1822), chap. 17. 

7. E.g. in the article on “Critical Method” on the 

occasion of the Exposition Universelle of 1855 

[translator’s note].


From III. The Artist, Man of the World, Man of the Crowd, and Child 

Today I want to discourse to the public about a strange man, a man of so 

powerful and so decided an originality that it is sufficient unto itself and 

does not even seek approval. Not a single one of his drawings is signed, if by 

signature you mean that string of easily forgeable characters which spell a 

name and which so many other artists affix ostentatiously at the foot of 

their least important trifles. Yet all his works are signed— with his dazzling 

soul; and art- lovers who have seen and appreciated them will readily recognize 

them from the description that I am about to give. 

A passionate lover of crowds and incognitos, Monsieur C. G. 8 carries 

originality to the point of shyness. Mr. Thackeray, 9 who, as is well known, 

is deeply interested in matters of art, and who himself executes the illustrations 

to his novels, spoke one day of Monsieur G. in the columns of a London 

review. 1 The latter was furious, as though at an outrage to his virtue. 

Recently again, when he learnt that I had it in mind to write an appreciation 

of his mind and his talent, he begged me— very imperiously, I must 

admit— to suppress his name, and if I must speak of his works, to speak of 

them as if they were those of an anonymous artist. I will humbly comply 

with this singular request. 

* * * 

For ten years I had wanted to get to know Monsieur G., who is by nature 

a great traveller and cosmopolitan. I knew that for some time he had been 

on the staff of an En glish illustrated journal, 2 and that engravings after his 

travel- sketches, made in Spain, Turkey and the Crimea, had been published 

there. Since then I have seen a considerable quantity of those drawings, 

hastily sketched on the spot, and thus I have been able to read, so to speak, 

a detailed account of the Crimean campaign 3 which is much preferable to 

any other that I know. The same paper had also published, always without 

signature, a great number of his illustrations of new ballets and operas. 

When at last I ran him to earth, I saw at once that it was not precisely an 

artist, but rather a man of the world with whom I had to do. 

* * * 

And so, as a first step towards an understanding of Monsieur G., I would 

ask you to note at once that the mainspring of his genius is curiosity. 

Do you remember a picture (it really is a picture!), painted— or rather 

written— by the most powerful pen of our age, and entitled The Man of the 

Crowd? 4 In the window of a coffee- house there sits a convalescent, pleas urably 

absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling, through the medium of 

thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him. But lately returned 

from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturously breathing in all 

8. Constantin Guys (1802– 1892), prolific draftsman 

whose sketches of the Crimean War were 

forerunners of photojournalism. 

9. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811– 1863), 

En glish novelist and satirist. 

1. The reference has not been traced [translator’s 

note]. 

2. The Illustrated London News [translator’s note]. 

3. War (1854– 56) in which Britain, France, and 

Sardinia came to the aid of Turkey against Russia. 

4. A story by edgar allan poe, included among 

his Tales (1845) and translated by Baudelaire in 

the Nouvelles Histoires Extraordinaires [translator’s 

note].


the odours and essences of life; as he has been on the brink of total oblivion, 

he remembers, and fervently desires to remember, everything. Finally 

he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of an 

unknown, half- glimpsed countenance that has, on an instant, bewitched 

him. Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion! 

Imagine an artist who was always, spiritually, in the condition of that 

convalescent, and you will have the key to the nature of Monsieur G. 

Now convalescence is like a return towards childhood. The convalescent, 

like the child, is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly 

interesting himself in things, be they apparently of the most trivial. Let us 

go back, if we can, by a retrospective effort of the imagination, towards our 

most youthful, our earliest, impressions, and we will recognize that they 

had a strange kinship with those brightly coloured impressions which we 

were later to receive in the aftermath of a physical illness, always provided 

that that illness had left our spiritual capacities pure and unharmed. The 

child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing 

more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child 

absorbs form and colour. I am prepared to go even further and assert that 

inspiration has something in common with a convulsion, and that every 

sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less violent ner vous shock 

which has its repercussion in the very core of the brain. The man of genius 

has sound nerves, while those of the child are weak. With the one, Reason 

has taken up a considerable position; with the other, Sensibility is almost 

the whole being. But genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered 

at will— a childhood now equipped for self- expression with manhood’s 

capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw 

material which it has involuntarily accumulated. 

* * * 

The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. 

His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For 

the perfect flâneur, 5 for the passionate spectator, it is an im mense joy to set 

up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, 

in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet 

to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of 

the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world— such are a few of the 

slightest pleasures of those in de pen dent, passionate, impartial natures 

which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who 

everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole 

world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family 

from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are— or are 

not— to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of 

dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the 

crowd as though it were an im mense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we 

might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope 

gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and 

reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the 

5. Idler, man- about- town (French).


elements of life. He is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non- I’, at 

every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life 

itself, which is always unstable and fugitive. 

* * * 

Few men are gifted with the capacity of seeing; there are fewer still who 

possess the power of expression. So now, at a time when others are asleep, 

Monsieur G. is bending over his table, darting on to a sheet of paper the 

same glance that a moment ago he was directing towards external things, 

skirmishing with his pencil, his pen, his brush, splashing his glass of water 

up to the ceiling, wiping his pen on his shirt, in a ferment of violent activity, 

as though afraid that the image might escape him, cantankerous though 

alone, elbowing himself on. And the external world is reborn upon his 

paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful, 

strange and endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of its creator. The 

phantasmagoria has been distilled from nature. All the raw materials with 

which the memory has loaded itself are put in order, ranged and harmonized, 

and undergo that forced idealization which is the result of a childlike 

perceptiveness— that is to say, a perceptiveness acute and magical by reason 

of its innocence! 

IV. Modernity 

And so away he goes, hurrying, searching. But searching for what? Be very 

sure that this man, such as I have depicted him— this solitary, gifted with an 

active imagination, ceaselessly journeying across the great human desert— 

has an aim loftier than that of a mere flâneur, an aim more general, something 

other than the fugitive plea sure of circumstance. He is looking for that 

quality which you must allow me to call ‘modernity’; for I know of no better 

word to express the idea I have in mind. He makes it his business to extract 

from fashion what ever element it may contain of poetry within history, to 

distil the eternal from the transitory. Casting an eye over our exhibitions of 

modern pictures, we are struck by a general tendency among artists to dress 

all their subjects in the garments of the past. Almost all of them make use 

of the costumes and furnishings of the Re nais sance, just as David 6 employed 

the costumes and furnishings of Rome. There is however this difference, that 

David, by choosing subjects which were specifically Greek or Roman, had no 

alternative but to dress them in antique garb, whereas the paint ers of today, 

though choosing subjects of a general nature and applicable to all ages, nevertheless 

persist in rigging them out in the costumes of the Middle Ages, the 

Re nais sance or the Orient. This is clearly symptomatic of a great degree of 

laziness; for it is much easier to decide outright that everything about the 

garb of an age is absolutely ugly than to devote oneself to the task of distilling 

from it the mysterious element of beauty that it may contain, however 

slight or minimal that element may be. By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, 

the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal 

and the immutable. Every old master has had his own modernity; the 

6. Jacques- Louis David (1748– 1825), artist famous for his classical depictions of the French Revolution. 

Re nais sance: in France, the 16th– 17th centuries.


great majority of fine portraits that have come down to us from former generations 

are clothed in the costume of their own period. They are perfectly 

harmonious, because everything— from costume and coiffure down to gesture, 

glance and smile (for each age has a deportment, a glance and a smile 

of its own)— everything, I say, combines to form a completely viable whole. 

This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must 

on no account be despised or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot 

fail to tumble into the abyss of an abstract and indeterminate beauty, like 

that of the first woman before the fall of man. If for the necessary and 

inevitable costume of the age you substitute another, you will be guilty of a 

mistranslation only to be excused in the case of a masquerade prescribed by 

fashion. (Thus, the goddesses, nymphs and sultanas of the eigh teenth century 

are still convincing portraits, morally speaking.) 

It is doubtless an excellent thing to study the old masters in order to learn 

how to paint; but it can be no more than a waste of labour if your aim is to 

understand the special nature of present- day beauty. The draperies of 

Rubens or Veronese 7 will in no way teach you how to depict moire antique, 

satin à la reine 8 or any other fabric of modern manufacture, which we see 

supported and hung over crinoline or starched muslin petticoat. In texture 

and weave these are quite different from the fabrics of ancient Venice or 

those worn at the court of Catherine. 9 Furthermore the cut of skirt and bodice 

is by no means similar; the pleats are arranged according to a new system. 

Finally the gesture and the bearing of the woman of today give to her 

dress a life and a special character which are not those of the woman of the 

past. In short, for any ‘modernity’ to be worthy of one day taking its place as 

‘antiquity’, it is necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally 

puts into it to be distilled from it. And it is to this task that Monsieur 

G. particularly addresses himself. 

I have remarked that every age had its own gait, glance and gesture. The 

easiest way to verify this proposition would be to betake oneself to some 

vast portrait- gallery, such as the one at Versailles. 1 But it has an even wider 

application. Within that unity which we call a Nation, the various professions 

and classes and the passing centuries all introduce variety, not only in 

manners and gesture, but even in the actual form of the face. Certain types 

of nose, mouth and brow will be found to dominate the scene for a period 

whose extent I have no intention of attempting to determine here, but 

which could certainly be subjected to a form of calculation. Considerations 

of this kind are not sufficiently familiar to our portrait- painters; the great 

failing of M. Ingres, 2 in par tic u lar, is that he seeks to impose upon every 

type of sitter a more or less complete, by which I mean a more or less despotic, 

form of perfection, borrowed from the repertory of classical ideas. 

In a matter of this kind it would be easy, and indeed legitimate, to argue 

a priori. The perpetual correlation between what is called the ‘soul’ and 

7. Paolo Caliari (1528– 1588), major paint er of 

the 16th- century Venetian school (called “Veronese” 

because born in Verona). Peter Paul Rubens 

(1577– 1640), Flemish baroque paint er. 

8. Literally “oldfashioned watered silk” and “satin 

for the queen” (French), two elegant modern fabrics. 

9. Catherine de Medici (1519– 1589), the queen 

consort of Henry II of France, and subsequently 

regent. 

1. The royal palace at Versailles (near Paris), 

built (1676– 1708) by Louis XIV; the seat of government 

for more than 100 years, it was designated 

a national museum in 1837. 

2. Jean- August- Dominique Ingres (1780– 1867), 

celebrated French paint er and portraitist.


what is called the ‘body’ explains quite clearly how everything that is ‘material’, 

or in other words an emanation of the ‘spiritual’, mirrors, and will 

always mirror, the spiritual reality from which it derives. If a painstaking, 

scrupulous, but feebly imaginative artist has to paint a courtesan of today 

and takes his ‘inspiration’ (that is the accepted word) from a courtesan by 

Titian or Raphael, it is only too likely that he will produce a work which is 

false, ambiguous and obscure. From the study of a masterpiece of that time 

and type he will learn nothing of the bearing, the glance, the smile or the 

living ‘style’ of one of those creatures whom the dictionary of fashion has 

successively classified under the coarse or playful titles of ‘doxies’, ‘kept 

women’, lorettes, or biches. 3 

The same criticism may be strictly applied to the study of the military 

man and the dandy, and even to that of animals, whether horses or dogs; in 

short, of everything that goes to make up the external life of this age. Woe 

to him who studies the antique for anything else but pure art, logic and general 

method! By steeping himself too thoroughly in it, he will lose all memory 

of the present; he will renounce the rights and privileges offered by 

circumstance— for almost all our originality comes from the seal which Time 

imprints on our sensations. I need hardly tell you that I could easily support 

my assertions with reference to many objects other than women. What 

would you say, for example, of a marine- painter (I am deliberately going to 

extremes) who, having to depict the sober and elegant beauty of a modern 

vessel, were to tire out his eyes by studying the overcharged, involved forms 

and the monumental poop of a galleon, or the complicated rigging of the 

sixteenth century? Again, what would you think if you had commissioned an 

artist to paint the portrait of a thoroughbred, famed in the annals of the 

turf, and he then proceeded to confine his researches to the Museums and 

contented himself with a study of the horse in the galleries of the past, in 

Van Dyck, Borgognone or Van der Meulen? 4 

Under the direction of nature and the tyranny of circumstance, Monsieur 

G. has pursued an altogether different path. He began by being an observer 

of life, and only later set himself the task of acquiring the means of expressing 

it. This has resulted in a thrilling originality in which any remaining 

vestiges of barbarousness or naïveté appear only as new proofs of his faithfulness 

to the impression received, or as a flattering compliment paid to 

truth. For most of us, and particularly for men of affairs, for whom nature 

has no existence save by reference to utility, the fantastic reality of life has 

become singularly diluted. Monsieur G. never ceases to drink it in; his eyes 

and his memory are full of it. 

From IX. The Dandy 

* * * 

If I speak of love in connection with dandyism, this is because love is the 

natural occupation of the idle. The dandy does not, however, regard love as 

3. Affectionate terms for sexually free women of 

the demimonde. 

4. The Flemish Anthony van Dyke (1599– 1641), 

the French Jacques Courtois, il Borgognone 

(1620– 1676), and the Flemish Adam Frans van 

der Meulen (1632– 1690) all painted horses (in 

battle scenes, equestrian portraits, and murals).


a special target to be aimed at. If I have spoken of money, this is because 

money is indispensable to those who make a cult of their emotions; but the 

dandy does not aspire to money as to something essential; this crude passion 

he leaves to vulgar mortals; he would be perfectly content with a limitless 

credit at the bank. Dandyism does not even consist, as many thoughtless 

people seem to believe, in an immoderate taste for the toilet and material 

elegance. For the perfect dandy these things are no more than symbols of 

his aristocratic superiority of mind. Furthermore to his eyes, which are in 

love with distinction above all things, the perfection of his toilet will consist 

in absolute simplicity, which is the best way, in fact, of achieving the 

desired quality. What then is this passion, which, becoming doctrine, has 

produced such a school of tyrants? what this unofficial institution which 

has formed so haughty and exclusive a sect? It is first and foremost the 

burning need to create for oneself a personal originality, bounded only by 

the limits of the proprieties. It is a kind of cult of the self which can nevertheless 

survive the pursuit of a happiness to be found in someone else— in 

woman, for example; which can even survive all that goes by in the name of 

illusions. It is the joy of astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of 

never oneself being astonished. A dandy may be blasé, he may even suffer; 

but in this case, he will smile like the Spartan boy under the fox’s tooth. 5 

* * * 

Whether these men are nicknamed exquisites, incroyables, 6 beaux, lions 

or dandies, they all spring from the same womb; they all partake of the 

same characteristic quality of opposition and revolt; they are all representatives 

of what is finest in human pride, of that compelling need, alas only too 

rare today, of combating and destroying triviality. It is from this that the 

dandies obtain that haughty exclusiveness, provocative in its very coldness. 

Dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not 

yet all- powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall. In 

the disorder of these times, certain men who are socially, po liti cally and 

financially ill at ease, but are all rich in native energy, may conceive the 

idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to shatter 

as it will be based on the most precious, the most enduring faculties, 

and on the divine gifts which work and money are unable to bestow. Dandyism 

is the last spark of heroism amid de cadence; and the type of dandy 

discovered by our traveller in North America does nothing to invalidate this 

idea; for how can we be sure that those tribes which we call ‘savage’ may 

not in fact be the disjecta membra 7 of great extinct civilizations? Dandyism 

is a sunset; like the declining daystar, it is glorious, without heat and full of 

melancholy. But alas, the rising tide of democracy, which invades and levels 

everything, is daily overwhelming these last representatives of human pride 

and pouring floods of oblivion upon the footprints of these stupendous 

warriors. Dandies are becoming rarer and rarer in our country, whereas 

amongst our neighbours in En gland the social system and the constitution 

(the true constitution, I mean: the constitution which expresses itself 

5. According to legend, a Greek boy of Sparta 

who had stolen a fox hid it under his cloak and 

allowed the animal to devour his entrails rather 

than reveal the theft. 

6. Incredibles (French): late- 18th- century fops 

who called everything “incredible.” 

7. Scattered pieces (Latin).


through behaviour) will for a long time yet allow a place for the descendants 

of Sheridan, Brummel and Byron, 8 granted at least that men are born 

who are worthy of such a heritage. 

What to the reader may have seemed a digression is not so in truth. The 

moral reflections and considerations provoked by an artist’s drawings are in 

many cases the best translation of them that criticism can make; such suggestions 

form part of an underlying idea which begins to emerge as they are 

set out one after the other. It is hardly necessary to say that when Monsieur 

G. sketches one of his dandies on the paper, he never fails to give him his 

historical personality— his legendary personality, I would venture to say, if 

we were not speaking of the present time and of things generally considered 

as frivolous. Nothing is missed; his lightness of step, his social aplomb, the 

simplicity in his air of authority, his way of wearing a coat or riding a horse, 

his bodily attitudes which are always relaxed but betray an inner energy, so 

that when your eye lights upon one of those privileged beings in whom the 

graceful and the formidable are so mysteriously blended, you think: ‘A rich 

man perhaps, but more likely an out- of- work Hercules!’ 9 

The distinguishing characteristic of the dandy’s beauty consists above all 

in an air of coldness which comes from an unshakeable determination not 

to be moved; you might call it a latent fire which hints at itself, and which 

could, but chooses not to burst into flame. It is this quality which these 

pictures express so perfectly. 

XI. In Praise of Cosmetics 

I remember a song, so worthless and silly that it seems hardly proper to quote 

from it in a work which has some pretensions to seriousness, but which nevertheless 

expresses very well, in its vaudev ille manner, the aesthetic creed of 

people who do not think. ‘Nature embellishes Beauty’, it runs. It is of course 

to be presumed that, had he known how to write in French, the poet would 

rather have said ‘Simplicity embellishes Beauty’, which is equivalent to the 

following startling new truism: ‘Nothing embellishes something.’ 

The majority of errors in the field of aesthetics spring from the eigh teenth 

century’s false premiss in the field of ethics. At that time Nature was taken as 

ground, source and type of all possible Good and Beauty. The negation of 

original sin played no small part in the general blindness of that period. But 

if we are prepared to refer simply to the facts, which are manifest to the experience 

of all ages no less than to the readers of the Law Reports, we shall see 

that Nature teaches us nothing, or practically nothing. I admit that she compels 

man to sleep, to eat, to drink, and to arm himself as well as he may 

against the inclemencies of the weather: but it is she too who incites man to 

murder his brother, to eat him, to lock him up and to torture him; for no 

sooner do we take leave of the domain of needs and necessities to enter that 

of pleasures and luxury than we see that Nature can counsel nothing but 

crime. It is this infallible Mother Nature who has created patricide and cannibalism, 

and a thousand other abominations that both shame and modesty 

8. The Irish- born dramatist Richard Brinsley 

Sheridan (1751– 1816), George Bryan (“Beau”) 

Brummell (1778– 1840), and the poet George 

Gordon, Lord Byron (1788– 1824) were all En glish 

dandies. 

9. The Roman name of Heracles, the greatest of 

the legendary Greek heroes; among other feats, 

he performed 12 famous labors.


prevent us from naming. On the other hand it is philosophy (I speak of good 

philosophy) and religion which command us to look after our parents when 

they are poor and infirm. Nature, being none other than the voice of our own 

self- interest, would have us slaughter them. I ask you to review and scrutinize 

what ever is natural— all the actions and desires of the purely natural man: 

you will find nothing but frightfulness. Everything beautiful and noble is 

the result of reason and calculation. Crime, of which the human animal has 

learned the taste in his mother’s womb, is natural by origin. Virtue, on the 

other hand, is artificial, supernatural, since at all times and in all places gods 

and prophets have been needed to teach it to animalized humanity, man 

being powerless to discover it by himself. Evil happens without effort, naturally, 

fatally; Good is always the product of some art. All that I am saying 

about Nature as a bad counsellor in moral matters, and about Reason as true 

redeemer and reformer, can be applied to the realm of Beauty. I am thus led 

to regard external finery as one of the signs of the primitive nobility of the 

human soul. Those races which our confused and perverted civilization is 

pleased to treat as savage, with an altogether ludicrous pride and complacency, 

understand, just as the child understands, the lofty spiritual significance 

of the toilet. In their naif adoration of what is brilliant—many- coloured 

feathers, iridescent fabrics, the incomparable majesty of artificial forms— the 

baby and the savage bear witness to their disgust of the real, and thus give 

proof, without knowing it, of the immateriality of their soul. Woe to him who, 

like Louis XV 1 (the product not of a true civilization but of a recrudescence of 

barbarism), carries his degeneracy to the point of no longer having a taste for 

anything but nature unadorned. 2 

Fashion should thus be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal 

which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bricà- 

brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain: as a sublime 

deformation of Nature, or rather a permanent and repeated attempt at her 

reformation. And so it has been sensibly pointed out (though the reason has 

not been discovered) that every fashion is charming, relatively speaking, 

each one being a new and more or less happy effort in the direction of Beauty, 

some kind of approximation to an ideal for which the restless human mind 

feels a constant, titillating hunger. But if one wants to appreciate them 

properly, fashions should never be considered as dead things; you might just 

as well admire the tattered old rags hung up, as slack and lifeless as the skin 

of St. Bartholomew, 3 in an old- clothes dealer’s cupboard. Rather they should 

be thought of as vitalized and animated by the beautiful women who wore 

them. Only in this way can their sense and meaning be understood. If 

therefore the aphorism ‘All fashions are charming’ upsets you as being too 

absolute, say, if you prefer, ‘All were once justifiably charming’. You can be 

sure of being right. 

Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind 

of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; 

1. King of France (1710– 1774; reigned 1715– 74). 

2. We know that when she wished to avoid receiving 

the king, Mme Du Barry made a point of putting 

on rouge. It was quite enough; it was her way 

of closing the door. It was in fact by beautifying 

herself that she used to frighten away her royal 

disciple of nature [Baudelaire’s note]. Marie 

Jeanne Bécu, comtesse du Barry (1743– 1793), 

the mistress of Louis XV. 

3. One of Jesus’ disciples, said to have been martyred 

by being flayed alive.


she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself 

in order to be adored. Thus she has to lay all the arts under contribution for 

the means of lifting herself above Nature, the better to conquer hearts and 

rivet attention. It matters but little that the artifice and trickery are known 

to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible. 

By reflecting in this way the philosopher- artist will find it easy to justify all 

the practices adopted by women at all times to consolidate and as it were to 

make divine their fragile beauty. To enumerate them would be an endless 

task: but to confine ourselves to what today is vulgarly called ‘maquillage’, 4 

anyone can see that the use of rice- powder, so stupidly anathematized by 

our Arcadian phi los o phers, 5 is successfully designed to rid the complexion 

of those blemishes that Nature has outrageously strewn there, and thus to 

create an abstract unity in the colour and texture of the skin, a unity, 

which, like that produced by the tights of a dancer, immediately approximates 

the human being to the statue, that is to something superior and 

divine. As for the artificial black with which the eye is outlined, and the 

rouge with which the upper part of the cheek is painted, although their use 

derives from the same principle, the need to surpass Nature, the result is 

calculated to satisfy an absolutely opposite need. Red and black represent 

life, a supernatural and excessive life: its black frame renders the glance 

more penetrating and individual, and gives the eye a more decisive appearance 

of a window open upon the infinite; and the rouge which sets fire to 

the cheek- bone only goes to increase the brightness of the pupil and adds to 

the face of a beautiful woman the mysterious passion of the priestess. 

Thus, if you will understand me aright, face- painting should not be used 

with the vulgar, unavowable object of imitating fair Nature and of entering 

into competition with youth. It has moreover been remarked that artifice 

cannot lend charm to ugliness and can only serve beauty. Who would dare 

to assign to art the sterile function of imitating Nature? Maquillage has no 

need to hide itself or to shrink from being suspected; on the contrary, let it 

display itself, at least if it does so with frankness and honesty. 

I am perfectly happy for those whose owlish gravity prevents them from 

seeking Beauty in its most minute manifestations to laugh at these reflections 

of mine and to accuse them of a childish self- importance; their austere 

verdict leaves me quite unmoved; I content myself with appealing to true 

artists as well as to those women themselves who, having received at birth a 

spark of that sacred flame, would tend it so that their whole beings were on 

fire with it. 

1863 

4. Makeup (French). 

5. Utopian lovers of nature; according to longstanding 

literary convention, Arcadia (a district 

of Greece) is the home of pastoral simplicity and 

happiness.

691 

MATTHEW ARNOLD 

1822–1888 

In an assessment published in the 1970s, the literary scholar and essayist Lionel 

Trilling concluded that Matthew Arnold is “virtually the founding father of modern 

criticism in the English- speaking world.” Citing our first selection, “The Function of 

Criticism at the Present Time” (1865), Trilling quoted Arnold’s famous injunction 

that the critic should strive to “see the object as in itself it really is” and his celebrated 

definition of criticism as the “disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate 

the best that is known and thought in the world.” These authoritative statements, 

Trilling maintained, gave later scholars and teachers their inspiration and interpretive 

mission. 

Arnold provided literary criticism with an important social function and paved the 

way for its “institutionalization” in the academy. He regarded the writing and reading 

of literature as urgent activities in the world, insisting “that poetry is at bottom a 

criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application 

of ideas to life,— to the question: How to live.” Serious criticism, he believed, was 

responsible for generating and maintaining the context of ideas and high standards 

that the production of literature required. Even more: criticism, for Arnold, meant an 

engagement with history, education, politics, religion, philosophy and other subjects 

and concerns; literature is vitally connected to society and culture. 

Arnold continues today to represent an ideal of literary and cultural humanism 

that many critics honor. But this same ideal is one that radical critics and contemporary 

literary theorists have sought to complicate or undermine. As the scholar 

Joseph Carroll has noted, Arnold’s key term “disinterestedness” is “now the most 

violently disputed word in the Arnoldian lexicon,” and many theorists from the 

1970s to the present have launched their proposals by taking issue with Arnold’s 

and his followers’ account of the critic’s role and procedures. For example, stanley 

fish’s reader- response criticism denies the possibility of “disinterested” objective 

perception, and the Marxist critic terry ea gleton emphasizes Arnold’s alignment 

with state power and the privileged classes in his stress on “timeless truths.” 

Arnold excelled as a critic and polemicist, and he frequently took delight in the 

public controversies that his books and articles kindled and in the charges hurled 

against him. Arnold was also a poet, an educator, and an advocate for civility and 

moderation who followed in the footsteps of his eminent father— Thomas Arnold 

(1795– 1842), a religious leader, historian, and, from 1828 to 1841, the influential, 

reform- minded headmaster of Rugby, a venerable boarding school for boys. At Rugby, 

Thomas Arnold added the study of French, German, and mathematics to the traditional 

classical curriculum and gave new emphasis to history and geography. He 

resolutely campaigned for Christianity, patriotism, self- reliance, loyalty, duty, and 

public ser vice, and he won great renown for his commitment to them in education. 

Educated at Rugby and Oxford University, Matthew Arnold at first concentrated 

more on his social life (he was something of a dandy) than on his studies. His 

poetry— most of which he wrote during the 1840s and 1850s— left him unsatisfied, 

yet it eloquently expresses the self- doubt, intellectual unease, and emotional hesitancy 

felt by midcentury intellectuals, when Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution 

and the skeptical inquiry into the historical status and transmission of biblical texts 

(the “higher criticism”) were calling the time- honored principles of Christian faith 

into question. Arnold’s first two books were The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems 

(1849) and Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems (1852). In his preface to his 1853 

collection, Poems: A New Edition— his first piece of published prose— Arnold articulated 

what he conceded was missing from his own verse: “the spirit of the great classical 

works,” “their intense significance, their noble simplicity, and their calm pathos”

692 / MATTHEW ARNOLD 

that create “unity and profoundness of moral impression.” He felt that this failure to 

evoke the best in Eu ro pe an moral value was widespread in modern literature. 

In 1851 Arnold received an appointment as an inspector of schools, and this 

demanding work involved much tedious discussion with teachers and administrators 

and painstaking reviews of students’ examinations and papers. It also required 

extensive travel in En gland and research trips abroad in 1859 and 1865, which led 

to three books on Eu ro pe an (particularly French) systems of education. Though it 

was wearying, Arnold took pride in his work and did not retire until 1883; he viewed 

the schools as the crucial site for “civilising the next generation of the lower classes, 

who, as things are going, will have most of the po liti cal power of the country in 

their hands.” Clearly, much more than literary interpretation was at stake. In his 

duties as an inspector, he saw the privations that workers and their families suffered, 

and he was dedicated to the task of social and cultural progress, identifying 

himself as a “Liberal of the future.” 

Arnold was named Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 1857, a position he 

held until 1867. Because this appointment did not oblige him to teach or supervise 

students or to be in residence, he was able both to remain in his government post 

and to gain notice as a prolific social, cultural, and literary critic. His major prose 

works are Essays in Criticism, First Series (1865), Essays in Criticism, Second Series 

(1888), and Culture and Anarchy (1869), which examines the condition of En gland 

as represented by the three groups Arnold nicknamed the Barbarians (the aristocracy), 

the Philistines (the middle classes), and the Populace (the working classes). 

He also wrote extensively on religion, including Literature and Dogma (1873), 

which, he said, was the “most important” of all his prose works, the one most 

capable “of being useful.” Examining the shaken doctrines and tenets of orthodox 

creeds and churches, it made a forthright case for a literary response and approach 

to the Scriptures that would trea sure their enduring moral truths. Literature and 

Dogma sold 100,000 copies, far more than any of his other books. 

Arnold stated in Culture and Anarchy that he wanted culture to heighten among 

the En glish “the impulse to the development of the whole man, to connecting and 

harmonizing all parts of him, perfecting all, leaving none to take their chance.” 

Though these sentiments were presented as possessing a timeless validity, Arnold 

voiced them at a moment in En glish history when “anarchy”— social unrest and 

rioting— had erupted in the streets and revolution seemed a real possibility. The 

Reform Act of 1832 had increased the number of voters by 50 percent, but the working 

class and the poor remained without the vote. The defeat of an effort to extend 

eligibility to their ranks in 1866 brought down the Liberal government and spurred 

mass protests and violent demonstrations across the country. The Reform Act of 

1867, passed in the midst of this social and po liti cal upheaval, added 938,000 voters 

and thereby doubled the size of the electorate. 

Who shall inherit En gland? This question, which Trilling called central to a 

major tradition of En glish novelists from Charles Dickens (1812– 1870) to E. M. 

Forster (1879– 1970), was raised as well by intellectuals of the nineteenth century 

(such as Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin) and twentieth century (such as t. s. 

eliot and D. H. Lawrence) in their works of cultural criticism. Not only who shall 

inherit En gland, but what kinds of power could they be trusted with? What forms 

of education should they receive? For Arnold in par tic u lar, the answers to these 

interconnected questions could be found in many literary sources— some in the 

distant past, others closer to his own era. He counseled moral betterment and 

spiritual renewal, achieved through the appreciative reading of the best literature. 

The best persons would be critics— poised, balanced, and reflective; they would be 

foes of fanat i cism, zealotry, and po liti cal enthusiasm, and they would be aspirants 

to “perfection” (a term Arnold fastened on in both Essays in Criticism and Culture 

and Anarchy). Such arguments echo those of literary and philosophical precursors 

and contemporaries. In The Defence of Poesy (1595; see above), for example,

MATTHEW ARNOLD / 693 

sir philip sidney had affirmed that “the final end” of learning “is to lead and draw 

us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, 

can be capable of.” And in “The Poet” (1844; see above), ralph waldo emerson, 

whose writings Arnold knew well, celebrated the poet as “representative of 

man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and impart.” 

Because Arnold is mainly interested in the personality and moral tone of the 

author, not in the resources of language or the unfolding meanings of literary works 

themselves, he does not devote much attention to specific texts; an exception is his 

series of lectures On Translating Homer, published in 1861. Lines that he does 

quote typically function for him as “touchstones,” those “specimens of poetry of the 

high, the very highest quality” that “save us from fallacious estimates of value”— 

and that seem to beg the very question of “greatness” that they are meant to answer. 

Arnold assumed that his readers would know these authors and texts and their contexts, 

and that the “touchstones” would be recognized by all as profound and 

memorable. Yet he himself had minimal sympathy for (or understanding of) En glish 

writers of the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, Arnold mentioned 

fiction only briefly and not very perceptively. Unlike, for example, henry james, he 

showed little interest in music, sculpture, painting, or the theater. 

These faults do not diminish the power with which Arnold defined the “function 

of criticism” for the Victorian and modern periods. Wholeheartedly defending literature 

against its enemies and detractors, whose emphasis on science, moneymaking, 

and commercial prosperity had led them to regard poetry as merely a pleasant 

pastime, he argued that it equipped men and women to perceive authentic value in 

the workings of the society and culture around them. 

Criticism is not, ultimately, something one does; it gestures toward who one is. 

The same is true of “culture,” as Arnold presents it in Culture and Anarchy (excerpted 

below). Culture is “a study of perfection,” an “internal condition”; it mandates a 

sharp yet supple movement of mind, a vigilant guard against an excess of commitment 

to a single point of view, and a refusal to accept the alluring power of extreme, 

polarizing judgments. Unlike later critics influenced by anthropology, Arnold does 

not view culture as designating the distinctive whole way of life of a people or a 

period. Nor would he agree with such critics as antonio gramsci, stuart hall, 

and edward said, who characterize culture as often an instrument of social and 

po liti cal control and conquest. For Arnold, culture is selective and harmonious, not 

conflictual. Criticism and culture loom large because of their beneficent effects on 

the individual, as they impel sustained acts of reflection and prevent persons from 

falling into complacency and “self- satisfaction.” 

Arnold defines criticism as involving flexibility, openness to new experiences, and 

curiosity (a word he explores in both “The Function of Criticism” and Culture and 

Anarchy). He insists, too, on the “free play” of mind— a phrase that poststructuralist 

theorists such as jacques derrida would define far more radically and subversively, 

without Arnold’s belief in a stable textual object that provides a center around 

which analysis and reflection occur. Arnold tethers criticism to a rigorous duty; 

criticism, he explains, “tends to establish an order of ideas” and seeks to “make the 

best ideas prevail.” As his choice of verbs indicates, criticism is challenging work; 

the campaign must be waged, in a phrase used in “The Function of Criticism,” with 

“inflexible honesty.” Arnold firmly believes that some ideas are right and others 

wrong: he is no relativist. Nor is he a revolutionary, but rather a careful, cautious, 

deliberate reformer, wary of the ways in which the impulse for change can run wild 

and become destructive. A good literary critic is, inevitably for Arnold, a good critic 

in general: a person of culture embarked on a steady, steadfast inquiry into self and 

society. For all of his witty turns of phrase, topical references and allusions, and 

stylistic clarity and poise, Arnold is at heart a writer who realized, as he acknowledged 

in a letter in 1863, that his arguments would make “a good many people 

uncomfortable.”


bibliography 

The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, edited by R. H. Super (11 vols., 1960– 

77), offers a definitive text and excellent notes. P. J. Keating (1970) and Christopher 

Ricks (1972) have edited collections of Arnold’s critical writings. For the poetry and 

prose, the editions by Lionel Trilling (1949) and A. Dwight Culler (1961) are useful, 

though thin in their annotations. For the correspondence, Letters, 1848– 1888, edited 

by George W. E. Russell (2 vols., 1895), remains important, although this edition, and 

other selections, have been superseded by Letters of Matthew Arnold, edited by Cecil 

Y. Lang (6 vols., 1996– 2001). Excellent biographies include Park Honan, Matthew 

Arnold: A Life (1981); Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (1995); and Ian 

Hamilton, A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (1999). 

For critical overviews, see Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (1939); Douglas Bush, 

Matthew Arnold: A Survey of His Poetry and Prose (1971), a cogent and informative 

survey of Arnold’s life and literary career; and Stefan Collini, Matthew Arnold: A 

Critical Portrait (2008). Also helpful is a collection of essays, Matthew Arnold, edited 

by Kenneth Allott (1976). 

Critical studies that focus on Arnold’s prose include John Holloway, The Victorian 

Sage: Studies in Argument (1953), insightful on Arnold’s style and rhetorical strategies; 

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780– 1950 (1958), a landmark history 

of British cultural criticism that includes a substantial discussion of Arnold; Vincent 

Buckley, Poetry and Morality: Studies on the Criticism of Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, 

and F. R. Leavis (1959); Leon Gottfried, Matthew Arnold and the Romantics (1963); 

David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian En gland: Newman, Arnold, and 

Pater (1969), which explicates the affinities and differences between Arnold and his 

contemporaries and successors; Fred G. Walcott, The Origins of Culture and Anarchy: 

Matthew Arnold and Pop u lar Education in En gland (1970); Sidney Coulling, 

Matthew Arnold and His Critics: A Study of Arnold’s Controversies (1974), which provides 

historical context; Joseph Carroll, The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold 

(1982), an excellent study of Arnold’s main themes and ideas; and Ruth apRoberts, 

Arnold and God (1983). For responses to Arnold by his contemporaries, see Matthew 

Arnold— Prose Writings: The Critical Heritage, edited by Carl Dawson and John 

Pfordresher (1979). Edward W. Said, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), 

and Geoffrey H. Hartman, in Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature 

Today (1980), are among the important contemporary literary theorists who have 

assessed Arnold’s impact on the academy. Additional commentaries can be found in 

an edition of Culture and Anarchy prepared by Samuel Lipman (1994). In Ethnicity 

and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois (2006), Daniel G. Williams studies 

Arnold in a transatlantic context, showing how he, William Dean Howells, W. B. 

Yeats, and W. E. B. Du Bois draw on ethnicity and race in their cultural and literary 

criticism. 

Concentrating on Arnold’s poetry but including pertinent commentary on the 

prose are A. Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold 

(1961); Alan Roper, Arnold’s Poetic Landscapes (1969); and David G. Riede, Matthew 

Arnold and the Betrayal of Language (1988). 

Thomas Burnett Smart has compiled The Bibliography of Matthew Arnold (1892); 

it should be supplemented by the listing in The Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 15 

(1903– 04). See also Clinton Machann, The Essential Matthew Arnold: An Annotated 

Bibliography of Major Modern Studies (1993).

695 

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time 1 

Many objections have been made to a proposition which, in some remarks 

of mine on translating Homer, 2 I ventured to put forth; a proposition about 

criticism, and its importance at the present day. I said: ‘Of the literature of 

France and Germany, as of the intellect of Eu rope in general, the main 

effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all 

branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see 

the object as in itself it really is.’ I added, that owing to the operation in 

En glish literature of certain causes, ‘almost the last thing for which one 

would come to En glish literature is just that very thing which now Eu rope 

most desires,— criticism’; and that the power and value of En glish literature 

was thereby impaired. More than one rejoinder declared that the importance 

I here assigned to criticism was excessive, and asserted the inherent 

superiority of the creative effort of the human spirit over its critical effort. 

And the other day, having been led by a Mr. Shairp’s excellent notice of 

Wordsworth 3 to turn again to his biography, I found, in the words of this 

great man, whom I, for one, must always listen to with the profoundest 

respect, a sentence passed on the critic’s business, which seems to justify 

every possible disparagement of it. Wordsworth says in one of his letters:— 

‘The writers in these publications’ (the Reviews), ‘while they prosecute 

their inglorious employment, can not be supposed to be in a state of mind 

very favourable for being affected by the finer influences of a thing so pure 

as genuine poetry.’ 

And a trustworthy reporter 4 of his conversation quotes a more elaborate 

judgment to the same effect:— 

‘Wordsworth holds the critical power very low, infinitely lower than the 

inventive; and he said today that if the quantity of time consumed in writing 

critiques on the works of others were given to original composition, of 

what ever kind it might be, it would be much better employed; it would 

make a man find out sooner his own level, and it would do infinitely less 

mischief. A false or malicious criticism may do much injury to the minds of 

others, a stupid invention, either in prose or verse, is quite harmless.’ 

It is almost too much to expect of poor human nature, that a man capable 

of producing some effect in one line of literature, should, for the greater 

good of society, voluntarily doom himself to impotence and obscurity in 

1. First delivered as a lecture at Oxford University, 

on October 29, 1864, and published in the 

National Review in November 1864, with the 

title given in the plural, “Functions.” Arnold 

altered the title for the book version (1865) and 

added several footnotes. The text reprinted here 

is that of the 1875 third edition, the last one that 

Arnold prepared. 

2. See Lecture II of On Translating Homer (1861). 

The Greek Iliad and Odyssey of Homer (ca. 8th c. 

b.c.e.) were a standard part of En glish elite education. 

3. I cannot help thinking that a practice, common 

in En gland during the last century, and still followed 

in France, of printing a notice of this kind,— 

a notice by a competent critic,— to serve as an 

introduction to an eminent author’s works, might 

be revived among us with advantage. To introduce 

all succeeding editions of Wordsworth, Mr. 

Shairp’s notice might, it seems to me, excellently 

serve; it is written from the point of view of an 

admirer, nay, of a disciple, and that is right; but 

then the disciple must be also, as in this case he is, 

a critic, a man of letters, not, as too often happens, 

some relation or friend with no qualification for his 

task except affection for his author [Arnold’s note]. 

John Campbell Shairp (1819– 1885) was a friend of 

Arnold’s at Balliol College, Oxford; the “notice” (in 

which Arnold is praised) is “Wordsworth: The Man 

and the Poet,” North British Review 41 (August 

1864): 1– 54. william wordsworth (1770– 1850) 

is the preeminent En glish Romantic poet. 

4. Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William 

Wordsworth (1851).


another. Still less is this to be expected from men addicted to the composition 

of the ‘false or malicious criticism’ of which Wordsworth speaks. However, 

everybody would admit that a false or malicious criticism had better 

never have been written. Everybody, too, would be willing to admit, as a 

general proposition, that the critical faculty is lower than the inventive. But 

is it true that criticism is really, in itself, a baneful and injurious employment; 

is it true that all time given to writing critiques on the works of others 

would be much better employed if it were given to original composition, of 

what ever kind this may be? Is it true that Johnson had better have gone on 

producing more Irenes 5 instead of writing his Lives of the Poets; nay, is it 

certain that Wordsworth himself was better employed in making his Ecclesiastical 

Sonnets than when he made his celebrated Preface, 6 so full of 

criticism, and criticism of the works of others? Wordsworth was himself a 

great critic, and it is to be sincerely regretted that he has not left us more 

criticism; Goethe 7 was one of the greatest of critics, and we may sincerely 

congratulate ourselves that he has left us so much criticism. Without wasting 

time over the exaggeration which Wordsworth’s judgment on criticism 

clearly contains, or over an attempt to trace the causes,— not difficult, I 

think, to be traced, 8 — which may have led Wordsworth to this exaggeration, 

a critic may with advantage seize an occasion for trying his own conscience, 

and for asking himself of what real ser vice at any given moment 

the practice of criticism either is or may be made to his own mind and 

spirit, and to the minds and spirits of others. 

The critical power is of lower rank than the creative. True; but in assenting 

to this proposition, one or two things are to be kept in mind. It is undeniable 

that the exercise of a creative power, that a free creative activity, is the 

highest function of man; it is proved to be so by man’s finding in it his true 

happiness. But it is undeniable, also, that men may have the sense of exercising 

this free creative activity in other ways than in producing great works of 

literature or art; if it were not so, all but a very few men would be shut out 

from the true happiness of all men. They may have it in well- doing, they may 

have it in learning, they may have it in criticising. This is one thing to be 

kept in mind. Another is, that the exercise of the creative power in the production 

of great works of literature or art, however high this exercise of it 

may rank, is not at all epochs and under all conditions possible; and that 

therefore labour may be vainly spent in attempting it, which might with 

more fruit be used in preparing for it, in rendering it possible. This creative 

power works with elements, with materials; what if it has not those materials, 

those elements, ready for its use? In that case it must surely wait till they 

are ready. Now, in literature,— I will limit myself to literature, for it is about 

literature that the question arises,— the elements with which the creative 

power works are ideas; the best ideas on every matter which literature 

touches, current at the time. At any rate we may lay it down as certain that 

in modern literature no manifestation of the creative power not working 

5. Irene (1749), an unsuccessful neoclassical 

tragedy by samuel johnson (1709– 1784), whose 

Lives of the Poets (1779– 81) were a considerable 

critical achievement. 

6. The preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800, 1802; see 

above). The 132 “Ecclesiastical Sonnets” (1821– 

22), which recount the history of the Church of 

En gland, are not considered among Wordsworth’s 

major works. 

7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749– 1832), 

German poet, dramatist, novelist, and scientist. 

8. That is, to hostile reviews of Wordsworth’s 

poetry.

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time / 697 

with these can be very important or fruitful. And I say current at the time, 

not merely accessible at the time; for creative literary genius does not principally 

show itself in discovering new ideas, that is rather the business of the 

phi los o pher. The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and 

exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being 

happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain 

order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; of dealing divinely with these 

ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations,— 

making beautiful works with them, in short. But it must have the atmosphere, 

it must find itself amidst the order of ideas, in order to work freely; 

and these it is not so easy to command. This is why great creative epochs in 

literature are so rare, this is why there is so much that is unsatisfactory in 

the productions of many men of real genius; because, for the creation of a 

master- work of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and 

the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment; 9 

the creative power has, for its happy exercise, appointed elements, and those 

elements are not in its own control. 

Nay, they are more within the control of the critical power. It is the business 

of the critical power, as I said in the words already quoted, ‘in all 

branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see 

the object as in itself it really is.’ Thus it tends, at last, to make an intellectual 

situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends 

to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison 

with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail. Presently these 

new ideas reach society, the touch of truth is the touch of life, and there is 

a stir and growth everywhere; out of this stir and growth come the creative 

epochs of literature. 

Or, to narrow our range, and quit these considerations of the general 

march of genius and of society,— considerations which are apt to become 

too abstract and impalpable,— every one can see that a poet, for instance, 

ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in poetry; and 

life and the world being in modern times very complex things, the creation 

of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it; 

else it must be a comparatively poor, barren, and short- lived affair. This is 

why Byron’s 1 poetry had so little endurance in it, and Goethe’s so much; 

both Byron and Goethe had a great productive power, but Goethe’s was 

nourished by a great critical effort providing the true materials for it, and 

Byron’s was not; Goethe knew life and the world, the poet’s necessary subjects, 

much more comprehensively and thoroughly than Byron. He knew a 

great deal more of them, and he knew them much more as they really are. 

It has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our literature, 

through the first quarter of this century, had about it in fact something 

premature; and that from this cause its productions are doomed, most of 

them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which accompanied and do still accompany 

them, to prove hardly more lasting than the productions of far less 

splendid epochs. And this prematureness comes from its having proceeded 

9. A reference to Hippolyte Taine’s History of 

En glish Literature (3 vols., 1863/4); in the introduction, 

the French critic and phi los o pher 

(1828–1893) describes the impact of heredity, 

environment, and history (“la race, le milieu, le 

moment”). 

1. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788– 1824), 

En glish Romantic poet.


without having its proper data, without sufficient materials to work with. In 

other words, the En glish poetry of the first quarter of this century, with 

plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough. This makes 

Byron so empty of matter, Shelley 2 so incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound 

as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and variety. Wordsworth 

cared little for books, and disparaged Goethe. I admire Wordsworth, as he 

is, so much that I cannot wish him different; and it is vain, no doubt, to 

imagine such a man different from what he is, to suppose that he could 

have been different. But surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth 

an even greater poet than he is,— his thought richer, and his influence of 

wider application,— was that he should have read more books, among them, 

no doubt, those of that Goethe whom he disparaged without reading him. 

But to speak of books and reading may easily lead to a misunderstanding 

here. It was not really books and reading that lacked to our poetry at this 

epoch; Shelley had plenty of reading, Coleridge 3 had im mense reading. Pindar 

and Sophocles 4 — as we all say so glibly, and often with so little discernment 

of the real import of what we are saying— had not many books; 

Shakespeare was no deep reader. True; but in the Greece of Pindar and 

Sophocles, in the En gland of Shakspeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas 

in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative power; society 

was, in the fullest mea sure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and 

alive. And this state of things is the true basis for the creative power’s exercise, 

in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand; all the 

books and reading in the world are only valuable as they are helps to this. 

Even when this does not actually exist, books and reading may enable a man 

to construct a kind of semblance of it in his own mind, a world of knowledge 

and intelligence in which he may live and work. This is by no means an 

equivalent to the artist for the nationally diffused life and thought of the 

epochs of Sophocles or Shakspeare; but, besides that it may be a means of 

preparation for such epochs, it does really constitute, if many share in it, a 

quickening and sustaining atmosphere of great value. Such an atmosphere 

the many- sided learning and the long and widely- combined critical effort of 

Germany formed for Goethe, when he lived and worked. There was no 

national glow of life and thought there as in the Athens of Pericles or the 

En gland of Elizabeth. 5 That was the poet’s weakness. But there was a sort of 

equivalent for it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large 

body of Germans. That was his strength. In the En gland of the first quarter 

of this century there was neither a national glow of life and thought, such as 

we had in the age of Elizabeth, nor yet a culture and a force of learning and 

criticism such as were to be found in Germany. Therefore the creative power 

of poetry wanted, for success in the highest sense, materials and a basis; a 

thorough interpretation of the world was necessarily denied to it. 

At first sight it seems strange that out of the im mense stir of the French 

Revolution and its age should not have come a crop of works of genius equal 

2. percy bysshe shelley (1792– 1822), En glish 

poet. 


En glish poet and critic, whose wide reading in 

German Romantic phi los o phers led to his introducing 

many of their ideas to En glish readers. 

4. Greek tragedian (ca. 496– 406 b.c.e.). Pindar 

(ca. 518– 438 b.c.e.), Greek lyric poet. 

5. Elizabeth I (1553– 1603; reigned 1558– 1603). 

Pericles (ca. 495– 429 b.c.e.), Athenian statesman, 

military leader, and supporter of the arts. 

He was the most influential man in Athens during 

the city’s Golden Age.


to that which came out of the stir of the great productive time of Greece, or 

out of that of the Renascence, with its powerful episode the Reformation. 

But the truth is that the stir of the French Revolution took a character which 

essentially distinguished it from such movements as these. These were, in 

the main, disinterestedly intellectual and spiritual movements; movements 

in which the human spirit looked for its satisfaction in itself and in the 

increased play of its own activity. The French Revolution took a po liti cal, 

practical character. The movement which went on in France under the old 

régime, from 1700 to 1789, was far more really akin than that of the Revolution 

itself to the movement of the Renascence; the France of Voltaire 

and Rousseau 6 told far more powerfully upon the mind of Eu rope than the 

France of the Revolution. Goethe reproached this last expressly with having 

‘thrown quiet culture back.’ Nay, and the true key to how much in our 

Byron, even in our Wordsworth, is this!— that they had their source in a 

great movement of feeling, not in a great movement of mind. The French 

Revolution, however,— that object of so much blind hatred,— found undoubtedly 

its motive- power in the intelligence of men, and not in their practical 

sense; this is what distinguishes it from the En glish Revolution of Charles 

the First’s time. This is what makes it a more spiritual event than our Revolution, 

an event of much more powerful and worldwide interest, though 

practically less successful; it appeals to an order of ideas which are universal, 

certain, permanent. 1789 asked of a thing, Is it rational? 1642 asked of a 

thing, Is it legal? or, when it went furthest, Is it according to conscience? 

This is the En glish fashion, a fashion to be treated, within its own sphere, 

with the highest respect; for its success, within its own sphere, has been 

prodigious. But what is law in one place is not law in another; what is law 

here today is not law even here to- morrow; and as for conscience, what is 

binding on one man’s conscience is not binding on another’s. The old woman 

who threw her stool at the head of the surpliced minister in St. Giles’s 

Church at Edinburgh 7 obeyed an impulse to which millions of the human 

race may be permitted to remain strangers. But the prescriptions of reason 

are absolute, unchanging, of universal validity; to count by tens is the easiest 

way of counting— that is a proposition of which every one, from here to the 

Antipodes, feels the force; at least I should say so if we did not live in a country 

where it is not impossible that any morning we may find a letter in the 

Times declaring that a decimal coinage is an absurdity. 8 That a whole nation 

should have been penetrated with an enthusiasm for pure reason, and with 

an ardent zeal for making its prescriptions triumph, is a very remarkable 

thing, when we consider how little of mind, or anything so worthy and 

quickening as mind, comes into the motives which alone, in general, impel 

great masses of men. In spite of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, 

in spite of the crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French 

Revolution derives from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which 


French po liti cal theorist and phi los o pher. 

Voltaire: pen name of François-Marie Arouet 

(1694– 1778), French poet, dramatist, historian, 

and satirist. 

7. A riot broke out in July 1637 in St. Giles’ 

Cathedral in protest against a new Anglican liturgy 

written by Archbishop Laud. It was said to 

have begun when a Presbyterian woman in Edinburgh, 

Scotland, named Jenny Geddes threw her 

stool at the dean giving the ser vice and accused 

him of saying Mass. 

8. Letters in the London Times in 1863 debated 

whether En gland should change its system of 

weights and mea sures to the metric system (itself 

an outgrowth of the French Revolution).


it took for its law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a multitude 

for these ideas, a unique and still living power; it is— it will probably 

long remain— the greatest, the most animating event in history. And as no 

sincere passion for the things of the mind, even though it turn out in many 

respects an unfortunate passion, is ever quite thrown away and quite barren 

of good, France has reaped from hers one fruit— the natural and legitimate 

fruit, though not precisely the grand fruit she expected: she is the country in 

Eu rope where the people is most alive. 

But the mania for giving an immediate po liti cal and practical application 

to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an En glishman is in his 

element: on this theme we can all go on for hours. And all we are in the 

habit of saying on it has undoubtedly a great deal of truth. Ideas cannot be 

too much prized in and for themselves, cannot be too much lived with; 

but to transport them abruptly into the world of politics and practice, violently 

to revolutionise this world to their bidding,— that is quite another 

thing. There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the 

French are often for suppressing the one and the En glish the other; but 

neither is to be suppressed. A member of the House of Commons said to me 

the other day: ‘That a thing is an anomaly, I consider to be no objection to 

it what ever.’ I venture to think he was wrong; that a thing is an anomaly is 

an objection to it, but absolutely and in the sphere of ideas: it is not necessarily, 

under such and such circumstances, or at such and such a moment, 

an objection to it in the sphere of politics and practice. Joubert 9 has said 

beautifully: ‘C’est la force et le droit qui règlent toutes choses dans le 

monde; la force en attendant le droit.’ (Force and right are the governors of 

this world; force till right is ready.) Force till right is ready; and till right is 

ready, force, the existing order of things, is justified, is the legitimate ruler. 

But right is something moral, and implies inward recognition, free assent of 

the will; we are not ready for right,—right, so far as we are concerned, is not 

ready,— until we have attained this sense of seeing it and willing it. The way 

in which for us it may change and transform force, the existing order of 

things, and become, in its turn, the legitimate ruler of the world, should 

depend on the way in which, when our times comes, we see it and will it. 

Therefore for other people enamoured of their own newly discerned right, 

to attempt to impose it upon us as ours, and violently to substitute their 

right for our force, is an act of tyranny, and to be resisted. It sets at nought 

the second great half of our maxim, force till right is ready. This was the 

grand error of the French Revolution; and its movement of ideas, by quitting 

the intellectual sphere and rushing furiously into the po liti cal sphere, 

ran, indeed, a prodigious and memorable course, but produced no such 

intellectual fruit as the movement of ideas of the Renascence, and created, 

in opposition to itself, what I may call an epoch of concentration. The great 

force of that epoch of concentration was En gland; and the great voice of 

the epoch of concentration was Burke. 1 It is the fashion to treat Burke’s 

writings on the French Revolution as superannuated and conquered by the 

event; as the eloquent but unphilosophical tirades of bigotry and prejudice. 

I will not deny that they are often disfigured by the violence and passion of 

the moment, and that in some directions Burke’s view was bounded, and 

9. Joseph Joubert (1754– 1824), French writer 

and moralist, known for his essays, maxims, and 

letters. 

1. edmund burke (1729– 1797), statesman and 

author of Reflections on the French Revolution 

(1790).


his observation therefore at fault. But on the whole, and for those who can 

make the needful corrections, what distinguishes these writings is their 

profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical truth. They contain the true 

philosophy of an epoch of concentration, dissipate the heavy atmosphere 

which its own nature is apt to engender round it, and make its re sis tance 

rational instead of mechanical. 

But Burke is so great because, almost alone in En gland, he brings thought 

to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought. It is his accident 2 

that his ideas were at the ser vice of an epoch of concentration, not of an 

epoch of expansion; it is his characteristic that he so lived by ideas, and had 

such a source of them welling up within him, that he could float even an 

epoch of concentration and En glish Tory politics with them. It does not hurt 

him that Dr. Price 3 and the Liberals were enraged with him; it does not even 

hurt him that George the Third and the Tories were enchanted with him. 

His greatness is that he lived in a world which neither En glish Liberalism 

nor En glish Toryism is apt to enter;— the world of ideas, not the world of 

catchwords and party habits. So far is it from being really true of him that he 

‘to party gave up what was meant for mankind,’ 4 that at the very end of his 

fierce struggle with the French Revolution, after all his invectives against its 

false pretensions, hollowness, and madness, with his sincere conviction of 

its mischievousness, he can close a memorandum on the best means of combating 

it, some of the last pages he ever wrote, 5 — the Thoughts on French 

Affairs, in December 1791,— with these striking words:— 

‘The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The remedy must be where 

power, wisdom, and information, I hope, are more united with good intentions 

than they can be with me. I have done with this subject, I believe, for 

ever. It has given me many anxious moments for the last two years. If a great 

change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the 

general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will 

forward it; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human 

affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere 

designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.’ 

That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the 

finest things in En glish literature, or indeed in any literature. That is what 

I call living by ideas: when one side of a question has long had your earnest 

support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear all round you 

no language but one, when your party talks this language like a steamengine 

and can imagine no other,— still to be able to think, still to be irresistibly 

carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of 

the question, and, like Balaam, 6 to be unable to speak anything but what 

the Lord has put in your mouth. I know nothing more striking, and I must 

add that I know nothing more un- English. 

For the En glishman in general is like my friend the Member of Parliament, 

and believes, point- blank, that for a thing to be an anomaly is 

2. Fortune. 

3. Richard Price (1723– 1791), Welsh dissenting 

minister, moral phi los o pher, supporter of the 

American and French Revolutions, and one of 

Burke’s opponents. 

4. An observation about “good Edmund” Burke 

in Oliver Goldsmith’s poem “Retaliation” (1774), 

line 32. 

5. R. H. Super, the modern editor of Arnold’s 

prose works, notes that in fact Burke continued 

to write until his death in 1797. 

6. Despite being sent by his king to curse the 

Israelites, Balaam blessed them, speaking “the 

word that God putteth in [his] mouth” (Numbers 

22. 38).


absolutely no objection to it what ever. He is like the Lord Auckland 7 of 

Burke’s day, who, in a memorandum on the French Revolution, talks of 

‘certain miscreants, assuming the name of phi los o phers, who have presumed 

themselves capable of establishing a new system of society.’ The 

En glishman has been called a po liti cal animal, and he values what is po litical 

and practical so much that ideas easily become objects of dislike in his 

eyes, and thinkers ‘miscreants,’ because ideas and thinkers have rashly 

meddled with politics and practice. This would be all very well if the dislike 

and neglect confined themselves to ideas transported out of their own 

sphere, and meddling rashly with practice; but they are inevitably extended 

to ideas as such, and to the whole life of intelligence; practice is everything, 

a free play of the mind is nothing. The notion of the free play of the mind 

upon all subjects being a plea sure in itself, being an object of desire, being 

an essential provider of elements without which a nation’s spirit, what ever 

compensations it may have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, 

hardly enters into an En glishman’s thoughts. It is noticeable that the word 

curiosity, which in other languages is used in a good sense, to mean, as a 

high and fine quality of man’s nature, just this disinterested love of a free 

play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake,— it is noticeable, I say, 

that this word has in our language no sense of the kind, no sense but a 

rather bad and disparaging one. But criticism, real criticism, is essentially 

the exercise of this very quality. It obeys an instinct prompting it to try to 

know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of 

practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and 

thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other considerations 

what ever. This is an instinct for which there is, I think, little 

original sympathy in the practical En glish nature, and what there was of it 

has undergone a long benumbing period of blight and suppression in the 

epoch of concentration which followed the French Revolution. 

But epochs of concentration cannot well endure for ever; epochs of expansion, 

in the due course of things, follow them. Such an epoch of expansion 

seems to be opening in this country. In the first place all danger of a hostile 

forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice has long disappeared; 

like the traveller in the fable, therefore, we begin to wear our cloak a little 

more loosely. 8 Then, with a long peace, the ideas of Eu rope steal gradually 

and amicably in, and mingle, though in infinitesimally small quantities at a 

time, with our own notions. Then, too, in spite of all that is said about the 

absorbing and brutalising influence of our passionate material progress, it 

seems to me indisputable that this progress is likely, though not certain, to 

lead in the end to an apparition 9 of intellectual life; and that man, after he 

has made himself perfectly comfortable and has now to determine what to 

do with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind, and that 

the mind may be made the source of great plea sure. I grant it is mainly the 

privilege of faith, at present, to discern this end to our railways, our business, 

and our fortune- making; but we shall see if, here as elsewhere, faith is 

not in the end the true prophet. Our ease, our travelling, and our unbounded 

liberty to hold just as hard and securely as we please to the practice to which 

7. William Eden, first Baron Auckland (1744– 

1814), statesman and diplomat. 

8. In Aesop’s fable of the wind and the sun, the 

two have a contest (which the sun wins) to see 

which can first make a traveler remove his cloak. 

9. An appearance before the world.


our notions have given birth, all tend to beget an inclination to deal a little 

more freely with these notions themselves, to canvass them a little, to penetrate 

a little into their real nature. Flutterings of curiosity, in the foreign 

sense of the word, appear amongst us, and it is in these that criticism must 

look to find its account. Criticism first; a time of true creative activity, 

perhaps,— which, as I have said, must inevitably be preceded amongst us by 

a time of criticism,— hereafter, when criticism has done its work. 

It is of the last importance that En glish criticism should clearly discern 

what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now opening to it, 

and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule may be 

summed up in one word,—disinterestedness. 1 And how is criticism to show 

disinterestedness? By keeping aloof from what is called ‘the practical view 

of things’; by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a 

free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches. By steadily refusing 

to lend itself to any of those ulterior, po liti cal, practical considerations 

about ideas, which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which 

perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in this country at any 

rate are certain to be attached to them quite sufficiently, but which criticism 

has really nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, simply to 

know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn 

making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its business 

is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but its business is to 

do no more, and to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and 

applications, questions which will never fail to have due prominence given 

to them. Else criticism, besides being really false to its own nature, merely 

continues in the old rut which it has hitherto followed in this country, and 

will certainly miss the chance now given to it. For what is at present the 

bane of criticism in this country? It is that practical considerations cling to 

it and stifle it. It subserves interests not its own. Our organs of criticism are 

organs of men and parties having practical ends to serve, and with them 

those practical ends are the first thing and the play of mind the second; so 

much play of mind as is compatible with the prosecution of those practical 

ends is all that is wanted. An organ like the Revue des Deux Mondes, 2 having 

for its main function to understand and utter the best that is known and 

thought in the world, existing, it may be said, as just an organ for a free play 

of the mind, we have not. But we have the Edinburgh Review, existing as an 

organ of the old Whigs, and for as much play of the mind as may suit its 

being that; we have the Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of the Tories, 

and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the British 

Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of the po liti cal Dissenters, and for as 

much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the Times, existing as 

an organ of the common, satisfied, well- to- do En glishman, and for as much 

play of mind as may suit its being that. And so on through all the various 

fractions, po liti cal and religious, of our society; every fraction has, as such, 

its organ of criticism, but the notion of combining all fractions in the common 

plea sure of a free disinterested play of mind meets with no favour. 

Directly this play of mind wants to have more scope, and to forget the 

1. Objectivity, in de pen dence of judgment. 

2. A highly respected and widely read French 

bimonthly review of culture, the arts, politics, 

and economics (begun in 1829).


pressure of practical considerations a little, it is checked, it is made to feel 

the chain. We saw this the other day in the extinction, so much to be 

regretted, of the Home and Foreign Review. 3 Perhaps in no organ of criticism 

in this country was there so much knowledge, so much play of mind; 

but these could not save it. The Dublin Review subordinates play of mind to 

the practical business of En glish and Irish Catholicism, and lives. It must 

needs be that men should act in sects and parties, that each of these sects 

and parties should have its organ, and should make this organ subserve the 

interests of its action; but it would be well, too, that there should be a criticism, 

not the minister of these interests, not their enemy, but absolutely 

and entirely in de pen dent of them. No other criticism will ever attain any 

real authority or make any real way towards its end,— the creating a current 

of true and fresh ideas. 

It is because criticism has so little kept in the pure intellectual sphere, 

has so little detached itself from practice, has been so directly polemical 

and controversial, that it has so ill accomplished, in this country, its best 

spiritual work; which is to keep man from a self- satisfaction which is 

retarding and vulgarising, to lead him towards perfection, by making his 

mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness 

of things. A polemical practical criticism makes men blind even to the 

ideal imperfection of their practice, makes them willingly assert its ideal 

perfection, in order the better to secure it against attack; and clearly this is 

narrowing and baneful for them. If they were reassured on the practical 

side, speculative considerations of ideal perfection they might be brought to 

entertain, and their spiritual horizon would thus gradually widen. Sir 

Charles Adderley 4 says to the Warwickshire farmers:— 

‘Talk of the improvement of breed! Why, the race we ourselves represent, 

the men and women, the old Anglo- Saxon race, are the best breed in the 

whole world. . . . The absence of a too enervating climate, too unclouded 

skies, and a too luxurious nature, has produced so vigorous a race of people, 

and has rendered us so superior to all the world.’ 

Mr. Roebuck 5 to the Sheffield cutlers:— 

‘I look around me and ask what is the state of En gland? Is not property 

safe? Is not every man able to say what he likes? Can you not walk from one 

end of En gland to the other in perfect security? I ask you whether, the 

world over or in past history, there is anything like it? Nothing. I pray that 

our unrivalled happiness may last.’ 

Now obviously there is a peril for poor human nature in words and 

thoughts of such exuberant self- satisfaction, until we find ourselves safe in 

the streets of the Celestial City. 

‘Das wenige verschwindet leicht dem Blicke, 

Der vorwärts sieht, wie viel noch übrig bleibt—’ 

says Goethe; 6 ‘the little that is done seems nothing when we look forward and 

see how much we have yet to do.’ Clearly this is a better line of reflection for 

weak humanity, so long as it remains on this earthly field of labour and trial. 

3. Liberal Catholic quarterly in London (1862– 

64). 

4. Conservative member of Parliament (1814– 

1905), wealthy holder of a large estate in Warwickshire. 

5. John Arthur Roebuck (1801– 1879), radical 

member of Parliament. 

6. Iphigenia in Tauris (1787), 1.2.91– 92.


But neither Sir Charles Adderley nor Mr. Roebuck is by nature inaccessible 

to considerations of this sort. They only lose sight of them owing to the 

controversial life we all lead, and the practical form which all speculation 

takes with us. They have in view opponents whose aim is not ideal, but practical; 

and in their zeal to uphold their own practice against these innovators, 

they go so far as even to attribute to this practice an ideal perfection. Somebody 

has been wanting to introduce a six- pound franchise, or to abolish 

church- rates, 7 or to collect agricultural statistics by force, or to diminish 

local self- government. How natural, in reply to such proposals, very likely 

improper or ill- timed, to go a little beyond the mark, and to say stoutly, ‘Such 

a race of people as we stand, so superior to all the world! The old Anglo- 

Saxon race, the best breed in the whole world! I pray that our unrivalled 

happiness may last! I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there 

is anything like it?’ And so long as criticism answers this dithyramb by 

insisting that the old Anglo- Saxon race would be still more superior to all 

others if it had no church- rates, or that our unrivalled happiness would last 

yet longer with a six- pound franchise, so long will the strain, ‘The best breed 

in the whole world!’ swell louder and louder, everything ideal and refining 

will be lost out of sight, and both the assailed and their critics will remain in 

a sphere, to say the truth, perfectly unvital, a sphere in which spiritual progression 

is impossible. But let criticism leave church- rates and the franchise 

alone, and in the most candid spirit, without a single lurking thought of 

practical innovation, confront with our dithyramb this paragraph on which 

I stumbled in a newspaper immediately after reading Mr. Roebuck:— 

‘A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl 

named Wragg 8 left the work house there on Saturday morning with her young 

illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly 

Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.’ 

Nothing but that; but, in juxtaposition with the absolute eulogies of Sir 

Charles Adderley and Mr. Roebuck, how eloquent, how suggestive are those 

few lines! ‘Our old Anglo- Saxon breed, the best in the whole world!’— how 

much that is harsh and ill- favoured there is in this best! Wragg! If we are to 

talk of ideal perfection, of ‘the best in the whole world,’ has any one reflected 

what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the 

more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst 

us of such hideous names,— Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and 

Attica 9 they were luckier in this respect than ‘the best race in the world’; by 

the Ilissus 1 there was no Wragg, poor thing! And ‘our unrivalled happiness’;— 

what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and 

blurs it; the work house, the dismal Mapperly Hills,— how dismal those who 

have seen them will remember;— the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled 

illegitimate child! ‘I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, 

there is anything like it?’ Perhaps not, one is inclined to answer; but at any 

rate, in that case, the world is very much to be pitied. And the final touch,— 

short, bleak, and inhuman: Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion 

7. Taxes legally imposed by the Church of En gland. 

“Six- pound franchise”: a proposal by radicals to 

extend the vote to anyone who owned land or 

buildings worth £6 annual rent (not £10, as set in 

1832). 

8. Elizabeth Wragg; this crime was committed 

on September 10, 1864. 

9. District of Greece that includes Athens. Ionia: 

area of the west coast of Asia Minor (where 

Homer is thought to have lived). 

1. River south of Athens.


of our unrivalled happiness; or (shall I say?) the superfluous Christian name 

lopped off by the straightforward vigour of our old Anglo- Saxon breed! There 

is profit for the spirit in such contrasts as this; criticism serves the cause of 

perfection by establishing them. By eluding sterile conflict, by refusing to 

remain in the sphere where alone narrow and relative conceptions have any 

worth and validity, criticism may diminish its momentary importance, but 

only in this way has it a chance of gaining admittance for those wider and 

more perfect conceptions to which all its duty is really owed. Mr. Roebuck 

will have a poor opinion of an adversary who replies to his defiant songs of 

triumph only by murmuring under his breath, Wragg is in custody; but in no 

other way will these songs of triumph be induced gradually to moderate 

themselves, to get rid of what in them is excessive and offensive, and to fall 

into a softer and truer key. 

It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect action which I am thus 

prescribing for criticism, and that, by embracing in this manner the Indian 

virtue of detachment 2 and abandoning the sphere of practical life, it condemns 

itself to a slow and obscure work. Slow and obscure it may be, but it is 

the only proper work of criticism. The mass of mankind will never have any 

ardent zeal for seeing things as they are; very inadequate ideas will always 

satisfy them. 3 On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general 

practice of the world. That is as much as saying that whoever sets himself 

to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle; but it 

is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas 

will ever get current at all. The rush and roar of practical life will always have 

a dizzying and attracting effect upon the most collected spectator, and tend 

to draw him into its vortex; most of all will this be the case where that life is 

so powerful as it is in En gland. But it is only by remaining collected, and 

refusing to lend himself to the point of view of the practical man, that the 

critic can do the practical man any ser vice; and it is only by the greatest sincerity 

in pursuing his own course, and by at last convincing even the practical 

man of his sincerity, that he can escape misunderstandings which 

perpetually threaten him. 

For the practical man is not apt for fine distinctions, and yet in these distinctions, 

truth and the highest culture greatly find their account. But it is 

not easy to lead a practical man,— unless you reassure him as to your practical 

intentions, you have no chance of leading him,— to see that a thing 

which he has always been used to look at from one side only, which he 

greatly values, and which, looked at from that side, quite deserves, perhaps, 

all the prizing and admiring which he bestows upon it,— that this thing, 

looked at from another side, may appear much less beneficent and beautiful, 

and yet retain all its claims to our practical allegiance. Where shall we find 

language innocent enough, how shall we make the spotless purity of our 

intentions evident enough, to enable us to say to the po liti cal En glishman 

that the British Constitution itself, which, seen from the practical side, 

looks such a magnificent organ of progress and virtue, seen from the speculative 

side,— with its compromises, its love of facts, its horror of theory, its 

studied avoidance of clear thoughts,— that, seen from this side, our august 

2. The ideal of detaching oneself from worldly 

activity, here associated with Hinduism. 

3. Arnold takes the terms “adequate” and “inadequate” 

from the Ethics (1677) of the Dutch philos 

o pher Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677).


Constitution sometimes looks,— forgive me, shade of Lord Somers! 4 — a 

colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines? 5 How is Cobbett 6 to 

say this and not be misunderstood, blackened as he is with the smoke of a 

lifelong conflict in the field of po liti cal practice? how is Mr. Carlyle 7 to say it 

and not be misunderstood, after his furious raid into this field with his 

Latter- day Pamphlets? how is Mr. Ruskin, 8 after his pugnacious po liti cal 

economy? I say, the critic must keep out of the region of immediate practice 

in the po liti cal, social, humanitarian sphere, if he wants to make a beginning 

for that more free speculative treatment of things, which may perhaps 

one day make its benefits felt even in this sphere, but in a natural and thence 

irresistible manner. 

Do what he will, however, the critic will still remain exposed to frequent 

misunderstandings, and nowhere so much as in this country. For here 

people are particularly indisposed even to comprehend that without this 

free disinterested treatment of things, truth and the highest culture are out 

of the question. So immersed are they in practical life, so accustomed to 

take all their notions from this life and its pro cesses, that they are apt to 

think that truth and culture themselves can be reached by the pro cess of 

this life, and that it is an impertinent singularity to think of reaching them 

in any other. ‘We are all terræ filii,’ 9 cries their eloquent advocate; ‘all Philistines 

together. Away with the notion of proceeding by any other course 

than the course dear to the Philistines; let us have a social movement, let us 

organise and combine a party to pursue truth and new thought, let us call 

it the liberal party, and let us all stick to each other, and back each other up. 

Let us have no nonsense about in de pen dent criticism, and intellectual delicacy, 

and the few and the many. Don’t let us trouble ourselves about foreign 

thought; we shall invent the whole thing for ourselves as we go along. If one 

of us speaks well, applaud him; if one of us speaks ill, applaud him too; we 

are all in the same movement, we are all liberals, we are all in pursuit of 

truth.’ In this way the pursuit of truth becomes really a social, practical, 

pleas ur able affair, almost requiring a chairman, a secretary, and advertisements; 

with the excitement of an occasional scandal, with a little re sis tance 

to give the happy sense of difficulty overcome; but, in general, plenty of 

bustle and very little thought. To act is so easy, as Goethe says; to think is 

so hard! 1 It is true that the critic has many temptations to go with the 

stream, to make one of the party movement, one of these terræ filii; it seems 

ungracious to refuse to be a terræ filius, when so many excellent people are; 

but the critic’s duty is to refuse, or, if re sis tance is vain, at least to cry with 

Obermann: Périssons en résistant. 2 

How serious a matter it is to try and resist, I had ample opportunity of 

experiencing when I ventured some time ago to criticise the celebrated first 

4. John Somers (1651– 1716), En glish constitutional 

lawyer and statesman. 

5. The materialist middle classes (a name taken 

from a biblical people that waged war against the 

Israelites). 

6. William Cobbett (1762– 1835), En glish radical 

journalist and reformer. 

7. Thomas Carlyle (1795– 1881), Scottish- born 

essayist and historian; he expressed bitter 

antidemo cratic views in Latter- Day Pamphlets 

(1850). 

8. John Ruskin (1819– 1900), art critic and social 

critic. In Unto This Last (1860– 62), he challenged 

the business and industrial practices and 

materialism of the age. 

9. Sons of the earth (Latin); that is, men of the 

soil. 

1. A reference to Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s 

Apprenticeship (1795– 96). 

2. Let us die resisting (French). Quoted from 

Obermann (1804), a Romantic epistolary novel by 

Etienne de Sénancour (1770–1846).


volume of Bishop Colenso. 3 The echoes of the storm which was then raised 

I still, from time to time, hear grumbling round me. That storm arose out of 

a misunderstanding almost inevitable. It is a result of no little culture to 

attain to a clear perception that science and religion are two wholly different 

things. The multitude will for ever confuse them, but happily that is of 

no great real importance, for while the multitude imagines itself to live by 

its false science, it does really live by its true religion. Dr. Colenso, however, 

in his first volume did all he could to strengthen the confusion, 4 and to 

make it dangerous. He did this with the best intentions, I freely admit, and 

with the most candid ignorance that this was the natural effect of what he 

was doing; but, says Joubert, ‘Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates 

the crime, is itself, in intellectual matters, a crime of the first order.’ I 

criticised Bishop Colenso’s speculative confusion. Immediately there was a 

cry raised: ‘What is this? here is a liberal attacking a liberal. Do not you 

belong to the movement? are not you a friend of truth? Is not Bishop Colenso 

in pursuit of truth? then speak with proper respect of his book. Dr. 

Stanley 5 is another friend of truth, and you speak with proper respect of his 

book; why make these invidious differences? both books are excellent, 

admirable, liberal; Bishop Colenso’s perhaps the most so, because it is the 

boldest, and will have the best practical consequences for the liberal cause. 

Do you want to encourage to the attack of a brother liberal his, and your, 

and our implacable enemies, the Church and State Review or the Record,— 

the High Church rhinoceros and the Evangelical hyæna? Be silent, therefore; 

or rather speak, speak as loud as ever you can! and go into ecstasies 

over the eighty and odd pigeons.’ 6 

But criticism cannot follow this coarse and indiscriminate method. It is 

unfortunately possible for a man in pursuit of truth to write a book which 

reposes upon a false conception. Even the practical consequences of a book 

are to genuine criticism no recommendation of it, if the book is, in the highest 

sense, blundering. I see that a lady 7 who herself, too, is in pursuit of 

truth, and who writes with great ability, but a little too much, perhaps, 

under the influence of the practical spirit of the En glish liberal movement, 

classes Bishop Colenso’s book and M. Renan’s 8 together, in her survey of the 

religious state of Eu rope, as facts of the same order, works, both of them, of 

3. So sincere is my dislike to all personal attack 

and controversy, that I abstain from reprinting, at 

this distance of time from the occasion which 

called them forth, the essays in which I criticised 

Dr. Colenso’s book; I feel bound, however, after all 

that has passed, to make here a final declaration 

of my sincere impenitence for having published 

them. Nay, I cannot forbear repeating yet once 

more, for his benefit and that of his readers, this 

sentence from my original remarks upon him: 

There is truth of science and truth of religion; truth 

of science does not become truth of religion till it is 

made religious. And I will add: Let us have all the 

science there is from the men of science; from the 

men of religion let us have religion [Arnold’s note]. 

John William Colenso (1814– 1883), bishop of 

Natal in South Africa, whose controversial studies 

disputed orthodox theology and the historical 

accuracy of biblical texts. In “The Bishop and 

the Phi los o pher” (Macmillan’s Magazine, January 

1863), Arnold sharply criticized Colenso’s scholarship 

and failure to address true spiritual needs. 

4. It has been said I make it ‘a crime against literary 

criticism and the higher culture to attempt to 

inform the ignorant.’ Need I point out that the 

ignorant are not informed by being confirmed in 

a confusion? [Arnold’s note]. Quoted from the 

jurist and essayist Fitzjames Stephen (1829–1894) 

in “Mr. Matthew Arnold and His Countrymen,” 

Saturday Review, December 3, 1864. 

5. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815– 1881), En glish 

biographer of Thomas Arnold, an ecclesiastical 

historian and advocate of religious toleration. 

6. Colenso used mathematics to cast doubt on the 

historical validity of certain passages in Leviticus 

and Numbers. 

7. Frances Power Cobbe (1822– 1908), Irish social 

worker and author of books on reform, women’s 

rights, and religion. Her “survey” is Broken Lights 

(1864). 

8. Ernest Renan (1823– 1892), French critic, historian, 

orientalist, and author of The Life of Jesus 

(1863).


‘great importance’; ‘great ability, power, and skill’; Bishop Colenso’s, perhaps, 

the most powerful; at least, Miss Cobbe gives special expression to her 

gratitude that to Bishop Colenso ‘has been given the strength to grasp, and 

the courage to teach, truths of such deep import.’ In the same way, more 

than one pop u lar writer has compared him to Luther. 9 Now it is just this 

kind of false estimate which the critical spirit is, it seems to me, bound to 

resist. It is really the strongest possible proof of the low ebb at which, in 

En gland, the critical spirit is, that while the critical hit in the religious literature 

of Germany is Dr. Strauss’s book, 1 in that of France M. Renan’s 

book, the book of Bishop Colenso is the critical hit in the religious literature 

of En gland. Bishop Colenso’s book reposes on a total misconception of the 

essential elements of the religious problem, as that problem is now presented 

for solution. To criticism, therefore, which seeks to have the best that is 

known and thought on this problem, it is, however well meant, of no importance 

what ever. M. Renan’s book attempts a new synthesis of the elements 

furnished to us by the Four Gospels. It attempts, in my opinion, a synthesis, 

perhaps premature, perhaps impossible, certainly not successful. Up to the 

present time, at any rate, we must acquiesce in Fleury’s sentence on such 

recastings of the Gospel- story: Quiconque s’imagine la pouvoir mieux écrire, 

ne l’entend pas. 2 M. Renan had himself passed by anticipation a like sentence 

on his own work, when he said: ‘If a new pre sen ta tion of the character 

of Jesus were offered to me, I would not have it; its very clearness would be, 

in my opinion, the best proof of its insufficiency.’ His friends may with perfect 

justice rejoin that at the sight of the Holy Land, and of the actual scene 

of the Gospel- story, all the current of M. Renan’s thoughts may have naturally 

changed, and a new casting of that story irresistibly suggested itself to 

him; and that this is just a case for applying Cicero’s maxim: Change of 

mind is not inconsistency—nemo doctus unquam mutationem consilii inconstantiam 

dixit esse. 3 Nevertheless, for criticism, M. Renan’s first thought 

must still be the truer one, as long as his new casting so fails more fully to 

commend itself, more fully (to use Coleridge’s happy phrase about the Bible) 

to find us. 4 Still M. Renan’s attempt is, for criticism, of the most real interest 

and importance, since, with all its difficulty, a fresh synthesis of the New 

Testament data,— not a making war on them, in Voltaire’s fashion, 5 not a 

leaving them out of mind, in the world’s fashion, but the putting a new construction 

upon them, the taking them from under the old, traditional, conventional 

point of view and placing them under a new one,— is the very 

essence of the religious problem, as now presented; and only by efforts in 

this direction can it receive a solution. 

Again, in the same spirit in which she judges Bishop Colenso, Miss 

Cobbe, like so many earnest liberals of our practical race, both here and in 

9. Martin Luther (1483– 1546), German religious 

reformer and found er of the Reformation. 

1. David Friedrich Strauss (1808– 1874), German 

theologian, author of The Life of Jesus (1835– 

36). 

2. Whoever imagines he can write it better does 

not understand it (French). From the Histoire 

ecclésiastique (1691– 1720), by the French historian 

and teacher Claude Fleury (1640– 1723). 

3. No educated man has ever said that a change 

of opinion is inconsistency (Latin). From Letters 

to Atticus, no. 16, by the Roman orator and 

statesman Cicero (106– 43 b.c.e.). 

4. See Coleridge’s Confessions of an Inquiring 

Spirit (1840): “In the Bible there is more that 

finds me than I have experienced in all other 

books put together.” 

5. Voltaire’s works include a number of attacks 

on Catholic doctrine and religious intolerance.


America, herself sets vigorously about a positive reconstruction of religion, 

about making a religion of the future out of hand, or at least setting about 

making it. We must not rest, she and they are always thinking and saying, 

in negative criticism, we must be creative and constructive; hence we have 

such works as her recent Religious Duty, 6 and works still more considerable, 

perhaps by others, which will be in every one’s mind. These works often 

have much ability; they often spring out of sincere convictions, and a sincere 

wish to do good; and they sometimes, perhaps, do good. Their fault is 

(if I may be permitted to say so) one which they have in common with the 

British College of Health, in the New Road. Every one knows the British 

College of Health; it is that building with the lion and the statue of the 

Goddess Hygeia before it; at least I am sure about the lion, though I am not 

absolutely certain about the Goddess Hygeia. 7 This building does credit, 

perhaps, to the resources of Dr. Morrison 8 and his disciples; but it falls a 

good deal short of one’s idea of what a British College of Health ought to 

be. In En gland, where we hate public interference and love individual 

enterprise, we have a whole crop of places like the British College of 

Health; the grand name without the grand thing. Unluckily, creditable to 

individual enterprise as they are, they tend to impair our taste by making us 

forget what more grandiose, noble, or beautiful character properly belongs 

to a public institution. The same may be said of the religions of the future 

of Miss Cobbe and others. Creditable, like the British College of Health, to 

the resources of their authors, they yet tend to make us forget what more 

grandiose, noble, or beautiful character properly belongs to religious constructions. 

The historic religions, with all their faults, have had this; it 

certainly belongs to the religious sentiment, when it truly flowers, to have 

this; and we impoverish our spirit if we allow a religion of the future without 

it. What then is the duty of criticism here? To take the practical point of 

view, to applaud the liberal movement and all its works,— its New Road 

religions of the future into the bargain,— for their general utility’s sake? By 

no means; but to be perpetually dissatisfied with these works, while they 

perpetually fall short of a high and perfect ideal. 

For criticism, these are elementary laws; but they never can be pop u lar, 

and in this country they have been very little followed, and one meets with 

im mense obstacles in following them. That is a reason for asserting them 

again and again. Criticism must maintain its in de pen dence of the practical 

spirit and its aim. Even with well- meant efforts of the practical spirit it 

must express dissatisfaction, if in the sphere of the ideal they seem impoverishing 

and limiting. It must not hurry on to the goal because of its practical 

importance. It must be patient, and know how to wait; and flexible, and 

know how to attach itself to things and how to withdraw from them. It must 

be apt to study and praise elements that for the fulness of spiritual perfection 

are wanted, even though they belong to a power which in the practical 

sphere may be maleficent. It must be apt to discern the spiritual shortcomings 

or illusions of powers that in the practical sphere may be beneficent. 

And this without any notion of favouring or injuring, in the practical 

sphere, one power or the other; without any notion of playing off, in this 

6. Published in 1864. 

7. Greek deity personifying health. 

8. James Morrison (1770– 1840), merchant and 

vendor, described himself as “the Hygeist”; in 1828 

he founded the British College of Health, from 

which he distributed his cure- all patent medicine.


sphere, one power against the other. When one looks, for instance, at the 

En glish Divorce Court,— an institution which perhaps has its practical 

con ve niences, but which in the ideal sphere is so hideous; an institution 

which neither makes divorce impossible nor makes it decent, which allows 

a man to get rid of his wife, or a wife of her husband, but makes them 

drag one another first, for the public edification, through a mire of unutterable 

infamy,— when one looks at this charming institution, I say, with its 

crowded trials, its newspaper reports, and its money compensations, this 

institution in which the gross unregenerate British Philistine has indeed 

stamped an image of himself,— one may be permitted to find the marriage 

theory of Catholicism 9 refreshing and elevating. Or when Protestantism, in 

virtue of its supposed rational and intellectual origin, gives the law to criticism 

too magisterially, criticism may and must remind it that its pretensions, 

in this respect, are illusive and do it harm; that the Reformation was 

a moral rather than an intellectual event; that Luther’s theory of grace no 

more exactly reflects the mind of the spirit than Bossuet’s 1 philosophy of 

history reflects it; and that there is no more antecedent probability of the 

Bishop of Durham’s stock of ideas being agreeable to perfect reason than of 

Pope Pius the Ninth’s. 2 But criticism will not on that account forget the 

achievements of Protestantism in the practical and moral sphere; nor that, 

even in the intellectual sphere, Protestantism, though in a blind and stumbling 

manner, carried forward the Renascence, while Catholicism threw 

itself violently across its path. 

I lately heard a man of thought and energy contrasting the want of ardor 

and movement which he now found amongst young men in this country 

with what he remembered in his own youth, twenty years ago. ‘What reformers 

we were then!’ he exclaimed; ‘what a zeal we had! how we canvassed 

every institution in Church and State, and were prepared to remodel them 

all on first principles!’ He was inclined to regret, as a spiritual flagging, the 

lull which he saw. I am disposed rather to regard it as a pause in which the 

turn to a new mode of spiritual progress is being accomplished. Everything 

was long seen, by the young and ardent amongst us, in inseparable connection 

with politics and practical life. We have pretty well exhausted the benefits 

of seeing things in this connection, we have got all that can be got by 

so seeing them. Let us try a more disinterested mode of seeing them; let us 

betake ourselves more to the serener life of the mind and spirit. This life, 

too, may have its excesses and dangers; but they are not for us at present. 

Let us think of quietly enlarging our stock of true and fresh ideas, and not, 

as soon as we get an idea or half an idea, be running out with it into the 

street, and trying to make it rule there. Our ideas will, in the end, shape the 

world all the better for maturing a little. Perhaps in fifty years’ time it will 

in the En glish House of Commons be an objection to an institution that it 

is an anomaly, and my friend the Member of Parliament will shudder in his 

grave. But let us in the meanwhile rather endeavour that in twenty years’ 

time it may, in En glish literature, be an objection to a proposition that it is 

9. That is, that in Christian marriage, once consummated, 

there can never be an absolute 

divorce. 

1. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627– 1704), French 

bishop and moralist; he maintained that Providence 

guided history in order to establish Christianity 

and, especially, the Catholic Church. 

2. Pius IX (1792– 1878), pope from 1846 to 1878, 

was criticized for his conservative views. Bishop of 

Durham: Charles Thomas Baring (1807– 1879).


absurd. That will be a change so vast, that the imagination almost fails to 

grasp it. Ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo. 3 

If I have insisted so much on the course which criticism must take where 

politics and religion are concerned, it is because, where these burning matters 

are in question, it is most likely to go astray. I have wished, above all, to 

insist on the attitude which criticism should adopt toward things in general; 

on its right tone and temper of mind. But then comes another question as to 

the subjectmatter which literary criticism should most seek. Here, in general, 

its course is determined for it by the idea which is the law of its being; 

the idea of a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is 

known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and 

true ideas. By the very nature of things, as En gland is not all the world, much 

of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be of En glish 

growth, must be foreign; by the nature of things, again, it is just this that we 

are least likely to know, while En glish thought is streaming in upon us from 

all sides, and takes excellent care that we shall not be ignorant of its existence. 

The En glish critic of literature, therefore, must dwell much on foreign 

thought, and with par tic u lar heed on any part of it, which, while significant 

and fruitful in itself, is for any reason specially likely to escape him. Again, 

judging is often spoken of as the critic’s one business, and so in some sense it 

is; but the judgment which almost insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear 

mind, along with fresh knowledge, is the valuable one; and thus knowledge, 

and ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic’s great concern for himself. And 

it is by communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judgment pass 

along with it,— but insensibly, and in the second place, not the first, as a sort 

of companion and clue, not as an abstract lawgiver,— that the critic will generally 

do most good to his readers. Sometimes, no doubt, for the sake of 

establishing an author’s place in literature, and his relation to a central standard 

(and if this is not done, how are we to get at our best in the world?), 

criticism may have to deal with a subjectmatter so familiar that fresh knowledge 

is out of the question, and then it must be all judgment; an enunciation 

and detailed application of principles. Here the great safeguard is never to let 

oneself become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively consciousness 

of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this fails us, to be 

sure that something is wrong. Still, under all circumstances, this mere judgment 

and application of principles is, in itself, not the most satisfactory work 

to the critic; like mathematics, it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like 

fresh learning, the sense of creative activity. 

But stop, some one will say; all this talk is of no practical use to us whatever; 

this criticism of yours is not what we have in our minds when we speak 

of criticism; when we speak of critics and criticism, we mean critics and 

criticism of the current En glish literature of the day; when you offer to tell 

criticism its function, it is to this criticism that we expect you to address 

yourself. I am sorry for it, for I am afraid I must disappoint these expectations. 

I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour 

to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world. 

How much of current En glish literature comes into this ‘best that is known 

3. From the renewal of the generations a [great] order is born (Latin). From Virgil, Eclogue 4.5 (ca. 37 

b.c.e.). This poem was sometimes interpreted by Christians as predicting the birth of the Messiah.


and thought in the world’? Not very much, I fear; certainly less, at this 

moment, than of the current literature of France or Germany. Well, then, am 

I to alter my definition of criticism, in order to meet the requirements of a 

number of practising En glish critics, who, after all, are free in their choice of 

a business? That would be making criticism lend itself just to one of those 

alien practical considerations, which, I have said, are so fatal to it. One 

may say, indeed, to those who have to deal with the mass— so much better 

disregarded— of current En glish literature, that they may at all events endeavour, 

in dealing with this, to try it, so far as they can, by the standard of the 

best that is known and thought in the world; one may say, that to get anywhere 

near this standard, every critic should try and possess one great literature, 

at least, besides his own; and the more unlike his own, the better. But, 

after all, the criticism I am really concerned with,— the criticism which alone 

can much help us for the future, the criticism which, throughout Eu rope, is 

at the present day meant, when so much stress is laid on the importance 

of criticism and the critical spirit,— is a criticism which regards Eu rope as 

being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound 

to a joint action and working to a common result; and whose members have, 

for their proper outfit, a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, 

and of one another. Special, local, and temporary advantages being put out 

of account, that modern nation will in the intellectual and spiritual sphere 

make most progress, which most thoroughly carries out this programme. 

And what is that but saying that we too, all of us, as individuals, the more 

thoroughly we carry it out, shall make the more progress? 

There is so much inviting us!— what are we to take? what will nourish us 

in growth towards perfection? That is the question which, with the im mense 

field of life and of literature lying before him, the critic has to answer; for 

himself first, and afterwards for others. In this idea of the critic’s business 

the essays brought together in the following pages 4 have had their origin; in 

this idea, widely different as are their subjects, they have, perhaps, their 

unity. 

I conclude with what I said at the beginning: to have the sense of creative 

activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is 

not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, 

flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have, in no 

contemptible mea sure, a joyful sense of creative activity; a sense which a 

man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he might derive from a 

poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs no 

other creation is possible. 

Still, in full mea sure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine 

creation; in literature we must never forget that. But what true man of 

letters ever can forget it? It is no such common matter for a gifted nature to 

come into possession of a current of true and living ideas, and to produce 

amidst the inspiration of them, that we are likely to underrate it. The 

epochs of Æschylus 5 and Shakspeare make us feel their pre- eminence. In 

an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of literature; there is the 

promised land, towards which criticism can only beckon. That promised 

4. In the book Essays in Criticism; this essay was 

the first in the volume. 

5. Greek tragedian (525– 456 b.c.e.).


land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die in the wilderness: 6 but to 

have desired to enter it, to have saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the 

best distinction among contemporaries; it will certainly be the best title to 

esteem with posterity. 

1864, 1875 

From Culture and Anarchy 

From Chapter 1. 

Sweetness and Light 1 

The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, 

they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is 

supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture 

which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either 

out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class 

distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people 

who have not got it. No serious man would call this culture, or attach any 

value to it, as culture, at all. To find the real ground for the very different 

estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must find some 

motive for culture in the terms of which may lie a real ambiguity; and such 

a motive the word curiosity gives us. 

I have before now pointed out 2 that we En glish do not, like the foreigners, 

use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense. With us the word is 

always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. A liberal and intelligent 

eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by a foreigner when he 

speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of 

frivolous and unedifying activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little time 

ago, was an estimate of the celebrated French critic, M. Sainte- Beuve, 3 and 

a very inadequate estimate it in my judgment was. And its inadequacy consisted 

chiefly in this: that in our En glish way it left out of sight the double 

sense really involved in the word curiosity, thinking enough was said to 

stamp M. Sainte- Beuve with blame if it was said that he was impelled in his 

operations as a critic by curiosity, and omitting either to perceive that M. 

Sainte- Beuve himself, and many other people with him, would consider that 

this was praiseworthy and not blameworthy, or to point out why it ought 

really to be accounted worthy of blame and not of praise. For as there is a 

curiosity about intellectual matters which is futile, and merely a disease, so 

there is certainly a curiosity,— a desire after the things of the mind simply 

for their own sakes and for the plea sure of seeing them as they are,— which 

is, in an intelligent being, natural and laudable. Nay, and the very desire to 

6. Like Moses, who viewed the Promised Land 

but did not live to enter it. See Deuteronomy 

32.48– 52, 34.1– 4. 

1. First delivered, with the title “Culture and Its 

Enemies,” as Arnold’s final lecture as Professor of 

Poetry at Oxford University, June 7, 1867, and published 

in the Cornhill Magazine in July. It appeared 

as chapter 1 of Culture and Anarchy in 1869. The 

text reprinted here is that of the 1882 third edition, 

the last that Arnold himself prepared. 

2. In “The Function of Criticism at the Present 

Time” (1864; see above). 

3. Charles Augustin Sainte- Beuve (1804– 1869), 

French literary critic. In the review mentioned 

(Quarterly Review 119 [January 1866]: 80– 108), 

the author identifies Arnold as Sainte- Beuve’s 

disciple and states that the Essays in Criticism are 

“graceful but perfectly unsatisfactory.”

Culture and Anarchy / 715 

see things as they are implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not 

often attained without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of the 

blind and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when 

we blame curiosity. Montesquieu 4 says: ‘The first motive which ought to 

impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our nature, and 

to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent.’ This is the true ground to 

assign for the genuine scientific passion, however manifested, and for culture, 

viewed simply as a fruit of this passion; and it is a worthy ground, even 

though we let the term curiosity stand to describe it. 

But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, 

the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an 

intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the 

love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, 

the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing 

human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier 

than we found it,— motives eminently such as are called social,— come 

in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and preeminent part. 

Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as 

having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves 

by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, 

but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. As, in the first 

view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu’s words: ‘To render an 

intelligent being yet more intelligent!’ so, in the second view of it, there is no 

better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: 5 ‘To make 

reason and the will of God prevail!’ 

Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be overhasty in determining 

what reason and the will of God say, because its turn is for acting 

rather than thinking and it wants to be beginning to act; and whereas it is 

apt to take its own conceptions, which proceed from its own state of development 

and share in all the imperfections and immaturities of this, for a 

basis of action; what distinguishes culture is, that it is possessed by the 

scientific passion as well as by the passion of doing good; that it demands 

worthy notions of reason and the will of God, and does not readily suffer its 

own crude conceptions to substitute themselves for them. And knowing 

that no action or institution can be salutary and stable which is not based 

on reason and the will of God, it is not so bent on acting and instituting, 

even with the great aim of diminishing human error and misery ever before 

its thoughts, but that it can remember that acting and instituting are of little 

use, unless we know how and what we ought to act and to institute. 

This culture is more interesting and more far- reaching than that other, 

which is founded solely on the scientific passion for knowing. But it needs 

times of faith and ardour, times when the intellectual horizon is opening 

and widening all round us, to flourish in. And is not the close and bounded 

intellectual horizon within which we have long lived and moved now lifting 

up, and are not new lights finding free passage to shine in upon us? For a 

long time there was no passage for them to make their way in upon us, and 

4. Charles de Secondat Montesquieu (1689– 1755), 

French phi los o pher and legal and po liti cal theorist. 

5. Thomas Wilson (1663– 1755), En glish churchman 

and author of devotional works. Arnold is 

condensing a passage from Wilson’s Maxims 

(first published in 1781).


then it was of no use to think of adapting the world’s action to them. Where 

was the hope of making reason and the will of God prevail among people 

who had a routine which they had christened reason and the will of God, in 

which they were inextricably bound, and beyond which they had no power 

of looking? But now the iron force of adhesion to the old routine,— social, 

po liti cal, religious,— has wonderfully yielded; the iron force of exclusion of 

all which is new has wonderfully yielded. The danger now is, not that people 

should obstinately refuse to allow anything but their old routine to pass 

for reason and the will of God, but either that they should allow some novelty 

or other to pass for these too easily, or else that they should underrate 

the importance of them altogether, and think it enough to follow action for 

its own sake, without troubling themselves to make reason and the will of 

God prevail therein. Now, then, is the moment for culture to be of ser vice, 

culture which believes in making reason and the will of God prevail, 

believes in perfection, is the study and pursuit of perfection, and is no longer 

debarred, by a rigid invincible exclusion of what ever is new, from getting 

ac cep tance for its ideas, simply because they are new. 

The moment this view of culture is seized, the moment it is regarded not 

solely as the endeavour to see things as they are, to draw towards a knowledge 

of the universal order which seems to be intended and aimed at in the 

world, and which it is a man’s happiness to go along with or his misery to go 

counter to,— to learn, in short, the will of God,— the moment, I say, culture 

is considered not merely as the endeavour to see and learn this, but as the 

endeavour, also, to make it prevail, the moral, social, and beneficent character 

of culture becomes manifest. The mere endeavour to see and learn the 

truth for our own personal satisfaction is indeed a commencement for making 

it prevail, a preparing the way for this, which always serves this, and is 

wrongly, therefore, stamped with blame absolutely in itself and not only in 

its caricature and degeneration. But perhaps it has got stamped with blame, 

and disparaged with the dubious title of curiosity, because in comparison 

with this wider endeavour of such great and plain utility it looks selfish, 

petty, and unprofitable. 

And religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the 

human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself,— religion, that voice 

of the deepest human experience,— does not only enjoin and sanction the 

aim which is the great aim of culture, the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain 

what perfection is and to make it prevail; but also, in determining generally 

in what human perfection consists, religion comes to a conclusion 

identical with that which culture,— culture seeking the determination of 

this question through all the voices of human experience which have been 

heard upon it, of art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as of religion, 

in order to give a greater fulness and certainty to its solution,— likewise 

reaches. Religion says: The kingdom of God is within you; 6 and culture, in 

like manner, places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth 

and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality. 

It places it in the ever- increasing efficacy and in the general harmonious 

expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling, which make the 

peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature. As I have said on 

6. Luke 17.21.


a former occasion: 7 ‘It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless 

expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that the 

spirit of the human race finds its ideal. To reach this ideal, culture is an 

indispensable aid, and that is the true value of culture.’ Not a having and a 

resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture 

conceives it; and here, too, it coincides with religion. 

And because men are all members of one great whole, and the sympathy 

which is in human nature will not allow one member to be indifferent to the 

rest or to have a perfect welfare in de pen dent of the rest, the expansion of our 

humanity, to suit the idea of perfection which culture forms, must be a general 

expansion. Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible while the 

individual remains isolated. The individual is required, under pain of being 

stunted and enfeebled in his own development if he disobeys, to carry others 

along with him in his march towards perfection, to be continually doing all 

he can to enlarge and increase the volume of the human stream sweeping 

thitherward. And here, once more, culture lays on us the same obligation as 

religion, which says, as Bishop Wilson has admirably put it, that ‘to promote 

the kingdom of God is to increase and hasten one’s own happiness.’ 

But, finally, perfection,— as culture from a thorough disinterested study 

of human nature and human experience learns to conceive it,— is a harmonious 

expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of 

human nature, and is not consistent with the over- development of any one 

power at the expense of the rest. Here culture goes beyond religion, as religion 

is generally conceived by us. 

If culture, then, is a study of perfection, and of harmonious perfection, 

general perfection, and perfection which consists in becoming something 

rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and 

spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances,— it is clear that culture, 

instead of being the frivolous and useless thing which Mr. Bright, and Mr. 

Frederic Harrison, 8 and many other Liberals are apt to call it, has a very 

important function to fulfil for mankind. And this function is particularly 

important in our modern world, of which the whole civilisation is, to a much 

greater degree than the civilisation of Greece and Rome, mechanical and 

external, and tends constantly to become more so. But above all in our own 

country has culture a weighty part to perform, because here that mechanical 

character, which civilisation tends to take everywhere, is shown in the 

most eminent degree. Indeed nearly all the characters of perfection, as culture 

teaches us to fix them, meet in this country with some powerful tendency 

which thwarts them and sets them at defiance. The idea of perfection 

as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical 

and material civilisation in esteem with us, and nowhere, as I have said, 

so much in esteem as with us. The idea of perfection as a general expansion 

of the human family is at variance with our strong individualism, our hatred 

of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual’s personality, our 

maxim of ‘every man for himself.’ Above all, the idea of perfection as a harmonious 

expansion of human nature is at variance with our want of flexibility, 

with our inaptitude for seeing more than one side of a thing, with our 

7. In A French Eton (1864), chapter 3. 

8. En glish jurist and phi los o pher (1831– 1923), 

and critic of Arnold’s cultural views. John Bright 

(1811– 1889), En glish po liti cal reformer, orator, 

and member of Parliament.


intense energetic absorption in the par tic u lar pursuit we happen to be following. 

So culture has a rough task to achieve in this country. Its preachers 

have, and are likely long to have, a hard time of it, and they will much 

oftener be regarded, for a great while to come, as elegant or spurious Jeremiahs 

than as friends and benefactors. That, however, will not prevent their 

doing in the end good ser vice if they persevere. And, meanwhile, the mode 

of action they have to pursue, and the sort of habits they must fight against, 

ought to be made quite clear for every one to see, who may be willing to look 

at the matter attentively and dispassionately. 

Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting danger; often in machinery 

most absurdly disproportioned to the end which this machinery, if it is to do 

any good at all, is to serve; but always in machinery, as if it had a value in and 

for itself. 9 What is freedom but machinery? what is population but machinery? 

what is coal but machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what is 

wealth but machinery? what are, even, religious organisations but machinery? 

Now almost every voice in En gland is accustomed to speak of these 

things as if they were precious ends in themselves, and therefore had some of 

the characters of perfection indisputably joined to them. I have before now 

noticed Mr. Roebuck’s 1 stock argument for proving the greatness and happiness 

of En gland as she is, and for quite stopping the mouths of all gainsayers. 

Mr. Roebuck is never weary of reiterating this argument of his, so I do not 

know why I should be weary of noticing it. ‘May not every man in En gland 

say what he likes?’— Mr. Roebuck perpetually asks; and that, he thinks, is 

quite sufficient, and when every man may say what he likes, our aspirations 

ought to be satisfied. But the aspirations of culture, which is the study of 

perfection, are not satisfied, unless what men say, when they may say what 

they like, is worth saying,— has good in it, and more good than bad. In the 

same way the Times, replying to some foreign strictures on the dress, looks, 

and behaviour of the En glish abroad, urges that the En glish ideal is that 

every one should be free to do and to look just as he likes. But culture indefatigably 

tries, not to make what each raw person may like the rule by which 

he fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed 

beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that. 

And in the same way with respect to railroads and coal. Every one must 

have observed the strange language current during the late discussions as 

to the possible failure of our supplies of coal. Our coal, thousands of people 

were saying, is the real basis of our national greatness; if our coal runs 

short, there is an end of the greatness of En gland. But what is greatness?— 

culture makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite 

love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness 

is that we excite love, interest, and admiration. If En gland were swallowed 

up by the sea to- morrow, which of the two, a hundred years hence, 

would most excite the love, interest, and admiration of mankind,— would 

most, therefore, show the evidences of having possessed greatness,— the 

En gland of the last twenty years, or the En gland of Elizabeth, 2 of a time of 

9. In “Signs of the Times” (1829), the Scottishborn 

author Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) had 

stated that it was now “the Mechanical Age. It 

is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and 

inward sense of that word.” 

1. John Arthur Roebuck (1801– 1879), radical 

member of Parliament. “Before now”: see “The 

Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” 

2. Elizabeth I (1533– 1603; reigned 1558– 1603).


splendid spiritual effort, but when our coal, and our industrial operations 

depending on coal, were very little developed? Well, then, what an unsound 

habit of mind it must be which makes us talk of things like coal or iron as 

constituting the greatness of En gland, and how salutary a friend is culture, 

bent on seeing things as they are, and thus dissipating delusions of this 

kind and fixing standards of perfection that are real! 

Wealth, again, that end to which our prodigious works for material advantage 

are directed,— the commonest of commonplaces tells us how men are 

always apt to regard wealth as a precious end in itself; and certainly they 

have never been so apt thus to regard it as they are in En gland at the present 

time. Never did people believe anything more firmly than nine En glishmen 

out of ten at the present day believe that our greatness and welfare are 

proved by our being so very rich. Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, 

by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but 

machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth 

as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so. If it were not 

for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, 

the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. 

3 The people who believe most that most greatness and welfare are 

proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to 

becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call 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 plea sure, 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?’ And thus 

culture begets a dissatisfaction which is of the highest possible value in stemming 

the common tide of men’s thoughts in a wealthy and industrial community, 

and which saves the future, as one may hope, from being vulgarised, 

even if it cannot save the present. 

Population, again, and bodily health and vigour, are things which are 

nowhere treated in such an unintelligent, misleading, exaggerated way as in 

En gland. Both are really machinery; yet how many people all around us do 

we see rest in them and fail to look beyond them! Why, one has heard people, 

fresh from reading certain articles of the Times on the Registrar- General’s 

returns of marriages and births in this country, 4 who would talk of our large 

En glish families in quite a solemn strain, as if they had something in itself 

beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in them; as if the British Philistine 

would have only to present himself before the Great Judge with his twelve 

children, in order to be received among the sheep 5 as a matter of right! 

But bodily health and vigour, it may be said, are not to be classed with 

wealth and population as mere machinery; they have a more real and essential 

value. True; but only as they are more intimately connected with a perfect 

spiritual condition than wealth or population are. The moment we disjoin 

3. The materialist middle classes (a name taken 

from a biblical people that waged war against the 

Israelites). 

4. “When Marriages are many and Deaths are 

few it is certain that the people are doing well” 

(London Times, February 3, 1866). 

5. That is, the saved; see Matthew 25.31– 46.


them from the idea of a perfect spiritual condition, and pursue them, as we do 

pursue them, for their own sake and as ends in themselves, our worship of 

them becomes as mere worship of machinery, as our worship of wealth or 

population, and as unintelligent and vulgarising a worship as that is. Every 

one with anything like an adequate idea of human perfection has distinctly 

marked this subordination to higher and spiritual ends of the cultivation of 

bodily vigour and activity. ‘Bodily exercise profiteth little; but godliness is profitable 

unto all things,’ says the author of the Epistle to Timothy. 6 And the 

utilitarian Franklin 7 says as explicitly:—‘Eat and drink such an exact quantity 

as suits the constitution of thy body, in reference to the ser vices of the mind.’ 

But the point of view of culture, keeping the mark of human perfection simply 

and broadly in view, and not assigning to this perfection, as religion or utilitarianism 

assigns to it, a special and limited character, this point of view, I say, 

of culture is best given by these words of Epictetus: 8 —‘It is a sign of φυι - α,’ 

says he,— that is, of a nature not finely tempered,—‘to give yourselves for 

instance, a great fuss about exercise, a great fuss about eating, a great fuss 

about drinking, a great fuss about walking, a great fuss about riding. All these 

things ought to be done merely by the way: the formation of the spirit and 

character must be our real concern.’ This is admirable; and, indeed, the Greek 

word εφυι - α, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection 

as culture brings us to conceive it: a harmonious perfection, a perfection in 

which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites 

‘the two noblest of things,’— as Swift, 9 who of one of the two, at any rate, had 

himself all too little, most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books,—‘the 

two noblest of things, sweetness and light.’ The εφυής is the man who tends 

towards sweetness and light; the φυής, on the other hand, is our Philistine. 

The im mense spiritual significance of the Greeks is due to their having been 

inspired with this central and happy idea of the essential character of human 

perfection; and Mr. Bright’s misconception of culture, as a smattering of 

Greek and Latin, comes itself, after all, from this wonderful significance of 

the Greeks having affected the very machinery of our education, and is in 

itself a kind of homage to it. 

In thus making sweetness and light to be characters of perfection, culture 

is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with poetry. Far more than 

on our freedom, our population, and our industrialism, many amongst us 

rely upon our religious organisations to save us. I have called religion a yet 

more important manifestation of human nature than poetry, because it has 

worked on a broader scale for perfection, and with greater masses of men. 

But the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all its sides, which 

is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true and invaluable idea, though it has 

not yet had the success that the idea of conquering the obvious faults of our 

animality, and of a human nature perfect on the moral side,— which is the 

6. 1 Timothy 4.8. 

7. Benjamin Franklin (1706– 1790), American 

statesman, writer, and scientist. Arnold quotes 

Franklin’s first recommendation in “Rules of 

Health,” from Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732– 

57). 

8. Greek Stoic phi los o pher (ca. 55– ca. 135 c.e.), 

who taught in Rome, in Enchiridion 41. 

9. Jonathan Swift (1667– 1745), En glish satirist, 

poet, and clergyman. In The Battle of the Books 

(1704), he recounts why Aesop, judging a contest 

between the spider (here representing the moderns) 

and the bee (the ancients), decided in favor 

of the bee: “the difference is, that, instead of dirt 

and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives 

with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind 

with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness 

and light.” In the larger battle that Swift 

describes, the outcome is less certain.

WALTER PATER / 721 

dominant idea of religion,— has been enabled to have; and it is destined, 

adding to itself the religious idea of a devout energy, to transform and govern 

the other. 

The best art and poetry of the Greeks, in which religion and poetry are 

one, in which the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all sides 

adds to itself a religious and devout energy, and works in the strength of 

that, is on this account of such surpassing interest and instructiveness for 

us, though it was,— as, having regard to the human race in general, and, 

indeed, having regard to the Greeks themselves, we must own,— a premature 

attempt, an attempt which for success needed the moral and religious 

fibre in humanity to be more braced and developed than it had yet been. 

But Greece did not err in having the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete 

human perfection, so present and paramount. It is impossible to have 

this idea too present and paramount; only, the moral fibre must be braced 

too. And we, because we have braced the moral fibre, are not on that 

account in the right way, if at the same time the idea of beauty, harmony, 

and complete human perfection, is wanting or misapprehended amongst 

us; and evidently it is wanting or misapprehended at present. And when we 

rely as we do on our religious organisations, which in themselves do not 

and cannot give us this idea, and think we have done enough if we make 

them spread and prevail, then, I say, we fall into our common fault of overvaluing 

machinery. 

* * * 

1867, 1882 

WALTER PATER 

1839–1894 

Contemporary critics and theorists have returned to Walter Pater’s books and 

essays, reexamined them in relation to current interests in figurative language, creativity 

in criticism, and historical study, and dramatically raised his critical stock. 

Literary histories had often described Pater as a “minor” Victorian overshadowed by 

Matthew Arnold. An impressionist critic who coined the En glish phrase “art for 

art’s sake” (which he later amended to “art for its own sake”), he sketched, it was 

said, the adventures of his soul among masterpieces. Now, however, Pater’s conception 

of art and his exaltation of aesthetic experience have linked him with his contemporaries 

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietz sche as a crucial writer 

for postmodern theory and criticism. 

Pater’s work has always been important for creative writers, including William 

Butler Yeats, who refashioned Pater’s prose description of Leonardo da Vinci’s 

Mona Lisa in Studies in the History of the Re nais sance (1873) and made it the first 

“poem” in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936). Pater has also inspired such 

twentiethcentury theorists of literary and critical consciousness as Georges Poulet 

and (in his early writings) Paul De Man. Harold Bloom and J. Hillis Miller point to 

Pater as having enriched and supplemented the Romantic tradition in criticism

722 / WALTER PATER 

inaugurated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and refined by John Ruskin (in Modern 

Paint ers, 1843– 56, and The Stones of Venice, 1851– 53). 

Pater was born in the East End of London. His father, a surgeon, died in 1842, 

and he was raised in a house hold of women that included his mother, a grandmother, 

and an aunt. After attending King’s School, Canterbury, he began his 

undergraduate career at Queen’s College, Oxford University, where he wrote essays 

on Greek philosophy for the eminent scholar Benjamin Jowett. Pater received his 

degree in 1862 and the following year was elected to Old Mortality, a literary society 

at Oxford. He became a fellow of Oxford’s Brasenose College in 1864, living 

there and, later, in London as a teacher, scholar, and critic. 

During the summer of 1865, Pater made his first trip to Italy, traveling in the company 

of his pupil and close friend C. L. Shadwell, to whom he would dedicate Studies 

in the History of the Re nais sance. The paintings he saw in Florence and other 

cities deeply moved him, giving him “a richer, more daring sense of life than any to 

be seen in Oxford.” For Pater, the Italian Re nais sance was not merely a historical 

period but a tremor in the heart that marked the consciousness of the person 

attuned to its splendors. To know the glorious works of Re nais sance art was intensely, 

indeed erotically, to feel them, and this feeling was Pater’s means of countering the 

dulling of sensation, the termination of feeling, the inevitability of death. 

Pater’s first essays were published anonymously in the late 1860s. A study of 

Coleridge in the Westminster Review (1866) suggests that Pater found a central 

theme early on: “Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of 

the ‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute.’ . . . To the modern spirit nothing is, or 

can be rightly known, except relatively and under certain conditions.” Pater’s first 

publication under his name was “Notes on Leonardo da Vinci” (1869). Studies in 

the History of the Re nais sance, a collection of essays on writers and Italian paint ers 

(including Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli), appeared four years later. 

Pater’s next book, the romance Marius the Epicurean (1885), describes the development 

of a young Roman in the time of Marcus Aurelius, the second- century c.e. 

Roman emperor and Stoic phi los o pher. He conceived it as the first of a three- part 

series— the second to be set in sixteenth- century France and the third in lateeighteenth- 

century England— but the other volumes remained unwritten. Pater’s 

later books include Imaginary Portraits (1887), Appreciations, with an Essay on Style 

(1889), and Plato and Platonism (1893). Greek Studies (1895) and an unfinished 

romance, Gaston de Latour (1896), were published posthumously. The three- volume 

theological project that Pater planned for his later years, which he seems to have 

envisioned as a response to Arnold’s writings on religion and culture, was left 

undone. 

Studies in the History of the Re nais sance was a momentous text for a number of 

Pater’s younger contemporaries, including Oscar Wilde. Pater states that his primary 

concern is with Italy in the fifteenth century, but he deliberately defines the 

term Re nais sance much more widely, describing it as an “outbreak of the human 

spirit” from the “limits which the religious system of the middle ages imposed on 

the heart and the imagination.” Throughout the book, Pater emphasizes the precious, 

fine textures of art, but always with the implication that only persons of rich 

receptiveness, of exquisite and accurate perception, can wholly sense and appreciate 

its singularities. The reliance on austere discipline to achieve liberation— the 

free life that art renders possible— helps explain Pater’s great appeal. By making 

a religion of art, a sacred duty of artistic creation and perception, Pater built the 

foundation for modern aestheticist rapture as well as for impressionist criticism. 

Studies in the History of the Re nais sance received mixed reviews. Some concurred 

with Pater, against Ruskin, in his esteem for the Re nais sance. But others attacked 

Pater for advocating plea sure as the highest good and self- gratification as the best 

rule for the conduct of life. George Eliot in a letter called the book “quite poisonous 

in its false principles of criticism and false conceptions of life.” Some accused Pater

WALTER PATER / 723 

of projecting nineteenthcentury modes of thinking onto the Re nais sance. To 

defend himself against these charges of hedonism and ahistoricism, Pater changed 

the title of the second edition (1877) to The Re nais sance: Studies in Art and Poetry 

and omitted the conclusion, which declared that nothing mattered more than the 

experience of brilliant moments (he restored it, in a slightly modified form, for the 

third and fourth editions). The damage had been done, however; in later years, 

he failed to win Oxford appointments he might otherwise have received. 

In the preface, Pater sounds a concrete, pragmatic note. Impatient with the notion 

that critics should seek broad, general definitions of key terms, he declares that 

“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative.” Referring 

to the plea sure that we receive from “a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life 

or in a book,” Pater intimates that on one level at least there is no difference between 

life and art, nature and culture: each matters only insofar as it gives plea sure. 

Pater at first seems directly to challenge Arnold’s dictum that the critic must see 

the object as in itself it really is by adding a necessary “first step”: “to know one’s 

own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.” Yet their 

goal is the same; knowing the impression is the means through which one perceives 

how and why one is “deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.” This 

response to art matters, according to Pater, because it frees each mind from being 

“a solitary prisoner [in] its own dream of a world.” Even more important, it frees 

individuals from their bondage to routine and particularly to death. The love of art 

for its own sake is what makes us, while the response lasts, more alive than dead. 

Like other late- nineteenth- century figures, Pater registers a heightened sense of 

fleeting beauty wherever it materializes, qualities also evident in so- called de cadent 

literature and impressionist painting of the time. 

Pater’s view of criticism and art startled his contemporaries, because God is 

absent from it. Most of them saw death not as final but as the pathway to the highest 

form of life. Pater neither offers any religious consolation nor invokes the moral 

earnestness and high seriousness of earlier Victorian writers, including Thomas 

Carlyle, Arnold, and Eliot. He seems unconcerned as well about social and po liti cal 

change: there is no higher purpose than seizing, desperately, each moment for whatever 

intensities it might supply. This is obviously the main limitation of his position, 

for the responsibility of the critic is maximizing his or her plea sure, not contributing 

to knowledge or to change in a body politic that in Pater’s view can no more withstand 

decay and death than anything or anyone else. 

bibliography 

Primary sources include The Works of Walter Pater (10 vols., 1910; rpt. 1967) and 

Letters, edited by Lawrence Evans (1970). See also Walter Pater: Three Major Texts, 

edited by William E. Buckler (1986), which includes Studies in the History of the 

Re nais sance, Appreciations, and Imaginary Portraits. For a good selection, see The 

Selected Writings of Walter Pater, edited by Harold Bloom (1974). Thomas Wright’s 

biography, The Life of Walter Pater (2 vols., 1907), is informative but not always reliable. 

Overviews of the life and work are provided by Ian Fletcher, Walter Pater (rev. 

ed., 1972), and Gerald Monsman, Walter Pater (1977). 

For background and annotations for Studies in the History of the Re nais sance, 

consult the editions by Adam Phillips (1986) and Donald L. Hill (1980). Context and 

analysis are offered by Paul Barolsky, Walter Pater’s Re nais sance (1987). Another 

useful resource is Billie Andrew Inman, Walter Pater and His Reading, 1874– 1877, 

with a Bibliography of His Library Borrowings, 1878– 1894 (1990). 

On Pater’s criticism, see David J. DeLaura, Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian 

En gland: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (1969); William E. Buckler, Walter Pater: The 

Critic as Artist of Ideas (1987); and Jonathan Loesberg, Aestheticism and Deconstruction: 

Pater, Derrida, and de Man (1991), which argues for the philosophical and


po liti cal force of Pater’s aestheticist views in Studies in the History of the Re naissance 

and other works. Critical studies include Wolfgang Iser, Walter Pater: The 

Aesthetic Moment (1960; trans. 1987); Robert Keefe, Walter Pater and the Gods of 

Disorder (1988), on Pater’s interest in Greek culture and mythology; Carolyn Williams, 

Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (1989), illuminating 

on Pater’s narrative and rhetorical strategies in his criticism and fiction; Jay Fellows, 

Tombs, Despoiled and Haunted: “Under- Textures” and “After- Thoughts” in Walter 

Pater (1991); Denis Donoghue, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (1995), a 

suggestive study of Pater as a writer who sees criticism as “an opportunity for the 

exercise of selfconsciousness”; and William Shuter, Rereading Walter Pater (1997), 

especially cogent on the influence of Heraclitus, Plato, and Hegel on Pater’s 

thought. Kenneth Daley, in The Rescue of Romanticism: Walter Pater and John 

Ruskin (2001), offers a stimulating account of Pater’s response to and interpretation 

of the Romantic movement. 

Walter Pater: An Imaginative Sense of Fact, edited by Philip Dodd (1981), collects 

papers presented at the First International Pater Conference, held in Oxford in 

1980. Another good collection is Pater in the 1990s, edited by Laurel Brake and Ian 

Small (1991). Comparative Criticism, vol. 17, ed. E. S. Shaffer (1995), includes 

excellent essays on Pater by Denis Donoghue, Richard Wollheim, and others. For 

his contemporaries’ responses to Pater’s writings, see Walter Pater: The Critical 

Heritage, edited by R. M. Seiler (1980). See also Walter Pater: An Annotated Bibliography 

of Writings about Him, edited by Franklin Court (1979). 

From Studies in the History of the Re nais sance 

Preface 

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define 

beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some 

universal formula for it. The value of these attempts has most often been in 

the suggestive and penetrating things said by the way. Such discussions 

help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate 

between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to 

use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning 

than they would otherwise have. Beauty, like all other qualities presented 

to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning 

and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty, not in 

the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its 

universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or 

that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of æsthetics. 

“To see the object as in itself it really is,” 1 has been justly said to be the 

aim of all true criticism what ever; and in æsthetic criticism the first step 

towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as 

it really is, to discriminate it, 2 to realise it distinctly. The objects with which 

æsthetic criticism deals— music, poetry, artistic and accomplished forms of 

human life— are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, 

like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this 

1. Matthew Arnold’s phrase, which he used first 

in “On Translating Homer” (1862) and then in 

the opening paragraph of a more widely read 

essay, “The Function of Criticism at the Present 

Time” (1864; see above). 

2. To perceive its distinguishing features.

Studies in the History of the Re nais sance / 725 

song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to 

me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me plea sure? and 

if so, what sort or degree of plea sure? How is my nature modified by its presence, 

and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original 

facts with which the æsthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of 

light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for one’s self, 

or not at all. And he who experiences these impressions strongly, and drives 

directly at the discrimination and analysis of them, has no need to trouble 

himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact 

relation to truth or experience— metaphysical questions, as unprofitable as 

metaphysical questions elsewhere. He may pass them all by as being, answerable 

or not, of no interest to him. 

The æsthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do, 

all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or 

forces producing pleas ur able sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or 

unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to explain, by analysing and 

reducing it to its elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging 

personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, the hills of Carrara, Pico of 

Mirandola, 3 are valuable for their virtues, as we say, in speaking of a herb, a 

wine, a gem; for the property each has of affecting one with a special, a 

unique, impression of plea sure. Our education becomes complete in proportion 

as our susceptibility to those impressions increases in depth and variety. 

And the function of the æsthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyse, and 

separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair 

personality in life or in a book, produces this special impression of beauty or 

plea sure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what 

conditions it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that 

virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself 

and others; and the rule for those who would reach this end is stated with 

great exactness in the words of a recent critique of Sainte- Beuve:—De se 

borner à connaître de près les belles choses, et à s’en nourrir en exquis amateurs, 

en humanistes accomplis. 4 

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct 

abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, 

the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects. 

He will remember always that beauty exists in many forms. To him all periods, 

types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal. In all ages there have 

been some excellent workmen, and some excellent work done. The question 

he asks is always:— In whom did the stir, the genius, the sentiment of the 

period find itself? where was the receptacle of its refinement, its elevation, 

its taste? “The ages are all equal,” says William Blake, “but genius is always 

above its age.” 5 

3. Giovanni Pico, count of Mirandola (1463– 

1494), an Italian humanist and Neoplatonist philos 

o pher whom Pater examines in one of the 

chapters of The Re nais sance. La Gioconda: Leonardo 

da Vinci’s painting Mona Lisa (ca. 1504). Carrara: 

a region of Italy famous for its white marble. 

4. One should limit oneself to knowing beautiful 

things intimately, and nourish oneself on them 

like exquisite amateurs, like accomplished humanists 

(French). Charles- Augustin Sainte- Beuve 

(1804– 1869), an eminent French critic and journalist; 

he wrote this sentence in an 1867 essay on 

the French poet and humanist Joachim Du Bellay 

(1522– 1560). Pater devotes a later chapter of 

Studies in the Re nais sance to du Bellay. 

5. From annotations to volume 1 of The Works of 

Sir Joshua Reynolds made by the Romantic poet 

Blake (1757– 1827).


Often it will require great nicety to disengage this virtue from the commoner 

elements with which it may be found in combination. Few artists, not 

Goethe or Byron 6 even, work quite cleanly, casting off all débris, and leaving 

us only what the heat of their imagination has wholly fused and transformed. 

Take, for instance, the writings of Wordsworth. 7 The heat of his 

genius, entering into the substance of his work, has crystallised a part, but 

only a part, of it; and in that great mass of verse there is much which might 

well be forgotten. But scattered up and down it, sometimes fusing and transforming 

entire compositions, like the Stanzas on Resolution and In de pendence, 

or the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood, 8 sometimes, as if at 

random, depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly 

search through and transmute, we trace the action of his unique, incommunicable 

faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things, and of 

man’s life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and character 

from local influences, from the hills and streams, and from natural sights 

and sounds. Well! that is the virtue, the active principle in Wordsworth’s 

poetry; and then the function of the critic of Wordsworth is to follow up that 

active principle, to disengage it, to mark the degree in which it penetrates 

his verse. 

The subjects of the following studies are taken from the history of the 

Re nais sance, and touch what I think the chief points in that complex, 

many- sided movement. I have explained in the first of them what I understand 

by the word, giving it a much wider scope than was intended by those 

who originally used it to denote that revival of classical antiquity in the fifteenth 

century which was only one of many results of a general excitement 

and enlightening of the human mind, but of which the great aim and 

achievements of what, as Christian art, is often falsely opposed to the 

Re nais sance, were another result. This outbreak of the human spirit may 

be traced far into the middle age itself, with its motives already clearly pronounced, 

the care for physical beauty, the worship of the body, the breaking 

down of those limits which the religious system of the middle age 

imposed on the heart and the imagination. I have taken as an example of 

this movement, this earlier Re nais sance within the middle age itself, and as 

an expression of its qualities, two little compositions in early French; not 

because they constitute the best possible expression of them, but because 

they help the unity of my series, inasmuch as the Re nais sance ends also in 

France, in French poetry, in a phase of which the writings of Joachim du 

Bellay are in many ways the most perfect illustration. The Re nais sance, in 

truth, put forth in France an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the products 

of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweetness which 

belongs to a refined and comely de cadence, as its earliest phases have the 

freshness which belongs to all periods of growth in art, the charm of ascêsis, 

9 of the austere and serious girding of the loins in youth. 

6. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788– 1824), 

En glish Romantic poet. Johann Wolfgang von 

Goethe (1749– 1832), German poet, dramatist, 

and novelist. 

7. William Wordsworth (1770– 1850), the greatest 

of the En glish Romantic poets. 

8. That is, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality 

from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807). 

“Resolution and In de pen dence” was also published 

in 1807. 

9. Practice, training (Greek); but in his essay 

“Style,” included in Appreciations (1889), Pater 

defines it as “self- restraint, a skillful economy of 

means.”


But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the Re naissance 

mainly lies,— in that solemn fifteenth century which can hardly be 

studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of the 

intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and 

prominent personalities, with their profound æsthetic charm, but for its 

general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate 

type. 

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the 

culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting- points, and 

by unconnected roads. As products of the same generation they partake 

indeed of a common character, and unconsciously illustrate each other; but 

of the producers themselves, each group is solitary, gaining what advantage 

or disadvantage there may be in intellectual isolation. Art and poetry, philosophy 

and the religious life, and that other life of refined plea sure and 

action in the conspicuous places of the world, are each of them confined to 

its own circle of ideas, and those who prosecute either of them are generally 

little curious of the thoughts of others. There come, however, from time to 

time, eras of more favourable conditions, in which the thoughts of men 

draw nearer together than is their wont, and the many interests of the intellectual 

world combine in one complete type of general culture. The fifteenth 

century in Italy is one of these happier eras, and what is sometimes 

said of the age of Pericles is true of that of Lorenzo: 1 — it is an age productive 

in personalities, many- sided, centralised, complete. Here, artists and 

phi los o phers and those whom the action of the world has elevated and 

made keen, do not live in isolation, but breathe a common air, and catch 

light and heat from each other’s thoughts. There is a spirit of general elevation 

and enlightenment in which all alike communicate. The unity of this 

spirit gives unity to all the various products of the Re nais sance; and it is to 

this intimate alliance with mind, this participation in the best thoughts 

which that age produced, that the art of Italy in the fifteenth century owes 

much of its grave dignity and influence. 

I have added an essay on Winckelmann, 2 as not incongruous with the 

studies which precede it, because Winckelmann, coming in the eigh teenth 

century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm for the 

things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, by his Hellenism, 

his lifelong struggle to attain to the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy 

with the humanists of a previous century. He is the last fruit of the Re naissance, 

and explains in a striking way its motive and tendencies. 

1. Lorenzo de Medici (1449– 1492), ruler of and 

patron of the arts in Florence, and himself a poet. 

Pericles (ca. 495– 429 b.c.e.), Athenian statesman 

and patron of the arts and architecture. 

2. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717– 1768), 

German classical archaeologist and art historian.


Conclusion 3 

Λέγει που ‘Hράκλειτος τι πάντα χωρεî κα οδν μένει 4 

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions 

has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin 

with that which is without— our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more 

exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the 

flood of water in summer heat. What is the whole physical life in that 

moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their 

names? But those elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are 

present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote 

from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them— the passage of the 

blood, the waste and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of 

the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound— processes which 

science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces. Like the elements of 

which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it 

rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are 

broadcast, driven in many currents; and birth and gesture and death and the 

springing of violets from the grave 5 are but a few out of ten thousand resultant 

combinations. That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an 

image of ours, under which we group them— a design in a web, the actual 

threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flame- like our life has, 

that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces 

parting sooner or later on their ways. 

Or if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirl pool 

is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring. There it is no longer 

the gradual darkening of the eye, the gradual fading of colour from the 

wall— movements of the shore- side, where the water flows down indeed, 

though in apparent rest— but the race of the midstream, a drift of momentary 

acts of sight and passion and thought. At first sight experience seems to 

bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and 

importunate, reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of 

action. But when reflexion begins to play upon those objects they are dissipated 

under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick 

of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions— colour, odour, 

texture— in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought 

on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, 

but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are 

extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the 

whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual 

mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed 

round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no 

3. This brief “Conclusion” was omitted in the second 

edition of this book, as I conceived it might 

possibly mislead some of those young men into 

whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have 

thought it best to reprint it here, with some slight 

changes which bring it closer to my original meaning. 

I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean 

with the thoughts suggested by it [Pater’s 

note]. Marius the Epicurean (1885), philosophical 

novel set in 2d- century c.e. Rome. 

4. Somewhere Heraclitus says that all things are 

in motion and nothing is lasting (Greek); in Plato 

and Platonism (1893), Pater translated the end of 

the epigraph, “All things give way: nothing 

remaineth.” Heraclitus (active ca. 500 b.c.e), pre- 

Socratic Greek phi los o pher. 

5. An echo of Laertes’ words at the grave of Ophelia, 

Hamlet 5.1.222– 23: “And from her fair and 

unpolluted flesh / May violets spring.”


real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can 

only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression 

of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner 

its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step further still, and assures 

us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, 

experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited 

by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely 

divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try 

to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to 

be than that it is. To such a tremulous wisp constantly re- forming itself on 

the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less 

fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It 

is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, 

images, sensations, that analysis leaves off— that continual vanishing away, 

that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves. 

Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren. 6 The ser vice 

of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, 

to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation. Every moment some 

form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is 

choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement 

is irresistibly real and attractive to us,— for that moment only. Not the 

fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of 

pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in 

them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass 

most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where 

the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? 

To burn always with this hard, gem- like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is 

success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: 

for, after all, habit is relative to a ste reo typed world, and meantime it is 

only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, 

seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite 

passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set 

the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, 

strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face 

of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in 

those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of 

forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. 

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, 

gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall 

hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What 

we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting 

new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or of 

Hegel, 7 or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, 

instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass 

unregarded by us. “Philosophy is the microscope of thought.” 8 The theory or 

6. To philosophize is to cast away inertia, to bring 

oneself to life (German). Novalis: the pen name 

of Baron Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772– 1801), 

German Romantic poet and novelist; “Fragmente 

II” from his Hymns to the Night (1800) is quoted 

here. 

7. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770– 1831), 

German idealist phi los o pher. Auguste Comte 

(1798– 1857), French positivist phi los o pher. 

8. From Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo 

(1802–1885), the leader of the Romantic movement 

in France.

730 / STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ 

idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, 

in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some 

abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, 

has no real claim upon us. 

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau 9 is that in the sixth book 

of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary 

sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now 

in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked 

himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that 

remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he 

decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then 

in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. 1 Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor 

Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite 

reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis 

indéfinis: 2 we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some 

spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least 

among “the children of this world,” 3 in art and song. For our one chance 

lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible 

into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, 

ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested 

or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it 

is passion— that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. 

Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the 

love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing 

frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they 

pass, and simply for those moments’ sake. 

1873, 1893 

9. Jean- Jacques Rousseau (1712– 1778), Swiss- born 

French phi los o pher and po liti cal theorist; his Confessions 

were published in 12 books (1781, 1788). 

1. The editor Donald L. Hill has pointed out that 

Rousseau, in his Confessions, nowhere mentions 

reading the French Enlightenment phi los o pher 

and writer Voltaire (François- Marie Arouet, 1694– 

1778). 

2. Men are all condemned to death with indefinite 

reprieves (French). From Hugo, The Last 

Day of a Condemned Person (1832). 

3. Luke 16.8. 

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ 

1842–1898 

“Such is my life, devoid of anecdote,” wrote Stéphane Mallarmé to Paul Verlaine, who 

had asked him to provide biographical information for a headnote in an anthology of 

contemporary poets. Mallarmé responded by describing a life entirely subordinate to 

writing: “I have always dreamed and attempted something else, with the patience of 

an alchemist, ready to sacrifice all vanity and satisfaction, as people once burned their 

furniture and their roof- beams, to stoke the fires of the Great Work. . . . The Orphic 

explanation of the Earth, which is the sole duty of the poet and the literary game par 

excellence: the very rhythm of the book, coming alive impersonally all the way down 

to its pagination, would take its place alongside the equations of this dream, or Ode.”

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ / 731 

Writing with a combination of grandiosity and modesty, Mallarmé spent a lifetime 

describing and exploring the tensions inherent not in personal life but in a poetry that 

aspires to the condition of music, mathematics, metaphysics, and myth. 

Born in 1842 to a family of Pa ri sian functionaries, Mallarmé spent his childhood 

in various boarding schools after the death of his mother in 1847. Married in 1863, 

he worked as a high school En glish teacher for the next thirty years, unhappily and 

unsuccessfully. (He claimed to have learned En glish in order to read Edgar Allan 

Poe.) To make ends meet, he undertook to write textbooks for language and literature 

instruction, cursing the amount of time these texts forced him to take away 

from what he saw as his true vocation, the invention of an entirely new kind of 

poetry. At his death in 1898, he considered his Great Work barely begun. Of the 

1,659 pages included in the 1945 Pléiade edition of Mallarmé’s works, fewer than 

100 contain what he considered serious poems (a proportion still smaller in the 

updated edition), and even those he referred to as mere “calling cards.” 

How did a poet who wrote so little come to be known as the Master of French 

Symbolism? On the one hand, by holding weekly meetings at his Paris apartment, 

where he dazzled a whole generation of poets with opaque yet suggestive discourses 

no one could quite remember. On the other, by locating his writing within its own 

impossibility. The “vibratory near- disappearance,” the “almost nothing,” the “stilled 

ode, in the blanks” of his texts were paradoxes of writing, exploring while collapsing 

the differences between language and silence, presence and absence, verse and 

prose. And he always exaggerated his lack of accomplishment: his notoriously difficult 

poems exerted a tremendous fascination on his contemporaries, and even in 

his textbooks and in the fashion journal La Dernière Mode (The Latest Fashion), 

which he wrote singlehandedly for four months, he worked out sustained, innovative 

aesthetic and linguistic theories. 

In his later years, Mallarmé invented what he called the “critical poem,” a genre 

of theoretical text as stylistically dense and complex as his verse. “Crisis in Poetry” 

(1896), our selection, belongs to that genre. In all of Mallarmé’s writing, the distinction 

between “poetry” and “theory” breaks down: every text is a lesson in how 

language works, weaving and unweaving the poetic act that it itself is in the pro cess 

of not quite accomplishing. The materiality of page, ink, paragraph, and spacing is 

often just as important as the logic of syntax, figure, and sense. 

The crisis in poetry about which Mallarmé writes is in one sense peculiarly 

French. The classical French verse form, codified by François de Malherbe in the 

early seventeenth century and exemplified by Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, and 

Jean- Baptiste Molière, was the alexandrine— a line of twelve syllables divided into 

two halves, or “hemistichs,” by a pause called a caesura. For almost three centuries, 

the rules of prosody were strictly observed. Even the displacement of the caesura 

from its central position in the line caused an uproar when Victor Hugo dared to 

attempt it in 1830 (in his play Hernani). But as of 1886, just after the death of Hugo, 

the poetic line seemed to Mallarmé to be breaking up altogether. Poets were writing 

in “free verse.” To a French ear, accustomed to counting syllables and evaluating 

rhyme, this was a revolution. Mallarmé even goes so far as to treat it as a kind of 

second French Revolution. 

But in another sense, in Mallarmé’s account of the “crisis,” this “liberation” of 

verse is merely a way of rediscovering Language itself and is not, strictly speaking, 

confined to French: all languages mobilize sound and sense, rhythm and rhyme, 

deploying words as material, sensual objects with properties that go beyond their 

meanings, with connotations that create networks of effects, as well as with syntax 

and rhetoric that provide structure and suggestion. The sounds of words may be 

related to their meaning, but the very existence of multiple languages indicates that 

that relation is not one of perfect reflection. Mallarmé notes that unlike God, we do 

not speak words that are themselves the things they name. While God can say “Let 

there be light,” and there is light, in French the spoken word jour (day) has a dark


vowel sound while nuit (night) has a light sound. But our ability to notice this lack 

of attunement between sound and sense leads us to imagine a virtual language that 

would be perfectly in tune with itself. One might think that this perfect language 

would be pure poetry, but Mallarmé does not exactly say so. In fact, he claims that 

if this language existed, verse itself would not exist, because verse consists of compensating 

for the failings of language, creating a “total word, new, unknown to the 

language,” suspending the multiple facets of an idea so that its fragments balance 

in a kind of “universal musicality.” 

Mallarmé was not the only symbolist whose highest ambitions for poetry were 

expressed in terms of music. Paul Verlaine (1844– 1896) had already asked for 

“music above all things.” And Richard Wagner, the German Romantic composer 

(1813– 1883), had considerable influence on French poetry. That influence sprang 

less from his music than from his imperfectly understood but enthusiastically 

endorsed theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, which would combine 

music, dance, theater, painting, and poetry. When Mallarmé speaks of Music, 

he refers simultaneously to two different things: a system of sounds that appeals 

directly to the senses and emotions, and a system of pure relations and intervals 

that has no referential but only a structural existence. 

“Crisis in Poetry” offers a critique of two dominant aesthetic theories of the nineteenth 

century: namely, realism and Romanticism. About realism, Mallarmé suggests 

that a book can offer only “allusions,” “suggestions”— effects—not any real 

object, “on which the pages would have difficulty closing.” By describing realism as 

a book trying to enclose a palace, he is saying (somewhat humorously) that reality 

cannot be presented directly, that any realism is already an interpretation of the 

real. About Romanticism, Mallarmé critiques the notion that the “personal breath” 

or voice of the individual poet controls the meaning of the poem. Rather, he claims, 

in pure poetry the initiative is taken by words themselves in their clashes and 

rhymes. For Mallarmé, the poet is absent and anonymous. Intentionality and inspiration 

are eclipsed by the workings of language itself: the poet’s voice is “stilled.” 

Convinced that all poets are attempting to write the same Book, Mallarmé sees 

poetry as eternal, canonical, and unified rather than historically, culturally, and 

po liti cally diverse. Mallarmé’s concept of poetic anonymity is thus at the farthest 

remove from Virginia Woolf’s. When Woolf claimed in 1929 that “anonymous was 

a woman,” she was referring to the fact that creative women have often been deprived 

of a place in history and a proper name. For Mallarmé, poetic anonymity is a sign 

not of dispossession but of cultural authority— precisely the kind of cultural authority 

that has often deprived women of voice. 

In Mallarmé’s “Crisis in Poetry,” the importance of the “liberation” of verse lies 

less in the actual accomplishments of writers in free verse than in the dissolution of 

the old distinction between verse and prose. In another essay, titled “Music and Letters” 

and first delivered as a lecture at Oxford and Cambridge in 1894, Mallarme 

goes so far as to say that “prose does not exist”: there is “verse” as soon as there is 

style, as soon as there is any linguistic residue of effectiveness beyond pure instrumentality 

(what he calls the “journalistic” or “commercial” use of language). Ironically, 

Mallarmé himself never wrote in free verse. However difficult or “unknown to 

the language” his late poems may be, they observe classical forms of prosody. But he 

did undertake one experiment that was definitely not “classical,” at least in its form. 

In A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (1897), Mallarmé positioned lines 

of varying lengths and sizes in different places on the page, letting a long conducting 

sentence be surrounded by subordinate clauses and typefaces, and sculpting the 

blanks as well as the writing. This stretching of the spacing of syntax to the breaking 

point, this exposure of the materiality of writing, and this recognition of the poetic 

line as an art of flows and interruptions had a major impact on twentiethcentury 

poetry and theory.

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ / 733 

Indeed, French critics and theorists have been not only attentive to, but also 

influenced by, the writings of Mallarmé. It was largely by learning the lesson of 

Mallarmé that critics like Roland Barthes came to speak of “the death of the 

author” in the making of literature. Rather than seeing the text as the emanation of 

an individual author’s intentions, structuralists and deconstructors followed the 

paths and patterns of the linguistic signifier, paying new attention to syntax, spacing, 

intertextuality, sound, semantics, etymology, and even individual letters. The 

theoretical styles of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and especially Jacques 

Lacan also owe a great deal to Mallarmé’s “critical poem.” 

bibliography 

There are two authoritative French editions of Mallarmé’s works: the Pléiade Oeuvres 

complétes, first edited by Henri Mondor and G. Jean- Aubry (1945) and updated 

by Bertrand Marchal (1998), and the Flammarion Poésies, edited by Carl- Paul Barbier 

and Charles Gordon Millan (1983). An excellent En glish translation by Henry 

Weinfield of Mallarmé’s prose and verse poems, Collected Poems, has been published 

in a bilingual edition (1994). Barbara Johnson translated Mallarmé’s Divagations 

(1897; trans. 2007), restoring the original arrangement of this odd miscellany— the 

only book of his prose pieces published during his lifetime. Robert Greer Cohn, in 

Mallarmé’s Divagations: A Guide and Commentary (1990), offers a useful blend of 

paraphrase and commentary. Bradford Cook translated a collection of poems, 

essays, and letters titled Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters (1956), 

and Mary Ann Caws edited his Selected Poetry and Prose (1982). Our selection is 

printed as an appendix to Rosemary Lloyd’s Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle 

(1999), a useful contextualization. Lloyd also translated The Selected Letters of 

Stéphane Mallarmé (1988), which contains many of Mallarmé’s best- known statements 

about poetry. For a wellresearched biography in En glish, see Gordon Millan, 

Mallarmé: A Throw of the Dice (1994). 

The history of Mallarmé criticism reads like a history of twentiethcentury developments 

in French criticism more generally. The first readers, including Mallarmé’s 

first editor and biographer, Henri Mondor (a wealthy doctor who owned many of 

Mallarmé’s papers), emphasized the metaphysical aspirations of Mallarmé’s poetic 

project. An important example is Albert Thibaudet’s La Poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé 

(1912). Reacting against Mallarmé’s perceived otherworldly aestheticism, the 

existentialist Jean- Paul Sartre complained that literature had turned its back on life 

and separated the aesthetic from po liti cal engagement (Mallarmé, or the Poet of 

Nothingness, 1986; trans. 1988; also see our selection below from What Is Literature?). 

A good sampling of diverse approaches to Mallarmé can be found in Stéphane 

Mallarmé, edited by Harold Bloom (1987), and in Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts, 

edited by Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman (1999). Jacques Derrida, in Dissemination 

(1972; trans. 1981), analyzes Mallarmé’s displacement of classical, 

Platonic concepts of mimesis; and Julia Kristeva, in Revolution in Poetic Language 

(1974; partial trans., 1984), uses the example of Mallarmé to define her concepts of 

“the semiotic” and “negativity” in poetry. Excellent studies by critics in En glish 

include Malcolm Bowie’s Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (1978) and Leo 

Bersani’s The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (1982). Other studies of Mallarmé’s theory 

and practice of poetic language include Michael Temple, The Name of the Poet 

(1995); Graham Robb, Unlocking Mallarmé (1996); Roger Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé: 

The Development of a Poetic Art (1996) and Mallarmé and Circumstance: The 

Translation of Silence (2004); and Richard Cándida Smith, Mallarmé’s Children: 

Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience (1999). A collection of essays dealing with 

Mallarmé’s legacy in France is Meetings with Mallarmé, edited by Michael Temple 

(1998). For a bibliographical overview of twentiethcentury criticism, see D. Hampton 

Morris’s Stéphane Mallarmé: Twentieth- Century Criticism, 1901– 1971 (1977)


and Stéphane Mallarmé: Twentieth- Century Criticism (1972– 1979) (1989). See also 

Pearson’s bibliography in Mallarmé and Circumstance, cited above. 

Crisis in Poetry 1 

Just now, abandoning any possibility of action, with the lassitude brought 

about by one afternoon after another of distressing bad weather, 2 I let fall, 

without any curiosity but with the feeling of having read it all twenty years 

ago, the thread of multicolored pearls that stud the rain, once more, in the 

glimmer of booklets in the bookshelves. Many a work under the bead- curtain 

will send out its own scintillation: as, in a mature sky against the window 

pane, I love to follow the lights of a storm. 

Our phase, which is recent, is, if not closing, taking breath or perhaps 

stock: considering it attentively reveals the creative and fairly sure will power 

driving it. 

Even the press, which usually needs twenty years to discover the news, is 

suddenly preoccupied with the subject, and on time. 

Literature here is undergoing an exquisite crisis, a fundamental crisis. 

Whoever grants that function a place, whether or not it be the first place, 

recognizes in this the substance of current affairs. We are observing, as a 

finale to the century not what last century observed, 3 not disruptions; but, 

outside the public arena, a trembling of the veil in the temple revealing 

significant folds, and to some extent, its tearing down. 4 

French readers, their habits disrupted by the death of Victor Hugo, 5 cannot 

fail to be disconcerted. Hugo, in his mysterious task, turned all prose, 

philosophy, eloquence, history, to verse, and as he was verse personified, he 

confiscated from any thinking person, anyone who talked or told stories, all 

but the right to speak. A monument in this desert, with silence far away; in 

a crypt, thus lies the godhead of a majestic and unconscious idea, to wit 

that the form we call verse is simply in itself literature; that there is verse as 

soon as diction is stressed, that there is rhythm as soon as style is emphasized. 

Poetry, I believe, waited respectfully until the giant who identified it 

with his tenacious hand, a hand stronger than that of a blacksmith, ceased 

to exist; waited until then before breaking up. The entire language, tailored 

to metrics, now recovered its vital rhythms and escaped, in a free disjunction 

of thousands of simple elements; and, as I’ll show, it was not unlike the 

multiplicity of cries in an orchestra, but an orchestra remaining verbal. 

The change dates from then: although it was surreptitiously and unexpectedly 

prepared beforehand by Verlaine, 6 who, fluid as he was, was called 

back to primitive forms. 

1. “Crise de vers”; translated by Rosemary Lloyd. 

2. Le temps in French means “weather” as well as 

“time.” By describing an innocuous rainy day, 

Mallarmé is actually starting both his “news of 

the day” sequence and his “verse” sequence; the 

raindrops are like beads of glass (verroterie: from 

verre, “glass,” which sounds just like vers, “verse”). 

The title of an earlier version of this essay brought 

the two sequences together by using the word 

averse, which means “shower” (“Averse ou critique,” 

or “Shower or Criticism,” 1895). 

3. That is, the French Revolution of 1789. 

4. An allusion to the veil in the temple separating 

off the Holy of Holies, which was said to be rent 

at the time of Christ’s crucifixion to show that all 

men, not merely high priests, could have access 

to God (see Mark 15.38). In the same way, Mallarmé 

implies, the “veil” of prosody has been rent 

by the discovery of free verse. 

5. Prolific French Romantic poet, novelist, and 

playwright (1802– 1885). 

6. Paul Verlaine (1844– 1896), French poet known 

for the musicality of his verse.

Crisis in Poetry / 735 

A witness to this adventure, in which people have asked me to play a 

more efficacious role although such a role suits no one, I did at least take a 

fervent interest in it and the time has come to talk about it, preferably from 

a distance, since what took place did so almost anonymously. 

Let’s grant that French poetry, because of the primary role played by 

rhyme in creating its enchantment, has, in its evolution up to our time, 

proved to be intermittent: for a time it gleams, then fades and waits. Extinct, 

or rather worn threadbare by repetition. Does the need to write poetry, in 

response to a variety of circumstances, now mean, after one of those periodical 

orgiastic excesses of almost a century comparable only to the Re naissance, 

7 that the time has come for shadows and cooler temperatures? Not at 

all! It means that the gleam continues, though changed. The recasting, a 

pro cess normally kept hidden, is taking place in public, by means of delicious 

approximations. 

I think one can separate under a triple aspect the treatment given to the 

solemn canon of poetry, taking each in order. 

That prosody, with its very brief rules, is nevertheless untouchable: it is 

what points to acts of prudence, such as the hemistich, 8 and what regulates 

the slightest effort at stimulating versification, like codes according to 

which abstention from flying is for instance a necessary condition for 

standing upright. 9 Exactly what one does not need to learn; because if you 

haven’t guessed it yourself beforehand, then you’ve proved the uselessness 

of constraining yourself to it. 

The faithful supporters of the alexandrine, our hexameter, 1 are loosening 

from within the rigid and puerile mechanism of its beat; the ear, set free 

from an artificial counter, discovers delight in discerning on its own all the 

possible combinations that twelve timbres can make amongst themselves. 

It’s a taste we should consider very modern. 

Let’s take an intermediate case, in no way the least curious: 

The poet who possesses acute tact and who always considers this alexandrine 

as the definitive jewel, but one you bring out as you would a sword or 

a flower only rarely and only when there is some premeditated motive for 

doing so, touches it modestly and plays around it, lending it neighboring 

chords, before bringing it out superb and unadorned. On many occasions 

he lets his fingering falter on the eleventh syllable or continues it to the 

thirteenth. M. Henri de Régnier 2 excels in these accompaniments, of his 

own invention, I know, an invention as discrete and proud as the genius he 

instills into it, and revelatory of the fleeting disquiet felt by the performers 

faced with the instrument they have inherited. Something else, which 

could simply be the opposite, reveals itself as a deliberate rebellion in the 

absence of the old mold, grown weary, when Jules Laforgue, 3 from the outset, 

initiated us into the unquestionable charm of the incorrect line. 

7. That is, the Romantic period. 

8. Half a verse line. 

9. Voler means both “to fly” and “to steal”; droiture 

means “uprightness” in both the moral and the 

physical sense. The sentence can thus also mean 

“abstaining from stealing is (not) a necessary condition 

of honesty.” In this way, the “laws” of verse 

are similar to the laws of gravity and honesty. 

1. The meter of Greek and Latin epic poetry 

(based on 6 metrical feet). “The alexandrine”: the 

meter of classical French verse, a 12- syllable line 

with a break (the caesura) in the middle, separating 

the two hemistichs. The En glish equivalent 

to both is iambic pentameter. 

2. French poet and novelist (1864– 1936), a faithful 

attender of Mallarmé’s Tuesday gatherings. 

3. French poet (1860– 1887), born in Uruguay, 

known for his ironic, innovative verse.


So far, in each of the models I’ve just mentioned, nothing apart from 

reserve and abandon, because of the lassitude caused by excessive recourse 

to our national rhythm; whose use, like that of the flag, ought to remain an 

exception. With this nevertheless amusing particularity that willful infractions 

or deliberate dissonances appeal to our delicacy, whereas, barely fifteen 

years ago, the pedant that we have remained would have felt as 

exasperated as if confronted with some ignorant sacrilege! I’ll say that the 

memory of the strict line of poetry haunts these games on the side and confers 

on them a certain benefit. 

The entire novelty, where free verse is concerned, resides not as the seventeenth 

century attributed verse to the fable or the opera (that was merely a 

non- strophic arrangement 4 of diverse famous meters) but in what it might be 

suitable to call its “polymorphous” nature: and we should now envisage the 

dissolution of the official number into what ever one wishes, as far as infinity, 

provided that it contains a renewed source of plea sure. Sometimes it’s 

a euphony fragmented with the consent of an intuitive reader, someone with 

inborn and precious good taste— just now, M. Moréas; or a languishing gesture 

of dream, leaping up in passion and finding the right beat— that’s M. 

Viélé- Griffin; beforehand it was M. Kahn with a very erudite notation of the 

tonal value of words. I’m giving names, for there are others who are typical, 

MM Charles Morice, Verhaeren, Dujardin, Mockel 5 and all, only as a proof 

of what I’m saying, so that you can consult their publications. 

What’s remarkable is that, for the first time in the course of any nation’s 

literary history, concurrently with the great general and secular organs, in 

which, following an inborn keyboard, orthodoxy expresses its exaltation, 

whoever wishes to use his or her own techniques and individual hearing 

can create a personal instrument on which to breathe, to touch or stroke 

with skill; and it can be used on its own, and also be dedicated to the Language 

in general. 

A high freedom has been acquired, the newest: I don’t see, and this 

remains my own intensely felt opinion, that anything that has been beautiful 

in the past has been eliminated, and I remain convinced that on important 

occasions we will always conform to the solemn tradition, that owes its 

prevalence to the fact that it stems from the classical genius; only, when 

what’s needed is a breath of sentiment or a story, there’s no call to disturb 

the venerable echoes, so we’ll look to do something else. Every soul is a 

melody, which needs only to be set in motion; and for that we each have our 

own flute or viola. 

In my view this is the belated eruption of a real condition or of a possibility, 

that of not only expressing ourselves, but of bursting into song, as we 

see fit. 

Languages, which are imperfect in so far as they are many, lack the 

supreme language: because thinking is like writing without instruments, not 

a whispering but still keeping silent, the immortal word, the diversity of idioms 

on earth, prevents anyone from proffering the words which otherwise 

4. That is, not arranged in metrically complex 

stanzas (such as those characteristic of odes). 

5. All poets writing in French and experimenting 

with free verse: Jean Moréas (1856– 1910), born in 

Greece; Francis Viélé- Griffin (1864– 1937), born 

in Virginia; Gustave Kahn (1859– 1936); Charles 

Morice (1861– 1919); Émile Verhaeren (1855– 

1916), born in Belgium; Édouard Dujardin (1861– 

1949), found er of La Revue Wagnerienne; and 

Albert Mockel (1866– 1945), born in Belgium.


would be at their disposal, each uniquely minted and in themselves revealing 

the material truth. This prohibition flourishes expressly in nature (you 

stumble upon it with a smile) so that there is no reason to consider yourself 

God; but, as soon as my mind turns to aesthetics, I regret that speech fails 

to express objects by marks that correspond to them in color and movement, 

marks that exist in the instrument of the voice, among languages and sometimes 

in a single language. Compared to the word ombre (shadow) which is 

opaque, ténèbres (darkness) is not much blacker; how disappointing to discover 

the perversity that in contradictory fashion bestows on the word jour 

(day, light) sounds that are dark, while those of nuit (night) are bright. 6 We 

desire a word of brilliant splendor or conversely one that fades away; and as 

for simple, luminous alternatives. . . . But, we should note, otherwise poetry 

would not exist: philosophically, it is poetry that makes up for the failure of 

language, providing an extra extension. 

Strange mystery; and from intentions no less strangely mysterious metrics 

burst forth in the days when everything was coming into being. 

Let an average group of words, under the comprehension of the gaze, line 

up in definitive traits, surrounded by silence. 

If, in the French case, no private invention were to surpass the prosody 

that we’ve inherited, there would be an outpouring of dis plea sure, as if a 

singer were unable, away from others or walking where he pleased among 

the infinite number of little flowers, wherever his voice met a notation, to 

pluck it. . . . This attempt took place just recently, and, leaving aside the 

erudite research in the same direction, accentuation 7 and so forth, that has 

been announced, I know that a seductive game leads, together with shreds 

of the old still recognizable line, to the possibility of eluding it or revealing 

it, rather than to a sudden discovery of something entirely alien. It just 

takes the time needed to loosen the constraints and whip up some zeal, 

where the school went astray. And it’s very precious: but to go from that 

freedom to imagine more, or simply to think that each individual brings a 

new prosody arising from their own way of breathing— which is certainly 

how some people spell— well it’s a joke to cause much laughter and to 

inspire the preface- writers to build their platforms. Similarity between 

lines of poetry and old proportions, this will provide the regularity that will 

last because the poetic act consists in suddenly seeing that an idea splits 

into a number of motives of equal value and in grouping them; they rhyme: 

and to place an external seal upon them we have their common metrics 

which the final beat binds together. 

It is in the very interesting treatment meted out to versification in this 

age of recess and interregnum, no less than in our virginal mental circumstances, 

that lies the crisis. 

To hear the unquestionable ray of light— as features gild or tear a meander 

of melodies: or Music rejoins Verse, to form, since Wagner, 8 Poetry. 

6. Harking back to theories of language discussed 

in Plato’s Cratylus (ca. 385 b.c.e.), Mallarmé 

describes words as though their sounds could imitate 

the things they name; here, vowel tones are 

expected to correspond to degrees of luminosity. 

7. Unlike in En glish, syllables in French words 

bear no inherent accents: stress always falls on 

the last syllable of a word or group of words. 

French therefore lends itself to syllabic rather 

than accentual verse; but since stresses do occur 

before pauses, it is possible to shape their occurrence 

into patterns. 

8. Richard Wagner (1813– 1883), German composer, 

conductor, and author whose influence was 

pervasive among late- 19th- century French poets 

even though his operas were largely banned in 

France after the Franco- Prussian War (1870– 71).


It’s not that one element or another moves away, advantageously, towards 

an integrity triumphing somewhere else, in the form of a concert that 

remains mute if it is not given voice, and the poem, enunciator: of their 

community or their new form, illuminating the instrumentation until it’s 

obvious under the veil, as elocution descends from the sky of sounds. The 

modern meteor, the symphony, at the plea sure of the musicians or unbeknownst 

to them, draws closer to thought, but a thought which no longer 

draws on current expressions. 

Some explosion of Mystery into all the skies of its impersonal magnificence, 

where the orchestra should not have failed to influence the ancient 

effort which has long sought to extract it from the mouth of the race. 

A double indication arises from this— 

De cadent or mystic, 9 the schools describe themselves or are given labels 

hastily by our news media, 1 and adopt, as meeting point, an Idealism 2 which 

(like fugues or sonatas) refuses the natural materials and brutally demands 

an exact thought to put them in order, so as to keep nothing but the mere 

suggestion. To create an exact relationship between the images, in such a way 

that a third aspect, fusible and light, and whose presence can be divined, will 

break free . . . We’ve abolished the pretension— an aesthetic error, although 

one that has commanded masterpieces 3 — of including on the subtle paper of 

the volume anything other than for instance the horror of the forest or the 

silent thunder scattered through the foliage, not the intrinsic and dense wood 

of the trees. A few bursts of the intimate pride truthfully trumpeted awaken 

the architecture of the palace, the only place where one can dwell; no stone, 

on which the pages would have difficulty closing. 

“Monuments, the sea, the human face, in their plenitude, and as they 

are, preserving a virtue which is more attractive than if they were veiled by 

a description, call it evocation, or allusion, suggestion: that somewhat random 

terminology bears witness to the tendency, a very decisive tendency 

perhaps, that literary art has experienced, a tendency that limits it and dispenses 

it. Literature’s witchery, if it is not to liberate from a fistful of dust 

or reality without enclosing it in the book, even as a text, that volatile dispersion 

which is the mind, which has nothing to do with anything but the 

musicality of everything.” 4 

Speech has no connection with the reality of things except in matters commercial; 

where literature is concerned, speech is content merely to make 

allusions or to distill the quality contained in some idea. 

On this condition the song burst forth, as a lighthearted joy. 

This ambition, I call Transposition— Structure is something else. 

The pure work of art implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet 

who yields the initiative to words, set in motion by the clash of their inequalities; 

they illuminate each other with reciprocal lights like a virtual trail of 

fire on precious stones, replacing the perceptible breath of the old lyric or 

the individual enthusiastic direction of the sentence. 

9. Movements that were literary reactions against 

19th- century bourgeois realism, positivism, and 

utilitarianism. 

1. Despite his professed scorn for journalism, 

Mallarmé at this time often portrays himself as a 

purveyor of news. When asked to speak in En gland 

on the state of French poetry, he announced, “I do 

indeed bring news: verse has been tampered 

with.” 

2. A term (like Spirit and Idea) that in Mallarmé is 

often seen as having Platonic or Hegelian significance, 

referring to ultimate metaphysical realities. 

3. That is, realist novels. 

4. Mallarmé quotes his own “Music and Letters” 

(1894), originally delivered in En gland.


An order of the book of verse springs from it, innate or pervasive, and 

eliminates chance; such an order is essential, to omit the author: well, a 

subject, destined, implies amongst the elements of the whole, a certain 

accord as to the appropriate place for it within the volume. This is a possibility 

brought about by the fact that each cry has its echo— in the same way 

motifs balance each other, from a distance, producing neither the incoherent 

sublimity of the romantic pagination, nor that artificial unity of more 

recent times, mea sured out to the book en bloc. Everything becomes suspense, 

a fragmentary disposition with alternations and oppositions, all working 

towards the total rhythm of the white spaces, which would be the poem 

silenced; but it is translated to some extent by each pendant. I want to consider 

it as instinct, perceived in these publications and, if the supposed type 

does not remain separate from complementary types, youth, for once, in 

poetry where a dazzling and harmonious plenitude imposes itself, has stuttered 

the magic concept of the Work. 5 Some symmetry, in parallel fashion, 

which, from the situation of the lines in the poem that are linked to the 

authenticity of the poem within the volume, fly beyond it, several of them 

inscribing on the spiritual plane the amplified signature of the genius, 

anonymous and perfect as an artistic existence. 

A chimera, 6 having thought of it proves, from the reflection of its scales, 

how much the current cycle or this last quarter century, is undergoing some 

absolute illumination— whose wild shower on my window panes wipes away 

the dripping murkiness sufficiently to illuminate those panes— that, more or 

less, all books contain the fusion of some counted repetitions: even if there 

were only one— the world’s law— a bible of the kind nations simulate. The 

difference from one work to another offers as many lessons set forth in an 

im mense competition for the true text, between the ages termed civilized 

or— lettered. 

Certainly I never sit down on the terraces to hear a concert without 

glimpsing amidst the obscure sublimity some sketch of one or other of 

humanity’s immanent poems or their original state, all the more comprehensible 

for not being spoken, and I see that to determine its vast line the composer 

experienced that easy suspension of even the temptation to express it. 

I imagine, through a no doubt ineradicable prejudice of writers, that nothing 

will remain if it is not given form; a form we have reached the stage, precisely, 

of seeking out, faced with a break in the great literary rhythms (I 

discussed this above) and their dispersal into shivers articulated in ways 

close to instrumentation. An art of achieving the transposition in the Book 

of the symphony or simply to take back our own: for there is no question that 

it is not the elementary sounds produced by the brass, strings, woods, but 

the intellectual word at its purest point that must lead, with plenitude and 

undeniably as the ensemble of links existing within everything, to Music. 

An undeniable longing of my time has been to separate as if for different 

purposes the double state of the word, raw and immediate on the one hand, 

on the other, essential. 

5. The (Great) Work, another name for the philos 

o phers’ stone, sought by the alchemists to turn 

base metals into gold. Mallarmé saw alchemy as 

an origin not only of aesthetics but also of po litical 

economy. 

6. Literally, in Greek mythology a fire- breathing 

monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a 

serpent’s tail; more generally, anything composed 

of incongruous parts, or an illusory mental fabrication.

740 / HENRY JAMES 

Telling, teaching, even describing, that’s all very well and yet all that 

would be needed perhaps for each of us to exchange our thoughts as 

humans would be to take from or leave in the hand of another a coin, in 

silence, but the elementary use of speech serves the universal reporting in 

which all the contemporary written genres participate, with the exception 

of literature. 

What is the point of the marvel of transposing a fact of nature into its 

almost vibratory disappearance according to the action of the word, however, 

if it is not so that there emanates from it, without the predicament 

posed by a near or concrete reminder, the pure notion. 

I say: a flower! And from the oblivion to which my voice relegates all contours, 

as something other than the unmentioned calyces, musically arises, 

the idea itself, and sweet, the flower absent from all bouquets. 7 

Contrary to the facile numerical and representative functions, as the 

crowd first treats it, speech which is above all dream and song, finds again 

in the Poet, by a necessity that is part of an art consecrated to fictions, its 

virtuality. 

The line of several words which re creates a total word, new, unknown to 

the language and as if incantatory, achieves that isolation of speech: denying, 

in a sovereign gesture, the arbitrariness that clings to words despite the 

artifice of their being alternately plunged in meaning and sound, and causes 

you that surprise at not having heard before a certain ordinary fragment of 

speech, at the same time as the memory of the named object bathes in a 

new atmosphere. 

1896 

7. In the original, the sentence ends “I’absente de 

tous bouquets” (the absent of all bouquets). By 

omitting the word “flower,” the French thus demonstrates 

more forcefully that a name indicates 

the absence of the thing named. 

HENRY JAMES 

1843–1916 

Born in New York City, Henry James typically is placed in anthologies of American 

literature, but he was in truth a cosmopolitan novelist and critic who sought to make 

his mark on the American, En glish, and Eu ro pe an literary scenes. “We can deal 

freely with forms of civilization not our own,” he affirmed in a letter in 1867, “can 

pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically) claim our property wherever 

we find it.” He wished to bring about “a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of 

the various National tendencies of the world”; his concern with the complex challenges 

and rewards of the “art of fiction” was general, not limited to American fiction 

alone. 

Henry James Sr., a religious phi los o pher and visionary, believed that his five children 

should be educated with as few restrictions as possible; hence he had taken 

them to Eu rope in 1855 for a three- year acquisition of a “sensuous education.” 

Theaters, art galleries, museums, monuments, and landscapes were his favored

HENRY JAMES / 741 

sites for learning. Among the gifted members of this family was William James, 

Henry’s elder brother, a professor of philosophy and then psychology at Harvard 

whose influential books include The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and 

Pragmatism (1907). During the late 1860s and early 1870s, Henry James lived 

abroad much of the time; in 1876 he decided to reside in London and frequently 

visit the Continent, especially Rome and Paris. 

James was an explorer of, and mediator between, cultures. One of his best early 

stories, “A Passionate Pilgrim” (1871), deals with the social and cultural challenges 

faced by an American visitor to Eu rope. He developed this theme of cultural interanimation 

and difference in his travel writings, such as Transatlantic Sketches (1875), 

and in a series of novels and novellas that includes Roderick Hudson (1876), The 

American (1877), The Eu ro pe ans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), An International Episode 

(1879), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). “I aspire to write in such a way,” James 

declared, “that it would be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am at a given 

moment an American writing about En gland or an En glishman writing about 

America. . . . And so far from being ashamed of such an ambiguity I should be 

exceedingly proud of it, for it would be highly civilised.” 

As his work of the 1870s and early 1880s attests, James was already an accomplished 

author when our selection, “The Art of Fiction”— his credo as a novelist— 

was published in London in September 1884. A month after the essay appeared, 

James lamented in a letter to the critic and biographer T. S. Perry that “my poor 

article has not attracted the smallest attention here & I haven’t heard, or seen, an 

allusion to it.” But soon critics and reviewers, especially in En gland, began to refer 

and reply to the piece. In subsequent de cades, as James’s own reputation rose, “The 

Art of Fiction” gained prominence as an inquiry into, and defense of, the novelist’s 

craft. A century later, the scholar James E. Miller Jr. judged it “perhaps the most 

pop u lar and surely the most influential brief statement of fictional theory ever 

made.” 

British and American novelists before James, including Henry Fielding, Jane 

Austen, Sir Walter Scott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, had commented on the nature 

of the novel and its relationship to the romance. Beginning in the mid– eighteenth 

century with Samuel Johnson, critics had considered the status and structure of 

“fiction” as a narrative form. Book- length studies included Clara Reeve’s Progress of 

Romance (1785) and John Dunlop’s massive twovolume survey, The History of Fiction 

(1816). And by 1884 countless essays and reviews in Victorian periodicals had 

debated plot, character, design and unity, morality in fiction, and many other topics 

in analyses written by such eminent novelists as George Eliot and by such noteworthy 

critics as G. H. Lewes and Leslie Stephen. 

James added to his own rich experience as a writer the de cades of development 

that the novel had undergone by the 1880s. He profited from extensive reading and 

close personal contact with the best writers of the day (among them William Dean 

Howells, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, and Ivan Turgenev). 

As an active essayist and reviewer since the 1860s for the Nation, the North American 

Review, and the Atlantic Monthly, James was defining his own artistic identity 

and mea sur ing himself alongside both national and international competition. His 

critical books of this period include French Poets and Novelists (1878) and Hawthorne 

(1879), and he examined fiction with a keen awareness of his own practice. 

Taking as his point of departure an 1884 lecture by the pop u lar novelist, historian, 

and philanthropist Walter Besant and borrowing its title, James insisted that 

the novelist be allowed to pursue artistic experiments freely. He told his friend 

Robert Louis Stevenson that “The Art of Fiction” was “simply a plea for liberty,” 

which for him signified the writer’s choice of subject and right both to experiment 

and to dissent from conventional standards and opinions. In one of the ironies that 

makes James so intriguing, he was a very interested critic, not an objective one. 

Even when he focuses on authors whom he genuinely admires, such as Honoré de


Balzac, Turgenev, and George Eliot, he cannot quite bring himself to respond to 

(let alone accept) them on their own terms— though his theory implies that he 

should. Here, as elsewhere in his critical writings, his allegiance to his own artistic 

aims and methods prevented James from engaging writers impartially and with full 

understanding; his assessments of Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Charles 

Baudelaire, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, among others, suffer from his impatience 

with their often controversial subjects and innovations in form. James’s criticisms 

thus sometimes tell us less about the shortcomings of the work discussed than 

about the tensions between his theory and practice. 

Like Matthew Arnold in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” 

(1864; see above), James in “The Art of Fiction” maintains that criticism prepares 

and enhances the context for creative writing. In an essay about Arnold published 

in the same year as “The Art of Fiction,” James describes the good novel (it “emits 

its light and stimulates our desire for perfection”) in a manner very close to Arnold’s 

definition of “the pursuit of perfection” as “the pursuit of sweetness and light” in 

Culture and Anarchy (1869; see above). James’s tone is forthright, optimistic, and 

celebratory of the power of the literary imagination. “The Art of Fiction” is a controlled, 

resonant rearticulation of the tributes to the imagination voiced de cades 

earlier by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 

and Ralph Waldo Emerson on behalf of the poet. James is often identified as 

a literary realist and early modernist— Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot esteemed him 

highly. But the roots of his creative and critical practice lie in Romanticism’s 

organic conception of literary form, and in its exalted view of the literary vocation 

(the writer, James remarked, is an alchemist who “renews something like the old 

dream of the secret of life”). 

These connections are important to bear in mind when reading James’s essay. 

“The Art of Fiction” often has been interpreted in isolation, with little note of its 

affinities to other critical and theoretical texts that preceded it. Sometimes it has 

been treated exclusively within the canon of James’s own creative and critical writings, 

as a prelude both to his dense, difficult final three novels, The Wings of the 

Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), and to the later 

prefaces— a “comprehensive manual” for “aspirants” to the profession— that he 

composed for the twenty- six- volume New York Edition of his novels and stories 

(1907– 09, 1917). Such intensively “Jamesian” readings value “The Art of Fiction” as 

a formative text in James’s own career: it shows him, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, 

establishing the terms through which his own work should be understood and 

appraised. But if we locate the essay solely within James’s corpus, we are prevented 

from understanding how this piece (and others he produced) contributes to his 

significance in the general history of narrative theory. 

James’s concern for taste, judgment, and discrimination glances backward to the 

eighteenthcentury writers David Hume and Edmund Burke. And when he hails 

the novel as “a personal, a direct impression of life,” he more immediately echoes the 

heightened phrasing that Walter Pater had employed in Studies in the History of the 

Re nais sance (1873; see above). His account of the novel as an “organism” not only 

reinforces the account of “organic form” delineated by Coleridge in the Biographia 

Literaria but also anticipates the elaborations of this same idea in the writings of 

John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and other New Critics of the 1930s and 

1940s. 

“The Art of Fiction” is a subtle verbal per for mance; playful, witty, and ironic, it is 

both generous and tough- minded toward James’s target- of- opportunity Walter 

Besant. Reading James profitably means paying close attention to his meta phors 

(e.g., the “huge spider- web” of experience) and analogies (e.g., between the novel and 

the picture). It means being alert as well to the illuminations provided by James’s 

handling of specific words, as when he reiterates the “torment” of the writer. There 

are also key moments when James invites readers to reflect on the implications of his

HENRY JAMES / 743 

claims. In perhaps the most elusive of these, he asserts that “the deepest quality of a 

work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.” James realized 

the demands inherent in such a claim: How will we know, in the case of each novel, 

when we have made contact with the mind of its producer? How can we determine 

that mind’s special quality? But his chosen criterion highlights the intimate relationship 

between writer and reader that the cosmopolitan James always looked for, and 

that he called on readers of “The Art of Fiction” to share. 

bibliography 

James’s literary criticism has been collected by the Library of America in two volumes, 

titled Essays, American and En glish Writers and Eu ro pe an Writers and the 

Prefaces (1984). This is an essential collection for the student of James’s work. 

Selections can be found in Literary Reviews and Essays on American, En glish, and 

French Literature, edited by Albert Mordell (1957); Henry James: Selected Literary 

Criticism, edited by Morris Shapira (1963); Theory of Fiction: Henry James, edited 

by James E. Miller Jr. (1972), arranged according to topics and categories; The 

House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel, edited by Leon Edel (1973); The Art of Criticism: 

Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, edited by William 

Veeder and Susan M. Griffin (1986), which includes excellent discussion of and 

detailed notes for each selection; and The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism 

of Henry James, edited by Roger Gard (1988), which is the best selection for an overview 

of James’s achievement in criticism and theory. Also important is The Art of 

the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James, with an introduction by R. P. Blackmur 

(new ed., 1984), which gathers the prefaces that James wrote for the New York Edition. 

Additional primary sources include Henry James: Autobiography, edited by 

F. W. Dupee (1956), written in James’s late labyrinthine, evocative manner; The Complete 

Notebooks of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (1987); 

and Letters, edited by Leon Edel (4 vols., 1974– 84). William and Henry James: 

Selected Letters, edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (1997), 

is a fascinating collection. A new, complete edition of James’s letters, edited by 

Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias, is now in progress (4 vols. to date, 2006–). 

Another valuable resource is Edgar F. Harden, A Henry James Chronology (2005). 

The definitive biography is Henry James, variously subtitled, in five volumes by 

Leon Edel (1953– 72); it is condensed and updated in the single volume Henry 

James: A Life (1985). Other excellent biographies include Fred Kaplan, Henry James: 

The Imagination of Genius: A Biography (1992), and Kenneth Graham, Henry 

James: A Literary Life (1995). Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two 

Women and His Art (1999), probes the impact on James’s writing of two important 

relationships: one with his cousin Minnie Temple, the other with the author Constance 

Fenimore Woolson. Sheldon M. Novick, in Henry James: The Young Master 

(1996) and Henry James: The Mature Master (2007), examines the work and the life, 

including a speculative, and controversial, account of James’s homosexuality. In 

House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (2008), Paul Fisher provides 

a keen study of the entire James family in the context of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury 

society and culture. 

The best scholarly writings on James as a critic and theorist are Sarah B. Daugherty, 

The Literary Criticism of Henry James (1981), and Vivien Jones, James the 

Critic (1984). Also helpful are Adeline Tintner, The Book World of Henry James: 

Appropriating the Classics (1987); Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry 

James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (1990), which makes cogent 

connections among James, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde; Edwin S. Fussell, The 

French Side of Henry James (1990); Tony Tanner, Henry James and the Art of Nonfiction 

(1995), which includes a suggestive chapter on the criticism; and Pierre A. 

Walker, Reading Henry James in French Cultural Contexts (1995).


Among the many books on James’s fiction, the most pertinent to his critical writings 

and context are Laurence Bedwell Holland, The Expense of Vision: Essays on the 

Craft of Henry James (1964), a brilliant analysis of the novels that relates them to the 

criticism, especially to the prefaces; John Carlos Rowe, The Theoretical Dimensions 

of Henry James (1984); Michael Anesko, “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and 

the Profession of Authorship (1986), on the pressures that James faced in struggling 

to meet but not surrender to the demands of the literary marketplace; Sharon Cameron, 

Thinking in Henry James (1989); Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry 

James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (1991), a wide- ranging comparison 

of the James brothers’ attitudes toward the challenges of modernity; Garry 

Hagberg, Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary 

Knowledge (1994); and Eric Haralson, Henry James and Queer Modernity (2003), 

rewarding for its analysis of sexual politics and aesthetic theory and practice in 

James, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. For comparisons of 

James and other significant critics, see Rob Davidson, The Master and the Dean: The 

Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells (2005), and Michèle 

Mendelssohn, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture (2007). 

See also A Bibliography of Henry James, by Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence, 

revised with the assistance of James Rambeau (3rd ed., 1982). Secondary sources 

are listed in Linda J. Taylor, Henry James, 1866– 1916: A Reference Guide (1982); 

Kristin Pruitt McColgan, Henry James, 1917– 1959: A Reference Guide (1979); Dorothy 

McInnis Scura, Henry James, 1960– 1974: A Reference Guide (1979); and Judith 

E. Funston, Henry James: A Reference Guide, 1975– 1987 (1991). 

The Art of Fiction 

I should not have affixed so comprehensive a title to these few remarks, 

necessarily wanting in any completeness upon a subject the full consideration 

of which would carry us far, did I not seem to discover a pretext for 

my temerity in the interesting pamphlet lately published under this name 

by Mr. Walter Besant. 1 Mr. Besant’s lecture at the Royal Institution— the 

original form of his pamphlet— appears to indicate that many persons are 

interested in the art of fiction, and are not indifferent to such remarks, as 

those who practise it may attempt to make about it. I am therefore anxious 

not to lose the benefit of this favourable association, and to edge in a few 

words under cover of the attention which Mr. Besant is sure to have excited. 

There is something very encouraging in his having put into form certain of 

his ideas on the mystery of storytelling. 

It is a proof of life and curiosity— curiosity on the part of the brotherhood 

of novelists as well as on the part of their readers. Only a short time ago it 

might have been supposed that the En glish novel was not what the French 

call discutable. 2 It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness 

of itself behind it— of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result 

of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the worse for that: 

it would take much more courage than I possess to intimate that the form of 

the novel as Dickens and Thackeray 3 (for instance) saw it had any taint of 

1. En glish novelist, historian, and critic (1836– 

1901). 

2. Discussable, debatable (French). 

3. William Thackeray (1811– 1863), En glish novelist 

and satirist. Charles Dickens (1812– 1870), 

most pop u lar 19th- century En glish novelist.

The Art of Fiction / 745 

incompleteness. It was, however, naïf (if I may help myself out with another 

French word); and evidently if it be destined to suffer in any way for having 

lost its naïveté it has now an idea of making sure of the corresponding 

advantages. During the period I have alluded to there was a comfortable, 

good- humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, 

and that our only business with it could be to swallow it. But within a 

year or two, for some reason or other, there have been signs of returning 

animation— the era of discussion would appear to have been to a certain 

extent opened. Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, 

upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of 

standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has 

anything par tic u lar to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or 

preference, though they may be times of honour, are not times of 

development— are times, possibly even, a little of dulness. The successful 

application of any art is a delightful spectacle, but the theory too is interesting; 

and though there is a great deal of the latter without the former I suspect 

there has never been a genuine success that has not had a latent core of 

conviction. Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilising 

when they are frank and sincere. Mr. Besant has set an excellent example in 

saying what he thinks, for his part, about the way in which fiction should be 

written, as well as about the way in which it should be published; for his 

view of the “art,” carried on into an appendix, covers that too. Other labourers 

in the same field will doubtless take up the argument, they will give it the 

light of their experience, and the effect will surely be to make our interest in 

the novel a little more what it had for some time threatened to fail to be— a 

serious, active, inquiring interest, under protection of which this delightful 

study may, in moments of confidence, venture to say a little more what it 

thinks of itself. 

It must take itself seriously for the public to take it so. The old superstition 

about fiction being “wicked” had doubtless died out in En gland; but the 

spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed toward any story which 

does not more or less admit that it is only a joke. Even the most jocular novel 

feels in some degree the weight of the proscription that was formerly directed 

against literary levity: the jocularity does not always succeed in passing for 

orthodoxy. It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, 

that a production which is after all only a “make believe” (for what else is a 

“story”?) shall be in some degree apologetic— shall renounce the pretension 

of attempting really to represent life. This, of course, any sensible, wideawake 

story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that the tolerance granted 

to it on such a condition is only an attempt to stifle it disguised in the form 

of generosity. The old evangelical hostility to the novel, which was as explicit 

as it was narrow, and which regarded it as little less favourable to our 

immortal part than a stage- play, was in reality far less insulting. The only 

reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. 4 

When it relinquishes this attempt, the same attempt that we see on the canvas 

of the paint er, it will have arrived at a very strange pass. It is not expected 

of the picture that it will make itself humble in order to be forgiven; and the 

4. In the first version of the essay, James wrote 

“does compete with life.” Robert Louis Stevenson 

criticized the use of the word “compete” in his 

reply to James, “A Humble Remonstrance,” in the 

December 1884 issue of Longman’s.


analogy between the art of the paint er and the art of the novelist is, so far as 

I am able to see, complete. Their inspiration is the same, their pro cess 

(allowing for the different quality of the vehicle), is the same, their success is 

the same. They may learn from each other, they may explain and sustain 

each other. Their cause is the same, and the honour of one is the honour of 

another. The Mahometans 5 think a picture an unholy thing, but it is a long 

time since any Christian did, and it is therefore the more odd that in the 

Christian mind the traces (dissimulated though they may be) of a suspicion 

of the sister art should linger to this day. The only effectual way to lay it to 

rest is to emphasise the analogy to which I just alluded— to insist on the fact 

that as the picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general 

description (which does it justice) that we may give of the novel. But history 

also is allowed to represent life; it is not, any more than painting, expected 

to apologise. The subjectmatter of fiction is stored up likewise in documents 

and rec ords, and if it will not give itself away, as they say in California, it 

must speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian. Certain accomplished 

novelists have a habit of giving themselves away which must often 

bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously. I was lately 

struck, in reading over many pages of Anthony Trollope, 6 with his want of 

discretion in this par tic u lar. In a digression, a parenthesis or an aside, he 

concedes to the reader that he and this trusting friend are only “making 

believe.” He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, 

and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best. Such a 

betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime; it is what 

I mean by the attitude of apology, and it shocks me every whit as much in 

Trollope as it would have shocked me in Gibbon or Macaulay. 7 It implies 

that the novelist is less occupied in looking for the truth (the truth, of course 

I mean, that he assumes, the premises that we must grant him, what ever 

they may be), than the historian, and in doing so it deprives him at a stroke 

of all his standing- room. To represent and illustrate the past, the actions of 

men, is the task of either writer, and the only difference that I can see is, in 

proportion as he succeeds, to the honour of the novelist, consisting as it does 

in his having more difficulty in collecting his evidence, which is so far from 

being purely literary. 8 It seems to me to give him a great character, the fact 

that he has at once so much in common with the phi los o pher and the 

paint er; this double analogy is a magnificent heritage. 

It is of all this evidently that Mr. Besant is full when he insists upon the 

fact that fiction is one of the fine arts, deserving in its turn of all the honours 

and emoluments that have hitherto been reserved for the successful profession 

of music, poetry, painting, architecture. It is impossible to insist too 

much on so important a truth, and the place that Mr. Besant demands for 

the work of the novelist may be represented, a trifle less abstractly, by saying 

that he demands not only that it shall be reputed artistic, but that it shall be 

reputed very artistic indeed. It is excellent that he should have struck this 

5. Muslims (i.e., followers of Muhammad, or 

Mahomet). Islam generally prohibits repre sen tational 

art. 

6. Prolific En glish novelist (1815– 1882). 

7. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800– 1859), 

En glish historian, essayist and statesman. Edward 

Gibbon (1737– 1794), En glish historian, author of 

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman 

Empire (6 vols., 1776– 88). 

8. On somewhat different grounds, Aristotle 

argues in Poetics 9 (see above) that poetry is more 

philosophical and more worthwhile than history.


note, for his doing so indicates that there was need of it, that his proposition 

may be to many people a novelty. One rubs one’s eyes at the thought; but the 

rest of Mr. Besant’s essay confirms the revelation. I suspect in truth that it 

would be possible to confirm it still further, and that one would not be far 

wrong in saying that in addition to the people to whom it has never occurred 

that a novel ought to be artistic, there are a great many others who, if this 

principle were urged upon them, would be filled with an indefinable mistrust. 

They would find it difficult to explain their repugnance, but it would 

operate strongly to put them on their guard. “Art,” in our Protestant communities, 

where so many things have got so strangely twisted about, is supposed 

in certain circles to have some vaguely injurious effect upon those 

who make it an important consideration, who let it weigh in the balance. It 

is assumed to be opposed in some mysterious manner to morality, to amusement, 

to instruction. When it is embodied in the work of the paint er (the 

sculptor is another affair!) you know what it is: it stands there before you, in 

the honesty of pink and green and a gilt frame; you can see the worst of it at 

a glance, and you can be on your guard. But when it is introduced into literature 

it becomes more insidious— there is danger of its hurting you before 

you know it. Literature should be either instructive or amusing, and there is 

in many minds an impression that these artistic preoccupations, the search 

for form, contribute to neither end, interfere indeed with both. They are too 

frivolous to be edifying, and too serious to be diverting; and they are moreover 

priggish and paradoxical and superfluous. That, I think, represents the 

manner in which the latent thought of many people who read novels as an 

exercise in skipping would explain itself if it were to become articulate. They 

would argue, of course, that a novel ought to be “good,” but they would interpret 

this term in a fashion of their own, which indeed would vary considerably 

from one critic to another. One would say that being good means 

representing virtuous and aspiring characters, placed in prominent positions; 

another would say that it depends on a “happy ending,” on a distribution 

at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, 

appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks. Another still would say that it 

means being full of incident and movement, so that we shall wish to jump 

ahead, to see who was the mysterious stranger, and if the stolen will was 

ever found, and shall not be distracted from this plea sure by any tiresome 

analysis or “description.” But they would all agree that the “artistic” idea 

would spoil some of their fun. One would hold it accountable for all the 

description, another would see it revealed in the absence of sympathy. Its 

hostility to a happy ending would be evident, and it might even in some 

cases render any ending at all impossible. The “ending” of a novel is, for 

many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices, and 

the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids 

agreeable aftertastes. It is therefore true that this conception of Mr. Besant’s 

of the novel as a superior form encounters not only a negative but a positive 

indifference. It matters little that as a work of art it should really be as little 

or as much of its essence to supply happy endings, sympathetic characters, 

and an objective tone, as if it were a work of mechanics: the association of 

ideas, however incongruous, might easily be too much for it if an eloquent 

voice were not sometimes raised to call attention to the fact that it is at once 

as free and as serious a branch of literature as any other.


Certainly this might sometimes be doubted in presence of the enormous 

number of works of fiction that appeal to the credulity of our generation, 

for it might easily seem that there could be no great character in a commodity 

so quickly and easily produced. It must be admitted that good novels 

are much compromised by bad ones, and that the field at large suffers 

discredit from overcrowding. I think, however, that this injury is only superficial, 

and that the superabundance of written fiction proves nothing against 

the principle itself. It has been vulgarised, like all other kinds of literature, 

like everything else today, and it has proved more than some kinds accessible 

to vulgarisation. But there is as much difference as there ever was 

between a good novel and a bad one: the bad is swept with all the daubed 

canvases and spoiled marble into some unvisited limbo, or infinite rubbishyard 

beneath the back- windows of the world, and the good subsists and 

emits its light and stimulates our desire for perfection. As I shall take the 

liberty of making but a single criticism of Mr. Besant, whose tone is so full 

of the love of his art, I may as well have done with it at once. He seems to 

me to mistake in attempting to say so definitely beforehand what sort of an 

affair the good novel will be. To indicate the danger of such an error as that 

has been the purpose of these few pages; to suggest that certain traditions 

on the subject, applied a priori, have already had much to answer for, and 

that the good health of an art which undertakes so immediately to reproduce 

life must demand that it be perfectly free. It lives upon exercise, and 

the very meaning of exercise is freedom. The only obligation to which in 

advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being 

arbitrary, is that it be interesting. That general responsibility rests upon it, 

but it is the only one I can think of. The ways in which it is at liberty to 

accomplish this result (of interesting us) strike me as innumerable, and 

such as can only suffer from being marked out or fenced in by prescription. 

They are as various as the temperament of man, and they are successful in 

proportion as they reveal a par tic u lar mind, different from others. A novel 

is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to 

begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the 

intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore 

no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a line 

to be followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out, is a limitation 

of that freedom and a suppression of the very thing that we are most 

curious about. The form, it seems to me, is to be appreciated after the fact: 

then the author’s choice has been made, his standard has been indicated; 

then we can follow lines and directions and compare tones and resemblances. 

Then in a word we can enjoy one of the most charming of pleasures, 

we can estimate quality, we can apply the test of execution. The 

execution belongs to the author alone; it is what is most personal to him, 

and we mea sure him by that. The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment 

and responsibility of the novelist, is that there is no limit to what he 

may attempt as an executant— no limit to his possible experiments, efforts, 

discoveries, successes. Here it is especially that he works, step by step, like 

his brother of the brush, of whom we may always say that he has painted his 

picture in a manner best known to himself. His manner is his secret, not 

necessarily a jealous one. He cannot disclose it as a general thing if he 

would; he would be at a loss to teach it to others. I say this with a due recol-


lection of having insisted on the community of method of the artist who 

paints a picture and the artist who writes a novel. The paint er is able to 

teach the rudiments of his practice, and it is possible, from the study of 

good work (granted the aptitude), both to learn how to paint and to learn 

how to write. Yet it remains true, without injury to the rapprochement, 9 that 

the literary artist would be obliged to say to his pupil much more than the 

other, “Ah, well, you must do it as you can.’ ” It is a question of degree, a 

matter of delicacy. If there are exact sciences, there are also exact arts, and 

the grammar of painting is so much more definite that it makes the difference. 

I ought to add, however, that if Mr. Besant says at the beginning of his 

essay that the “laws of fiction may be laid down and taught with as much 

precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion,” 

he mitigates what might appear to be an extravagance by applying his 

remark to “general” laws, and by expressing most of these rules in a manner 

with which it would certainly be unaccommodating to disagree. That the 

novelist must write from his experience, that his “characters must be real 

and such as might be met with in actual life;” that “a young lady brought up 

in a quiet country village should avoid descriptions of garrison life,” and “a 

writer whose friends and personal experiences belong to the lower middleclass 

should carefully avoid introducing his characters into society;” that 

one should enter one’s notes in a commonplace book; that one’s figures 

should be clear in outline; that making them clear by some trick of speech or 

of carriage is a bad method, and “describing them at length” is a worse one: 

that En glish Fiction should have a “conscious moral purpose;” that “it is 

almost impossible to estimate too highly the value of careful workmanship— 

that is, of style;” that “the most important point of all is the story,” that “the 

story is everything”: these are principles with most of which it is surely 

impossible not to sympathise. That remark about the lower middleclass 

writer and his knowing his place is perhaps rather chilling; but for the rest I 

should find it difficult to dissent from any one of these recommendations. At 

the same time, I should find it difficult positively to assent to them, with the 

exception, perhaps, of the injunction as to entering one’s notes in a commonplace 

book. They scarcely seem to me to have the quality that Mr. Besant 

attributes to the rules of the novelist— the “precision and exactness” of “the 

laws of harmony, perspective, and proportion.” They are suggestive, they are 

even inspiring, but they are not exact, though they are doubtless as much so 

as the case admits of: which is a proof of that liberty of interpretation for 

which I just contended. For the value of these different injunctions— so 

beautiful and so vague— is wholly in the meaning one attaches to them. The 

characters, the situation, which strike one as real will be those that touch 

and interest one most, but the mea sure of reality is very difficult to fix. The 

reality of Don Quixote or of Mr. Micawber 1 is a very delicate shade; it is a 

reality so coloured by the author’s vision that, vivid as it may be, one would 

hesitate to propose it as a model: one would expose one’s self to some very 

embarrassing questions on the part of a pupil. It goes without saying that 

you will not write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality; but it 

9. The bringing together (French); that is, of 

painting and novel writing. 

1. Character in David Copperfi eld (1849– 50), by 

Dickens. Don Quixote: title character of the 

novel (1605, 1615), by Miguel de Cervantes 

(1547–1616).


will be difficult to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being. Humanity 

is im mense, and reality has a myriad forms; the most one can affirm is 

that some of the flowers of fiction have the odour of it, and others have not; 

as for telling you in advance how your nosegay should be composed, that is 

another affair. It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must 

write from experience; to our supposititious aspirant such a declaration 

might savor of mockery. What kind of experience is intended, and where 

does it begin and end? Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; 

it is an im mense sensibility, a kind of huge spider- web of the finest silken 

threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne 

particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when 

the mind is imaginative— much more when it happens to be that of a man of 

genius— it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses 

of the air into revelations. The young lady living in a village has only to be a 

damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) 

to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military. 

Greater miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting, she should 

speak the truth about some of these gentlemen. I remember an En glish novelist, 

a woman of genius, 2 telling me that she was much commended for the 

impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way 

of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned 

so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her 

peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in 

Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the 

house hold of a pasteur, 3 some of the young Protestants were seated at table 

round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, 

but that moment was experience. She had got her direct personal impression, 

and she turned out her type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; 

she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be 

French, so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced 

a reality. Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which 

when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much 

greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the 

social, scale. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the 

implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition 

of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to 

knowing any par tic u lar corner of it— this cluster of gifts may almost be said 

to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the 

most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it 

may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) 

they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, 

“Write from experience and experience only,” I should feel that this was 

rather a tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add. “Try 

to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” 

I am far from intending by this to minimise the importance of exactness— 

of truth of detail. One can speak best from one’s own taste, and I may therefore 

venture to say that the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to 

2. Identified by James’s biographer Leon Edel as 

Anne Thackeray, Lady Ritchie (1837– 1919), the 

daughter of William Thackeray and the author of 

The Story of Elizabeth (1862– 63), to which James 

seems to be alluding. 

3. Protestant minister, pastor (French).


me to be the supreme virtue of a novel— the merit on which all its other 

merits (including that conscious moral purpose of which Mr. Besant speaks) 

helplessly and submissively depend. If it be not there they are all as nothing, 

and if these be there, they owe their effect to the success with which the 

author has produced the illusion of life. The cultivation of this success, the 

study of this exquisite pro cess, form, to my taste, the beginning and the end 

of the art of the novelist. They are his inspiration, his despair, his reward, 

his torment, his delight. It is here in very truth that he competes with life; it 

is here that he competes with his brother the paint er in his attempt to render 

the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, 

the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle. 

It is in regard to this that Mr. Besant is well inspired when he bids him take 

notes. He cannot possibly take too many, he cannot possibly take enough. 

All life solicits him, and to “render” the simplest surface, to produce the 

most momentary illusion, is a very complicated business. His case would be 

easier, and the rule would be more exact, if Mr. Besant had been able to tell 

him what notes to take. But this, I fear, he can never learn in any manual; it 

is the business of his life. He has to take a great many in order to select a 

few, he has to work them up as he can, and even the guides and phi los o phers 

who might have most to say to him must leave him alone when it comes to 

the application of precepts, as we leave the paint er in communion with his 

palette. That his characters “must be clear in outline,” as Mr. Besant says— 

he feels that down to his boots; but how he shall make them so is a secret 

between his good angel and himself. It would be absurdly simple if he could 

be taught that a great deal of “description” would make them so, or that on 

the contrary the absence of description and the cultivation of dialogue, or 

the absence of dialogue and the multiplication of “incident,” would rescue 

him from his difficulties. Nothing, for instance, is more possible than that 

he be of a turn of mind for which this odd, literal opposition of description 

and dialogue, incident and description, has little meaning and light. People 

often talk of these things as if they had a kind of internecine distinctness, 

instead of melting into each other at every breath, and being intimately associated 

parts of one general effort of expression. I cannot imagine composition 

existing in a series of blocks, nor conceive, in any novel worth discussing 

at all, of a passage of description that is not in its intention narrative, a passage 

of dialogue that is not in its intention descriptive, a touch of truth of 

any sort that does not partake of the nature of incident, or an incident that 

derives its interest from any other source than the general and only source 

of the success of a work of art— that of being illustrative. A novel is a living 

thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as 

it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something 

of each of the other parts. The critic who over the close texture of a finished 

work shall pretend to trace a geography of items will mark some frontiers as 

artificial, I fear, as any that have been known to history. There is an oldfashioned 

distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident 

which must have cost many a smile to the intending fabulist who was 

keen about his work. It appears to me as little to the point as the equally 

celebrated distinction between the novel and the romance— to answer as 

little to any reality. There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad 

pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any


meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can 

imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture one says 

of character, when one says novel one says of incident, and the terms may be 

transposed at will. What is character but the determination of incident? 

What is incident but the illustration of character? What is either a picture or 

a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? It 

is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and 

look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident I think it will be 

hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character. If you 

say you don’t see it (character in that— allons donc!), 4 this is exactly what the 

artist who has reasons of his own for thinking he does see it undertakes to 

show you. When a young man makes up his mind that he has not faith 

enough after all to enter the church as he intended, that is an incident, 

though you may not hurry to the end of the chapter to see whether perhaps 

he doesn’t change once more. I do not say that these are extraordinary or 

startling incidents. I do not pretend to estimate the degree of interest proceeding 

from them, for this will depend upon the skill of the paint er. It 

sounds almost puerile to say that some incidents are intrinsically much more 

important than others, and I need not take this precaution after having professed 

my sympathy for the major ones in remarking that the only classification 

of the novel that I can understand is into that which has life and that 

which has it not. 

The novel and the romance, the novel of incident and that of character— 

these clumsy separations appear to me to have been made by critics and 

readers for their own con ve nience, and to help them out of some of their 

occasional queer predicaments, but to have little reality or interest for the 

producer, from whose point of view it is of course that we are attempting to 

consider the art of fiction. The case is the same with another shadowy category 

which Mr. Besant apparently is disposed to set up— that of the “modern 

En glish novel”; unless indeed it be that in this matter he has fallen into 

an accidental confusion of standpoints. It is not quite clear whether he 

intends the remarks in which he alludes to it to be didactic or historical. It is 

as difficult to suppose a person intending to write a modern En glish as to 

suppose him writing an ancient En glish novel: that is a label which begs the 

question. One writes the novel, one paints the picture, of one’s language and 

of one’s time, and calling it modern En glish will not, alas! make the difficult 

task any easier. No more, unfortunately, will calling this or that work of 

one’s fellow- artist a romance— unless it be, of course, simply for the pleasantness 

of the thing, as for instance when Hawthorne gave this heading to 

his story of Blithedale. 5 The French, who have brought the theory of fiction 

to remarkable completeness, have but one name for the novel, and have not 

attempted smaller things in it, that I can see, for that. I can think of no obligation 

to which the “romancer” would not be held equally with the novelist; 

the standard of execution is equally high for each. Of course it is of execution 

that we are talking— that being the only point of a novel that is open to 

contention. This is perhaps too often lost sight of, only to produce interminable 

confusions and cross- purposes. We must grant the artist his subject, 

4. Come now, that’s nonsense (French). 

5. The Blithedale Romance (1852), by Nathaniel 

Hawthorne (1804– 1864). This American writer’s 

clearest statement of the distinction he saw 

between novel and romance appears in his preface 

to The House of Seven Gables (1851).


his idea, his donnée: 6 our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it. 

Naturally I do not mean that we are bound to like it or find it interesting: in 

case we do not our course is perfectly simple— to let it alone. We may believe 

that of a certain idea even the most sincere novelist can make nothing at all, 

and the event may perfectly justify our belief; but the failure will have been 

a failure to execute, and it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is 

recorded. If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his 

freedom of choice, in the face, in par tic u lar cases, of innumerable presumptions 

that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its 

beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions, and some of the 

most interesting experiments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom 

of common things. Gustave Flaubert has written a story about the devotion 

of a servant- girl to a parrot, 7 and the production, highly finished as it is, cannot 

on the whole be called a success. We are perfectly free to find it flat, but 

I think it might have been interesting; and I, for my part, am extremely glad 

he should have written it; it is a contribution to our knowledge of what can 

be done— or what cannot. Ivan Turgénieff has written a tale about a deaf 

and dumb serf and a lap- dog, 8 and the thing is touching, loving, a little masterpiece. 

He struck the note of life where Gustave Flaubert missed it— he 

flew in the face of a presumption and achieved a victory. 

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of “liking” 

a work of art or not liking it: the most improved criticism will not abolish 

that primitive, that ultimate test. I mention this to guard myself from the 

accusation of intimating that the idea, the subject, of a novel or a picture, 

does not matter. It matters, to my sense, in the highest degree, and if I might 

put up a prayer it would be that artists should select none but the richest. 

Some, as I have already hastened to admit, are much more remunerative 

than others, and it would be a world happily arranged in which persons 

intending to treat them should be exempt from confusions and mistakes. 

This fortunate condition will arrive only, I fear, on the same day that critics 

become purged from error. Meanwhile, I repeat, we do not judge the artist 

with fairness unless we say to him, “Oh, I grant you your startingpoint, 

because if I did not I should seem to prescribe to you, and heaven forbid 

I should take that responsibility. If I pretend to tell you what you must not 

take, you will call upon me to tell you then what you must take; in which 

case I shall be prettily caught. Moreover, it isn’t till I have accepted your 

data that I can begin to mea sure you. I have the standard, the pitch; I have 

no right to tamper with your flute and then criticise your music. Of course I 

may not care for your idea at all; I may think it silly, or stale, or unclean; in 

which case I wash my hands of you altogether. I may content myself with 

believing that you will not have succeeded in being interesting, but I shall, 

of course, not attempt to demonstrate it, and you will be as indifferent to me 

as I am to you. I needn’t remind you that there are all sorts of tastes: who 

can know it better? Some people, for excellent reasons, don’t like to read 

about carpenters; others, for reasons even better, don’t like to read about 

courtesans. Many object to Americans. Others (I believe they are mainly 

editors and publishers) won’t look at Italians. Some readers don’t like quiet 

6. That which is given, starting point (French). 

7. “A Simple Soul” (1877), by the French author 

Flaubert (1821– 1880). 

8. “Mumu” (1856), by the Rus sian author Turgenev 

(1818– 1883).


subjects; others don’t like bustling ones. Some enjoy a complete illusion, others 

the consciousness of large concessions. They choose their novels accordingly, 

and if they don’t care about your idea they won’t, a fortiori, care about 

your treatment.” 

So that it comes back very quickly, as I have said, to the liking: in spite of 

M. Zola, 9 who reasons less powerfully than he represents, and who will not 

reconcile himself to this absoluteness of taste, thinking that there are certain 

things that people ought to like, and that they can be made to like. I am 

quite at a loss to imagine anything (at any rate in this matter of fiction) that 

people ought to like or to dislike. Selection will be sure to take care of itself, 

for it has a constant motive behind it. That motive is simply experience. As 

people feel life, so they will feel the art that is most closely related to it. This 

closeness of relation is what we should never forget in talking of the effort of 

the novel. Many people speak of it as a factitious, artificial form, a product 

of ingenuity, the business of which is to alter and arrange the things that 

surround us, to translate them into conventional, traditional moulds. This, 

however, is a view of the matter which carries us but a very short way, condemns 

the art to an eternal repetition of a few familiar clichés, cuts short its 

development, and leads us straight up to a dead wall. Catching the very note 

and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose 

strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet. In proportion as in what she 

offers us we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching 

the truth; in proportion as we see it with rearrangement do we feel that we 

are being put off with a substitute, a compromise and convention. It is not 

uncommon to hear an extraordinary assurance of remark in regard to this 

matter of rearranging, which is often spoken of as if it were the last word of 

art. Mr. Besant seems to me in danger of falling into the great error with his 

rather unguarded talk about “selection.” Art is essentially selection, but it is 

a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive. For many people 

art means rose- coloured window- panes, and selection means picking a bouquet 

for Mrs. Grundy. 1 They will tell you glibly that artistic considerations 

have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the ugly; they will rattle off 

shallow commonplaces about the province of art and the limits of art till you 

are moved to some wonder in return as to the province and the limits of 

ignorance. It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic 

attempt without becoming conscious of an im mense increase— a kind of 

revelation— of freedom. One perceives in that case— by the light of a heavenly 

ray— that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all 

vision. As Mr. Besant so justly intimates, it is all experience. That is a sufficient 

answer to those who maintain that it must not touch the sad things of 

life, who stick into its divine unconscious bosom little prohibitory inscriptions 

on the end of sticks, such as we see in public gardens—“It is forbidden 

to walk on the grass; it is forbidden to touch the flowers; it is not allowed to 

introduce dogs or to remain after dark; it is requested to keep to the right.” 

The young aspirant in the line of fiction whom we continue to imagine will 

do nothing without taste, for in that case his freedom would be of little use 

9. Émile Zola (1840– 1902), French novelist, 

critic, and theorist of the naturalist movement in 

literature. James finds Zola’s theory less impressive 

than his practice. 

1. The unseen arbiter of taste and morals in the 

play Speed the Plough (1798), by the English playwright 

Thomas Morton (1764–1838) a symbol of 

moral rigidity.


to him; but the first advantage of his taste will be to reveal to him the absurdity 

of the little sticks and tickets. If he have taste, I must add, of course he 

will have ingenuity, and my disrespectful reference to that quality just now 

was not meant to imply that it is useless in fiction. But it is only a secondary 

aid; the first is a capacity for receiving straight impressions. 

Mr. Besant has some remarks on the question of “the story” which I shall 

not attempt to criticise, though they seem to me to contain a singular ambiguity, 

because I do not think I understand them. I cannot see what is meant 

by talking as if there were a part of a novel which is the story and part of it 

which for mystical reasons is not— unless indeed the distinction be made in 

a sense in which it is difficult to suppose that any one should attempt to 

convey anything. “The story,” if it represents anything, represents the subject, 

the idea, the donnée of the novel; and there is surely no “school”— Mr. 

Besant speaks of a school— which urges that a novel should be all treatment 

and no subject. There must assuredly be something to treat; every school is 

intimately conscious of that. This sense of the story being the idea, the 

startingpoint, of the novel, is the only one that I see in which it can be spoken 

of as something different from its organic whole; and since in proportion 

as the work is successful the idea permeates and penetrates it, informs 

and animates it, so that every word and every punctuation- point contribute 

directly to the expression, in that proportion do we lose our sense of the 

story being a blade which may be drawn more or less out of its sheath. The 

story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I 

never heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread 

without the needle, or the needle without the thread. Mr. Besant is not the 

only critic who may be observed to have spoken as if there were certain 

things in life which constitute stories, and certain others which do not. I 

find the same odd implication in an entertaining article 2 in the Pall Mall 

Gazette, devoted, as it happens, to Mr. Besant’s lecture. “The story is the 

thing!” says this graceful writer, as if with a tone of opposition to some other 

idea. I should think it was, as every paint er who, as the time for “sending in” 

his picture 3 looms in the distance, finds himself still in quest of a subject— as 

every belated artist not fixed about his theme will heartily agree. There are 

some subjects which speak to us and others which do not, but he would be a 

clever man who should undertake to give a rule— an index expurgatorius 4 — 

by which the story and the no- story should be known apart. It is impossible 

(to me at least) to imagine any such rule which shall not be altogether arbitrary. 

The writer in the Pall Mall opposes the delightful (as I suppose) novel 

of Margot la Balafrée to certain tales in which “Bostonian nymphs” appear to 

have “rejected En glish dukes for psychological reasons.” 5 I am not acquainted 

with the romance just designated, and can scarcely forgive the Pall Mall 

critic for not mentioning the name of the author, but the title appears to 

refer to a lady who may have received a scar in some heroic adventure. I am 

inconsolable at not being acquainted with this episode, but am utterly at a 

2. “The Art of Fiction,” Pall Mall Gazette, April 

30, 1884, by the Scottish critic and journalist 

Andrew Lang (1844–1912). 

3. That is, the time he sends it off to an exhibit at 

the Royal Academy. 

4. Rule for justifying (James’s Latin coinage). 

5. In James’s International Episode (1879) (the 

writer may also have had in mind The Portrait of 

a Lady, 1881). Margot: Margot the Scarred Woman 

(1884), by the French romantic novelist Fortuné 

du Boisgobey (1821–1891).


loss to see why it is a story when the rejection (or ac cep tance) of a duke is 

not, and why a reason, psychological or other, is not a subject when a cicatrix 

is. They are all particles of the multitudinous life with which the novel 

deals, and surely no dogma which pretends to make it lawful to touch the 

one and unlawful to touch the other will stand for a moment on its feet. It is 

the special picture that must stand or fall, according as it seem to possess 

truth or to lack it. Mr. Besant does not, to my sense, light up the subject by 

intimating that a story must, under penalty of not being a story, consist of 

“adventures.” Why of adventures more than of green spectacles? 6 He mentions 

a category of impossible things, and among them he places “fiction 

without adventure.” Why without adventure, more than without matrimony, 

or celibacy, or parturition, or cholera, or hydropathy, or Jansenism? 7 This 

seems to me to bring the novel back to the hapless little rôle of being an 

artificial, ingenious thing— bring it down from its large, free character of an 

im mense and exquisite correspondence with life. And what is adventure, 

when it comes to that, and by what sign is the listening pupil to recognise it? 

It is an adventure— an im mense one— for me to write this little article; and 

for a Bostonian nymph to reject an En glish duke is an adventure only less 

stirring, I should say, than for an En glish duke to be rejected by a Bostonian 

nymph. I see dramas within dramas in that, and innumerable points of view. 

A psychological reason is, to my imagination, an object adorably pictorial; to 

catch the tint of its complexion— I feel as if that idea might inspire one to 

Titianesque 8 efforts. There are few things more exciting to me, in short, 

than a psychological reason, and yet, I protest, the novel seems to me the 

most magnificent form of art. I have just been reading, at the same time, the 

delightful story of Trea sure Island, by Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson and, in a 

manner less consecutive, the last tale from M. Edmond de Goncourt, which 

is entitled Chérie. 9 One of these works treats of murders, mysteries, islands 

of dreadful renown, hairbreadth escapes, miraculous coincidences and buried 

doubloons. The other treats of a little French girl who lived in a fine 

house in Paris, and died of wounded sensibility because no one would marry 

her. I call Trea sure Island delightful, because it appears to me to have succeeded 

wonderfully in what it attempts; and I venture to bestow no epithet 

upon Chérie, which strikes me as having failed deplorably in what it 

attempts— that is in tracing the development of the moral consciousness of 

a child. But one of these productions strikes me as exactly as much of a 

novel as the other, and as having a “story” quite as much. The moral consciousness 

of a child is as much a part of life as the islands of the Spanish 

Main, and the one sort of geography seems to me to have those “surprises” 

of which Mr. Besant speaks quite as much as the other. For myself (since it 

comes back in the last resort, as I say, to the preference of the individual), 

the picture of the child’s experience has the advantage that I can at successive 

steps (an im mense luxury, near to the “sensual plea sure” of which Mr. 

6. An allusion to an episode in Oliver Goldsmith’s 

Vicar of Wakefi eld (1766), in which a son spends 

the money from the sale of the family colt on a 

gross of green spectacles. 

7. A Roman Catholic religious movement, condemned 

as heresy, that emphasized predestination 

and the importance of personal holiness; it 

grew out of the writings of the Dutch theologian 

Cornelis Jansen (1585– 1638). 

8. That is, characteristic of the Venetian paint er 

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, ca. 1488– 1576), especially 

famous for his use of color. 

9. A psychological study of a young woman (1884), 

by Goncourt (1822– 1896). Trea sure Island, by 

Stevenson (1850– 1894), was published in 1883.


Besant’s critic in the Pall Mall speaks) say Yes or No, as it may be, to what 

the artist puts before me. I have been a child in fact, but I have been on a 

quest for a buried trea sure only in supposition, and it is a simple accident 

that with M. de Goncourt I should have for the most part to say No. With 

George Eliot, 1 when she painted that country with a far other intelligence, 

I always said Yes. 

The most interesting part of Mr. Besant’s lecture is unfortunately the 

briefest passage— his very cursory allusion to the “conscious moral purpose” 

of the novel. Here again it is not very clear whether he be recording a fact or 

laying down a principle; it is a great pity that in the latter case he should not 

have developed his idea. This branch of the subject is of im mense importance, 

and Mr. Besant’s few words point to considerations of the widest 

reach, not to be lightly disposed of. He will have treated the art of fiction but 

superficially who is not prepared to go every inch of the way that these considerations 

will carry him. It is for this reason that at the beginning of these 

remarks I was careful to notify the reader that my reflections on so large a 

theme have no pretension to be exhaustive. Like Mr. Besant, I have left the 

question of the morality of the novel till the last, and at the last I find I have 

used up my space. It is a question surrounded with difficulties, as witness 

the very first that meets us, in the form of a definite question, on the threshold. 

Vagueness, in such a discussion, is fatal, and what is the meaning of 

your morality and your conscious moral purpose? Will you not define your 

terms and explain how (a novel being a picture) a picture can be either moral 

or immoral? You wish to paint a moral picture or carve a moral statue: will 

you not tell us how you would set about it? We are discussing the Art of Fiction; 

questions of art are questions (in the widest sense) of execution; questions 

of morality are quite another affair, and will you not let us see how it is 

that you find it so easy to mix them up? These things are so clear to Mr. 

Besant that he has deduced from them a law which he sees embodied in 

En glish Fiction, and which is “a truly admirable thing and a great cause for 

congratulation.” It is a great cause for congratulation indeed when such 

thorny problems become as smooth as silk. I may add that in so far as Mr. 

Besant perceives that in point of fact En glish Fiction has addressed itself 

preponderantly to these delicate questions he will appear to many people to 

have made a vain discovery. They will have been positively struck, on the 

contrary, with the moral timidity of the usual En glish novelist; with his (or 

with her) aversion to face the difficulties with which on every side the treatment 

of reality bristles. He is apt to be extremely shy (whereas the picture 

that Mr. Besant draws is a picture of boldness), and the sign of his work, for 

the most part, is a cautious silence on certain subjects. In the En glish novel 

(by which of course I mean the American as well), more than in any other, 

there is a traditional difference between that which people know and that 

which they agree to admit that they know, that which they see and that 

which they speak of, that which they feel to be a part of life and that which 

they allow to enter into literature. There is the great difference, in short, 

between what they talk of in conversation and what they talk of in print. The 

essence of moral energy is to survey the whole field, and I should directly 

1. En glish novelist (1819– 1880). George Eliot depicted “that country” of a child’s consciousness in The 

Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861).


reverse Mr. Besant’s remark and say not that the En glish novel has a purpose, 

but that it has a diffidence. To what degree a purpose in a work of art 

is a source of corruption I shall not attempt to inquire; the one that seems to 

me least dangerous is the purpose of making a perfect work. As for our 

novel, I may say lastly on this score that as we find it in En gland today it 

strikes me as addressed in a large degree to “young people,” and that this in 

itself constitutes a presumption that it will be rather shy. There are certain 

things which it is generally agreed not to discuss, not even to mention, 

before young people. That is very well, but the absence of discussion is not a 

symptom of the moral passion. The purpose of the En glish novel—“a truly 

admirable thing, and a great cause for congratulation”— strikes me therefore 

as rather negative. 

There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very 

near together; that is in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest 

quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. 

In proportion as that intelligence is fine will the novel, the picture, 

the statue partake of the substance of beauty and truth. To be constituted of 

such elements is, to my vision, to have purpose enough. No good novel will 

ever proceed from a superficial mind; that seems to me an axiom which, for 

the artist in fiction, will cover all needful moral ground: if the youthful aspirant 

take it to heart it will illuminate for him many of the mysteries of “purpose.” 

There are many other useful things that might be said to him, but I 

have come to the end of my article, and can only touch them as I pass. The 

critic in the Pall Mall Gazette, whom I have already quoted, draws attention 

to the danger, in speaking of the art of fiction, of generalising. The danger 

that he has in mind is rather, I imagine, that of particularising, for there are 

some comprehensive remarks which, in addition to those embodied in Mr. 

Besant’s suggestive lecture, might without fear of misleading him be 

addressed to the ingenuous student. I should remind him first of the magnificence 

of the form that is open to him, which offers to sight so few restrictions 

and such innumerable opportunities. The other arts, in comparison, 

appear confined and hampered; the various conditions under which they are 

exercised are so rigid and definite. But the only condition that I can think of 

attaching to the composition of the novel is, as I have already said, that it be 

sincere. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson of the 

young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it. “Enjoy it as it deserves,” I should 

say to him; “take possession of it, explore it to its utmost extent, publish it, 

rejoice in it. All life belongs to you, and do not listen either to those who 

would shut you up into corners of it and tell you that it is only here and there 

that art inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that this heavenly 

messenger wings her way outside of life altogether, breathing a superfine air, 

and turning away her head from the truth of things. There is no impression 

of life, no manner of seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist 

may not offer a place; you have only to remember that talents so dissimilar 

as those of Alexandre Dumas and Jane Austen, 2 Charles Dickens and 

Gustave Flaubert have worked in this field with equal glory. Do not think 

too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the colour of life 

2. En glish novelist (1775– 1817). Dumas (1802– 1870), French dramatist and novelist whose works 

include The Three Musketeers (1844).

FRIEDRICH NIETZ SCHE / 759 

itself. In France today we see a prodigious effort (that of Emile Zola, to 

whose solid and serious work no explorer of the capacity of the novel can 

allude without respect), we see an extraordinary effort vitiated by a spirit of 

pessimism on a narrow basis. M. Zola is magnificent, but he strikes an 

En glish reader as ignorant; he has an air of working in the dark; if he had as 

much light as energy, his results would be of the highest value. As for the 

aberrations of a shallow optimism, the ground (of En glish fiction especially) 

is strewn with their brittle particles as with broken glass. If you must indulge 

in conclusions, let them have the taste of a wide knowledge. Remember that 

your first duty is to be as complete as possible— to make as perfect a work. 

Be generous and delicate and pursue the prize.” 

1884, 1888 

FRIEDRICH NIETZ SCHE 

1844–1900 

Friedrich Nietz sche is the wild man, the self- proclaimed anti- Christ, of Western 

thought. A brilliant polemicist, he champions energy over reason and art over science 

while contemptuous of the quiet, “timid” virtues of domesticity, democracy, 

and peace. His extravagances not only remind us of modernism’s per sis tent desire 

to shock the staid middle classes but also recall the many twentiethcentury 

figures— from W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound to Martin Heidegger and Paul De 

Man— whose genius is inextricably mixed with dubious po liti cal views. But Nietzsche, 

an inveterate foe of Christianity and of Platonic philosophy, is absolutely 

central to modern and postmodern attempts to rethink the Western tradition’s most 

fundamental assumptions. 

Nietz sche was born in Röcken, a small village in Prus sian Saxony. He was the 

son and grandson (on both sides of the family) of Lutheran ministers. His father 

died when he was four and his younger brother died the next year, leaving him the 

only male in a house hold with five women. Nietz sche’s subsequent infatuations 

with the work of German phi los o pher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788– 1860) and with 

the work, theories, and wife of German composer Richard Wagner, followed by his 

equally violent rejections of the two men, are sometimes explained in terms of “surrogate 

father figures” and Oedipal rebellion. Certainly, Wagner and his wife Cosima 

dominated Nietz sche’s life in the early 1870s. Having received his doctorate at the 

University of Leipzig, Nietz sche was appointed professor of philology at the University 

of Basel in Switzerland in 1869. He met Wagner and Cosima von Bülow in late 

1868, and his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), combines a new theory of 

Greek tragedy with an extended argument that Wagner’s work constitutes a German 

rebirth of that ancient form. By 1876, however, Nietz sche had broken completely 

with Wagner, repelled by Wagner’s turn to Christianity and his increasing 

anti- Semitism. That same year, ill health forced Nietz sche to stop teaching. In 1879 

he officially resigned his university post, receiving a small disability pension. He 

spent the next ten years writing the books that present his ambitious attempt to 

overthrow Christianity and post- Socratic philosophy through a radical “revaluation 

of all values.” The last ten years of Nietz sche’s life were lost to incoherent madness. 

After a mental breakdown in 1889, he returned to Röcken to live with his mother;

760 / FRIEDRICH NIETZ SCHE 

when she died, in 1897, he came under the care of his sister Elisabeth, which continued 

until his death. 

Even before Nietz sche’s death, his sister wrote a biography to publicize his work, 

and she published her own editions of his writings. She stressed those elements 

that accorded with her own anti- Semitic and pro- Aryan views and is often blamed 

for the Nazis’ later appropriation of Nietz sche as a phi los o pher sympathetic to their 

policies. But blaming his sister does not absolve Nietz sche. Some aspects of his 

thought chime with National Socialism, while others contradict it. Those who read 

and interpret Nietz sche’s challenging work must grapple with his relation to the 

Nazis, just as they must take into account his tremendous influence on modernism, 

existentialism, and poststructuralism. 

Our first selection, the essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non- Moral Sense” (written 

1873), was not published during Nietz sche’s lifetime. It articulates a number of 

Nietz sche’s major themes and became a favorite reference point for poststructuralists 

such as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man during the 1970s. Nietz sche’s target 

here is nothing less than the epistemological foundations of Western philosophy. 

From Plato on, Western philosophy has been committed (with a few exceptions) to 

ascertaining the fixed and solid truth that exists in de pen dently of human minds. 

Nietz sche simply denies that we can ever know anything except through the lens of 

human perception. We cannot put that lens aside in order to judge which perceptions 

accurately portray the world and which do not. Given this impossibility, why 

are humans committed to the search for “truth”? Because, Nietz sche answers, truth 

is a useful illusion, one that serves a fundamental drive to survive. Nietzsche’s explanation 

here is recognizably Darwinian. Behaviors that sustain life will be adopted 

by the species as a whole. Truth is a comfortable lie; it suggest that “the world [is] 

something which is similar in kind to humanity,” and it boosts self- confidence, the 

untroubled conviction of being right. While Nietz sche is scornful of this smug 

“anthropomorphism,” he does underline its utility. 

The essay’s account of language’s role in human cognition has been especially 

influential among literary theorists. Nietz sche accepts that the outer world impinges 

on the human perceiver, but we translate that experience into human terms by 

naming it. This “first meta phor” introduces an unbridgeable gap, which leads Nietzsche 

to conclude that “subject and object” are “absolutely different spheres.” Nor do 

the nonrepre sen ta tional additions (“supplements”) supplied by language stop there. 

We also use the same name to designate separate experiences of nerve stimulation. 

We call today’s “leaf” by the same word used to label yesterday’s. This substitution 

of one “concept” in the place of multiple experiences is the “second meta phor” that 

Nietz sche identifies— and his account of how concepts erase awareness of differences 

would later echo throughout poststructuralism. “Every concept,” he writes, 

“comes into being by making equivalent that which is nonequivalent[,] . . . by forgetting 

those features which differentiate one thing from another.” 

Once Nietz sche pulls the veil of illusion from our eyes and shows that truth is 

a “mobile army of meta phors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms,” what next? One 

possible response is stoicism, described in the essay’s last paragraph. Alone in an 

alien world, humans could just endure, preserving a “dignified equilibrium” in the 

face of everything to which life subjects them. More extreme is the “nihilistic” 

denial of this world as “fallen” or “evil,” a position that Nietz sche associates with 

Christianity. Against stoicism and nihilism, Nietz sche calls on humans to forcefully 

and joyfully step into the vacuum created by the death of truth, of God, and of 

the other metaphysical guarantees on which the West has traditionally relied. We 

must learn not just to accept but to proudly affirm that “humanity” is a “mighty 

architectural genius who succeeds in erecting the infinitely complicated cathedral 

of concepts on moving foundations, or even, one might say, on flowing water.” 

Nietz sche celebrates the creativity and the will that builds a world for humans to


inhabit— and he takes the artist as his prime example of an individual responding 

joyfully to the challenge of shedding the illusion of truth. 

Our selections from The Birth of Tragedy (1872) show how Nietz sche returns to 

Greek thought before Plato to discover the artistic form and worldview that he prefers 

to the Platonic and Christian traditions. (Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth 

century and Martin Heidegger and Erich Auerbach in the twentieth also return to 

the pre- Socratic Greeks for principles to counter modernity.) Nietz sche’s mantra in 

this text is that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon do existence and the world appear 

justified.” This formula draws on the root meaning of aesthetic as “pertaining to 

sense perception.” Nietz sche says that life is worthwhile only if we experience strong 

feelings or sensations. As Walter Pater, who was writing at almost exactly the same 

time, would put it, the quality and intensity of our sensations indicates the quality of 

our lives. And for Nietz sche, as for Pater, the step from the “aesthetic” as sensation 

to the “aesthetic” as art is a short one. Art is the realm of heightened sensation. But 

whereas Pater stresses the experience of the spectator, Nietz sche focuses on the 

exuberant joy felt by the artist / creator in the struggle to bend recalcitrant materials 

to his or her will. 

Nietz sche thus appears to promote heroic individualism and transcendent genius. 

He has often been read this way, not least by countless modernist artists, who also 

responded to his diatribes against the conformist “herds” that try to curb the 

strong, amoral artist. Much in Nietz sche celebrates the “will” of the “overman” 

(superman) and denigrates everything (from conventional morality to democracy) 

that would make the genius answerable to any authority outside of his self. “His” is 

used advisedly— Nietzsche often contrasts this individual’s manly strength to the 

effeminate weakness of lesser souls. 

Yet to read Nietz sche as a phi los o pher of heroic individualism is to miss much. 

Both our texts show that human suffering figures largely in Nietz sche’s thought; the 

individual is subjected to a world that precedes and is more powerful than the self. 

Greek tragedy, in Nietz sche’s view, grants us a glimpse of a “primordial unity” that 

predates individuation (which Nietz sche associates with comedy). He takes seriously 

the claim that Greek tragedy originated in choral songs performed at a festival of 

Dionysus and that Aeschylus introduced the first individualized characters. 

Such individuation, Nietz sche argues in The Birth of Tragedy, is necessary for 

artistic expression, artistic form. (In his later work, he often claims that “the subject” 

is a grammatical form that we consistently mistake for a metaphysical entity.) 

The chaos of Dionysian nondifferentiation (intimated by music) can be rendered 

intelligible or expressible only by the “calm” Apollonian “semblance” (conveyed by 

words and images). But the glory of Greek tragedy is that it does not take Apollonian 

semblance for truth— or, at least, not for the entire truth. Prometheus becomes 

Nietz sche’s primary example of the need to establish an existence apart from the 

primordial unity. But Prometheus “must suffer for the fact of [his] individuation.” 

And Nietz sche insists that it is the sufferings of Dionysus himself, whose repeated 

deaths and rebirths enact the “end of individuation,” that are represented in every 

tragedy. The “primal contradiction hidden within the things of this world” is that 

while humans can experience energy, will, and sensation only as individuals, the 

pro cess of individuation separates them from the universe. Thus suffering is inevitable; 

the essence of the tragic view is to affirm that suffering, to glory in the active 

wrongdoing by which the hero offends the way things are, and to say, as Nietz sche 

imagines Aeschylus saying: “All that exists is just and unjust and is equally justified 

in both respects.” 

Tragedy can exist only so long as we recognize, accept, and affirm the irresolvable 

contradiction between our hopes and how the world is. Once we believe that suffering 

is not inevitable, tragedy dies: we begin to demand justice from our gods, and 

life is justified not as an aesthetic phenomenon but rather because justice is finally


done. In the comic ending, the good are rewarded, the bad punished, and human 

desires and worldly facts are aligned. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietz sche blames 

Euripides and Socrates for the death of the tragic worldview in ancient Athenian 

society. Euripides effects a reconciliation with the gods in many of his plays, thus 

assuring the audience that all can be made right in this world. Socrates, and then 

Plato, suggests that reason can lead humans to ascertain the truths of the universe 

to which they can conform. 

Later in his career Nietz sche attacked Christianity for its essentially comic vision. 

We get hints of that critique here when he contrasts the Semitic notion of “sin” to 

the Aryan notion of “wrongdoing.” This passage, with its oppositions of Aryan and 

Semite, masculine and feminine, highlights problematic features in Nietz sche’s 

work (as does his lyric call for a rebirth of the German spirit). Nietz sche highlights 

our admiration of the tragic hero, who often (as in Oedipus’s case) could not have 

avoided wrongdoing. The notion of “sin,” however, indicates both that one is free to 

act and that acting differently would have been better, would (it is strongly implied) 

not have led to suffering. Nietz sche urges us to have the strength to love life even 

though suffering is inevitable. Indeed, he suggests that we are most alive when we 

suffer, because that is when we are feeling most intensely. The murdered and resurrected 

god whose myth embodies this worldview is the tragic Dionysus, not the 

comic Christ. 

This mixture of nobility and masochism, of rebellion (against Plato and Christianity) 

and submission (to Dionysus), proved heady stuff to many modernists. Of 

course, other factors— ranging from Sigmund Freud’s use of the Oedipal myth to 

the slaughter of a generation in World War I— also shaped the modernist fascination 

with tragedy and pre- Socratic Greece. But Nietz sche is central to attempts 

during the previous and present centuries to find imaginative and historical alternatives 

to both the Christian worldview and to the narrative of Western progress 

and enlightenment. That such attempts come from both the po liti cal left and the 

right indicates the complexity of the Western heritage and of Nietz sche’s engagement 

with it. 

For the modernists of the early twentieth century, Nietz sche was often more an 

attitude, a stance, than a phi los o pher. A few powerful phrases—“the death of God,” 

“overman,” “will to power,” “herd morality,” and “beyond good and evil”— suggested 

his blasphemous demystification of progressive, “enlightened” values. Nietz sche’s 

aestheticism, his disdain of reason, and his lyrical style led many readers to see his 

work as existing somewhere between poetry and philosophy. But his work received 

much more extensive scholarly and philosophical analysis in the second half of the 

century. His critiques of truth, of substance, and of the self, along with his accounts 

of language and the formation of moral codes, were all taken extremely seriously, 

despite their summary dismissal by some intellectuals. Perhaps debates about 

Nietz sche’s politics have been especially fierce because his views have often been 

adopted— and not just by poststructuralists. 

For literary critics, Nietz sche’s methods may be as important as any view he 

holds. Famously described by the French phi los o pher Paul Ricoeur (1913– 2005) as, 

in company with Karl Marx and Freud, a found er of the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” 

Nietz sche teaches us not to take any pronouncement at face value. If we want 

to understand the meaning of a term, we must discover its “genealogy”— the way 

the term has been deployed in specific circumstances to achieve specific results. 

(Michel Foucault later explicitly adopted this Nietz schean method in his studies 

of the prison and of sexuality.) From the perspective of Nietz schean genealogy, 

terms are tools and weapons in the continual struggles and conflicts that characterize 

human interactions with the world and with each other. Nietz sche’s own effort 

to alter our understanding of tragedy is concerned less with determining the “truth” 

of tragedy than with revising the dominant worldviews that his readers have inherited 

from Christianity and Western philosophy. The success of that attempt stands


apart from what ever virtues his genealogical method possesses— but those to whom 

the method appeals have usually been sympathetic to the message. 

bibliography 

The standard German edition of Nietz sche’s work is Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 

edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (1967–), now up to forty volumes 

and still in pro cess. All of Nietz sche’s major works and much of his occasional 

and unpublished work have been translated, but the history of En glish editions of 

Nietz sche is almost as vexed as that of his German editions. After World War II, 

Random House published almost all of Nietz sche’s major works in translations by 

Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, but Kaufmann especially has been much 

criticized for heavy- handed editing. Stanford University Press started publishing an 

En glish version of the Colli- Montinari edition in the 1990s, but that project has 

stalled after the publication of three volumes (with date of German publication first, 

followed by date of the En glish version): Unfashionable Observations (1873– 76; 

1995), Human, All Too Human (1878; 1997), and Unpublished Writings from the 

Period of Unfashionable Observations (1872– 74, 1999). In 1997, Cambridge University 

Press began publishing new translations. Here we list the Cambridge edition 

where one exists and the Random House version where it still remains the most 

readily available: The Birth of Tragedy (1872; 1999), On the Advantage and Disadvantage 

of History for Life (1877; 1980), Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality 

(1881; 1982), The Gay Science (1882; 2001), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885; 2006), 

Beyond Good and Evil (1886; 2001), Genealogy of Morals (1887; 2007), The Case of 

Wagner (1888; 1966), and The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and Twilight of the Idols (1908; 

2005). The Will to Power, edited by Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale (1967), is 

an important collection of entries from Nietz sche’s notebooks, but controversial 

because it reproduces a work collated by Nietz sche’s sister. The more recent Writings 

from the Late Notebooks, edited by Rüdiger Bittner (2003), explains the controversy 

in its introduction and attempts to provide a less tendentious selection of work that 

Nietz sche did not publish himself. Nietz sche on Rhetoric and Language, edited and 

translated by Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent (1989), collects 

work of par tic u lar interest to literary critics. The Nietz sche Reader, edited by Keith 

Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (2006), offers generous selections from the whole 

range of Nietz sche’s career. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietz sche, edited and translated 

by Christopher Middleton (1969), is the most useful collection of letters. Ecce 

Homo is Nietz sche’s half- mad and fascinating autobiography; the most readable 

biography is Ronald Hayman’s Nietz sche: A Critical Life (1980), but the more serious 

student will want to read the superb intellectual biography by Rüdiger Safranski, 

Nietz sche: A Philosophical Biography (2000; trans. 2002), or the more comprehensive, 

although somewhat pedestrian, Friedrich Nietz sche (2002) by Curtis Cate. 

Arthur Danto’s Nietz sche as Phi los o pher (1965) remains an excellent overview; it 

can be supplemented with Alexander Nehamas’s influential Nietz sche: Life as Literature 

(1985) and Gianni Vattimo’s Nietz sche: An Introduction (1985; trans. 2001). 

The Cambridge Companion to Nietz sche, edited by Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. 

Higgins (1996), collects essays that address a wide range of issues connected to 

Nietz sche’s life, work, and influence. Martin Heidegger’s four- volume Nietz sche 

(1961; trans. 1979– 86) is a major document of twentiethcentury philosophy as well 

as a powerful, if idiosyncratic, interpretation of Nietz sche. Many poststructuralists 

have written extensively on Nietz sche. A partial list includes Michel Foucault, Language, 

Counter- Memory, Practice (1977); Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (1979); 

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietz sche’s Styles (1978; trans. 1979); Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche 

and Philosophy (1962; trans. 1983); Sarah Kofman, Nietz sche and Meta phor 

(1972; trans. 1993); David Farrell Krell, Infectious Nietz sche (1996); and Pierre 

Klossowski, Nietz sche and the Vicious Circle (1969; trans. 1997). Four studies of


par tic u lar relevance to literary critics are Henry Staten’s Nietz sche’s Voice (1990), 

Ernst Behler’s Confrontations: Derrida, Heidegger, Nietz sche (1991), John Sallis’s 

Crossings: Nietz sche and the Space of Tragedy (1991), and James I. Porter’s The 

Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on “The Birth of Tragedy” (2000). The reader who 

wants a broad sense of the ways that literary theorists (especially) have approached 

Nietz sche’s work in recent de cades can start with the many fine collections of 

essays on his work: The New Nietz sche, edited by David B. Allison (1977); Why 

Nietz sche Now?, edited by Daniel O’Hara (1985); Friedrich Nietz sche, edited by 

Harold Bloom (1987); Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietz sche, edited by 

Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall (1998); Nietz sche, Philosophy and the Arts, edited 

by Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell, and Daniel W. Conway (1998); Why Nietz sche Still?, 

edited by Alan D. Schrift (2000); and A Companion to Nietz sche, edited by Keith 

Ansell Pearson (2006). Nietz sche: Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of 

a Philosophy, edited by Jacob Golumb and Robert S. Wistrich (2002), offers essays 

that explore Nietz sche’s relationship to National Socialism, including an important 

reassessment by Robert C. Holub of the notion that Nietz sche’s sister is to blame for 

the Nazi’s appropriation of Nietz sche’s work. William H. Schaberg’s The Nietz sche 

Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography (1995) carefully traces the history of 

all of Nietz sche’s texts. Two useful bibliographies of Nietz sche’s work and of the 

secondary literature to that work arranged by topic can be found in The Cambridge 

Companion to Nietz sche and the more recent The Nietz sche Reader. 

On Truth and Lying in a Non- Moral Sense 1 

1 

In some remote corner of the universe, flickering in the light of the countless 

solar systems into which it had been poured, there was once a planet on 

which clever animals invented cognition. It was the most arrogant and most 

mendacious minute in the ‘history of the world’; but a minute was all it was. 

After nature had drawn just a few more breaths the planet froze and the 

clever animals had to die. Someone could invent a fable like this and yet 

they would still not have given a satisfactory illustration of just how pitiful, 

how insubstantial and transitory, how purposeless and arbitrary the human 

intellect looks within nature; there were eternities during which it did not 

exist; and when it has disappeared again, nothing will have happened. For 

this intellect has no further mission that might extend beyond the bounds of 

human life. Rather, the intellect is human, and only its own possessor and 

progenitor regards it with such pathos, as if it housed the axis around which 

the entire world revolved. But if we could communicate with a midge we 

would hear that it too floats through the air with the very same pathos, feeling 

that it too contains within itself the flying centre of this world. There is 

nothing in nature so despicable and mean that would not immediately swell 

up like a balloon from just one little puff of that force of cognition; and just 

as every bearer of burdens wants to be admired, so the proudest man of all, 

the phi los o pher, wants to see, on all sides, the eyes of the universe trained, 

as through telescopes, on his thoughts and deeds. 

It is odd that the intellect can produce this effect, since it is nothing other 

than an aid supplied to the most unfortunate, most delicate and most tran- 

1. Translated by Ronald Speirs. Except as indicated, all notes are the translator’s.

On Truth and Lying in a Non- Moral Sense / 765 

sient of beings so as to detain them for a minute within existence; otherwise, 

without this supplement, they would have every reason to flee existence as 

quickly as did Lessing’s infant son. 2 The arrogance inherent in cognition 

and feeling casts a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of human beings, 

and because it contains within itself the most flattering evaluation of cognition 

it deceives them about the value of existence. Its most general effect is 

deception— but each of its separate effects also has something of the same 

character. 

As a means for the preservation of the individual, the intellect shows its 

greatest strengths in dissimulation, since this is the means to preserve those 

weaker, less robust individuals who, by nature, are denied horns or the 

sharp fangs of a beast of prey with which to wage the struggle for existence. 

This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in humankind, where deception, 

flattery, lying and cheating, speaking behind the backs of others, keeping up 

appearances, 3 living in borrowed finery, wearing masks, the drapery of convention, 

play- acting for the benefit of others and oneself— in short, the constant 

fluttering of human beings around the one flame of vanity is so much 

the rule and the law that there is virtually nothing which defies understanding 

so much as the fact that an honest and pure drive towards truth should 

ever have emerged in them. They are deeply immersed in illusions and 

dream- images; their eyes merely glide across the surface of things and see 

‘forms’; nowhere does their perception lead into truth; instead it is content to 

receive stimuli and, as it were, to play with its fingers on the back of things. 

What is more, human beings allow themselves to be lied to in dreams every 

night of their lives, without their moral sense ever seeking to prevent this 

happening, whereas it is said that some people have even eliminated snoring 

by willpower. What do human beings really know about themselves? Are 

they even capable of perceiving themselves in their entirety just once, 

stretched out as in an illuminated glass case? Does nature not remain silent 

about almost everything, even about our bodies, banishing and enclosing us 

within a proud, illusory consciousness, far away from the twists and turns of 

the bowels, the rapid flow of the blood stream and the complicated tremblings 

of the nerve- fibres? Nature has thrown away the key, and woe betide 

fateful curiosity should it ever succeed in peering through a crack in the 

chamber of consciousness, out and down into the depths, and thus gain an 

intimation of the fact that humanity, in the indifference of its ignorance, 

rests on the pitiless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous— clinging in 

dreams, as it were, to the back of a tiger. Given this constellation, where on 

earth can the drive to truth possibly have come from? 

Insofar as the individual wishes to preserve himself in relation to other 

individuals, in the state of nature he mostly used his intellect for concealment 

and dissimulation; however, because necessity and boredom also lead 

men to want to live in societies and herds, they need a peace treaty, and so 

they endeavour to eliminate from their world at least the crudest forms of 

2. Lessing’s first and only son died immediately 

after birth, followed soon after by his mother. 

This drew from Lessing the comment: “Was it 

good sense that they had to pull him into the 

world with iron tongs, or that he noticed the filth 

so quickly? Was it not good sense that he took the 

first opportunity to leave it again?” (Letter to 

Eschenburg, 10 January 1778). [Gotthold 

Ephraim Lessing (1729– 1781), German dramatist 

and critic— editor’s note.] 

3. The verb Nietz sche uses is repräsentieren. This 

means keeping up a show in public, representing 

one’s family, country, or social group before the 

eyes of the world.


the bellum omnium contra omnes. 4 In the wake of this peace treaty, however, 

comes something which looks like the first step towards the acquisition of 

that mysterious drive for truth. For that which is to count as ‘truth’ from this 

point onwards now becomes fixed, i.e. a way of designating things is invented 

which has the same validity and force everywhere, and the legislation of 

language also produces the first laws of truth, for the contrast between truth 

and lying comes into existence here for the first time: the liar uses the valid 

tokens of designation— words—to make the unreal appear to be real; he 

says, for example, ‘I am rich’, whereas the correct designation for his condition 

would be, precisely, ‘poor’. He misuses the established conventions by 

arbitrarily switching or even inverting the names for things. If he does this 

in a manner that is selfish and otherwise harmful, society will no longer 

trust him and therefore exclude him from its ranks. Human beings do not so 

much flee from being tricked as from being harmed by being tricked. Even 

on this level they do not hate deception but rather the damaging, inimical 

consequences of certain species of deception. Truth, too, is only desired by 

human beings in a similarly limited sense. They desire the pleasant, lifepreserving 

consequences of truth; they are indifferent to pure knowledge if 

it has no consequences, but they are actually hostile towards truths which 

may be harmful and destructive. And, besides, what is the status of those 

conventions of language? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, of the 

sense of truth? Is there a perfect match between things and their designations? 

Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities? 

Only through forgetfulness could human beings ever entertain the illusion 

that they possess truth to the degree described above. If they will not 

content themselves with truth in the form of tautology, i.e. with empty 

husks, they will for ever exchange illusions for truth. What is a word? The 

copy of a ner vous stimulation in sounds. To infer from the fact of the nervous 

stimulation that there exists a cause outside us is already the result 

of applying the principle of sufficient reason wrongly. If truth alone had 

been decisive in the genesis of language, if the viewpoint of certainty had 

been decisive in creating designations, how could we possibly be permitted 

to say, ‘The stone is hard’, as if ‘hard’ were something known to us in 

some other way, and not merely as an entirely subjective stimulus? We 

divide things up by gender, describing a tree as masculine and a plant as 

feminine 5 — how arbitrary these translations are! How far they have flown 

beyond the canon of certainty! We speak of a snake; the designation captures 

only its twisting movements and thus could equally well apply to a 

worm. How arbitrarily these borders are drawn, how onesided the preference 

for this or that property of a thing! When different languages are set 

alongside one another it becomes clear that, where words are concerned, 

what matters is never truth, never the full and adequate expression; 6 otherwise 

there would not be so many languages. The ‘thing- in- itself’ 7 (which 

4. “War of all against all” [Latin]: phrase associated 

with Thomas Hobbes’ description of the 

state of nature before the institution of po liti cal 

authority (cf. Hobbes, De cive I.12 and Leviathan, 

chapter XIII). [Hobbes (1588– 1679), En glish 

po liti cal philosopher— editor’s note.] 

5. “Tree” is masculine in German (der Baum) and 

“plant” (die Pflanze) is feminine. 

6. Nietz sche uses the term adäquat which indicates 

that the meaning of something is fully conveyed 

by a word or expression; En glish “adequate” 

alone does not convey this sense completely. 

7. Term used by the German phi los o pher Immanuel 

Kant (1724– 1804) for the real object in depen 

dent of our awareness of it. Kant argues that 

such categories as time and space, mentioned 

later by Nietz sche, are part of our own form of 

thought, not of what we observe [editor’s note].


would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible 

for even the creator of language to grasp, and indeed this is not at all desirable. 

He designates only the relations of things to human beings, and in 

order to express them he avails himself of the boldest meta phors. The 

stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image: first meta phor! The 

image is then imitated by a sound: second meta phor! And each time there is 

a complete leap from one sphere into the heart of another, new sphere. One 

can conceive of a profoundly deaf human being who has never experienced 

sound or music; just as such a person will gaze in astonishment at the 

Chladnian sound- figures in sand, 8 find their cause in the vibration of a 

string, and swear that he must now know what men call sound— this is 

precisely what happens to all of us with language. We believe that when we 

speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things 

themselves, and yet we possess only meta phors of things which in no way 

correspond to the original entities. Just as the musical sound appears as a 

figure in the sand, so the mysterious ‘X’ of the thing- in- itself appears first as 

a ner vous stimulus, then as an image, and finally as an articulated sound. 

At all events, things do not proceed logically when language comes into 

being, and the entire material in and with which the man of truth, the 

researcher, the phi los o pher, works and builds, stems, if not from cloudcuckoo 

land, then certainly not from the essence of things. 

Let us consider in par tic u lar how concepts are formed; each word immediately 

becomes a concept, not by virtue of the fact that it is intended to 

serve as a memory (say) of the unique, utterly individualized, primary experience 

to which it owes its existence, but because at the same time it must 

fit countless other, more or less similar cases, i.e. cases which, strictly speaking, 

are never equivalent, and thus nothing other than nonequivalent cases. 

Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is nonequivalent. 

Just as it is certain that no leaf is ever exactly the same as any 

other leaf, it is equally certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by dropping 

these individual differences arbitrarily, by forgetting those features which 

differentiate one thing from another, so that the concept then gives rise to 

the notion that something other than leaves exists in nature, something 

which would be ‘leaf’, a primal form, say, from which all leaves were woven, 

drawn, delineated, dyed, curled, painted— but by a clumsy pair of hands, so 

that no single example turned out to be a faithful, correct, and reliable copy 

of the primal form. We call a man honest; we ask, ‘Why did he act so honestly 

today?’ Our answer is usually: ‘Because of his honesty.’ Honesty!— yet 

again, this means that the leaf is the cause of the leaves. We have no knowledge 

of an essential quality which might be called honesty, but we do know 

of numerous individualized and hence nonequivalent actions which we 

equate with each other by omitting what is unlike, and which we now designate 

as honest actions; finally we formulate from them a qualitas occulta 9 

with the name ‘honesty’. 

Like form, a concept is produced by overlooking what is individual and 

real, whereas nature knows neither forms nor concepts and hence no 

species, but only an ‘X’ which is inaccessible to us and indefinable by us. 

8. The vibration of a string can create figures in 

the sand (in an appropriately constructed sandbox) 

which give a visual repre sen ta tion of that 

which the human ear perceives as a tone. The 

term comes from the name of the [German] physicist 

Ernst Chladni [1756– 1827], whose experiments 

demonstrated the effect. 

9. Hidden property (Latin).


For the opposition we make between individual and species is also anthropomorphic 

and does not stem from the essence of things, although we 

equally do not dare to say that it does not correspond to the essence of 

things, since that would be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, just as incapable 

of being proved as its opposite. 

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of meta phors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, 

in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected 

to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and 

which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly 

established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have 

forgotten that they are illusions, meta phors which have become worn by 

frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their 

stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins. Yet we still do not 

know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard 

about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist, 

i.e. the obligation to use the customary meta phors, or, to put it in moral 

terms, the obligation to lie in accordance with firmly established convention, 

to lie en masse and in a style that is binding for all. Now, it is true that 

human beings forget that this is how things are; thus they lie unconsciously 

in the way we have described, and in accordance with centuries- old habits— 

and precisely because of this unconsciousness, precisely because of this forgetting, 

they arrive at the feeling of truth. The feeling that one is obliged to 

describe one thing as red, another as cold, and a third as dumb, prompts a 

moral impulse which pertains to truth; from its opposite, the liar whom no 

one trusts and all exclude, human beings demonstrate to themselves just 

how honourable, confidence- inspiring and useful truth is. As creatures of 

reason, human beings now make their actions subject to the rule of abstractions; 

they no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and 

sensuous perceptions; they now generalize all these impressions first, turning 

them into cooler, less colourful concepts in order to harness the vehicle 

of their lives and actions to them. Everything which distinguishes human 

beings from animals depends on this ability to sublimate sensuous metaphors 

into a schema, in other words, to dissolve an image into a concept. 

This is because something becomes possible in the realm of these schemata 

which could never be achieved in the realm of those sensuous first impressions, 

namely the construction of a pyramidal order based on castes and 

degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, definitions 

of borders, which now confronts the other, sensuously perceived 

world as something firmer, more general, more familiar, more human, and 

hence as something regulatory and imperative. Whereas every meta phor 

standing for a sensuous perception is individual and unique and is therefore 

always able to escape classification, the great edifice of concepts exhibits the 

rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium, 1 while logic breathes out that air 

of severity and coolness which is peculiar to mathematics. Anyone who has 

been touched by that cool breath will scarcely believe that concepts too, 

which are as bony and eight- cornered as a dice and just as capable of being 

shifted around, are only the left- over residue of a meta phor, and that the illu- 

1. Originally a dovecote, then a catacomb with niches at regular intervals for urns containing the ashes 

of the dead.


sion produced by the artistic translation of a ner vous stimulus into images 

is, if not the mother, then at least the grandmother of each and every concept. 

Within this conceptual game of dice, however, ‘truth’ means using 

each die in accordance with its designation, counting its spots precisely, 

forming correct classifications, and never offending against the order of 

castes nor against the sequence of classes of rank. Just as the Romans and 

the Etruscans divided up the sky with rigid mathematical lines and confined 

a god in a space which they had thus delimited as in a templum, 2 all peoples 

have just such a mathematically divided firmament of concepts above them, 

and they understand the demand of truth to mean that the god of every concept 

is to be sought only in his sphere. Here one can certainly admire 

humanity as a mighty architectural genius who succeeds in erecting the 

infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations, or even, 

one might say, on flowing water; admittedly, in order to rest on such foundations, 

it has to be like a thing constructed from cobwebs, so delicate that it 

can be carried off on the waves and yet so firm as not to be blown apart by 

the wind. By these standards the human being is an architectural genius 

who is far superior to the bee; the latter builds with wax which she gathers 

from nature, whereas the human being builds with the far more delicate 

material of concepts which he must first manufacture from himself. In this 

he is to be much admired— but just not for his impulse to truth, to the pure 

cognition of things. If someone hides something behind a bush, looks for it 

in the same place and then finds it there, his seeking and finding is nothing 

much to boast about; but this is exactly how things are as far as the seeking 

and finding of ‘truth’ within the territory of reason is concerned. If I create 

the definition of a mammal and then, having inspected a camel, declare, 

‘Behold, a mammal’, then a truth has certainly been brought to light, but it 

is of limited value, by which I mean that it is anthropomorphic through and 

through and contains not a single point which could be said to be ‘true in 

itself’, really and in a generally valid sense, regardless of mankind. Anyone 

who researches for truths of that kind is basically only seeking the metamorphosis 

of the world in human beings; he strives for an understanding of the 

world as something which is similar in kind to humanity, and what he gains 

by his efforts is at best a feeling of assimilation. Rather as the astrologer 

studies the stars in the ser vice of human beings and in relation to humanity’s 

happiness and suffering, this type of researcher regards the whole world 

as linked to humankind, as the infinitely refracted echo of an original 

sound, that of humanity, and as the multiple copy of a single, original image, 

that of humanity. His procedure is to mea sure all things against man, and in 

doing so he takes as his point of departure the erroneous belief that he has 

these things directly before him, as pure objects. Thus, forgetting that the 

original meta phors of perception were indeed meta phors, he takes them for 

the things themselves. 

Only by forgetting this primitive world of meta phor, only by virtue of the 

fact that a mass of images, which originally flowed in a hot, liquid stream 

from the primal power of the human imagination, has become hard and 

rigid, only because of the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this 

table is a truth in itself— in short only because man forgets himself as a 

2. Literally, a space marked out; the space of the heavens; sanctuary, temple (Latin) [editor’s note].


subject, and indeed as an artistically creative subject, does he live with some 

degree of peace, security, and consistency; if he could escape for just a 

moment from the prison walls of this faith, it would mean the end of his 

‘consciousness of self’. 3 He even has to make an effort to admit to himself 

that insects or birds perceive a quite different world from that of human 

beings, and that the question as to which of these two perceptions of the 

world is the more correct is quite meaningless, since this would require 

them to be mea sured by the criterion of the correct perception, i.e. by a nonexistent 

criterion. But generally it seems to me that the correct perception— 

which would mean the full and adequate expression of an object in the 

subject— is something contradictory and impossible; for between two absolutely 

different spheres, such as subject and object are, there is no causality, 

no correctness, no expression, but at most an aesthetic way of relating, by 

which I mean an allusive transference, a stammering translation into a quite 

different language. For which purpose a middle sphere and mediating force 

is certainly required which can freely invent and freely create poetry. The 

word appearance (Erscheinung) contains many seductions, and for this reason 

I avoid using it as far as possible; for it is not true that the essence of 

things appears in the empirical world. A paint er who has no hands and who 

wished to express in song the image hovering before him will still reveal 

more through this substitution of one sphere for another than the empirical 

world betrays of the essence of things. Even the relation of a ner vous stimulus 

to the image produced thereby is inherently not a necessary relationship; 

but when that same image has been produced millions of times and has 

been passed down through many generations of humanity, indeed eventually 

appears in the whole of humanity as a consequence of the same occasion, 

it finally acquires the same significance for all human beings, as if it 

were the only necessary image and as if that relation of the original ner vous 

stimulus to the image produced were a relation of strict causality— in exactly 

the same way as a dream, if repeated eternally, would be felt and judged 

entirely as reality. But the fact that a meta phor becomes hard and rigid is 

absolutely no guarantee of the necessity and exclusive justification of that 

meta phor. 

Anyone who is at home in such considerations will certainly have felt a 

deep mistrust of this kind of idealism when once he has become clearly convinced 

of the eternal consistency, ubiquitousness and infallibility of the laws 

of nature; he will then conclude that everything, as far as we can penetrate, 

whether to the heights of the telescopic world or the depths of the microscopic 

world, is so sure, so elaborated, so endless, so much in conformity to 

laws, and so free of lacunae, that science will be able to mine these shafts 

successfully for ever, and that everything found there will be in agreement 

and without self- contradiction. How little all of this resembles a product of 

the imagination, for if it were such a thing, the illusion and the unreality 

would be bound to be detectable somewhere. The first thing to be said 

against this view is this: if each of us still had a different kind of sensuous 

perception, if we ourselves could only perceive things as, variously, a bird, a 

worm, or a plant does, or if one of us were to see a stimulus as red, a second 

person were to see the same stimulus as blue, while a third were even to 

3. The word Nietz sche uses here—Selbstbewußtsein—could also mean “self- confidence.”


hear it as a sound, nobody would ever speak of nature as something conforming 

to laws; rather they would take it to be nothing other than a highly 

subjective formation. Consequently, what is a law of nature for us at all? It is 

not known to us in itself but only in its effects, i.e. in its relations to other 

laws of nature which are in turn known to us only as relations. Thus, all 

these relations refer only to one another, and they are utterly incomprehensible 

to us in their essential nature; the only things we really know about 

them are things which we bring to bear on them: time and space, in other 

words, relations of succession and number. But everything which is wonderful 

and which elicits our astonishment at precisely these laws of nature, 

everything which demands explanation of us and could seduce us into being 

suspicious of idealism, is attributable precisely and exclusively to the rigour 

and universal validity of the repre sen ta tions of time and space. But these we 

produce within ourselves and from ourselves with the same necessity as a 

spider spins; if we are forced to comprehend all things under these forms 

alone, then it is no longer wonderful that what we comprehend in all these 

things is actually nothing other than these very forms; for all of them must 

exhibit the laws of number, and number is precisely that which is most 

astonishing about things. All the conformity to laws which we find so imposing 

in the orbits of the stars and chemical pro cesses is basically identical 

with those qualities which we ourselves bring to bear on things, so that what 

we find imposing is our own activity. Of course the consequence of this is 

that the artistic production of meta phor, with which every sensation begins 

within us, already presupposes those forms, and is thus executed in them; 

only from the stability of these original forms can one explain how it is possible 

for an edifice of concepts to be constituted in its turn from the metaphors 

themselves. For this conceptual edifice is an imitation of the relations 

of time, space, and number on the foundations of meta phor. 

2 

Originally, as we have seen, it is language which works on building the edifice 

of concepts; later it is science. Just as the bee simultaneously builds the 

cells of its comb and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly at 

that great columbarium of concepts, the burial site of perceptions, builds 

ever- new, ever- higher tiers, supports, cleans, renews the old cells, and strives 

above all to fill that framework which towers up to vast heights, and to fit 

into it in an orderly way the whole empirical world, i.e. the anthropomorphic 

world. If even the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts, so 

as not to be swept away and lose himself, the researcher builds his hut close 

by the tower of science so that he can lend a hand with the building and find 

protection for himself beneath its already existing bulwarks. And he has 

need of protection, for there exist fearful powers which constantly press in 

on him and which confront scientific truth with ‘truths’ of quite another 

kind, on shields emblazoned with the most multifarious emblems. 

That drive to form meta phors, that fundamental human drive which cannot 

be left out of consideration for even a second without also leaving out 

human beings themselves, is in truth not defeated, indeed hardly even 

tamed, by the pro cess whereby a regular and rigid new world is built from its 

own sublimated products— concepts—in order to imprison it in a fortress.


The drive seeks out a channel and a new area for its activity, and finds it in 

myth and in art generally. It constantly confuses the cells and the classifications 

of concepts by setting up new translations, meta phors, metonymies; it 

constantly manifests the desire to shape the given world of the waking 

human being in ways which are just as multiform, irregular, inconsequential, 

incoherent, charming and ever- new, as things are in the world of dream. 

Actually the waking human being is only clear about the fact that he is 

awake thanks to the rigid and regular web of concepts, and for that reason 

he sometimes comes to believe that he is dreaming if once that web of concepts 

is torn apart by art. Pascal is right to maintain that if the same dream 

were to come to us every night we would occupy ourselves with it just as 

much as we do with the things we see every day: ‘If an artisan could be sure 

to dream each night for a full twelve hours that he was a king,’ says Pascal, 

‘I believe he would be just as happy as a king who dreamt for twelve hours 

each night that he was an artisan.’ 4 Thanks to the constantly effective miracle 

assumed by myth, the waking day of a people who are stimulated by 

myth, as the ancient Greeks were, does indeed resemble dream more than it 

does the day of a thinker whose mind has been sobered by science. If, one 

day, any tree may speak as a nymph, or if a god can carry off virgins in the 

guise of a bull, if the goddess Athene herself is suddenly seen riding on a 

beautiful chariot in the company of Pisistratus through the market- places of 

Athens 5 — and that was what the honest Athenian believed— then anything 

is possible at any time, as it is in dream, and the whole of nature cavorts 

around men as if it were just a masquerade of the gods who are merely having 

fun by deceiving men in every shape and form. 

But human beings themselves have an unconquerable urge to let themselves 

be deceived, and they are as if enchanted with happiness when the 

bard recites epic fairy- tales as if they were true, or when the actor in a play 

acts the king more regally than reality shows him to be. The intellect, that 

master of pretence, is free and absolved of its usual slavery for as long as it 

can deceive without doing harm, and it celebrates its Saturnalian festivals 6 

when it does so; at no time is it richer, more luxuriant, more proud, skilful, 

and bold. Full of creative contentment, it jumbles up meta phors and shifts 

the boundary stones of abstraction, describing a river, for example, as a moving 

road that carries men to destinations to which they normally walk. The 

intellect has now cast off the mark of servitude; whereas it normally labours, 

with dull- spirited industry, to show to some poor individual who lusts after 

life the road and the tools he needs, and rides out in search of spoils and 

booty for its master, here the intellect has become the master itself and is 

permitted to wipe the expression of neediness from its face. What ever the 

intellect now does, all of it, compared with what it did before, bears the 

mark of pretence, just as what it did before bore the mark of distortion. It 

copies human life, but it takes it to be something good and appears to be 

4. Pensées VI.386. [Blaise Pascal (1623– 1662), 

French mathematician, theologian, and 

philosopher— editor’s note.] 

5. Herodotus 1.60. [The Greek historian (ca. 

484– ca. 425 b.c.e.) describes in the passage cited 

a ruse of the Athenian ruler Pisistratus (d. 527 

b.c.e.) after he was forced out of the city in 566: 

he dressed a tall, handsome woman in armor and 

led the people to believe that Athena, goddess of 

war and wisdom and the patron of Athens, was 

herself restoring him to power. “The guise of a 

bull”: Zeus, the Greek king of the gods, took the 

form of a bull when he abducted Europa, a Phoenician 

princess— editor’s note.] 

6. Roman holidays at the winter solstice during 

which no business was conducted, slaves were 

temporarily freed, and the normal rules of propriety 

were suspended [editor’s note].


fairly content with it. That vast assembly of beams and boards to which 

needy man clings, thereby saving himself on his journey through life, is used 

by the liberated intellect as a mere climbing frame and plaything on which 

to perform its most reckless tricks; and when it smashes this framework, 

jumbles it up and ironically re- assembles it, pairing the most unlike things 

and dividing those things which are closest to one another, it reveals the fact 

that it does not require those makeshift aids of neediness, and that it is now 

guided, not by concepts but by intuitions. No regular way leads from these 

intuitions into the land of the ghostly schemata and abstractions; words are 

not made for them; man is struck dumb when he sees them, or he will speak 

only in forbidden meta phors and unheard- of combinations of concepts so 

that, by at least demolishing and deriding the old conceptual barriers, he 

may do creative justice to the impression made on him by the mighty, present 

intuition. 

There are epochs in which the man of reason and the man of intuition 

stand side by side, the one fearful of intuition, the other filled with scorn for 

abstraction, the latter as unreasonable as the former is unartistic. They both 

desire to rule over life; the one by his knowledge of how to cope with the 

chief calamities of life by providing for the future, by prudence and regularity, 

the other by being an ‘exuberant hero’ 7 who does not see those calamities 

and who only acknowledges life as real when it is disguised as beauty and 

appearance. Where the man of intuition, as was once the case in ancient 

Greece, wields his weapons more mightily and victoriously than his contrary, 

a culture can take shape, given favourable conditions, and the rule of 

art over life can become established; all the expressions of a life lived thus 

are accompanied by pretence, by the denial of neediness, by the radiance of 

meta phorical visions, and indeed generally by the immediacy of deception. 

Neither the house, nor the gait, nor the clothing, nor the pitcher of clay gives 

any hint that these things were invented by neediness; it seems as if all of 

them were intended to express sublime happiness and Olympian 8 cloudlessness 

and, as it were, a playing with earnest things. Whereas the man who is 

guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds thereby in warding off 

misfortune, is unable to compel the abstractions themselves to yield him 

happiness, and strives merely to be as free as possible of pain, the man of 

intuition, standing in the midst of a culture, reaps directly from his intuitions 

not just protection from harm but also a constant stream of brightness, 

a lightening of the spirit, redemption, and release. Of course, when he 

suffers, he suffers more severely; indeed he suffers more frequently because 

he does not know how to learn from experience and keeps on falling into the 

very same trap time after time. When he is suffering he is just as unreasonable 

as he is when happy, he shouts out loudly and knows no solace. How 

differently the same misfortune is endured by the stoic who has learned 

from experience and who governs himself by means of concepts! This man, 

who otherwise seeks only honesty, truth, freedom from illusions, and 

protection from the onslaughts of things which might distract him, now 

7. Phrase used to describe Siegfried in Wagner’s 

Götterdämmerung (Act III). [Richard Wagner 

(1813– 1883), German composer who was Nietzsche’s 

friend and mentor until their falling out 

in 1876. Götterdämmerung, the conclusion of 

Wagner’s Ring cycle, was first produced in 

1876— editor’s note.] 

8. That is, characteristic of Mount Olympus, the 

home of the Greek gods [editor’s note].


performs, in the midst of misfortune, a masterpiece of pretence, just as the 

other did in the midst of happiness: he does not wear a twitching, mobile, 

human face, but rather a mask, as it were, with its features in dignified equilibrium; 

he does not shout, nor does he even change his tone of voice. If a 

veritable storm- cloud empties itself on his head, he wraps himself in his 

cloak and slowly walks away from under it. 

1873 1903 

From The Birth of Tragedy 1 

1 

We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics when we have come 

to realize, not just through logical insight but also with the certainty of something 

directly apprehended (Anschauung), that the continuous evolution of 

art is bound up with the duality of the Apolline and the Dionysiac in much the 

same way as reproduction depends on there being two sexes which coexist in 

a state of perpetual conflict interrupted only occasionally by periods of reconciliation. 

We have borrowed these names from the Greeks who reveal the 

profound mysteries of their view of art to those with insight, not in concepts, 

admittedly, but through the penetratingly vivid figures of their gods. Their 

two deities of art, Apollo and Dionysos, 2 provide the startingpoint for our 

recognition that there exists in the world of the Greeks an enormous opposition, 

both in origin and goals, between the Apolline art of the image- maker or 

sculptor (Bildner) and the imageless art of music, which is that of Dionysos. 

These two very different drives (Triebe) exist side by side, mostly in open conflict, 

stimulating and provoking (reizen) one another to give birth to ever- new, 

more vigorous offspring in whom they perpetuate the conflict inherent in the 

opposition between them, an opposition only apparently bridged by the common 

term ‘art’— until eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic 

‘Will’, they appear paired and, in this pairing, finally engender a work of art 

which is Dionysiac and Apolline in equal mea sure: Attic tragedy. 3 

In order to gain a closer understanding of these two drives, let us think of 

them in the first place as the separate art- worlds of dream and intoxication 

(Rausch). Between these two physiological phenomena an opposition can 

be observed which corresponds to that between the Apolline and the Dionysiac. 

As Lucretius 4 envisages it, it was in dream that the magnificent figures 

of the gods first appeared before the souls of men; in dream the great 

image- maker saw the delightfully proportioned bodies of superhuman 

beings; and the Hellenic poet, if asked about the secrets of poetic procre- 

1. Translated by Ronald Speirs. Except as indicated, 

all subsequent notes are the translator’s; 

in the text, he occasionally retains the original 

German in parentheses. The full title is The 

Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. 

2. Greek god of wine, the object of frenzied cult 

worship (somewhat muted in its official forms). 

Apollo: Greek god of music, prophecy, and medicine, 

associated with the higher developments of 

civilization; as Phoebus Apollo, he is god of light 

[editor’s note]. 

3. Plays performed at the festival of Dionysus in 

Athens during the 5th century b.c.e. [editor’s 

note]. 

4. Roman poet and phi los o pher (ca. 94– 55 

b.c.e.); see De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of 

Things) 5.1169– 82 [editor’s note].

The Birth of Tragedy / 775 

ation, would likewise have reminded us of dream and would have given an 

account much like that given by Hans Sachs in the Meistersinger: 

My friend, it is the poet’s task 

To mark his dreams, their meaning ask. 

Trust me, the truest phantom man doth know 

Hath meaning only dreams may show: 

The arts of verse and poetry 

Tell nought but dreaming’s prophecy. 5 

Every human being is fully an artist when creating the worlds of dream, 

and the lovely semblance of dream is the precondition of all the arts of 

image- making, including, as we shall see, an important half of poetry. We 

take plea sure in dreaming, understanding its figures without mediation; all 

forms speak to us; nothing is indifferent or unnecessary. Yet even while this 

dream- reality is most alive, we nevertheless retain a pervasive sense that it 

is semblance; at least this is my experience, and I could adduce a good deal 

of evidence and the statements of poets to attest to the frequency, indeed 

normality, of my experience. Philosophical natures even have a presentiment 

that hidden beneath the reality in which we live and have our being 

there also lies a second, quite different reality; in other words, this reality 

too is a semblance. Indeed Schopenhauer actually states that the mark of 

a person’s capacity for philosophy is the gift for feeling occasionally as if 

people and all things were mere phantoms or dream- images. 6 A person with 

artistic sensibility relates to the reality of dream in the same way as a philos 

o pher relates to the reality of existence: he attends to it closely and with 

plea sure, using these images to interpret life, and practising for life with 

the help of these events. Not that it is only the pleasant and friendly images 

which give him this feeling of complete intelligibility; he also sees passing 

before him things which are grave, gloomy, sad, dark, sudden blocks, teasings 

of chance, anxious expectations, in short the entire ‘Divine Comedy’ 7 

of life, including the Inferno, but not like some mere shadow- play—for he, 

too, lives in these scenes and shares in the suffering— and yet never without 

that fleeting sense of its character as semblance. Perhaps others will 

recall, as I do, shouting out, sometimes successfully, words of encouragement 

in the midst of the perils and terrors of a dream: ‘It is a dream! I will 

dream on!’ I have even heard of people who were capable of continuing the 

causality of one and the same dream through three and more successive 

nights. All of these facts are clear evidence that our innermost being, the 

deep ground (Untergrund) common to all our lives, experiences the state of 

dreaming with profound plea sure (Lust) and joyous necessity. 

The Greeks also expressed the joyous necessity of dream- experience in 

their Apollo: as the god of all image- making energies, Apollo is also the god 

of prophecy. According to the etymological root of his name, he is ‘the luminous 

one’ (der Scheinende), the god of light; as such, he also governs the 

5. Wagner, Die Meistersinger, Act III, sc. 2. 

[Richard Wagner (1813– 1883), German composer 

whose music and aesthetic theories greatly 

influenced Nietz sche’s argument in The Birth of 

Tragedy. Hans Sachs (1494– 1576), German poet 

and dramatist who has a major role in Wagner’s 

1868 opera— editor’s note.] 

6. Aus Schopenhauers handschriftlichem Nachlass, 

ed. J. Frauenstädt (Leipzig 1874), p. 295. 

[Arthur Schopenhauer (1788– 1860), German philos 

o pher, a major influence on Nietzsche— editor’s 

note.] 

7. Epic poem by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri 

(1265– 1321); in the first part of the Inferno, the 

poet narrates a passage through hell [editor’s 

note].


lovely semblance produced by the inner world of fantasy. The higher truth, 

the perfection of these dream- states in contrast to the only partially intelligible 

reality of the daylight world, together with the profound consciousness 

of the helping and healing powers of nature in sleep and dream, is simultaneously 

the symbolic analogue of the ability to prophesy and indeed of all 

the arts through which life is made possible and worth living. But the image 

of Apollo must also contain that delicate line which the dream- image may 

not overstep if its effect is not to become pathological, so that, in the worst 

case, the semblance would deceive us as if it were crude reality; his image 

(Bild) must include that mea sured limitation (maßvolle Begrenzung), that 

freedom from wilder impulses, that wise calm of the image- making god. In 

accordance with his origin, his eye must be ‘sun- like’; even when its gaze is 

angry and shows dis plea sure, it exhibits the consecrated quality of lovely 

semblance. Thus, in an eccentric sense, one could apply to Apollo what 

Schopenhauer says about human beings trapped in the veil of maya: 

Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a 

stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with 

the howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering 

and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by and 

trusting in the principium individuationis 8 [ . . . ] (World as Will and 

Repre sen ta tion, I, p. 416) 

Indeed one could say that Apollo is the most sublime expression of imperturbable 

trust in this principle and of the calm sitting- there of the person trapped 

within it; one might even describe Apollo as the magnificent divine image 

(Götterbild) of the principium individuationis, whose gestures and gaze speak 

to us of all the intense plea sure, wisdom and beauty of ‘semblance’. 

In the same passage Schopenhauer has described for us the enormous 

horror which seizes people when they suddenly become confused and lose 

faith in the cognitive forms of the phenomenal world because the principle 

of sufficient reason, in one or other of its modes, appears to sustain an 

exception. If we add to this horror the blissful ecstasy which arises from the 

innermost ground of man, indeed of nature itself, whenever this breakdown 

of the principium individuationis occurs, we catch a glimpse of the essence 

of the Dionysiac, which is best conveyed by the analogy of intoxication. 

These Dionysiac stirrings, which, as they grow in intensity, cause subjectivity 

to vanish to the point of complete self- forgetting, awaken either under the 

influence of narcotic drink, of which all human beings and peoples who are 

close to the origin of things speak in their hymns, or at the approach of 

spring when the whole of nature is pervaded by lust for life. In the German 

Middle Ages, too, ever- growing throngs roamed from place to place, impelled 

by the same Dionysiac power, singing and dancing as they went; in these St 

John’s and St Vitus’ dancers we recognize the Bacchic choruses of the 

Greeks, with their prehistory in Asia Minor, extending to Babylon and the 

orgiastic Sacaea. 9 There are those who, whether from lack of experience or 

from dullness of spirit, turn away in scorn or pity from such phenomena, 

8. Principle of individuation (Latin). For Schopenhauer, 

the mind can apprehend the world 

only by dividing it up into individual things; this 

pro cess produces an erroneous vision of reality, 

which he calls “the veil of maya” [editor’s note]. 

9. A festival of the winter solstice. Nietz sche 

links together a number of ecstatic celebrations 

[editor’s note].


regarding them as ‘pop u lar diseases’ while believing in their own good 

health; of course, these poor creatures have not the slightest inkling of how 

spectral and deathly pale their ‘health’ seems when the glowing life of Dionysiac 

enthusiasts storms past them. 

Not only is the bond between human beings renewed by the magic of the 

Dionysiac, but nature, alienated, inimical, or subjugated, celebrates once 

more her festival of reconciliation with her lost son, humankind. Freely the 

earth offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from mountain and desert 

approach in peace. The chariot of Dionysos is laden with flowers and wreaths; 

beneath its yoke stride panther and tiger. If one were to transform Beethoven’s 

jubilant ‘Hymn to Joy’ 1 into a painting and place no constraints on one’s 

imagination as the millions sink into the dust, shivering in awe, then one 

could begin to approach the Dionysiac. Now the slave is a freeman, now all 

the rigid, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or ‘impudent fashion’ 2 

have established between human beings, break asunder. Now, hearing this 

gospel of universal harmony, each person feels himself to be not simply 

united, reconciled or merged with his neighbour, but quite literally one with 

him, as if the veil of maya had been torn apart, so that mere shreds of it flutter 

before the mysterious primordial unity (das Ur- Eine). Singing and dancing, 

man expresses his sense of belonging to a higher community; he has 

forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the brink of flying and dancing, up 

and away into the air above. His gestures speak of his enchantment. Just as 

the animals now talk and the earth gives milk and honey, 3 there now sounds 

out from within man something supernatural: he feels himself to be a god, he 

himself now moves in such ecstasy and sublimity as once he saw the gods 

move in his dreams. Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: 

all nature’s artistic power reveals itself here, amidst shivers of intoxication, to 

the highest, most blissful satisfaction of the primordial unity. Here man, the 

noblest clay, the most precious marble, is kneaded and carved and, to the 

accompaniment of the chisel- blows of the Dionysiac world- artist, the call of 

the Eleusinian Mysteries rings out: ‘Fall ye to the ground, ye millions? Feelst 

thou thy Creator, world?’ 4 * * * 

9 

Everything that rises to the surface in dialogue, the Apolline part of Greek 

tragedy, appears simple, transparent, beautiful. In this sense the dialogue is 

a copy of the Hellene, whose nature is expressed in dance, because in dance 

the greatest strength is still only potential, although it is betrayed by the 

suppleness and luxuriance of movement. Thus the language of Sophocles’ 5 

heroes surprises us by its Apolline definiteness and clarity, so that we feel as 

1. Beethoven used a version of Schiller’s ode To 

Joy for the choral finale of his Ninth Symphony. 

[Ludwig van Beethoven (1770– 1827), German 

composer. Friedrich Von Schiller (1759– 1805), 

German poet and playwright— editor’s note.] 

2. Quotation from Schiller’s To Joy. 

3. Conflation of Euripides’ Bacchae lines 142 and 

708– 11 with Exodus 3.8. [Euripides (ca. 485– ca. 

406 b.c.e.), the last of the three great Attic tragedians; 

Nietz sche associates him with the decline 

of tragedy. The Bacchae of the play are the frenzied 

women who follow Dionysus— editor’s note.] 

4. Schiller’s To Joy, lines 33– 34. [Eleusinian 

Mysteries: the most famous of the secret Greek 

cults, which were connected with Demeter (goddess 

of the fruits of the earth) and Dionysus. 

Eleusis was an important town in southwest 

Attica— editor’s note.] 

5. Greek tragedian (ca. 496– 406 b.c.e.) [editor’s 

note].


if we are looking straight into the innermost ground of its being, and are 

somewhat astonished that the road to this ground is so short. But if we once 

divert our gaze from the character of the hero as it rises to the surface and 

becomes visible— fundamentally, it is no more than an image of light (Lichtbild) 

projected on to a dark wall, i.e. appearance (Erscheinung) through and 

through— if, rather, we penetrate to the myth which projects itself in these 

bright reflections, we suddenly experience a phenomenon which inverts a 

familiar optical one. When we turn away blinded after a strenuous attempt 

to look directly at the sun, we have dark, coloured patches before our eyes, 

as if their purpose were to heal them; conversely, those appearances of the 

Sophoclean hero in images of light, in other words, the Apolline quality of 

the mask, are the necessary result of gazing into the inner, terrible depths of 

nature— radiant patches, as it were, to heal a gaze seared by gruesome 

night. Only in this sense may we believe that we have grasped the serious 

and significant concept of ‘Greek serenity’ (Heiterkeit) correctly; admittedly, 

wherever one looks at present one comes across a misunderstood notion of 

this as ‘cheerfulness’, something identified with a condition of unendangered 

ease and comfort. 

The most suffering figure of the Greek stage, the unfortunate Oedipus, 6 

was understood by Sophocles as the noble human being who is destined for 

error and misery despite his wisdom, but who in the end, through his enormous 

suffering, exerts on the world around him a magical, beneficent force 

which remains effective even after his death. The noble human being does 

not sin, so this profound poet wants to tell us; every law, all natural order, 

indeed the moral world, may be destroyed by his actions, yet by these very 

actions a higher, magical circle of effects is drawn which found a new world 

on the ruins of the old one that has been overthrown. This is what the poet, 

inasmuch as he is also a religious thinker, wishes to tell us; as a poet he first 

shows us a wonderfully tied trial- knot which the judge slowly undoes, strand 

by strand, to bring great harm upon himself; the genuinely Hellenic delight 

in this dialectical solution is so great that an air of sovereign serenity pervades 

the whole work, blunting all the sharp, horrifying preconditions of 

that trial. We encounter this same serenity in Oedipus at Colonus, but here 

it is elevated into infinite transfiguration; in this play the old man, stricken 

with an excess of suffering, and exposed, purely as a suffering being, to all 

that affects him, is contrasted with the unearthly serenity which comes 

down from the sphere of the gods as a sign to us that in his purely passive 

behaviour the hero achieves the highest form of activity, which has consequences 

reaching far beyond his own life, whereas all his conscious words 

and actions in his life hitherto have merely led to his passivity. Thus the 

trial- knot of the story of Oedipus, which strikes the mortal eye as inextricably 

tangled, is slowly unravelled— and we are overcome by the most profound 

human delight at this matching piece of divine dialectic. If our 

explanation has done justice to the poet, the question remains whether the 

content of the myth has been exhausted thereby; at this point it becomes 

6. The hero of Oedipus Rex (ca. 430 b.c.e.), who 

unknowingly kills his father, the king of Thebes, 

and then marries his mother, becoming king in 

turn; when he discovers the truth, he blinds himself 

and is banished. In Oedipus at Colonus (produced 

posthumously), the ruler of Thebes 

unsuccessfully attempts to persuade Oedipus, now 

a dying old man, to return so that after his death 

he will benefit and not curse the city (Greek heroes 

were thought to exert power even when dead) [editor’s 

note].


plain that the poet’s whole interpretation of the story is nothing other than 

one of those images of light held out to us by healing nature after we have 

gazed into the abyss. Oedipus, murderer of his father, husband of his mother, 

Oedipus the solver of the Sphinx’s riddle! What does this trinity of fateful 

deeds tell us? There is an ancient pop u lar belief, particularly in Persia, that 

a wise magician can only be born out of incest; the riddle- solving Oedipus 

who woos his mother immediately leads us to interpret this as meaning that 

some enormous offence against nature (such as incest in this case) must 

first have occurred to supply the cause whenever prophetic and magical 

energies break the spell of present and future, the rigid law of individuation, 

and indeed the actual magic of nature. How else could nature be forced to 

reveal its secrets, other than by victorious re sis tance to her, i.e. by some 

unnatural event? I see this insight expressed in that terrible trinity of Oedipus’ 

fates: the same man who solves the riddle of nature— that of the doublenatured 

7 sphinx— must also destroy the most sacred orders of nature by 

murdering his father and becoming his mother’s husband. Wisdom, the 

myth seems to whisper to us, and Dionysiac wisdom in par tic u lar, is an 

unnatural abomination: whoever plunges nature into the abyss of destruction 

by what he knows must in turn experience the dissolution of nature in 

his own person. ‘The sharp point of wisdom turns against the wise man; 

wisdom is an offence against nature’: such are the terrible words the myth 

calls out to us. But, like a shaft of sunlight, the Hellenic poet touches the 

sublime and terrible Memnon’s Column of myth 8 so that it suddenly begins 

to sound— in Sophoclean melodies! 

I shall now contrast the glory of passivity with the glory of activity which 

shines around the Prometheus of Aeschylus. 9 What the thinker Aeschylus 

had to tell us here, but what his symbolic poetic image only hints at, has 

been revealed to us by the youthful Goethe in the reckless words of his Prometheus: 

Here I sit, forming men 

In my own image, 

A race to be like me, 

To suffer and to weep, 

To know delight and joy 

And heed you not, 

Like me! 1 

Raising himself to Titanic heights, man fights for and achieves his own culture, 

and he compels the gods to ally themselves with him because, in his 

very own wisdom, he holds existence and its limits in his hands. But the 

most wonderful thing in that poem about Prometheus (which, in terms of its 

basic thought, is the true hymn of impiety) is its profound, Aeschylean 

7. Having the face of a woman and the body of a 

lion [editor’s note]. 

8. The remnants of a monumental statue in 

Egypt were said to produce a musical tone when 

illuminated by the rays of the rising sun. 

9. Greek tragedian (525– 456 b.c.e.), generally 

credited with giving Attic drama its traditional 

form. Prometheus Bound depicts Prometheus, a 

Titan (pre- Olympian god) punished by Zeus, the 

supreme god who has overthrown the Titans, for 

giving fire to humans. Prometheus is chained to 

a rock in the mountains, where daily a vulture 

tears out his liver. According to some stories, 

Prometheus created humans out of mud [editor’s 

note]. 

1. Goethe, Prometheus, lines 51 ff. [Johann Wolfgang 

von Goethe (1749– 1832), German poet, 

playwright, and novelist; Nietz sche quotes the 

final stanza of his 1773 poem— editor’s note.]


tendency to justice: the limitless suffering of the bold ‘individual’ on the one 

hand, and the extreme plight of the gods, indeed a premonition of the twilight 

of the gods, on the other; the power of both these worlds of suffering to 

enforce reconciliation, metaphysical oneness— all this recalls in the strongest 

possible way the centre and principal tenet of the Aeschylean view of 

the world, which sees moira, 2 as eternal justice, throned above gods and 

men. If the boldness of Aeschylus in placing the world of the Olympians on 

his scales of justice seems astonishing, we must remember that the deepthinking 

Greek had an unshakably firm foundation for metaphysical thought 

in his Mysteries, so that all attacks of scepticism could be discharged on the 

Olympians. The Greek artist in par tic u lar had an obscure feeling that he 

and these gods were mutually dependent, a feeling symbolized precisely in 

Aeschylus’ Prometheus. The Titanic artist found within himself the defiant 

belief that he could create human beings and destroy the Olympian gods at 

least, and that his higher wisdom enabled him to do so, for which, admittedly, 

he was forced to do penance by suffering eternally. The magnificent 

‘ability’ (Können) of the great genius, for which even eternal suffering is too 

small a price to pay, the bitter pride of the artist: this is the content and the 

soul of Aeschylus’ play, whereas Sophocles, in his Oedipus, begins the prelude 

to the victory- hymn of the saint. But even Aeschylus’s interpretation of 

the myth does not plumb its astonishing, terrible depths; rather, the artist’s 

delight in Becoming, the serenity of artistic creation in defiance of all catastrophes, 

is merely a bright image of clouds and sky reflected in a dark sea of 

sadness. Originally, the legend of Prometheus belonged to the entire community 

of Aryan peoples 3 and documented their talent for the profound and 

the tragic; indeed, it is not unlikely that this myth is as significant for the 

Aryan character as the myth of the Fall is for the Semitic character, and that 

the relationship between the two myths is like that between brother and 

sister. The myth of Prometheus presupposes the unbounded value which 

naive humanity placed on fire as the true palladium 4 of every rising culture; 

but it struck those contemplative original men as a crime, a theft perpetrated 

on divine nature, to believe that man commanded fire freely, rather 

than receiving it as a gift from heaven, as a bolt of lightning which could 

start a blaze, or as the warming fire of the sun. Thus the very first philosophical 

problem presents a painful, irresolvable conflict between god and 

man, and pushes it like a mighty block of rock up against the threshold of 

every culture. Humanity achieves the best and highest of which it is capable 

by committing an offence and must in turn accept the consequences of this, 

namely the whole flood of suffering and tribulations which the offended 

heavenly powers must in turn visit upon the human race as it strives nobly 

towards higher things: a bitter thought, but one which, thanks to the dignity 

it accords to the offence, contrasts strangely with the Semitic myth of the 

Fall, where the origin of evil was seen to lie in curiosity, mendacious pretence, 

openness to seduction, lasciviousness, in short: in a whole series of 

2. Fate or destiny (Greek) [editor’s note]. 

3. Speakers of Indo- European, the prehistoric 

language whose descendents include Greek, German, 

En glish, and Hindi; here they are contrasted 

with speakers of Semitic languages, such as those 

who wrote Genesis in Hebrew [editor’s note]. 

4. Here simply: “prized possession.” [Specifically, 

in Greek mythology, the Palladium was a 

statue of the goddess Pallas Athena, whose presence 

at Troy supposedly kept the city safe— 

editor’s note.]


predominantly feminine attributes. What distinguishes the Aryan conception 

is the sublime view that active sin is the true Promethean virtue; thereby 

we have also found the ethical foundation of pessimistic tragedy, its justification 

of the evil in human life, both in the sense of human guilt and in the 

sense of the suffering brought about by it. The curse in the nature of things, 

which the reflective Aryan is not inclined simply to explain away, the contradiction 

at the heart of the world, presents itself to him as a mixture of different 

worlds, e.g. a divine and a human one, each of which, taken individually, 

is in the right, but which, as one world existing alongside another, must suffer 

for the fact of its individuation. The heroic urge of the individual to reach 

out towards the general, the attempt to cross the fixed boundaries of individuation, 

and the desire to become the one world- being itself, all this leads 

him to suffer in his own person the primal contradiction hidden within the 

things of this world, i.e. he commits a great wrong and suffers. Thus great 

wrongdoing is understood as masculine by the Aryans, but as feminine by 

the Semites, 5 just as the original wrong was committed by a man and the 

original sin by a woman. These, incidentally, are the words of the warlocks’ 

chorus: 

So what, if women on the whole 

Take many steps to reach the goal? 

Let them run as fast as they dare, 

With one good jump a man gets there. 6 

Anyone who understands the innermost kernel of the legend of 

Prometheus— namely that wrongdoing is of necessity imposed on the titanically 

striving individual— is bound also to sense the un- Apolline quality of 

this pessimistic view of things, for it is the will of Apollo to bring rest and 

calm to individual beings precisely by drawing boundaries between them, 

and by reminding them constantly, with his demands for selfknowledge 

and mea sure, that these are the most sacred laws in the world. But lest this 

Apolline tendency should cause form to freeze into Egyptian stiffness and 

coldness, lest the attempt to prescribe the course and extent of each individual 

wave should cause the movement of the whole lake to die away, the 

flood- tide of the Dionysiac would destroy periodically all the small circles 

in which the one- sidedly Apolline will attempted to confine Hellenic life. 

That sudden swell of the Dionysiac tide then lifts the separate little waves 

of individuals on to its back, just as the Titan Atlas, 7 brother of Prometheus, 

lifted up the earth. This Titanic urge to become, as it were, the Atlas of all 

single beings, and to carry them on a broad back higher and higher, further 

and further, is the common feature shared by the Promethean and the Dionysiac. 

In this respect the Prometheus of Aeschylus is a Dionysiac mask, 

whereas the aforementioned deep strain of justice in Aeschylus reveals to 

those with eyes to see his paternal descent from Apollo, the god of individuation 

and of the boundaries of justice. The double essence of Aeschylus’ 

Prometheus, his simultaneously Apolline and Dionysiac nature, could 

5. The noun translated as “wrongdoing” (der 

Frevel) has masculine gender in German; “sin” 

(die Sünde) has feminine. 

6. Goethe, Faust [1808], I, 3982 ff. 

7. In Greek myth, punished for warring against 

the Olympian gods by having to bear the world 

upon his shoulders [editor’s note].


therefore be expressed like this: ‘All that exists is just and unjust and is 

equally justified in both respects.’ 

That is your world. That you call a world. 8 

10 

It is a matter of indisputable historical record that the only subjectmatter 

of Greek tragedy, in its earliest form, was the sufferings of Dionysos, and 

that for a long time the only hero present on the stage was, accordingly, 

Dionysos. But one may also say with equal certainty that, right down to 

Euripides, Dionysos never ceased to be the tragic hero, and that all the 

famous figures of the Greek stage, Prometheus, Oedipus etc., are merely 

masks of that original hero, Dionysos. The fact that there is a deity behind 

all these masks is one of the essential reasons for the ‘ideal’ quality of those 

famous figures which has prompted so much astonishment. Someone or 

other (I do not know who) once remarked that all individuals, as individuals, 

are comic, and therefore un- tragic; from which one could conclude that 

the Greeks were quite incapable of tolerating any individuals on the tragic 

stage. And indeed this does appear to have been their feeling, just as the 

reason for the Platonic distinction between, and deprecation of, the ‘idea’ 

as opposed to the ‘idol’, 9 or copied image, lay deep within the Hellenic character. 

Using Plato’s terminology, one would have to say something like this 

about the tragic figures of the Hellenic stage: the one, truly real Dionysos 

manifests himself in a multiplicity of figures, in the mask of a fighting hero 

and, as it were, entangled in the net of the individual will. In the way that 

he now speaks and acts, the god who appears resembles an erring, striving, 

suffering individual; and the fact that he appears at all with such epic definiteness 

and clarity, is the effect of Apollo, the interpreter of dreams, who 

interprets to the chorus its Dionysiac condition by means of this symbolic 

appearance. In truth, however, this hero is the suffering Dionysos of the 

Mysteries, the god who experiences the sufferings of individuation in his 

own person, of whom wonderful myths recount that he was torn to pieces 

by the Titans when he was a boy and is now venerated in this condition as 

Zagreus; 1 at the same time, it is indicated that his being torn into pieces, 

the genuinely Dionysiac suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, 

earth, and fire, so that we are to regard the state of individuation as the 

source and primal cause of all suffering, as something inherently to be 

rejected. From the smile of that Dionysos the Olympian gods were born, 

from his tears human beings. In this existence as a dismembered god, Dionysos 

has a double nature; he is both cruel, savage demon and mild, gentle 

ruler. But what the epopts 2 hoped for was the rebirth of Dionysos, which we 

must now understand, by premonition, as the end of individuation; the 

epopts’ roaring song of jubilation rang out to greet this third Dionysos. 

8. Goethe, Faust, I, 409. 

9. That is, an eikon, or “likeness,” which Plato (ca. 

427– ca. 347 b.c.e.) sees as necessarily inferior to 

the Form or Idea (idea) of which it can be only an 

imperfect repre sen ta tion and through which it 

participates in what is truly real [editor’s note]. 

1. A myth to the effect that Dionysos, under the 

name “Zagreus,” is torn apart and then reassembled 

occurs in some late Hellenistic sources. 

Whether this is a survival of an older (perhaps 

secret) doctrine about Dionysos, as Nietz sche 

assumes, or a late innovative embellishment of 

earlier tradition is, given the state of our knowledge, 

undecidable. [In this version, Dionysus is 

the son of Demeter; in most myths, he is said to be 

the son of a mortal woman, Semele, and Zeus— 

editor’s note.] 

2. Devoted followers who have “seen” their god.


Only in the hope of this is there a gleam of joy on the countenance of a 

world torn apart and shattered into individuals; myth symbolizes this in the 

image of Demeter, sunk in eternal mourning, who knows no happiness 

until she is told that she can give birth to Dionysos again. In the views 

described here we already have all the constituent elements of a profound 

and pessimistic way of looking at the world and thus, at the same time, of 

the doctrine of the Mysteries taught by tragedy: the fundamental recognition 

that everything which exists is a unity; the view that individuation is the 

primal source of all evil; and art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation 

can be broken, a premonition of unity restored. 

* * * 

24 

* * * 

At this point we need to take a bold run- up and vault into a metaphysics of 

art, as I repeat my earlier sentence that only as an aesthetic phenomenon 

do existence and the world appear justified; which means that tragic myth 

in par tic u lar must convince us that even the ugly and disharmonious is an 

artistic game which the Will, in the eternal fullness of its delight, plays 

with itself. Yet this difficult, primal phenomenon of Dionysiac art can be 

grasped in a uniquely intelligible and direct way in the wonderful significance 

of musical dissonance; as indeed music generally is the only thing 

which, when set alongside the world, can illustrate what is meant by the 

justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. The plea sure engendered 

by the tragic myth comes from the same homeland as our pleas ur able 

sensation of dissonance in music. The Dionysiac, with the primal plea sure 

it perceives even in pain, is the common womb from which both music and 

the tragic myth are born. 

Could it not be that, with the assistance of musical dissonance, we have 

eased significantly the difficult problem of the effect of tragedy? After all, we 

do now understand the meaning of our desire to look, and yet to long to go 

beyond looking when we are watching tragedy; when applied to our response 

to the artistic use of dissonance, this state of mind would have to be described 

in similar terms: we want to listen, but at the same time we long to go beyond 

listening. That striving towards infinity, that wing- beat of longing even as we 

feel supreme delight in a clearly perceived reality, these things indicate that 

in both these states of mind we are to recognize a Dionysiac phenomenon, 

one which reveals to us the playful construction and de mo li tion of the world 

of individuality as an outpouring of primal plea sure and delight, a pro cess 

quite similar to Heraclitus the Obscure’s comparison of the force that shapes 

the world to a playing child who sets down stones here, there, and the next 

place, and who builds up piles of sand only to knock them down again. 3 

Thus, in order to judge the Dionysiac capacity of a people correctly, it is 

necessary for us to consider the evidence not simply of their music but also 

of their tragic myth. Given the intimate relationship between music and 

myth, one would expect that the atrophy of the one would be connected to 

the degeneration and depravation of the other, if indeed it is true that any 

3. Heraclitus, fragment 52. [Heraclitus (active ca. 500 b.c.e), pre- Socratic Greek philosopher— editor’s 

note.]


weakening of myth generally expresses a waning of the capacity for the Dionysiac. 

One only needs to glance at the development of the German character 

to be left in no doubt on both counts: we saw that the nature of Socratic 

optimism, 4 something which is as unartistic as it is parasitic on life, was 

revealed in equal mea sure both in opera and in the abstract character of our 

mythless existence, in an art which had sunk to the level of mere entertainment 

as much as in a life guided by concepts. We took some comfort, however, 

from certain signs that, despite all this, the German spirit has remained 

whole, in magnificent health, depth, and Dionysiac strength, resting and 

dreaming in an inaccessible abyss like a knight who has sunk into slumber; 

now the Dionysiac song rises from this abyss to tell us that, at this very 

moment, this German knight still dreams his ancient Dionysiac myth in 

blissfully grave visions. Let no one believe that the German spirit has lost its 

mythical home for ever, if it can still understand so clearly the voices of the 

birds which tell of its homeland. One day it will find itself awake, with all 

the morning freshness that comes from a vast sleep; then it will slay dragons, 

destroy the treacherous dwarfs, and awaken Brünnhilde— and not even 

Wotan’s spear itself will be able to bar its path! 5 

My friends, you who believe in the music of Dionysos, you also know what 

tragedy means for us. In it we have the tragic myth, reborn from music— 

and in this you may hope for all things and forget that which is most painful! 

But for all of us the most painful thing is that long period of indignity when 

the German genius lived in the ser vice of treacherous dwarfs, estranged 

from hearth and home. You understand what my words mean— just as you 

will also understand, finally, my hopes. 

25 

Music and tragic myth both express, in the same way, the Dionysiac capacity 

of a people, and they cannot be separated from one another. Both originate 

in an artistic realm which lies beyond the Apolline; both transfigure a 

region where dissonance and the terrible image of the world fade away in 

chords of delight; both play with the goad of disinclination, trusting to their 

immeasurably powerful arts of magic; both justify by their play the existence 

of even the ‘worst of all worlds’. Here the Dionysiac shows itself, in 

comparison with the Apolline, to be the eternal and original power of art 

which summons the entire world of appearances into existence, in the 

midst of which a new, transfiguring semblance is needed to hold fast within 

life the animated world of individuation. If you could imagine dissonance 

assuming human form— and what else is man?— this dissonance would 

need, to be able to live, a magnificent illusion which would spread a veil of 

beauty over its own nature. This is the true artistic aim of Apollo, in whose 

name we gather together all those countless illusions of beautiful semblance 

which, at every moment, make existence at all worth living at every 

moment and thereby urge us on to experience the next. 

4. In sections that we have omitted, Nietz sche 

portrays the Greek phi los o pher Socrates (469– 

399 b.c.e.) as opposed to Dionysus and an ally of 

Euripides [editor’s note]. 

5. In Wagner’s opera Siegfried (1876) the hero 

slays a dragon (really the giant Fafner), kills the 

dwarf Mime, and awakens the heroine Brünnhilde 

despite the efforts of Wotan, chief of the 

gods, to block him [editor’s note].

OSCAR WILDE / 785 

At the same time, only as much of that foundation of all existence, that 

Dionysiac underground of the world, can be permitted to enter an individual’s 

consciousness as can be overcome, in its turn, by the Apolline power 

of transfiguration, so that both of these artistic drives are required to 

unfold their energies in strict, reciprocal proportion, according to the law 

of eternal justice. Where the Dionysiac powers rise up with such unbounded 

vigour as we are seeing at present, Apollo, too, must already have descended 

amongst us, concealed in a cloud, and his most abundant effects of beauty 

will surely be seen by a generation which comes after us. 

That there is a need for this effect is a feeling which each of us would grasp 

intuitively, if he were ever to feel himself translated, even just in dream, back 

into the life of an ancient Hellene. As he wandered beneath rows of high, 

Ionic columns, gazing upwards to a horizon cut off by pure and noble lines, 

seeing beside him reflections of his own, transfigured form in luminous 

marble, surrounded by human beings who walk solemnly or move delicately, 

with harmonious sounds and a rhythmical language of gestures— would such 

a person, with all this beauty streaming in on him from all sides, not be 

bound to call out, as he raised a hand to Apollo: ‘Blessed people of Hellas! 

How great must Dionysos be amongst you, if the God of Delos considers such 

acts of magic are needed to heal your dithyrambic 6 madness!’ It is likely, however, 

that an aged Athenian would reply to a visitor in this mood, looking up 

at him with the sublime eye of Aeschylus: ‘But say also this, curious stranger: 

how much did this people have to suffer in order that it might become so 

beautiful! But now follow me to the tragedy and sacrifice along with me in 

the temple of both deities!’ 

1872 

6. Manifest in dithyrambs, choral poems originally 

sung in honor of Dionysus and later associated 

with highly excited music and impassioned 

language. Delos: Greek island in the Cyclades, site 

of an important oracle of Apollo [editor’s note]. 

OSCAR WILDE 

1854–1900 

Oscar Wilde is known for his epigrammatic wit, dazzling skills in conversation, and 

scandalous homosexual behavior, which in 1895 led to his trial and imprisonment 

for sodomy. But Wilde was more than a brilliant— and tragic— cultural personality. 

He was a gifted, wonderfully entertaining, and disquieting writer, the author of an 

impressive body of work that includes the superb comedy The Importance of Being 

Earnest, the haunting novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and sharp, suggestive critical 

essays. 

Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland. His father was a surgeon and respected 

author; his mother also wrote both verse and prose. Educated in classics at Trinity 

College, Dublin, Wilde won a fellowship to Magdalen College, Oxford University. 

There he was influenced by the eminent art historian John Ruskin, Walter Pater, 

and the Pre- Raphaelite brotherhood of En glish poets and paint ers. The young

786 / OSCAR WILDE 

Wilde began to lead his life as if it were a work of art, to be crafted, cultivated, and 

made to sparkle. Defying orthodoxy and social convention, he was flamboyant and 

theatrical. 

In 1881, at his own expense, Wilde published his first book, Poems, a promising 

but derivative volume that reflects the influence of Wilde’s reading of John Keats 

(1795– 1821), Algernon Swinburne (1837– 1909), Pater, and the Pre- Raphaelites. In 

the following year, Wilde toured and lectured in the United States. It is said that on 

his arrival in New York City, when asked by customs officials if he had anything to 

declare, he replied, “Only my genius.” Wilde was by now a leader of the aesthetic 

movement, which rallied around the dictum of “art for art’s sake.” His deliberate 

eccentricity and exuberant self- regard drew ridicule in the weekly comic periodical 

Punch, and he was parodied as Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1881 operetta 

Patience. 

Though Wilde had (in the words of one recent scholar) “flirted” with homosexuality 

for a number of years, he married Constance Lloyd, daughter of a prominent Irish barrister, 

in 1884. For his two sons Wilde wrote stories— inspired by the Danish writer 

Hans Christian Andersen— included in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and 

A House of Pomegranates (1892). He also wrote reviews for the Pall Mall Gazette and, 

from 1887 to 1889, served as the editor of Woman’s World, a pop u lar periodical to 

which Constance also contributed articles on politics and women’s issues. 

In the early 1890s, Wilde hit his stride. The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared first 

in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890; the book, revised and expanded by six chapters, 

was published in 1891. It recounts the story of a beautiful young man who seems 

not to age but whose portrait becomes aged and ugly over time, the sign of his own 

corruption. In Intentions (1891), an important collection of essays, Wilde presented 

his audacious views on literature, art, and criticism; and in Collected Poems (1892), 

he gathered his verse. Wilde had hoped to center his literary career in poetry, but 

his greatest success was as a comic and satiric dramatist. His plays include Lady 

Windemere’s Fan (1892); A Woman of No Importance (1893); An Ideal Husband 

(1895); and, above all, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which describes the 

courtships and betrothals of two young men- about- town who are leading double 

lives. Wilde also wrote the historical tragedies The Duchess of Padua (1892) and 

Salomé (1893); the latter, about the woman who danced before Herod and afterward 

demanded the head of John the Baptist, was written in French and then published 

in an En glish translation (1894) that included eerie, erotic illustrations by 

Aubrey Beardsley. 

Wilde’s plea sure in titillating and unnerving his audiences and readers resulted 

in many striking witticisms, such as Cecily’s reproach in The Importance of Being 

Earnest: “I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked 

and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.” Yet in his own way, 

Wilde was deeply serious and morally earnest. A critic of middleclass Philistine 

smugness and moral complacency, he too wanted greater opportunity— though 

more than Matthew Arnold would have accepted— for freedom of expression and 

dissent, for the right to contest the status quo. 

In one of his lectures in America, Wilde had declared, “To disagree with three 

fourths of all En gland on all points of view is one of the first elements of sanity.” But 

in 1895 Wilde discovered that social and moral convention could be relentlessly 

punitive. When the marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord 

Alfred Douglas, left a card at his club addressed “To Oscar Wilde, posing as a sodomite,” 

Wilde unsuccessfully sued for libel— and then was himself arrested for violating 

the law forbidding “indecencies between grown- up men, in public or private.” 

Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment at hard labor. 

After his release in May 1897, Wilde— divorced, broken, bankrupt, and disgraced— 

left for France, calling himself “Sebastian Melmoth” (“Sebastian” after the Christian


martyred by arrows in early- fourth- century Rome, and “Melmoth” after the doomed 

hero of Charles Maturin’s 1820 Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer). Wilde spent 

the rest of his life as an exile in Eu rope, recovering enough focus as a writer to tell of 

his painful prison experiences in The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). He died in Paris 

in November 1900, having remarked, “If I were to survive into the twentieth century, 

it would be more than the En glish people could bear.” De Profundis (“out of the 

depths,” the first two words of the Latin version of Psalm 130), both a book- length 

letter of reproach to Lord Alfred and a personal testament, was published in 1905. 

His self- judgment in this text is unsparing, as he declares: “Terrible as was what the 

world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.” 

In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, our first selection, Wilde sketches 

his position on art and morality in a sequence of aphorisms. Authentic artists, says 

Wilde, concern themselves with style and form, with the adroit handling of the 

artistic medium and the shaping of beautiful works. Morality, he explains, is not a 

matter of an artist’s or a writer’s message; it instead rests in how well he or she has 

executed an aesthetic task. Wilde revises Arnold’s statement that critics should be 

devoted to the best that has been thought and said by maintaining that the best is 

the most beautiful, whose nature is ultimately formal and stylistic rather than ethical. 

Wilde provokes us by concluding, “All art is quite useless.” 

Our next selection is an excerpt from the final part of Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying: 

An Observation,” which he completed in December 1888. It was published in the 

January 1889 issue of the journal The Nineteenth Century, and Wilde then revised 

and expanded it for Intentions (1891), a collection of his essays. Showing his mastery 

of the “dialogue” form, Wilde presents two characters, Vivian and Cyril, in conversation 

in the library of a country house in Nottinghamshire. Vivian has written an essay 

titled “The Decay of Lying: A Protest,” which he reads aloud to, and explicates for, 

Cyril— Wilde named the characters after his own sons Cyril (born in 1885) and Vivian 

(born in 1886). Wilde here deftly explores a two- part antirealist claim: “Art never 

expresses anything but itself” and “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates 

Life.” 

As Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellman has noted, Wilde mocks “conventional 

theories of sincerity and verisimilitude” and proposes instead an aesthetic based on 

“lies and masks.” Ellman makes the astute point that Wilde avoids the term “imagination” 

because it connotes a Romantic flow or outpouring from within; he prefers 

the deliberately disquieting term “lying,” with its implication of a self- aware desire 

to mislead and deceive. Writers do not tell the truth, but rather are engaged in 

doing the opposite. Furthermore, they do not reflect or take expression from the era 

in which they live but instead give shape to the era: Art gives character and meaning 

to Life. 

From one perspective, Wilde’s goal in “The Decay of Lying” is a familiar one; like 

horace, sir philip sidney, and others from the classical period to the Re nais sance, 

he seeks both to entertain and instruct readers. He revels in paradox and exaggeration; 

he enjoys clever turns of phrase and reversing conventional judgments and 

assumptions; and he is fond of sequences of wit and irony. Throughout it is a bright, 

amusing per for mance. 

But at the same time, the ideas that Wilde holds up for inspection are highly subversive, 

indeed outrageous. “The Decay of Lying,” as Ellman has observed, presents 

the writer- artist as “a sacred malefactor,” a liar, a nontruth teller who is not bound by 

any taken- for- granted norms of good and evil. In a sense, Wilde is reaching back to 

plato, who denounced fiction for its falsehood— the very claim that Wilde comes 

forward to embrace and rejoice in. Both exhilarating and unnerving, Wilde’s cleverly 

articulated conception of art gives supreme power to writers, critics, and playwrights: 

it is for him a manifesto and, it seems, an act of self- expression. Just as 

much or more, however, what Wilde offers to his readers is a provocative pose that


impels them to ask whether there is a significant difference between telling the truth 

and lying. 

In “The Critic as Artist” (1890, 1891), a brisk, pointed dialogue on the nature of, 

and relationship between, the arts and criticism, Wilde expands on and develops 

the claims he advanced in the preface to Dorian Gray and in “The Decay of Lying.” 

His mouthpiece Gilbert not only celebrates criticism in its own right but asserts and 

praises its superiority over so- called creative or primary literary and artistic work. 

Throughout, Wilde emphasizes and honors style, form, and selfconscious craft; in 

an anti- Romantic thrust, he devalues inspiration. He is antihistorical as well, 

opposed to history because of (and here he echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson) the 

constraints that it imposes on individual expression. 

“The details of history,” according to Gilbert in part 1, “are always wearisome.” 

Criticism “is more fascinating than history,” for it “is concerned simply with oneself”: 

it is a type of autobiography and impressionism. As Gilbert’s comments on 

Ruskin and Pater indicate, for Wilde it does not matter whether the creative critic is 

faithful to the work of art: accurate statements about an aesthetic object or the artist’s 

intentions count less than the critical essay’s status as an in de pen dent work of 

art. In part 2, Wilde qualifies and complicates this position; for example, in his references 

to Shakespeare he concedes that historical study is important after all. But he 

continues to stress that “the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal 

impression, is, in its way, more creative than creation.” 

Wilde is not an especially original thinker. He draws on nineteenthcentury French 

and En glish authors, including the poet- critic Théophile Gautier, the novelist Joris- 

Karl Huysman, Charles Baudelaire, and Pater. The concept of “art for art’s sake” 

was in fact proposed by Gautier, in the preface to Ma de moi selle de Maupin (1835), 

where he affirmed: “Les choses sont belles en proportion inverse de leur utilité” 

(Things are beautiful in inverse proportion to their usefulness). Sometimes Wilde’s 

cool, canny ironies can feel predictable, produced on cue and according to formula. 

There is a mea sure of truth to the complaint of the American cultural critic H. L. 

Mencken (1880– 1956) that in his endless flaunting of paradoxes, Wilde can be as 

insufferable as an overpious preacher. 

On the other hand, Wilde’s epigrams and arguments at their best are compelling, 

and in recent years his life has drawn equal interest. Literary critics and theorists 

and scholars in gender and gay and lesbian studies have since the 1980s devoted 

many books and essays to Wilde’s writings and extraordinary and aggrieved life. 

Even earlier, critics including Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom praised him 

extravagantly; Frye, in Creation and Recreation (1980), portrayed Wilde as a theorist 

of the imagination equal in significance to the revolutionary paint er and poet 

William Blake (1757– 1827). Like Blake, and like the later Romantics Percy Bysshe 

Shelley and Emerson, Wilde contends that great writers and artists give structure 

to life through the power of their enlightened vision. For him the terms and values of 

art themselves constitute life. Nature, Wilde maintained, “is our creation. . . . Things 

are because we see them.” The result of critical inquiry is not truth, but an interpretation— 

or rather a series of misinterpretations, of misreadings, since we do not (and 

never will) possess an objectively known reality with which we could appraise and 

firmly decide among conflicting views. 

This line of argument gives us a Wilde less akin to Pater than to the German philos 

o pher Friedrich Nietz sche, the Nietz sche of The Will to Power (1901) in par ticu 

lar: “It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. 

Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like 

to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.” Wilde lacks this tone of grim 

intensity, but his elegantly articulated ideas imply the consequences that Nietz sche 

and later authors have expressed.


bibliography 

Wilde’s Complete Works were published in twelve volumes in 1923. The Complete 

Works of Oscar Wilde, edited by Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, is being published by 

Oxford University Press; volume 4 is Criticism: Historical Criticism, “Intentions,” 

“The Soul of Man,” edited by Josephine M. Guy (2007). There are a number of onevolume 

collections, including Oscar Wilde: Selected Writings, edited by Richard Ellmann 

(1961), and Selected Writings of Oscar Wilde, edited by Russell Fraser (1969). 

The best, because it is annotated, is Oscar Wilde, edited by Isobel Murray (1989). 

For the correspondence, see the volumes edited by Rupert Hart- Davis, Letters (1962) 

and More Letters (1985), and The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin 

Holland and Rupert Hart- Davis (2000). For his literary criticism, consult Literary 

Criticism of Oscar Wilde, edited by Stanley Weintraub (1968), and The Artist as 

Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, edited by Richard Ellmann (1969). 

Biographies include Hesketh Pearson, The Life of Oscar Wilde (1946), a good overview 

of Wilde’s career that deals well with his shift from poetry to fiction and drama, 

and Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1988), a major study, especially in its account of 

Wilde’s early life and his response to John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Henry James, and 

contemporary French writers. Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (2005), 

examines Wilde’s life as a gay man and shows the centrality of his homosexuality to 

his identity, literary work, and politics. Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde: A Pictorial 

Biography (1960), is also valuable. H. Montgomery Hyde has edited The Trials of Oscar 

Wilde (1948); see also Hyde’s The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1956) and Oscar Wilde 

in Prison (1956). Other resources include Oscar Wilde: Interviews and Recollections, 

edited by E. H. Mikhail (2 vols., 1979); Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks, edited by 

Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand (1989); and Norman Page, An Oscar Wilde 

Chronology (1991). 

Collections surveying the critical and scholarly response to Wilde include Oscar 

Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Richard Ellmann (1969); Oscar Wilde: 

The Critical Heritage, edited by Karl Beckson (1970); Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde, 

edited by Regenia Gagnier (1991); and Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, 

edited by Jonathan Freedman (1996). 

Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism (1997), is an 

excellent treatment of Wilde’s views on literature and criticism. A number of studies 

in the 1990s focused on the social, sexual, and cultural issues that Wilde’s life and, 

especially, his trial and imprisonment dramatize. Among these are Eve Kosofsky 

Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990); Patricia Flanagan Behrendt, Oscar 

Wilde: Eros and Aesthetics (1991); Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy 

of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (1993); Melissa Knox, Oscar Wilde: A Long 

and Lovely Suicide (1994); Gary Schmidgall, The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar 

(1994); Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the Queer 

Moment (1994); and John Stokes, Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations 

(1996). Julia Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art 

(1997), deals succinctly with Wilde’s aesthetic theory and its influence on later writers. 

Michael S. Foldy, Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late- Victorian 

Society (1998), describes the range of threats (including, but not limited to, deviant 

sexuality) that En glish society associated with Wilde. Wilde the Irishman, edited by 

Jerusha McCormack (1998), deals with the Irish dimension of Wilde’s work and with 

the responses to Wilde by poets, playwrights, sculptors, and others. See also Bruce 

Bashford, Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Humanist (1999). Reference works include Stuart 

Mason, Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (1914); Thomas A. Mikolyzk, Oscar Wilde: An 

Annotated Bibliography (1993); Ian Small, Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New 

Materials and Methods of Research (1993); and Karl Beckson, The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia 

(1998).


Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray 

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. 

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can 

translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful 

things. 

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. 

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being 

charming. This is a fault. 

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. 

For these there is hope. 

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. 

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well 

written, or badly written. That is all. 

The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his 

own face in a glass. 1 

The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban 

not seeing his own face in a glass. 

The moral life of man forms part of the subjectmatter of the artist, but 

the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. 

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. 

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an 

unpardonable mannerism of style. 

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. 

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. 

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. 

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. 

From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. 

All art is at once surface and symbol. 

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. 

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. 

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. 

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, 

and vital. 

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. 

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire 

it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. 

All art is quite useless. 

1891 

From The Decay of Lying: An Observation 

* * * 

Cyril. * * * But even admitting this strange imitative instinct in Life and 

Nature, surely you would acknowledge that Art expresses the temper of its 

1. Mirror. Caliban: half- human slave of Prospero in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (1611).

The Decay of Lying / 791 

age, the spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions that surround it, 

and under whose influence it is produced. 

Vivian. Certainly not! Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the 

principle of my new æsthetics; and it is this, more than that vital connection 

between form and substance, on which Mr Pater 1 dwells, that makes 

music the type of all the arts. Of course, nations and individuals, with that 

healthy natural vanity which is the secret of existence, are always under the 

impression that it is of them that the Muses are talking, always trying to 

find in the calm dignity of imaginative art some mirror of their own turbid 

passions, always forgetting that the singer of life is not Apollo, but Marsyas. 2 

Remote from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of 

the cave, 3 Art reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that 

watches the opening of the marvellous, many- petalled rose 4 fancies that it 

is its own history that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding expression 

in a new form. But it is not so. The highest art rejects the burden of the 

human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than 

she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty passion, or from 

any great awakening of the human consciousness. She develops purely on 

her own lines. She is not symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her 

symbols. 

Even those who hold that Art is representative of time and place and 

people, cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is, the less it 

represents to us the spirit of its age. The evil faces of the Roman emperors 

look out at us from the foul porphyry and spotted jasper in which the realistic 

artists of the day delighted to work, and we fancy that in those cruel 

lips and heavy sensual jaws we can find the secret of the ruin of the Empire. 

But it was not so. The vices of Tiberius 5 could not destroy that supreme 

civilization, any more than the virtues of the Antonines 6 could save it. It fell 

for other, for less interesting reasons. The sibyls and prophets of the Sistine 

7 may indeed serve to interpret for some that new birth of the emancipated 

spirit that we call the Re nais sance; but what do the drunken boors 

and brawling peasants of Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland? 

The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the 

temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let 

us look at its architecture or its music. 

Cyril. I quite agree with you there. The spirit of an age may be best 

expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal. 

1. walter pater (1839– 1834), En glish essayist 

and art critic. The reference is to “The School of 

Giorgione,” included in The Re nais sance: Studies 

in Art and Poetry (2d ed., 1877), where Pater 

explores “a certain interpenetration of the matter 

or subject of a work of art with the form of it” in 

painting, music, and poetry. The Italian paint er 

Giorgione (1478– 1510) was an early master of the 

Venetian school. 

2. In Greek mythology, a flute player who challenged 

Apollo, god of music and poetry, to a musical 

contest, judged by the Muses (the 9 daughters 

of Memory who presided over the arts and all 

intellectual pursuits); after he lost, Apollo flayed 

him alive for his presumption. 

3. plato (ca. 427– ca. 347 b.c.e.), in Republic 

7.514a– 518b, compares the human condition to 

that of prisoners in a cave, able to see only shadows 

cast by repre sen ta tions of things (and thus at 

a double remove from reality). 

4. See dante (1265– 1321), Paradiso, XXXI; the 

sacred host in Heaven appears in the form of a 

white rose. 

5. The second Roman emperor (42 b.c.e.– 37 c.e.; 

emperor 14– 37 c.e.) accused by ancient historians 

of cruelty, perversion, and vice. 

6. The collective name of 4 Roman emperors of 

the 2d century c.e.; the first, Antoninus Pius (86– 

161; emperor, 138– 161), was known for his beneficence 

and enjoyed a peaceful reign. 

7. The Sistine Chapel in Rome, whose ceiling was 

painted by Michelangelo Buonarroti between 

1508 and 1512. “Sibyls”: female prophets.


Upon the other hand, for the visible aspect of an age, for its look, as the 

phrase goes, we must of course go to the arts of imitation. 

Vivian. I don’t think so. After all, what the imitative arts really give us are 

merely the various styles of par tic u lar artists, or of certain schools of artists. 

Surely you don’t imagine that the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance 

at all to the figures on mediæval stained glass, or in mediæval stone 

and wood carving, or on mediæval metal- work, or tapestries, or illuminated 

MSS. 8 They were probably very ordinary-looking people, with nothing grotesque, 

or remarkable, or fantastic in their appearance. The Middle Ages, as 

we know them in art, are simply a definite form of style, and there is no reason 

at all why an artist with this style should not be produced in the nineteenth 

century. No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he 

would cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that 

you are fond of Japa nese things. 9 Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese 

people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you 

do, you have never understood Japa nese art at all. The Japa nese people are 

the deliberate selfconscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set 

a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, 1 or any of the great native paint ers, beside a 

real Japa nese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest 

resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not 

unlike the general run of En glish people; that is to say, they are extremely 

commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact 

the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no 

such people. One of our most charming paint ers 2 went recently to the Land 

of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japa nese. All he saw, 

all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He was 

quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Messrs 

Dowdeswell’s Gallery showed only too well. He did not know that the Japanese 

people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of 

art. And so, if you desire to see a Japa nese effect, you will not behave like a 

tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home, and steep 

yourself in the work of certain Japa nese artists, and then, when you have 

absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of 

vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, 

3 and if you cannot see an absolutely Japa nese effect there, you will not 

see it anywhere. Or, to return again to the past, take as another instance the 

ancient Greeks. Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek 

people were like? Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the 

stately dignified figures of the Parthenon frieze, 4 or like those marvellous 

goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same building? If you 

8. Manuscripts. 

9. Japa nese art, especially woodblock prints, influenced 

many Western artists in the late 19th century 

and became highly fashionable in En gland. 

1. Totoya (Katsushika) Hokkei (1780– 1850), 

Japa nese printmaker, a student of the artist Katsushika 

Hokusai (1760– 1849), who is remembered 

for his historical scenes and landscapes. 

2. Mortimer Menpes (1859– 1938), an Australianborn 

paint er who was one of the first to study 

Japa nese art in Japan; he exhibited his work at 

the Dowdeswell Gallery in London in April– May 

1888. 

3. A major shopping street in central London. The 

Park: Hyde Park, pop u lar for fashionable promenades. 

4. The continuous band of low- relief sculpture, 

depicting a religious pro cession, that adorned the 

outside of the Parthenon, the temple of Athena 

(built 447– 432 b.c.e.) on the Acropolis of Athens; 

in 1816 almost half of the 525- foot frieze 

was bought by London’s British Museum.

The Decay of Lying / 793 

judge from the art, they certainly were so. But read an authority, like Aristophanes 

5 for instance. You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, 

wore high- heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their 

faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen creature of our own 

day. The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of 

Art, and Art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth. 

Cyril. But modern portraits by En glish paint ers, what of them? Surely 

they are like the people they pretend to represent? 

Vivian. Quite so. They are so like them that a hundred years from now no 

one will believe in them. The only portraits in which one believes are portraits 

where there is very little of the sitter, and a very great deal of the artist. 

Holbein’s 6 drawings of the men and women of his time impress us with a 

sense of their absolute reality. But this is simply because Holbein compelled 

life to accept his conditions, to restrain itself within his limitations, to reproduce 

his type, and to appear as he wished it to appear. It is style that makes 

us believe in a thing– nothing but style. Most of our modern portrait paint ers 

are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint 

what the public sees, and the public never sees anything. 

* * * 

Cyril. * * * But in order to avoid making any error I want you to tell me 

briefly the doctrines of the new Æsthetics. 

Vivian. Briefly, then, they are these. Art never expresses anything but 

itself. It has an in de pen dent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely 

on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor 

spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is 

usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us 

is the history of its own progress. Sometimes it returns upon its footsteps, 

and revives some antique form, as happened in the archaistic movement of 

late Greek Art, and in the pre- Raphaelite movement 7 of our own day. At 

other times it entirely anticipates its age, and produces in one century work 

that it takes another century to understand, to appreciate, and to enjoy. In 

no case does it reproduce its age. To pass from the art of a time to the time 

itself is the great mistake that all historians commit. 

The second doctrine is this. All bad art comes from returning to Life and 

Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be 

used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real ser vice 

to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art 

surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything. As a method 

Realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should 

avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subjectmatter. To us, who 

live in the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for art except 

our own. The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us. It 

5. Greek comic playwright (ca. 450– ca. 385 

b.c.e.). 

6. Hans Holbein the Younger (1497?– 1553), German 

portrait artist and printmaker. 

7. A “brotherhood” founded in 1848 by En glish 

poets and paint ers who rejected Victorian materialism 

and neoclassical conventions of academic 

art, focusing instead on the medieval world and 

imitating Italian paint ers prior to Raphael (Raffaelo 

Sanzio, 1483– 1520). “Archaistic”: imitating 

earlier archaic art (ca. 660– 480 b.c.e.), especially 

sculpture, as occurred in the 4th century b.c.e.


is, to have the plea sure of quoting myself, 8 exactly because Hecuba is nothing 

to us that her sorrows are so suitable a motive for a tragedy. Besides, it 

is only the modern that ever becomes oldfashioned. M. Zola sits down to 

give us a picture of the Second Empire. 9 Who cares for the Second Empire 

now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is 

always in front of Life. 

The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates 

Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact 

that the selfconscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers 

it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy. It is a 

theory that has never been put forward before, but it is extremely fruitful, 

and throws an entirely new light upon the history of Art. It follows, as a 

corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates Art. The only effects 

that she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry, 

or in paintings. This is the secret of Nature’s charm, as well as the explanation 

of Nature’s weakness. The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of 

beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. But of this I think I have 

spoken at sufficient length. And now let us go out on the terrace, where 

‘droops the milk- white peacock like a ghost’, while the eve ning star ‘washes 

the dusk with silver’. 1 At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive 

effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate 

quotations from the poets. Come! We have talked long enough. 

1891 

From The Critic as Artist 1 

From Part 1 

* * * 

Ernest. * * * I am quite ready to admit that I was wrong in what I said about 

the Greeks. They were, as you have pointed out, a nation of art critics. I 

acknowledge it, and I feel a little sorry for them. For the creative faculty is 

higher than the critical. There is really no comparison between them. 

Gilbert. The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary. Without the 

critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all worthy of the name. You 

spoke a little while ago of that fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of 

selection by which the artist realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary 

perfection. Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact of omission, is really 

the critical faculty in one of its most characteristic moods, and no one who 

does not possess this critical faculty can create anything at all in art. 

8. Wilde repeats the following phrase from an earlier 

passage not included in our selection. The 

reference is to Hamlet (ca. 1600)—“What’s Hecuba 

to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for 

her?” (2.2.536–37)—Hamlet’s response to an 

actor’s impassioned sympathy for the suffering of 

a mythical figure, the Trojan queen Hecuba. 

9. The imperial Bonapartist regime (1852– 70) of 

Napoleon III. Émile Zola (1840– 1902), French 

novelist whose naturalist works described the corruption 

and de cadence of the Second Empire in 

realistic detail. 

1. Wilde quotes first “Now Sleeps the Crimson 

Petal, Now the White,” a lyric from The Princess 

(1847), by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and then the 

poem “To the Eve ning Star” (1783), by William 

Blake. 

1. Originally titled “The True Function and Value 

of Criticism, with Some Remarks on the Importance 

of Doing Nothing.” For his book Intentions 

(1891), Wilde retitled and revised the text.

The Critic as Artist / 795 

Arnold’s definition of literature as a criticism of life, 2 was not very felicitous 

in form, but it showed how keenly he recognised the importance of the 

critical element in all creative work. 

Ernest. I should have said that great artists worked unconsciously, that 

they were “wiser than they knew,” as, I think, Emerson remarks somewhere. 

3 

Gilbert. It is really not so, Ernest. All fine imaginative work is selfconscious 

and deliberate. No poet sings because he must sing. At least, no great poet 

does. A great poet sings because he chooses to sing. It is so now, and it has 

always been so. We are sometimes apt to think that the voices that sounded 

at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and 

that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they 

walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and almost without changing 

could pass into song. The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its 

steep, scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet 

of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at 

eve ning came Apollo 4 to sing to the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are 

merely lending to other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. 

Our historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetry is, so far, 

an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most natural 

and simple product of its time is always the result of the most selfconscious 

effort. Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without selfconsciousness, and 

selfconsciousness and the critical spirit are one. 

Ernest. I see what you mean, and there is much in it. But surely you 

would admit that the great poems of the early world, the primitive, anonymous 

collective poems, were the result of the imagination of races, rather 

than of the imagination of individuals? 

Gilbert. Not when they became poetry. Not when they received a beautiful 

form. For there is no art where there is no style, and no style where 

there is no unity, and unity is of the individual. No doubt Homer had old 

ballads and stories to deal with, as Shakespeare had chronicles and plays 

and novels from which to work, but they were merely his rough material. 

He took them and shaped them into song. They became his, because he 

made them lovely. They were built out of music, 

And so not built at all, 

And therefore built for ever. 5 

The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels that 

behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that it is not 

the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age. Indeed, 

I am inclined to think that each myth and legend that seems to us to spring 

out of the wonder, or terror, or fancy of tribe and nation, was in its origin the 

invention of one single mind. The curiously limited number of the myths 

2. Often in “The Critic as Artist,” Wilde alludes 

or responds directly to matthew arnold’s views 

on literature and criticism in Essays in Criticism: 

First Series (1865), in par tic u lar “The Function of 

Criticism at the Present Time” (see above). 

3. See “The Over- Soul” and “Compensation,” 

both in Essays: First Series (1841), by ralph 

waldo emerson (1803– 1882). 

4. The Greek god of prophecy, music, and poetry. 

Olympus: mountain range in northern Greece 

and home of the Greek gods. Muses: in Greek 

mythology, the 9 daughters of memory; they presided 

over the arts and sciences. 

5. Slightly misquoting Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 

Idylls of the King (1859– 85), “Gareth and 

Lynette,” lines 272– 74.


seems to me to point to this conclusion. But we must not go off into questions 

of comparative mythology. We must keep to criticism. And what I want 

to point out is this. An age that has no criticism is either an age in which art 

is immobile, hieratic, and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or 

an age that possesses no art at all. There have been critical ages that have 

not been creative, in the ordinary sense of the word, ages in which the spirit 

of man has sought to set in order the trea sures of his treasure- house, to 

separate the gold from the silver, and the silver from the lead, to count over 

the jewels, and to give names to the pearls. But there has never been a creative 

age that has not been critical also. For it is the critical faculty that 

invents fresh forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself. It is to the 

critical instinct that we owe each new school that springs up, each new 

mould that art finds ready to its hand. There is really not a single form that 

art now uses that does not come to us from the critical spirit of Alexandria, 6 

where these forms were either ste reo typed, or invented, or made perfect. I 

say Alexandria, not merely because it was there that the Greek spirit became 

most selfconscious, and indeed ultimately expired in scepticism and theology, 

but because it was to that city, and not to Athens, that Rome turned for 

her models, and it was through the survival, such as it was, of the Latin language 

that culture lived at all. When, at the Re nais sance, Greek literature 

dawned upon Eu rope, the soil had been in some mea sure prepared for it. 

But to get rid of the details of history, which are always wearisome, and usually 

inaccurate, let us say generally that the forms of art have been due to the 

Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire drama in 

every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll, the romantic 

novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture, 

for which perhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all 

the wide meaning of that word. In fact, we owe it everything, except the sonnet, 

to which, however, some curious parallels of thought movement may be 

traced in the Anthology, 7 American journalism, to which no parallel can be 

found anywhere, and the ballad in sham Scotch dialect, which one of our 

most industrious writers 8 has recently proposed should be made the basis 

for a final and unanimous effort on the part of our second- rate poets to 

make themselves really romantic. Each new school, as it appears, cries out 

against criticism, but it is to the critical faculty in man that it owes its origin. 

The mere creative instinct does not innovate, but reproduces. 

Ernest. You have been talking of criticism as an essential part of the creative 

spirit, and I now fully accept your theory. But what of criticism outside 

creation? I have a foolish habit of reading periodicals, and it seems to 

me that most modern criticism is perfectly valueless. 

Gilbert. So is most modern creative work, also. Mediocrity weighing 

mediocrity in the balance, and incompetence applauding its brother— that 

is the spectacle which the artistic activity of En gland affords us from time 

to time. And yet, I feel I am a little unfair in this matter. As a rule, the 

6. City and major seaport in northern Egypt. 

Founded by Alexander the Great after he conquered 

Egypt in 331 b.c.e., it was the center of 

Hellenistic commerce and learning, with a great 

university and two royal libraries. 

7. The Greek or Palatine Anthology, a collection 

of Greek epigrams (some from as early as the 7th 

c. b.c.e.) compiled ca. 980 c.e. 

8. William Sharp (1855– 1905), Scottish writer 

whose works (written under the name Fiona 

Macleod) include mystic Celtic tales and romances 

of peasant life.


critics— I speak, of course, of the higher class, of those, in fact, who write 

for the sixpenny papers— are far more cultured than the people whose work 

they are called upon to review. This is, indeed, only what one would expect, 

for criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does. 

Ernest. Really? 

Gilbert. Certainly. Anybody can write a three- volumed novel. 9 It merely 

requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature. The difficulty that I 

should fancy the reviewer feels is the difficulty of sustaining any standard. 

Where there is no style a standard must be impossible. The poor reviewers 

are apparently reduced to be the reporters of the police court of literature, 

the chroniclers of the doings of the habitual criminals of art. It is sometimes 

said of them that they do not read all through the works they are called upon 

to criticise. They do not. Or at least they should not. If they did so, they 

would become confirmed misanthropes; or, if I may borrow a phrase from 

one of the pretty Newnham graduates, confirmed womanthropes 1 for the rest 

of their lives. Nor is it necessary. To know the vintage and quality of a wine 

one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy in half an hour 

to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten minutes are 

really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. Who wants to wade through 

a dull volume? One tastes it, and that is quite enough— more than enough, 

I should imagine. I am aware that there are many honest workers in painting 

as well as in literature who object to criticism entirely. They are quite right. 

Their work stands in no intellectual relation to their age. It brings us no new 

element of plea sure. It suggests no fresh departure of thought, or passion, 

or beauty. It should not be spoken of. It should be left to the oblivion that it 

deserves. 

Ernest. But, my dear fellow— excuse me for interrupting you— you seem 

to me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a great deal too 

far. For, after all, even you must admit that it is much more difficult to do a 

thing than to talk about it. 

Gilbert. More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That 

is a gross pop u lar error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing 

than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is, of course, obvious. Anybody 

can make history. Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of 

action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It 

is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other— by language, 

which is the parent, and not the child, of thought. Action, indeed, is 

always easy, and when presented to us in its most aggravated, because most 

continuous form, which I take to be that of real industry, becomes simply 

the refuge of people who have nothing whatsoever to do. No, Ernest, don’t 

talk about action. It is a blind thing, dependent on external influences, and 

moved by an impulse of whose nature it is unconscious. It is a thing incomplete 

in its essence, because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction, 

being always at variance with its aim. Its basis is the lack of imagination. 

It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream. 

9. Standard length of Victorian novels. 

1. A nonsensical coinage meaning “womanhaters.” 

Newnham College: the second of the colleges 

for women in Cambridge (founded in 1871; 

women initially did not follow the university curriculum 

and were not granted Cambridge degrees 

for another half century).


Ernest. Gilbert, you treat the world as if it were a crystal ball. You hold it 

in your hand, and reverse it to please a wilful fancy. You do nothing but 

rewrite history. 

Gilbert. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. That is not the 

least of the tasks in store for the critical spirit. When we have fully discovered 

the scientific laws that govern life we shall realise that the one person 

who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action. He, indeed, 

knows neither the origin of his deeds nor their results. From the field in 

which he thought that he had sown thorns we have gathered our vintage, 

and the fig- tree that he planted for our plea sure is as barren as the thistle, 

and more bitter. 2 It is because Humanity has never known where it was 

going that it has been able to find its way. 

Ernest. You think, then, that in the sphere of action a conscious aim is a 

delusion? 

Gilbert. It is worse than a delusion. If we lived long enough to see the 

results of our actions, it may be that those who call themselves good would 

be sickened with a dull remorse, and those whom the world calls evil stirred 

by a noble joy. Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of 

life, which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or 

transform our sins into elements of a new civilisation, more marvellous and 

more splendid than any that has gone before. * * * 

Ernest. * * * But, surely, the higher you place the creative artist, the lower 

must the critic rank. 

Gilbert. Why so? 

Ernest. Because the best that he can give us will be but an echo of rich 

music, a dim shadow of clear- outlined form. It may, indeed, be that life is 

chaos, as you tell me that it is; that its martyrdoms are mean and its heroisms 

ignoble; and that it is the function of Literature to create, from the rough 

material of actual existence, a new world that will be more marvellous, more 

enduring, and more true than the world that common eyes look upon, and 

through which common natures seek to realise their perfection. But surely, if 

this new world has been made by the spirit and touch of a great artist, it will 

be a thing so complete and perfect that there will be nothing left for the critic 

to do. I quite understand now, and indeed admit most readily, that it is far 

more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. But it seems to me that this 

sound and sensible maxim, which is really extremely soothing to one’s feelings, 

and should be adopted as its motto by every Academy of Literature all 

over the world, applies only to the relations that exist between Art and Life, 

and not to any relations that there may be between Art and Criticism. 

Gilbert. But, surely, Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation 

implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be 

said to exist at all, so Criticism is really creative in the highest sense of the 

word. Criticism is, in fact, both creative and in de pen dent. 

Ernest. In de pen dent? 

Gilbert. Yes; in de pen dent. Criticism is no more to be judged by any low 

standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or sculptor. 

The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as 

the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of 

2. See Matthew 7.16: “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?”


passion and of thought. He does not even require for the perfection of his 

art the finest materials. Anything will serve his purpose. And just as out of 

the sordid and sentimental amours of the silly wife of a small country doctor 

in the squalid village of Yonville- l’Abbaye, near Rouen, Gustave Flaubert 3 

was able to create a classic, and make a masterpiece of style, so from subjects 

of little or of no importance, such as the pictures in this year’s Royal 

Academy, or in any year’s Royal Academy, for that matter, Mr. Lewis Morris’s 

poems, M. Ohnet’s novels, or the plays of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, 4 the 

true critic can, if it be his plea sure so to direct or waste his faculty of contemplation, 

produce work that will be flawless in beauty and instinct with 

intellectual subtlety. Why not? Dulness is always an irresistible temptation 

for brilliancy, and stupidity is the permanent Bestia Trionfans 5 that calls 

wisdom from its cave. To an artist so creative as the critic, what does subjectmatter 

signify? No more and no less than it does to the novelist and the 

paint er. Like them, he can find his motives everywhere. Treatment is the test. 

There is nothing that has not in it suggestion or challenge. 

Ernest. But is Criticism really a creative art? 

Gilbert. Why should it not be? It works with materials, and puts them into 

a form that is at once new and delightful. What more can one say of poetry? 

Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For just as the 

great artists, from Homer and Æschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, 6 

did not go directly to life for their subjectmatter, but sought for it in myth, 

and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others 

have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour 

have been already added. Nay, more, I would say that the highest Criticism, 

being the purest form of personal impression, is, in its way, more creative 

than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and 

is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, 

and to itself, an end. Certainly, it is never trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude. 

No ignoble considerations of probability, that cowardly concession 

to the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever. One may 

appeal from fiction unto fact. But from the soul there is no appeal. 

Ernest. From the soul? 

Gilbert. Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest Criticism really is, 

the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned 

simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its 

subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised 

form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the 

thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, 

but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind. 

I am always amused by the silly vanity of those writers and artists of our day 

who seem to imagine that the primary function of the critic is to chatter 

about their second- rate work. The best that one can say of most modern 

3. French novelist (1821– 1880); the “amours” are 

treated in Madame Bovary (1856). 

4. En glish dramatist (1851– 1929). Morris (1833– 

1907), Welsh poet, essayist, and barrister. Georges 

Ohnet (1848– 1918), French novelist and dramatist. 

5. Triumphant Beast (Italian); the reference is to 

Spaccio della bestia Trionfante (1584, Expulsion 

of the Triumphant Beast), a philosophical allegory 

by the Italian scientist and phi los o pher Giordano 

Bruno (1548–1600). 

6. John Keats (1795– 1821), En glish Romantic 

poet; roughly 2 centuries separated his works 

from those of Shakespeare, and the tragedies of 

Aeschylus (525– 456 b.c.e.) from the epics of 

Homer.


creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, 

with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, 

will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will 

turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamour of actual existence, though 

the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn. His sole aim is to chronicle his 

own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books written, and 

marble hewn into form. 

Ernest. I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism. 

Gilbert. Yes: it has been said by one whose gracious memory we all revere, 

and the music of whose pipe once lured Proserpina from her Sicilian fields, 

and made those white feet stir, and not in vain, the Cumnor cowslips, that 

the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is. 7 But 

this is a very serious error, and takes no cognisance of Criticism’s most perfect 

form, which is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its 

own secret and not the secret of another. For the highest Criticism deals 

with art not as expressive, but as impressive, purely. 

Ernest. But is that really so? 

Gilbert. Of course it is. Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner 8 

are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, 

so fervid and so fiery- coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate, 

symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word 

and epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets 

that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in En gland’s Gallery; 9 greater, 

indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because its equal beauty is 

more enduring, but on account of the fuller variety of its appeal, soul speaking 

to soul in those long- cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, 

though through these, indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual 

and emotional utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, 

with imaginative insight, and with poetic aim; greater, I always think, even 

as Literature is the greater art. Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put 

into the portrait of Monna Lisa 1 something that Lionardo never dreamed of? 

The paint er may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some have 

fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, 

and stand before that strange figure “set in its marble chair in that cirque 

of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea,” I murmur to myself, “She 

is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been 

dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver 

in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange 

webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, 

and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the 

sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has 

moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.” 

And I say to my friend, “The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the 

waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to 

7. Matthew Arnold defines the “aim of criticism” 

in “The Function of Criticism at the Present 

Time.” In his poem “Thyrsis” (1866), Arnold says 

that he would supplicate Proserpina, the goddess 

of fertility and queen of the underworld, “in 

vain”; for while she knows Sicily well, she does 

not know the “Cumnor cowslips,” near Oxford. 

8. The paint er J. M. W. Turner (1775– 1851), passionately 

defended by the En glish writer, reformer, 

and art critic John Ruskin (1819– 1900). 

9. The National Gallery, in London. 

1. In the essay on Leonardo da Vinci (1452– 1519) 

included in Studies in the History of the Re naissance 

(1873), by walter pater (1839– 1894); Gilbert 

then quotes Pater.


desire”; and he answers me, “Hers is the head upon which all ‘the ends of the 

world are come,’ and the eyelids are a little weary.” 

And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and 

reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the music of the 

mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute- player’s music that lent 

to the lips of La Gioconda 2 those subtle and poisonous curves. Do you ask me 

what Lionardo would have said had any one told him of this picture that “all 

the thoughts and experience of the world had etched and moulded there 

in that which they had of power to refine and make expressive the outward 

form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle 

Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan 

world, the sins of the Borgias?” 3 He would probably have answered that he had 

contemplated none of these things, but had concerned himself simply with 

certain arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious colourharmonies 

of blue and green. And it is for this very reason that the criticism 

which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work of art 

simply as a startingpoint for a new creation. It does not confine itself— let us 

at least suppose so for the moment— to discovering the real intention of the 

artist and accepting that as final. And in this it is right, for the meaning of 

any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks 

at it as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who 

lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for 

us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion 

of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having 

prayed for, we fear that we may receive. The longer I study, Ernest, the more 

clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts is, as the beauty of music, 

impressive primarily, and that it may be marred, and indeed often is so, by any 

excess of intellectual intention on the part of the artist. For when the work is 

finished it has, as it were, an in de pen dent life of its own, and may deliver a 

message far other than that which was put into its lips to say. Sometimes, 

when I listen to the overture of Tannhäuser, 4 I seem indeed to see that comely 

knight treading delicately on the flower- strewn grass, and to hear the voice of 

Venus calling to him from the caverned hill. But at other times it speaks to me 

of a thousand different things, of myself, it may be, and my own life, or of the 

lives of others whom one has loved and grown weary of loving, or of the passions 

that man has known, or of the passions that man has not known, and so 

has sought for. To- night it may fill one with that EPΩΣ TΩN AΔYNATΩN, that 

Amour de l’Impossible, 5 which falls like a madness on many who think they 

live securely and out of reach of harm, so that they sicken suddenly with the 

poison of unlimited desire, and, in the infinite pursuit of what they may not 

obtain, grow faint and swoon or stumble. To- morrow, like the music of which 

Aristotle and Plato tell us, the noble Dorian music 6 of the Greek, it may perform 

the office of a physician, and give us an anodyne against pain, and heal 

2. The subject of Leonardo’s painting (ca. 1504) 

was the wife of Francesco del Gioconda; thus, 

the Mona Lisa is sometimes referred to as La Gioconda. 

3. An Italian family, influential from the 14th to 

the 16th century, that included religious, military, 

and po liti cal leaders and patrons of the arts; they 

were notorious for their ruthlessness and greed. 

4. An 1845 opera by the German composer Richard 

Wagner (1813–1883), which describes the 

legendary relationship between the 14th- century 

German poet of the title and Venus, Roman goddess 

of love. 

5. The Greek and French phrases both mean 

“love of the impossible.” 

6. Restrained and simple music associated with 

the Dorians, the last of the northern invaders of 

Greece (ca. 11th c. b.c.e.). On the Greek phi loso 

phers plato (ca. 427– 347 b.c.e.) and aristotle 

(384– 322 b.c.e.), see above.


the spirit that is wounded, and “bring the soul into harmony with all right 

things.” And what is true about music is true about all the arts. Beauty has as 

many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty 

reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself it 

shows us the whole fiery- coloured world. 

Ernest. But is such work as you have talked about really criticism? 

Gilbert. It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merely the individual 

work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with wonder a form which the 

artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely. 

Ernest. The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and 

the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not; 

that is your theory, I believe? 

Gilbert. Yes, that is my theory. To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion 

for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious 

resemblance to the thing it criticises. The one characteristic of a beautiful 

form is that one can put into it what ever one wishes, and see in it what ever 

one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and 

æsthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a 

thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who 

carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem. 

It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of the 

highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that the pictures that the 

critic loves most to write about are those that belong to the anecdotage of 

painting, and that deal with scenes taken out of literature or history. But this 

is not so. Indeed, pictures of this kind are far too intelligible. As a class, they 

rank with illustrations, and, even considered from this point of view, are failures, 

as they do not stir the imagination, but set definite bounds to it. For the 

domain of the paint er is, as I suggested before, widely different from that of 

the poet. To the latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety; not merely 

the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to also; not merely 

the momentary grace of form or the transient gladness of colour, but the 

whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of thought. The paint er is so far 

limited that it is only through the mask of the body that he can show us the 

mystery of the soul; only through conventional images that he can handle 

ideas; only through its physical equivalents that he can deal with psychology. 

And how inadequately does he do it then, asking us to accept the torn turban 

of the Moor for the noble rage of Othello, or a dotard in a storm for the wild 

madness of Lear! Yet it seems as if nothing could stop him. Most of our 

el der ly En glish paint ers spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching 

upon the domain of the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, 

and striving to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is invisible, 

the splendour of what is not seen. Their pictures are, as a natural consequence, 

insufferably tedious. They have degraded the visible arts into the 

obvious arts, and the one thing not worth looking at is the obvious. I do not 

say that poet and paint er may not treat of the same subject. They have always 

done so, and will always do so. But while the poet can be pictorial or not, as 

he chooses, the paint er must be pictorial always. For a paint er is limited, not 

to what he sees in nature, but to what upon canvas may be seen. 

And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really fascinate the 

critic. He will turn from them to such works as make him brood and dream 

and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion, and seem to


tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider world. It is sometimes 

said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that he cannot realise his ideal. 

But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise 

their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its 

wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal 

that is other than itself. This is the reason why music is the perfect type of 

art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the explanation 

of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative 

colour, and the paint er the actual dimensions of form, because by such 

renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a pre sen ta tion of the Real, 

which would be mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, 

which would be too purely intellectual. It is through its very incompleteness 

that Art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty 

of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the æsthetic sense 

alone, which, while accepting both reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, 

subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work 

of art as a whole, and, taking what ever alien emotional elements the work 

may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity 

may be added to the ultimate impression itself. You see, then, how it is that 

the æsthetic critic rejects those obvious modes of art that have but one message 

to deliver, and having delivered it becomes dumb and sterile, and seeks 

rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their imaginative 

beauty make all interpretations true and no interpretation final. Some resemblance, 

no doubt, the creative work of the critic will have to the work that has 

stirred him to creation, but it will be such resemblance as exists, not between 

Nature and the mirror that the paint er of landscape or figure may be supposed 

to hold up to her, but between Nature and the work of the decorative 

artist. Just as on the flowerless carpets of Persia, tulip and rose blossom 

indeed, and are lovely to look on, though they are not reproduced in visible 

shape or line; just as the pearl and purple of the seashell is echoed in the 

church of St. Mark at Venice; just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel 

of Ravenna 7 is made gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the 

peacock’s tail, though the birds of Juno 8 fly not across it; so the critic reproduces 

the work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of 

whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows 

us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of Beauty, and, by 

transforming each art into literature, solves once for all the problem of Art’s 

unity. 

* * * 

From Part 2 

* * * 

Ernest. * * * You have told me that the highest criticism deals with art, not as 

expressive, but as impressive purely, and is, consequently, both creative 

and in de pen dent; is, in fact, an art by itself, occupying the same relation 

to creative work that creative work does to the visible world of form and 

7. City in north central Italy, known for its Roman 

and Byzantine buildings, tombs (including that of 

the poet dante alighieri), and mosaics. 

8. That is, peacocks (associated with Juno, the 

queen of the Roman gods).


colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought. Well, now tell me, 

will not the critic be sometimes a real interpreter? 

Gilbert. Yes; the critic will be an interpreter, if he chooses. He can pass 

from his sympathetic impression of the work of art as a whole, to an analysis 

or exposition of the work itself, and in this lower sphere, as I hold it to be, 

there are many delightful things to be said and done. Yet his object will not 

always be to explain the work of art. He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, 

to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is dear 

to both gods and worshippers alike. Ordinary people are “terribly at ease 

in Zion.” 9 They propose to walk arm in arm with the poets, and have a glib, 

ignorant way of saying, “Why should we read what is written about Shakespeare 

and Milton? We can read the plays and the poems. That is enough.” 

But an appreciation of Milton is, as the late Rector of Lincoln 1 remarked 

once, the reward of consummate scholarship. And he who desires to understand 

Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which Shakespeare 

stood to the Re nais sance and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth 

and the age of James; 2 he must be familiar with the history of the struggle 

for supremacy between the old classical forms and the new spirit of romance, 

between the school of Sidney, and Daniel, and Jonson, and the school of 

Marlowe 3 and Marlowe’s greater son; he must know the materials that were 

at Shakespeare’s disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the 

conditions of theatric pre sen ta tion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 

their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the literary 

criticism of Shakespeare’s day, its aims and modes and canons; he must 

study the En glish language in its progress, and blank or rhymed verse in its 

various developments; he must study the Greek drama, and the connection 

between the art of the creator of the Agamemnon 4 and the art of the creator 

of Macbeth; in a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the 

Athens of Pericles, 5 and to learn Shakespeare’s true position in the history 

of Eu ro pe an drama and the drama of the world. The critic will certainly be 

an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow 

secret may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are wounded and who 

knows not his name. 6 Rather, he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery 

it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make 

more marvellous in the eyes of men. 

And here, Ernest, this strange thing happens. The critic will, indeed, be an 

interpreter, but he will not be an interpreter in the sense of one who simply 

repeats in another form a message that has been put into his lips to say. For, 

9. In a passage in Culture and Anarchy (1868, 

1869), Matthew Arnold quotes a remark by the 

Scottish- born essayist and historian Thomas 

Carlyle (1795– 1881) on the difference between 

Hellenism and Hebraism: “Socrates is terribly at 

ease in Zion.” 

1. Mark Pattison (1813– 1884), En glish scholar 

whose works include a book on John Milton 

(1879); he was elected rector of Lincoln College, 

Oxford University, in 1861. 

2. James I (1566– 1625) reigned 1603– 25, after 

the death of Elizabeth I. 

3. Christopher Marlowe (1564– 1593), En glish 

poet and dramatist. sir philip sidney (1554– 1586), 

En glish poet, politician, and soldier. Samuel Daniel 

(1562– 1619), En glish poet and historian. Ben 

Jonson (1572– 1637), En glish poet and dramatist. 

4. Agamemnon (458 b.c.e.) is the first play in the 

Oresteia trilogy of Aeschylus. 

5. Great Athenian statesman, military leader, and 

famous patron of the arts (ca. 495– 429 b.c.e.). 

6. The parents of Oedipus (literally, “swollen 

foot”) left their newborn son— his feet pierced 

and bound together— on a mountainside to die. 

He grew up to solve the Sphinx’s riddle and fulfill 

the prophecy they had hoped to avert by his death 

(that he would kill his father). His story is told in 

the Iliad and in many Greek dramas, most notably 

Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (ca. 430 b.c.e.).


just as it is only by contact with the art of foreign nations that the art of a 

country gains that individual and separate life that we call nationality, so, by 

curious inversion, it is only by intensifying his own personality that the 

critic can interpret the personality and work of others, and the more strongly 

this personality enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation 

becomes, the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true. 

Ernest. I would have said that personality would have been a disturbing 

element. 

Gilbert. No; it is an element of revelation. If you wish to understand others 

you must intensify your own individualism. 

Ernest. What, then, is the result? 

Gilbert. I will tell you, and perhaps I can tell you best by definite example. 

It seems to me that, while the literary critic stands, of course, first, as having 

the wider range, and larger vision, and nobler material, each of the arts has a 

critic, as it were, assigned to it. The actor is a critic of the drama. He shows 

the poet’s work under new conditions, and by a method special to himself. He 

takes the written word, and action, gesture, and voice become the media 

of revelation. The singer, or the player on lute and viol, is the critic of music. 

The etcher of a picture robs the painting of its fair colours, but shows us by 

the use of a new material its true colour- quality, its tones and values, and the 

relations of its masses, and so is, in his way, a critic of it, for the critic is he 

who exhibits to us a work of art in a form different from that of the work 

itself, and the employment of a new material is a critical as well as a creative 

element. Sculpture, too, has its critic, who may be either the carver of a gem, 

as he was in Greek days, or some paint er like Mantegna, 7 who sought to 

reproduce on canvas the beauty of plastic line and the symphonic dignity of 

pro cessional bas- relief. And in the case of all these creative critics of art it is 

evident that personality is an absolute essential for any real interpretation. 

When Rubinstein plays to us the Sonata Appassionata 8 of Beethoven, he 

gives us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven 

absolutely— Beethoven reinterpreted through a rich artistic nature, and made 

vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality. When a great 

actor plays Shakespeare we have the same experience. His own individuality 

becomes a vital part of the interpretation. People sometimes say that actors 

give us their own Hamlets, and not Shakespeare’s; and this fallacy— for it is a 

fallacy— is, I regret to say, repeated by that charming and graceful writer who 

has lately deserted the turmoil of literature for the peace of the House of 

Commons— I mean the author of Obiter Dicta. 9 In point of fact, there is no 

such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. If Hamlet has something of the definiteness 

of a work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life. 

There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies. 

Ernest. As many Hamlets as there are melancholies? 

Gilbert. Yes: and as art springs from personality, so it is only to personality 

that it can be revealed, and from the meeting of the two comes right 

interpretative criticism. 

7. Andrea Mantegna (1431– 1506), northern Italian 

paint er and engraver, known for his mastery 

of perspective and compositional techniques. 

8. Piano Sonata in F Minor, opus 57 (1805), by 

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770– 1827). Anton 

Rubinstein (1829– 1894), famous Rus sian pianist. 

9. Augustine Birrell (1850– 1933), En glish writer 

and politician; Obiter Dicta was published in 3 

vols. (1884, 1887, 1924).


Ernest. The critic, then, considered as the interpreter, will give no less 

than he receives, and lend as much as he borrows? 

Gilbert. He will be always showing us the work of art in some new relation 

to our age. He will always be reminding us that great works of art are 

living things— are, in fact, the only things that live. So much, indeed, will 

he feel this, that I am certain that, as civilisation progresses and we become 

more highly organised, the elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured 

spirits, will grow less and less interested in actual life, and will seek to gain 

their impressions almost entirely from what Art has touched. For Life is terribly 

deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong 

people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem 

to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it. 

Things last either too long, or not long enough. 

* * * 

Ernest. But where in this is the function of the critical spirit? 

Gilbert. The culture that this transmission of racial experiences 1 makes 

possible can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone, and indeed may be 

said to be one with it. For who is the true critic but he who bears within 

himself the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of myriad generations, and to 

whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure? And who 

the true man of culture, if not he who by fine scholarship and fastidious 

rejection has made instinct selfconscious and intelligent, and can separate 

the work that has distinction from the work that has it not, and so by contact 

and comparison makes himself master of the secrets of style and school, and 

understands their meanings, and listens to their voices, and develops that 

spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the real root, as it is the real flower, 

of the intellectual life, and thus attains to intellectual clarity; and, having 

learned “the best that is known and thought in the world,” lives it— is not 

fanciful to say so— with those who are the Immortals? 

Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not doing 

but being, and not being merely, but becoming— that is what the critical spirit 

can give us. The gods live thus: either brooding over their own perfection, as 

Aristotle tells us, or, as Epicurus 2 fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the 

spectator the tragi- comedy of the world that they have made. We, too, might 

live like them, and set ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions the 

varied scenes that man and nature afford. We might make ourselves spiritual 

by detaching ourselves from action, and become perfect by the rejection 

of energy. It has often seemed to me that Browning 3 felt something of 

this. Shakespeare hurls Hamlet into active life, and makes him realise his 

mission by effort. Browning might have given us a Hamlet who would have 

realised his mission by thought. Incident and event were to him unreal or 

unmeaning. He made the soul the protagonist of life’s tragedy, and looked 

on action as the one undramatic element of a play. To us, at any rate, the 

BIOΣ ΘEΩPHTIKOΣ 4 is the true ideal. From the high tower of Thought 

1. That is, the experiences of a tribe, nation, or 

people, regarded as forming a distinct ethnic stock 

or group. 

2. Greek phi los o pher (341– 270 b.c.e.), whose 

teachings emphasize gaining happiness through 

self- restraint, moderation, and detachment. Aristotle: 

see Metaphysics 12.7, 9. 

3. Robert Browning (1812– 1889), En glish poet. 

4. Bios theoretikos: contemplative life (Greek).

SIGMUND FREUD / 807 

we can look out at the world. Calm, and self- centred, and complete, the 

æsthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can 

pierce between the joints of his harness. He at least is safe. He has discovered 

how to live. 

Is such a mode of life immoral? Yes: all the arts are immoral, except those 

baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek to excite to action of evil or of 

good. For action of every kind belongs to the sphere of ethics. The aim of art 

is simply to create a mood. Is such a mode of life unpractical? Ah! it is not so 

easy to be unpractical as the ignorant Philistine 5 imagines. It were well for 

En gland if it were so. There is no country in the world so much in need of 

unpractical people as this country of ours. With us, Thought is degraded by 

its constant association with practice. Who that moves in the stress and turmoil 

of actual existence, noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor, 

narrow- minded priest, blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant section 

of the community among whom he has cast his lot, can seriously claim to 

be able to form a disinterested intellectual judgment about any one thing? 

Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces 

every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the undereducated; 

the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely 

stupid. And, harsh though it may sound, I cannot help saying that such 

people deserve their doom. The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to 

try to make oneself useful. 

Ernest. A charming doctrine, Gilbert. 

Gilbert. I am not sure about that, but it has at least the minor merit of 

being true. 

* * * 

1890, 1891 

5. A member of a biblical people who waged war 

against the Israelites. Matthew Arnold applies the 

name in Culture and Anarchy to the complacent 

materialist middle classes, indifferent or antagonistic 

to artistic and cultural values. 

SIGMUND FREUD 

1856–1939 

It is hard to imagine the twentieth century without Sigmund Freud. Along with 

Charles Darwin (1809– 1882), karl marx (1818– 1883), and Albert Einstein (1879– 

1955), he helped revolutionize the modern Western conception of human life and its 

place in the universe. For Freud, human reason was not master in its own house but 

a precarious defense mechanism struggling against, and often motivated by, unconscious 

desires and forces. His theory and practice of psychoanalysis have changed 

the way people think about themselves today, whether they are aware of it or not. At 

the same time, psychoanalysis has been controversial from the beginning because, 

unlike experimental science, it cannot be adequately tested, falsified, or objectified. 

It aims higher than— or falls short of— objective verifiability because it is a study of 

the very limits of objectivity itself. The impossibility of separating psychoanalysis

808 / SIGMUND FREUD 

from the biography of its found er has been used to discredit it, but in fact Freud’s 

writings signal a significant change in the relation between autobiography and 

thought. They make visible in new ways the narrative challenges involved in telling 

the story of a life— one’s own in par tic u lar. Freud’s attention to language may help 

explain why his writings have grown in importance for literary scholars at the same 

time that they are increasingly criticized for diverging from the protocols of science. 

Yet perhaps it is also in large part because his writings exist at the limits of both literature 

and science that Freud continues to fascinate us. 

Freud was born in Moravia (in what is now the Czech Republic), the first of seven 

children, to poor Jewish parents. His young mother, Amalia, was his father Jacob’s 

third wife. The Freuds moved to Vienna in 1860, where Sigmund obtained all his 

education (with the exception of a few months in Paris). Although psychoanalysis 

today is associated with the “talking cure” and the theory of infantile sexuality, 

Freud began his career as a clinical neurologist, obtaining his medical degree in 

1881. He entered the University of Vienna in 1873, at a time when Jews, who had 

moved to liberal Vienna in sizable numbers, were already being scapegoated for 

Austria’s economic problems. Freud, in his Autobiographical Study (1925), attributed 

his in de pen dence of mind to his position just outside the “compact majority” 

(Henrik Ibsen’s phrase) of German gentile culture, which he nevertheless also 

shared. When Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Freud left Vienna reluctantly 

and under duress. In his lifetime, social liberalism had given way to the most 

virulent anti- Semitism—a sad confirmation of his warning against taking any 

notion of the progress of civilization for granted. 

While working to obtain his medical degree, Freud was distracted by his broad 

interests in research. Among other subjects, he became fascinated by the account 

given by the respected physician Josef Breuer of the treatment of a particularly intelligent 

hysterical patient. “Anna O.” invented the term “talking cure”; she is often 

considered the first patient of psychoanalysis, although Freud himself never treated 

her. Fifteen years later, Freud and Breuer would write Studies on Hysteria (1895) 

about this and later cases. In the meantime Freud met Martha Bernays, the woman 

he hoped would become his wife, and went to Paris. Too poor to marry, he progressed 

in his profession by getting a small grant to work at the famous Salpêtrière 

mental hospital under the supervision of the medical showman and great specialist 

in hysteria Jean- Martin Charcot. In 1886 he returned to Vienna, opened his medical 

practice, and married Martha; they had six children (three girls and three boys). 

From 1891 onward, the Freuds lived at Berggasse 19, where Sigmund set up his 

famous consulting room. 

In the years leading up to his groundbreaking Interpretation of Dreams (1900), 

Freud began a formative and intellectually wide- ranging correspondence with Wilhelm 

Fliess, an ear, nose, and throat specialist from Berlin. In his practice, Freud 

gradually abandoned the hypnotic treatments for hysteria recommended by Charcot, 

substituting instead a form of dialogue between patient and doctor. At first convinced 

that many of his patients had suffered sexual abuse (or “seduction”) by their 

fathers in childhood, he later came to realize that some of his patients’ tales of sexual 

events were fantasies. The death in 1896 of Freud’s own father perhaps increased 

his unwillingness to believe in paternal guilt. What he called the “abandonment of 

the seduction theory” has become controversial in recent de cades (largely because 

of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s 1984 book, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression 

of the Seduction Theory), criticized as an abandonment of the realities of childhood 

sexual abuse. But the shift was not first and foremost a denial of the reality of incest; 

Freud saw in fantasies of incest a psychic reality, and an infantile sexuality, that had 

to be taken seriously in itself. In his move from realities of fact to realities of fantasy, 

however, Freud changed the sex of the representative subject: in his new theory of 

unconscious desire (the “Oedipus complex”), he substituted the desiring son for the 

abused daughter, the desirable mother for the guilty father. The father, in his


account, was no longer a lawbreaker but a lawgiver: the enforcer of the law prohibiting 

incest between the son and the mother. 

In order to gather evidence of the existence of unconscious forces at work in 

everyday life, Freud turned to psychological phenomena that were at once recognized 

and disregarded. His first three books—The Interpretation of Dreams, The 

Psychopathology of Everyday Life (published in a journal in 1901 and as a book in 

1904), and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905)— lay out the analytical 

strategies that would inform the betterknown Three Essays in the Theory of 

Sexuality (1905). His theory would have been impossible without the meticulous 

study of the discredited forms of knowledge revealed by dreams, slips of the tongue, 

memory lapses, and jokes. 

Freud continued seeing patients and published several extensive and now famous 

case studies—Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (better known as “Dora,” 

1905), “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five- Year- Old Boy” (“Little Hans,” 1909), “Notes 

Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis” (“Rat Man,” 1909), “Psycho- Analytic Notes 

on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia” (“Schreber,” 1911), and From 

the History of an Infantile Neurosis (“Wolf Man,” written 1914 and published 1918). 

Each attempts to come to terms with a difficult psychoanalytic but also narrative 

challenge: for example, Dora left treatment before Freud was finished with her, and 

his later footnotes allude to oversights in his understanding; Wolf Man’s childhood 

neurosis could be analyzed only through the screen of adult constructions; and 

Schreber was analyzed not as Freud’s patient but as the author of an autobiography. 

Freud’s case histories offer a fascinating hybrid of certainty, doubt, and inner 

debate. 

In addition to his research and his practice, Freud, at the suggestion of a disciple, 

founded the Psychological Wednesday Society (later transformed into the Vienna 

Psychoanalytic Society) in 1902. He traveled to the United States in 1909 to lecture 

and receive an honorary degree from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, 

accompanied by his younger colleagues Carl G. Jung and Sandor Ferenczi 

(lectures subsequently published as Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1910). The 

tensions— theoretical, personal, and institutional— between Freud and Jung were 

already growing; by the end of 1912, the two had essentially stopped speaking to 

each other. Freud took his revenge on his wayward disciples in his polemical “History 

of the Psycho- Analytic Movement” (1914). He also published a new series of 

lectures and a number of papers on psychoanalytic technique. 

When World War I began Freud’s three sons volunteered for the army, but he grew 

more and more critical of war as a solution to human problems. (Later, at the request 

of the League of Nations, Freud would collaborate with Albert Einstein in writing 

Why War? [1933].) The war deeply affected his thought, already in a new phase with 

the publication of his celebrated essay on narcissism in 1914. Traumatic neuroses 

seemed to put in question the dominance in psychic life of the “plea sure principle” 

that he had posited as the motive force of dreams. Even children’s games sometimes 

seemed to give greater weight to the pro cess of repetition itself than to the pleas urable 

thing repeated. It was at this time that Freud wrote his essay “The ‘Uncanny’ ” 

(1919) and the longer Beyond the Plea sure Principle (1920). A sense of strangeness, of 

genuinely enigmatic forces, pervades his theory of the “death instinct” and the “repetition 

compulsion.” But perhaps this strangeness was also a way of reconnecting 

with the strangeness of his original discoveries, which had grown quite familiar. The 

theoretical gains from this period are formulated in The Ego and the Id (1923). (The 

famous Latin names for the almost allegorical parts of the self— ego, id, superego— 

were bestowed by translators; Freud himself used German terms meaning “I,” “it,” 

and “over- I.”) 

In the 1920s Freud wrote about larger cultural forces and structures (Group Psychology 

and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921; The Future of an Illusion, 1927; and Civilization 

and Its Discontents, 1929), provided major reformulations of his theory, and


turned his attention to the problem of sexual difference. His paper “Some Psychical 

Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (1925) began to 

explore the question of “castration” in a new way. When children observe that some 

people have penises and others do not, he asserted, they assume that everyone must 

at first have had one, and that in some people it had been cut off. This encounter 

with the fact of difference is more satisfying to the little boy than to the little girl. 

But the “psychic consequences” are far- reaching: the boy takes seriously the father’s 

threat of castration as the punishment for incest, thus experiencing “castration 

anxiety,” while the girl tries to deal with her “inferiority,” thus feeling “penis envy.” 

In later essays— especially “Female Sexuality” (1931) and “Femininity” (1932)— Freud 

attempted to make sense of the desires his theory allotted to women. Feminists have 

treated his theories with ambivalence: on the one hand, he had the merit of describing 

human sexuality as a question, not a given; on the other hand, his phrase “anatomy 

is destiny” seems in the final analysis to uphold the sexual certainties he 

himself questioned. 

The lectures Freud wrote that include “Femininity” were never meant to be delivered; 

a series of operations for mouth cancer (beginning in 1923) had left him 

unable to perform in public. The po liti cal situation was also worrisome: Adolf Hitler 

had been appointed chancellor of Germany, and the Nazi Party was in control. 

Freud’s books were among those burned in Berlin. His last book, Moses and Monothe 

ism, was not completed until his own “exodus” to En gland in 1938. In London in 

1939, his cancer worsening, Freud officially closed his practice; and, just after the 

Germans invaded Poland and after France and Britain declared war on Germany, 

Freud asked his physician to give him a lethal dose of morphine. He died in September 

of that year. 

How did Freud practice interpretation, then, and how did his theory transform it? 

Although the details of each individual dream are par tic u lar to the dreamer, there 

are, says Freud, some dreams that occur widely and point to the existence of universal 

desires. Incest and its prohibition— the universal break between nature and culture, 

according to anthropologists— form the core of Freud’s theory of unconscious 

desire. In our first selection from The Interpretation of Dreams, he turns to the same 

literary text as aristotle for a version of the fundamental human plot: Sophocles’ 

Oedipus Rex. Warned by an oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother, 

Oedipus leaves home in order to escape his fate, only to kill a man and marry a 

woman who turn out to be the very biological parents who had abandoned him as an 

infant in order to thwart the same oracle. Literature thus exists for Freud as a form 

of evidence: the play’s centuries- long hold over the attention of viewers must correspond 

to its depiction of something universally fascinating and repressed. The truth 

told by the oracle corresponds to unconscious desire, fulfilling itself despite— or 

perhaps because of— every conscious effort to escape it. The plot of Sophocles’ play 

also furnishes a parallel to the plot of an analysis: a patient’s re sis tance to unconscious 

knowledge is like Oedipus’s reluctance to learn his true identity. Freud goes 

on to discuss the relation between Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s Hamlet— both in 

terms of the incest taboo. In answer to the question “Why does Hamlet delay his 

revenge for his father’s death?” Freud replies, “Because his uncle has only carried 

out a murder that he himself wanted to accomplish.” In a few short pages, Freud 

thus revolutionized the reading of two major canonical texts of Western culture and 

placed the world of the imagination at the center of human subjectivity. 

Freud’s attention to new modes of meaning has been im mensely suggestive for 

literary studies. While the relation between literature and dreams has often been 

noted, as in the ancient work of Macrobius (b. ca. 360 c.e.), Freud pursues the connection 

beyond the realm of general symbolism to lay out a kind of rhetoric of everyday 

dreams. In our second selection, on the dreamwork, he writes that dreams are 

not nonsensical but meaningful. They are composites made out of the residues of 

individual lives chosen by the unconscious to represent the fulfilment of a wish: no


simple “key” can decode them. Only the dreamer can provide a set of associations to 

illuminate the “dreamthoughts” behind the dream. Beneath the composite surface, 

which functions like a puzzle, lies the wish, the puzzle’s solution. The dreamthoughts 

function like a “latent content” behind the “manifest content” of the dream. 

Distortion and disguise fill dreams— or literary texts— because the unconscious 

wish is in some way unacceptable and must evade censorship. Dreams have three 

main sources of unavoidable distortion, he argues: condensation, displacement, and 

the needs of repre sen ta tion. These unconscious “primary pro cesses” are also subject 

to “secondary revision,” the editing to which a dream is subject if the dreamer tries 

to remember it on awakening. Freud’s description of the four rhetorical operations 

(“distortions”) performed by dreams has been productively extended to literary texts: 

while the role of secondary revision there is stronger and more complex, literary 

texts may provide access to forces that are not directly accessible in other ways. 

Freud often uses literary texts to illustrate or confirm his theory. His reading of a 

1903 novella by Wilhelm Jensen (Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen’s “Gradiva,” 

1907) aims to ratify his theory of dreams; “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” 

(1908) expands on his description of fantasy life; in “The Theme of the Three Caskets” 

(1913), he turns again to Shakespeare; and in numerous other short essays 

and notes Freud focuses directly on literature or art. But some of the most explicit 

literary demonstrations function as “secondary revisions” of the theory itself, eliding 

the role of literature in forming central concepts (the Oedipus complex, narcissism, 

etc.). For Freud, it is always as if a bourgeois drama is playing on the conscious 

stage of the psyche, while a Greek tragedy is going on somewhere else. 

Freud’s celebrated essay “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” our third selection, offers both a literary 

application and a new theoretical direction. It contains an extensive analysis of 

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” (1816), in which a young man, 

Nathaniel, traumatized by the mysterious death of his father, falls in love with a 

wooden doll, Olympia, in preference to his flesh- and- blood sweetheart. Freud 

argues that what is uncanny about the story is related not to intellectual uncertainty 

about whether the doll is alive (as an article by Ernst Jentsch had speculated), 

but to anxiety about the cause of Nathaniel’s father’s death. When Nathaniel 

encounters Coppola, an optician, he thinks he recognizes Coppelius, a lawyer, 

whom he believes to have caused his father’s death and who is conflated in his mind 

with the Sandman— a storybook figure who takes the eyes of little children who 

won’t go to bed. These threats to the eyes are connected in Freud’s mind to the 

castration complex (Oedipus had blinded himself on learning that he had fulfilled 

the prophecy). The uncanny return of these figures (the Sandman, Coppelius, Coppola) 

is also related to Freud’s new sense of the “repetition compulsion.” Dolls and 

inanimate objects, which for Freud are not uncanny in the story, nevertheless 

return to haunt the essay’s discussion of “the omnipotence of thoughts” and of the 

supposedly surmounted childhood belief in animism. 

Freud begins his discussion with the characteristics of the word uncanny, extensively 

documented through citations from a dictionary. The German unheimlich 

(unhomelike, uncanny) turns out to share a meaning with its apparent opposite. 

Heimlich (homey, familiar) can also mean “concealed, secret,” and thus the opposite 

of the familiar and open. This pro cess of estrangement of the familiar (of the 

“home”) is exactly the same as the pro cess of repression. The fear of being buried 

alive, for example, is a distorted desire to return to the mother’s womb— the “home” 

of all humanity. The German term gives a clue to a pro cess that psychoanalysis 

tries to understand more generally. Freud expresses astonishment that other languages 

lack the equivalent of what in German is such a handy word. But if all languages 

had the same pro cess in the same place, that pro cess would become a 

theme, a topic, and thus belong to conscious, rather than unconscious, knowledge. 

The essay also addresses “aesthetics” more generally, as its first sentence announces. 

Indeed, it investigates what analyses of the “beautiful” and the “sublime” leave out:


the disturbing, the unsettling, the uncomfortable. Freud’s essay itself is far from 

beautiful: it wanders from topic to topic, it quotes others at great length, it places 

major points in footnotes, and, in general, it seems sewn together from mismatched 

parts. Hence, we have edited an already poorly sutured text. Yet “The ‘Uncanny’ ” 

offers the reader an opportunity to follow the pro cess, and not just the result, of 

Freud’s thinking. Indeed, that the essay lacks “organic” form, so that readers tend to 

get lost in it, contributes powerfully to its own uncanny effect. In recent years, partly 

as a result of Freud’s essay, critics have devoted increasing attention to the Gothic in 

literature and to elements Freud associates with the uncanny— unexpected doubles, 

severed limbs, bodies buried alive, the return of the dead, magical thinking. Freud’s 

reading of Hoffmann’s story allows him to touch many theoretical bases that he, 

unlike many others, feels comfortable with— unacceptable authorial desires, castration 

anxieties, homosexual fantasies. But Freud’s essay itself also makes readable the 

per sis tence of questions he dismisses, and it vividly reveals, in its wandering way, his 

fascination with what is escaping his grasp. 

Freud’s short essay titled “Fetishism” (1927), our final selection, builds on his 

analysis of the consequences of sexual difference. Certain men, he claims, cannot 

accept the evidence that the woman (the mother) doesn’t have a penis. In order to 

fall in love with women and not become homosexual, they choose as a substitute 

some object that will continue to support the sexual interest they originally had in 

the missing maternal penis. The logic of fetishism thus involves both perceiving 

and denying the evidence of maternal “castration.” In a very different way, the 

same logic of denial and displacement underlies Karl Marx’s theory of “the fetishism 

of the commodity” (Capital, vol. 1, 1867; see above). There, the commodity 

itself appears to contain the value that is really produced by the pro cesses of labor 

invisible behind it. Here, the substitute (foot, velvet, hair, etc.) appears to function 

like a sexual organ. In both cases there is a “gleam” around the fetish that attracts 

desire (sexual or commercial), as if the fetish actually contained the values that it 

represents. 

Freud’s analyses have had a fundamental impact on what we now understand as 

literary theory, influencing virtually every twentiethcentury critic. On the one 

hand, Freud’s radical new view of subjectivity has deeply affected the analysis of 

characters, authors, and readers, enabling a new understanding of split, hidden, or 

contradictory desires and intentions. On the other hand, for Freud literature is not 

just an illustration but also a source and authority for understanding those desires 

and intentions in the first place. 

Perhaps more profoundly, Freud changed the nature of attentiveness itself. It was 

in listening to patients differently that Freud discovered the unconscious— a force 

of otherness as powerful as, but in no way equivalent to, a god. Inside every person, 

he said, there was something transmitting scrambled messages in a cryptic language, 

trying to break through the conscious surface of life. The “other” was in 

ourselves— indeed, it was ourselves. Despite the limitations of Freud’s middleclass 

Viennese patriarchal assumptions, his conception of a human subjectivity fundamentally 

at odds with itself opened up possibilities he never dreamed of. Each person’s 

life was documented in more than one way: official personal history (conscious 

remembrance and self- image) and unofficial personal history (the record of changes, 

traumas, desires, anxieties, and associations that might never have been conscious). 

Unconscious history contained impossible or forbidden wishes, repressed from the 

official record or simply outgrown— wishes that remained active in the unconscious 

and sought expression in dreams, mistakes, jokes, myths, and other discredited or 

discounted forms of communication. Psychoanalysis is the name for the theory and 

practice of their interpretation, and literary theory continues to derive inspiration 

from the psychoanalytic engagement with the most canonical as well as the most 

uncanonical of texts.


bibliography 

The En glish translation of Freud’s collected works, carried out under the direction 

of James Strachey for Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, has become in 

many ways more authoritative than any collected works in German. This Standard 

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 vols., 1953– 74) 

is thus the edition most often cited. A handy collection of Freud’s literary and artistic 

essays was edited by Neil Hertz in 1997 under the title Writings on Art and Literature. 

For more general purposes, see Peter Gay’s Freud Reader (1989) and 

Elisabeth Young- Bruehl’s Freud on Women (1990). Many volumes of Freud’s copious 

correspondence (he never left a letter unanswered) have also been published. A 

monumental three- volume biography, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, was 

published by Ernest Jones, who knew Freud well (1953– 57; abridged into one volume, 

1961). Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988) by Peter Gay is excellent; his invaluable 

bibliographical essays appended to each chapter delineate all the major debates. 

In Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision (2000), the psychoanalyst Louis Breger 

engages with Freud and his work in unexpected and new ways. For an intriguing 

study of Freud’s final years in London and how he was affected by the rise of totalitarian 

figures like Hitler, see Mark Edmundson’s The Death of Sigmund Freud: The 

Legacy of His Last Days (2004). 

Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) and Peter Gay’s Reading 

Freud (1990) are good introductions, the latter more literary. See also Paul Ricoeur’s 

Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1970) and Steven Marcus’s Freud 

and the Culture of Psychoanalysis: Studies in the Transition from Victorian Humanism 

to Modernity (1984). For a collection of essays critical of Freud, see Unauthorized 

Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend, edited by Frederick C. Crews (1998). 

On the centrality of Freud to contemporary critical theory, see the works of 

Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. Related developments can be found in The 

Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will (1980), edited by Joseph 

H. Smith; Malcolm Bowie, Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory (1993), speculates 

about Freud’s continuing impact on discussions of art; while Freud and Forbidden 

Knowledge, edited by Peter L. Rudnytsky and Ellen Handler Spitz (1994), 

investigates the literary and religious sources of Freud’s concepts. See also Graham 

Frankland’s Freud’s Literary Culture (2000). 

For a good general approach to early feminist responses to Freud, see Juliet 

Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974). A related work by Lisa Appignanesi 

and John Forrester, Freud’s Women (1992), analyzes both the historical and the 

theoretical importance of femininity and of the many women who surrounded 

Freud as analysts and patients. Luce Irigaray, in Speculum of the Other Woman 

(1974; trans. 1985), and Sarah Kofman, in The Enigma of Woman (1980; trans. 

1985), revisit Freud’s writings on femininity from a French poststructuralist perspective. 

For a good overview of the intersection of Freud, feminism, and literary 

studies, see In Dora’s Case: Freud— Hysteria—Feminism, edited by Charles Bernheimer 

and Claire Kahane (2d ed., 1990). A fascinating compilation by Susan Stanford 

Friedman, Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle (2002), 

provides insight into Freud’s mind as well as the minds of the modernist woman 

writer H.D. and her correspondents. 

On Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, see Lawrence M. Porter, The Interpretation 

of Dreams: Freud’s Theories Revisited (1987); Alexander Welsh, Freud’s Wishful 

Dream Book (1994); Harvie Ferguson, The Lure of Dreams: Sigmund Freud and the 

Construction of Modernity (1996); and the collection of interdisciplinary essays 

edited by Laura Marcus, Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams”: New 

Interdisciplinary Essays (1999).


Two essays on Freud’s “Uncanny” deserve special note: Hélène Cixous, “Fiction 

and Its Phantoms,” New Literary History 7 (1976), and “Freud and the Sandman” by 

Neil Hertz, published in his study of the sublime, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis 

and the Sublime (1985). Contemporary literary studies have been greatly 

affected by Freud’s notion of the uncanny, from those focusing on the Re nais sance 

(Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality, 1984) 

to the Enlightenment (Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth- Century 

Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, 1995) to the posthuman Gothic (Judith 

Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, 1995). Julia 

Kristeva, in Strangers to Ourselves (1988; trans. 1991), applies the notion to po liti cal 

science, while Anthony Vidler, in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern 

Unhomely (1994), explores it in architecture. 

E. L. McCallum’s Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism (1999) offers 

a full- scale analysis of Freud’s notion. Two books attempt to combine the Freudian 

and the Marxian versions of fetishism: Slavoj ŽiŽek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology 

(1989) and Rachel Bowlby’s Shopping with Freud (1993). 

Much research deals with Freud’s Jewishness: Marthe Robert’s From Oedipus to 

Moses: Freud’s Jewish Identity (1974; trans. 1976) and Susan Handelman’s Slayers of 

Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (1982) 

give two early versions of this analysis, later taken in other directions by Sander 

Gilman in both Freud, Race, and Gender (1993) and The Case of Sigmund Freud: 

Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (1993). Jay Geller’s On Freud’s Jewish 

Body: Mitigating Circumcisions (2007) continues this trend. Diana Fuss’s Identification 

Papers (1995) reads Freud through the lenses of queer and postcolonial theory. 

Fuss also has written a superior comparative study of Freud’s interior life in The 

Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them (2004). 

The Cambridge Companion to Freud, edited by Jerome Neu (1991), is a useful 

resource. Among the bibliographies available in En glish, by far the best for the period 

up to 1988 is the bibliographical survey in Peter Gay’s biography. An excellent synthesis 

of subsequent bibliographic materials and resources is provided by Breyer’s biography 

cited above, Freud. 

From The Interpretation of Dreams 1 

From Chapter V. The Material and Sources of Dreams 

* * * 

[the oedipus complex] 

In my experience, which is already extensive, the chief part in the mental 

lives of all children who later become psychoneurotics is played by their parents. 

Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the 

essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed at 

that time and which is of such importance in determining the symptoms of 

the later neurosis. It is not my belief, however, that psychoneurotics differ 

sharply in this respect from other human beings who remain normal— that 

they are able, that is, to create something absolutely new and peculiar to 

themselves. It is far more probable— and this is confirmed by occasional 

observations on normal children— that they are only distinguished by exhibiting 

on a magnified scale feelings of love and hatred to their parents which 

occur less obviously and less intensely in the minds of most children. 

1. Translated by James Strachey. This standard edition incorporates later revisions made by Freud.

The Interpretation of Dreams / 815 

This discovery is confirmed by a legend that has come down to us from 

classical antiquity: a legend whose profound and universal power to move 

can only be understood if the hypothesis I have put forward in regard to the 

psychology of children has an equally universal validity. What I have in 

mind is the legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles’ 2 drama which bears his 

name. 

Oedipus, son of Laïus, King of Thebes, and of Jocasta, was exposed as an 

infant because an oracle had warned Laïus that the still unborn child 

would be his father’s murderer. The child was rescued, and grew up as a 

prince in an alien court, until, in doubts as to his origin, he too questioned 

the oracle and was warned to avoid his home since he was destined to murder 

his father and take his mother in marriage. On the road leading away 

from what he believed was his home, he met King Laïus and slew him in a 

sudden quarrel. He came next to Thebes and solved the riddle set him by 

the Sphinx 3 who barred his way. Out of gratitude the Thebans made him 

their king and gave him Jocasta’s hand in marriage. He reigned long in 

peace and honour, and she who, unknown to him, was his mother bore him 

two sons and two daughters. Then at last a plague broke out and the Thebans 

made enquiry once more of the oracle. It is at this point that Sophocles’ 

tragedy opens. The messengers bring back the reply that the plague 

will cease when the murderer of Laïus has been driven from the land. 

But he, where is he? Where shall now be read 

The fading record of this ancient guilt? 4 

The action of the play consists in nothing other than the pro cess of revealing, 

with cunning delays and ever- mounting excitement— a pro cess that can 

be likened to the work of a psychoanalysis— that Oedipus himself is the 

murderer of Laïus, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and 

of Jocasta. Appalled at the abomination which he has unwittingly perpetrated, 

Oedipus blinds himself and forsakes his home. The oracle has been 

fulfilled. 

Oedipus Rex is what is known as a tragedy of destiny. Its tragic effect is 

said to lie in the contrast between the supreme will of the gods and the vain 

attempts of mankind to escape the evil that threatens them. The lesson 

which, it is said, the deeply moved spectator should learn from the tragedy 

is submission to the divine will and realization of his own impotence. Modern 

dramatists have accordingly tried to achieve a similar tragic effect by 

weaving the same contrast into a plot invented by themselves. But the spectators 

have looked on unmoved while a curse or an oracle was fulfilled in 

spite of all the efforts of some innocent man: later tragedies of destiny have 

failed in their effect. 

If Oedipus Rex moves a modern audience no less than it did the contemporary 

Greek one, the explanation can only be that its effect does not lie in 

the contrast between destiny and human will, but is to be looked for in the 

par tic u lar nature of the material on which that contrast is exemplified. 

There must be something which makes a voice within us ready to recognize 

the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus, while we can dismiss as 

2. Greek tragic dramatist (ca. 496– 406 b.c.e.), 

author of Oedipus Rex (ca. 430). 

3. A monster with a woman’s face, lion’s body, and 

bird’s wings who killed travelers who could not 

answer her riddle; when Oedipus solved it, she 

killed herself. 

4. Lewis Campbell’s translation (1883), lines 108– 

9 [translator’s note].


merely arbitrary such dispositions as are laid down in [Grillparzer’s] Die 

Ahnfrau 5 or other modern tragedies of destiny. And a factor of this kind is 

in fact involved in the story of King Oedipus. His destiny moves us only 

because it might have been ours— because the oracle laid the same curse 

upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to 

direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and 

our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that 

that is so. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laïus and married his mother 

Jocasta, merely shows us the fulfilment of our own childhood wishes. But, 

more fortunate than he, we have meanwhile succeeded, in so far as we have 

not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our 

mothers and in forgetting our jealousy of our fathers. Here is one in whom 

these primaeval wishes of our childhood have been fulfilled, and we shrink 

back from him with the whole force of the repression by which those wishes 

have since that time been held down within us. While the poet, as he unravels 

the past, brings to light the guilt of Oedipus, he is at the same time compelling 

us to recognize our own inner minds, in which those same impulses, 

though suppressed, are still to be found. The contrast with which the closing 

Chorus leaves us confronted— 

. . . Fix on Oedipus your eyes, 

Who resolved the dark enigma, noblest champion and most wise. 

Like a star his envied fortune mounted beaming far and wide: 

Now he sinks in seas of anguish, whelmed beneath a raging tide . . . 6 

—strikes as a warning at ourselves and our pride, at us who since our childhood 

have grown so wise and so mighty in our own eyes. Like Oedipus, we 

live in ignorance of these wishes, repugnant to morality, which have been 

forced upon us by Nature, and after their revelation we may all of us well 

seek to close our eyes to the scenes of our childhood. 7 

There is an unmistakable indication in the text of Sophocles’ tragedy itself 

that the legend of Oedipus sprang from some primaeval dream- material 

which had as its content the distressing disturbance of a child’s relation to 

his parents owing to the first stirrings of sexuality. At a point when Oedipus, 

though he is not yet enlightened, has begun to feel troubled by his recollection 

of the oracle, Jocasta consoles him by referring to a dream which many 

people dream, though, as she thinks, it has no meaning: 

5. The Ancestress (1817), by the Austrian dramatist 

Franz Grillparzer. The play’s protagonist 

unknowingly falls in love with his sister and kills 

his father. 

6. Campbell’s translation, lines 1524– 27 [translator’s 

note]. 

7. [Footnote added 1914:] None of the findings of 

psychoanalytic research has provoked such embittered 

denials, such fierce opposition— or such 

amusing contortions— on the part of critics as this 

indication of the childhood impulses towards 

incest which persist in the unconscious. An 

attempt has even been made recently to make out, 

in the face of all experience, that the incest should 

only be taken as “symbolic.”— Ferenczi (“The Symbolic 

Repre sen ta tion of the Plea sure and Reality 

Principles in the Oedipus Myth,” 1912) has proposed 

an ingenious “over- interpretation” of the 

Oedipus myth, based on a passage in one of Schopenhauer’s 

letters.—[Added 1919:] Later studies 

have shown that the “Oedipus complex,” which 

was touched upon for the first time in the above 

paragraphs in the Interpretation of Dreams, throws 

a light of undreamt- of importance on the history 

of the human race and the evolution of religion 

and morality. (See my Totem and Taboo, 1912– 13 

[Essay IV].) [Freud’s note].—[Actually the gist of 

this discussion of the Oedipus complex and of the 

Oedipus Rex, as well as of what follows on the subject 

of Hamlet, had already been put forward by 

Freud in a letter to Fliess as early as October 15, 

1897. A still earlier hint at the discovery of the 

Oedipus complex was included in a letter of May 

31, 1897.— The actual term “Oedipus complex” 

seems to have been first used by Freud in his published 

writings in the first of his “Contributions to 

the Psychology of Love” (1910)— translator’s note.] 

Some of Freud’s later footnotes are omitted.


Many a man ere now in dreams hath lain 

With her who bare him. He hath least annoy 

Who with such omens troubleth not his mind. 8 

To- day, just as then, many men dream of having sexual relations with their 

mothers, and speak of the fact with indignation and astonishment. It is 

clearly the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the dreamer’s 

father being dead. The story of Oedipus is the reaction of the imagination 

to these two typical dreams. And just as these dreams, when dreamt by 

adults, are accompanied by feelings of repulsion, so too the legend must 

include horror and self- punishment. Its further modification originates once 

again in a misconceived secondary revision of the material, which has sought 

to exploit it for theological purposes. (Cf. the dream- material in dreams of 

exhibiting [discussed earlier].) The attempt to harmonize divine omnipotence 

with human responsibility must naturally fail in connection with this subjectmatter 

just as with any other. 

Another of the great creations of tragic poetry, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, has 

its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex. But the changed treatment of the 

same material reveals the whole difference in the mental life of these two 

widely separated epochs of civilization: the secular advance of repression in 

the emotional life of mankind. In the Oedipus the child’s wishful phantasy 

that underlies it is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a 

dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and— just as in the case of a neurosis— 

we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences. Strangely 

enough, the overwhelming effect produced by the more modern tragedy has 

turned out to be compatible with the fact that people have remained completely 

in the dark as to the hero’s character. The play is built up on Hamlet’s 

hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its 

text offers no reasons or motives for these hesitations and an im mense variety 

of attempts at interpreting them have failed to produce a result. According 

to the view which was originated by Goethe 9 and is still the prevailing 

one today, Hamlet represents the type of man whose power of direct action 

is paralysed by an excessive development of his intellect. (He is ‘sicklied o’er 

with the pale cast of thought’.) 1 According to another view, the dramatist has 

tried to portray a pathologically irresolute character which might be classed 

as neurasthenic. The plot of the drama shows us, however, that Hamlet is 

far from being represented as a person incapable of taking any action. We 

see him doing so on two occasions: first in a sudden outburst of temper, 

when he runs his sword through the eavesdropper behind the arras, and 

secondly in a premeditated and even crafty fashion, when, with all the callousness 

of a Re nais sance prince, he sends the two courtiers to the death 

that had been planned for himself. What is it, then, that inhibits him in 

fulfilling the task set him by his father’s ghost? The answer, once again, is 

that it is the peculiar nature of the task. Hamlet is able to do anything— 

except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took 

that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed 

8. Campbell’s translation, lines 982– 84 [translator’s 

note]. 

9. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749– 1832), 

German poet, playwright, and novelist. 

1. Hamlet (ca. 1600), 3.1.87.


wishes of his own childhood realized. Thus the loathing which should drive 

him on to revenge is replaced in him by self- reproaches, by scruples of conscience, 

which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner 

whom he is to punish. Here I have translated into conscious terms what 

was bound to remain unconscious in Hamlet’s mind; and if anyone is inclined 

to call him a hysteric, I can only accept the fact as one that is implied by my 

interpretation. The distaste for sexuality expressed by Hamlet in his conversation 

with Ophelia fits in very well with this: the same distaste which was 

destined to take possession of the poet’s mind more and more during the years 

that followed, and which reached its extreme expression in Timon of Athens. 

For it can of course only be the poet’s own mind which confronts us in Hamlet. 

I observe in a book on Shakespeare by Georg Brandes 2 (1896) a statement 

that Hamlet was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare’s father 

(in 1601), that is, under the immediate impact of his bereavement and, as we 

may well assume, while his childhood feelings about his father had been 

freshly revived. It is known, too, that Shakespeare’s own son who died at an 

early age bore the name of ‘Hamnet’, which is identical with ‘Hamlet’. Just as 

Hamlet deals with the relation of a son to his parents, so Macbeth (written at 

approximately the same period) is concerned with the subject of childlessness. 

But just as all neurotic symptoms, and, for that matter, dreams, are capable 

of being ‘over- interpreted’ and indeed need to be, if they are to be fully 

understood, so all genuinely creative writings are the product of more than 

a single motive and more than a single impulse in the poet’s mind, and are 

open to more than a single interpretation. In what I have written I have only 

attempted to interpret the deepest layer of impulses in the mind of the creative 

writer. 3 * * * 

From Chapter VI. The Dream- Work 

Every attempt that has hitherto been made to solve the problem of dreams 

has dealt directly with their manifest content as it is presented in our memory. 

All such attempts have endeavoured to arrive at an interpretation of dreams 

from their manifest content or (if no interpretation was attempted) to form 

a judgement as to their nature on the basis of that same manifest content. 

We are alone in taking something else into account. We have introduced a 

new class of psychical material between the manifest content of dreams and 

the conclusions of our enquiry: namely, their latent content, or (as we say) 

the ‘dreamthoughts’, arrived at by means of our procedure. It is from these 

dreamthoughts and not from a dream’s manifest content that we disentangle 

its meaning. We are thus presented with a new task which had no previous 

existence: the task, that is, of investigating the relations between the manifest 

content of dreams and the latent dreamthoughts, and of tracing out the 

pro cesses by which the latter have been changed into the former. 

2. Danish critic and scholar (1842– 1927); his 

William Shakespeare (1895– 96) was translated 

into German in 1896. 

3. [Footnote added 1919:] The above indications of 

a psychoanalytic explanation of Hamlet have 

since been amplified by Ernest Jones and defended 

against the alternative views put forward in the 

literature of the subject. (See Jones, Hamlet and 

Oedipus, 1910 [and, in a completer form, 1949].)— 

[Added 1930:] Incidentally, I have in the meantime 

ceased to believe that the author of Shakespeare’s 

works was the man from Stratford [Freud’s note].


The dreamthoughts and the dreamcontent are presented to us like two 

versions of the same subjectmatter in two different languages. Or, more 

properly, the dreamcontent seems like a transcript of the dreamthoughts 

into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is 

our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation. The 

dreamthoughts are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt 

them. The dreamcontent, on the other hand, is expressed as it were in a 

pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually 

into the language of the dreamthoughts. If we attempted to read these 

characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their 

symbolic relation, we should clearly be led into error. Suppose I have a 

picture- puzzle, a rebus, in front of me. It depicts a house with a boat on its 

roof, a single letter of the alphabet, the figure of a running man whose head 

has been conjured away, and so on. Now I might be misled into raising objections 

and declaring that the picture as a whole and its component parts are 

nonsensical. A boat has no business to be on the roof of a house, and a headless 

man cannot run. Moreover, the man is bigger than the house; and if the 

whole picture is intended to represent a landscape, letters of the alphabet are 

out of place in it since such objects do not occur in nature. But obviously we 

can only form a proper judgement of the rebus if we put aside criticisms such 

as these of the whole composition and its parts and if, instead, we try to 

replace each separate element by a syllable or word that can be represented 

by that element in some way or other. The words which are put together in 

this way are no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase of the 

greatest beauty and significance. A dream is a picture- puzzle of this sort and 

our pre de ces sors in the field of dream- interpretation have made the mistake 

of treating the rebus as a pictorial composition: and as such it has seemed to 

them nonsensical and worthless. 

(a). 

the work of condensation 

The first thing that becomes clear to anyone who compares the dreamcontent 

with the dreamthoughts is that a work of condensation on a large 

scale has been carried out. Dreams are brief, meagre and laconic in comparison 

with the range and wealth of the dreamthoughts. If a dream is 

written out it may perhaps fill half a page. The analysis setting out the 

dreamthoughts underlying it may occupy six, eight or a dozen times as much 

space. This relation varies with different dreams; but so far as my experience 

goes its direction never varies. As a rule one underestimates the amount of 

compression that has taken place, since one is inclined to regard the dreamthoughts 

that have been brought to light as the complete material, whereas if 

the work of interpretation is carried further it may reveal still more thoughts 

concealed behind the dream. I have already had occasion to point out that it 

is in fact never possible to be sure that a dream has been completely interpreted. 

Even if the solution seems satisfactory and without gaps, the possibility 

always remains that the dream may have yet another meaning. Strictly 

speaking, then, it is impossible to determine the amount of condensation. 

* * *


(b). 

the work of displacement 

* * * 

Among the thoughts that analysis brings to light are many which are relatively 

remote from the kernel of the dream and which look like artificial 

interpolations made for some par tic u lar purpose. That purpose is easy to 

divine. It is precisely they that constitute a connection, often a forced and 

far- fetched one, between the dreamcontent and the dreamthoughts; and if 

these elements were weeded out of the analysis the result would often be 

that the component parts of the dreamcontent would be left not only without 

overdetermination 4 but without any satisfactory determination at all. 

We shall be led to conclude that the multiple determination which decides 

what shall be included in a dream is not always a primary factor in dreamconstruction 

but is often the secondary product of a psychical force which 

is still unknown to us. Nevertheless multiple determination must be of 

importance in choosing what par tic u lar elements shall enter a dream, since 

we can see that a considerable expenditure of effort is used to bring it about 

in cases where it does not arise from the dream- material unassisted. 

It thus seems plausible to suppose that in the dreamwork a psychical force 

is operating which on the one hand strips the elements which have a high 

psychical value of their intensity, and on the other hand, by means of overdetermination, 

creates from elements of low psychical value new values, 

which afterwards find their way into the dreamcontent. If that is so, a transference 

5 and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the pro cess of 

dream- formation, and it is as a result of these that the difference between the 

text of the dreamcontent and that of the dreamthoughts comes about. The 

pro cess which we are here presuming is nothing less than the essential portion 

of the dreamwork; and it deserves to be described as ‘dream- displacement’. 

Dream- displacement and dream- condensation are the two governing factors 

to whose activity we may in essence ascribe the form assumed by dreams. 

Nor do I think we shall have any difficulty in recognizing the psychical 

force which manifests itself in the facts of dream- displacement. The consequence 

of the displacement is that the dreamcontent no longer resembles 

the core of the dreamthoughts and that the dream gives no more than a 

distortion of the dream- wish which exists in the unconscious. But we are 

already familiar with dream- distortion. We traced it back to the censorship 

which is exercised by one psychical agency in the mind over another. 

Dream- displacement is one of the chief methods by which that distortion is 

achieved. Is fecit cui profuit. 6 We may assume, then, that dream- displacement 

comes about through the influence of the same censorship— that is, the 

censorship of endopsychic defence. 

The question of the interplay of these factors— of displacement, condensation 

and overdetermination— in the construction of dreams, and the 

4. That is, multiple causal factors (a model for 

causality implying a network rather than the simply 

linear). 

5. A term that in psychoanalysis later comes to 

signify a displacement of psychical intensities 

from a person in the past to a person in the present 

(especially to the analyst, in the course of a treatment). 

6. The old legal tag: “He did the deed who gained 

by it” [(Latin); translator’s note].


question which is a dominant factor and which a subordinate one— all of 

this we shall leave aside for later investigation. But we can state provisionally 

a second condition which must be satisfied by those elements of the 

dreamthoughts which make their way into the dream: they must escape 

the censorship imposed by re sis tance. And henceforward in interpreting 

dreams we shall take dream- displacement into account as an undeniable 

fact. 

(c). 

the means of repre sen ta tion in dreams 

In the pro cess of transforming the latent thoughts into the manifest content 

of a dream we have found two factors at work: dream- condensation and 

dream- displacement. As we continue our investigation we shall, in addition 

to these, come across two further determinants which exercise an undoubted 

influence on the choice of the material which is to find access to the dream. 

* * * 

We are here interested only in the essential dreamthoughts. These usually 

emerge as a complex of thoughts and memories of the most intricate possible 

structure, with all the attributes of the trains of thought familiar to us 

in waking life. They are not infrequently trains of thought starting out from 

more than one centre, though having points of contact. Each train of 

thought is almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory counterpart, 

linked with it by antithetical association. 

The different portions of this complicated structure stand, of course, in 

the most manifold logical relations to one another. They can represent foreground 

and background, digressions and illustrations, conditions, chains of 

evidence and counter- arguments. When the whole mass of these dreamthoughts 

is brought under the pressure of the dreamwork, and its elements 

are turned about, broken into fragments and jammed together— almost like 

pack- ice—the question arises of what happens to the logical connections 

which have hitherto formed its framework. What repre sen ta tion do dreams 

provide for ‘if’, ‘because’, ‘just as’, ‘although’, ‘either— or’, and all the other 

conjunctions without which we cannot understand sentences or speeches? 

In the first resort our answer must be that dreams have no means at their 

disposal for representing these logical relations between the dreamthoughts. 

For the most part dreams disregard all these conjunctions, and it is only the 

substantive content of the dreamthoughts that they take over and manipulate. 

The restoration of the connections which the dreamwork has destroyed 

is a task which has to be performed by the interpretative pro cess. 

The incapacity of dreams to express these things must lie in the nature of 

the psychical material out of which dreams are made. The plastic arts of 

painting and sculpture labour, indeed, under a similar limitation as compared 

with poetry, which can make use of speech; and here once again the 

reason for their incapacity lies in the nature of the material which these two 

forms of art manipulate in their effort to express something. Before painting 

became acquainted with the laws of expression by which it is governed, it 

made attempts to get over this handicap. In ancient paintings small labels 

were hung from the mouths of the persons represented, containing in written


characters the speeches which the artist despaired of representing pictorially. 

At this point an objection may perhaps be raised in dispute of the idea that 

dreams are unable to represent logical relations. For there are dreams in 

which the most complicated intellectual operations take place, statements 

are contradicted or confirmed, ridiculed or compared, just as they are in waking 

thought. But here again appearances are deceitful. If we go into the interpretation 

of dreams such as these, we find that the whole of this is part of the 

material of the dreamthoughts and is not a repre sen ta tion of intellectual work 

performed during the dream itself. What is reproduced by the ostensible 

thinking in the dream is the subjectmatter of the dreamthoughts and not 

the mutual relations between them, the assertion of which constitutes thinking. 

I shall bring forward some instances of this. But the easiest point to 

establish in this connection is that all spoken sentences which occur in 

dreams and are specifically described as such are unmodified or slightly 

modified reproductions of speeches which are also to be found among the 

recollections in the material of the dreamthoughts. A speech of this kind is 

often no more than an allusion to some event included among the dreamthoughts, 

and the meaning of the dream may be a totally different one. 

* * * 

What means does the dreamwork possess for indicating these relations in 

the dreamthoughts which it is so hard to represent? I will attempt to enumerate 

them one by one. 

In the first place, dreams take into account in a general way the connection 

which undeniably exists between all the portions of the dreamthoughts 

by combining the whole material into a single situation or event. They 

reproduce logical connection by simultaneity in time. Here they are acting 

like the paint er who, in a picture of the School of Athens or of Parnassus, 7 

represents in one group all the phi los o phers or all the poets. It is true that 

they were never in fact assembled in a single hall or on a single mountaintop; 

but they certainly form a group in the conceptual sense. 

Dreams carry this method of reproduction down to details. Whenever 

they show us two elements close together, this guarantees that there is some 

specially intimate connection between what correspond to them among the 

dreamthoughts. In the same way, in our system of writing, ‘ab’ means that 

the two letters are to be pronounced in a single syllable. If a gap is left 

between the ‘a’ and the ‘b’, it means that the ‘a’ is the last letter of one word 

and the ‘b’ is the first of the next one. So, too, collocations in dreams do not 

consist of any chance, disconnected portions of the dream- material, but of 

portions which are fairly closely connected in the dreamthoughts as well. 

For representing causal relations dreams have two procedures which are in 

essence the same. Suppose the dreamthoughts run like this: ‘Since this was 

so and so, such and such was bound to happen.’ Then the commoner method 

of repre sen ta tion would be to introduce the dependent clause as an introduc- 

7. A mountain in Greece sacred to Apollo and the 

Muses and hence the region of poetry. The 

School of Athens: Raphael’s famous fresco of this 

title (1509– 11) depicts phi los o phers of very different 

times as if they were contemporaries.


tory dream and to add the principal clause as the main dream. If I have 

interpreted aright, the temporal sequence may be reversed. But the more 

extensive part of the dream always corresponds to the principal clause. 

* * * 

The alternative ‘either— or’ cannot be expressed in dreams in any way 

what ever. Both of the alternatives are usually inserted in the text of the 

dream as though they were equally valid. The dream of Irma’s injection 

contains a classic instance of this. 8 Its latent thoughts clearly ran: ‘I am not 

responsible for the per sis tence of Irma’s pains; the responsibility lies either 

in her recalcitrance to accepting my solution, or in the unfavourable sexual 

conditions under which she lives and which I cannot alter, or in the fact 

that her pains are not hysterical at all but of an organic nature.’ The dream, 

on the other hand, fulfilled all of these possibilities (which were almost 

mutually exclusive), and did not hesitate to add a fourth solution, based on 

the dream- wish. After interpreting the dream, I proceeded to insert the 

‘either— or’ into the context of the dreamthoughts. 

If, however, in reproducing a dream, its narrator feels inclined to make use 

of an ‘either— or’—e.g. ‘it was either a garden or a sitting- room’—what was 

present in the dreamthoughts was not an alternative but an ‘and’, a simple 

addition. An ‘either— or’ is mostly used to describe a dream- element that has 

a quality of vagueness— which, however, is capable of being resolved. In such 

cases the rule for interpretation is: treat the two apparent alternatives as of 

equal validity and link them together with an ‘and’. 

For instance, on one occasion a friend of mine was stopping in Italy and 

I had been without his address for a considerable time. I then had a dream 

of receiving a tele gram containing this address. I saw it printed in blue on 

the telegraph form. The first word was vague: 

‘Via’, perhaps 

or ‘Villa’ 

;the second was clear: ‘Secerno’. 

or possibly even (‘Casa’)} 

The second word sounded like some Italian name and reminded me of discussions 

I had had with my friend on the subject of etymology. It also 

expressed my anger with him for having kept his address secret from me for 

so long. 9 On the other hand, each of the three alternatives for the first word 

turned out on analysis to be an in de pen dent and equally valid startingpoint 

for a chain of thoughts. 1 

During the night before my father’s funeral I had a dream of a printed 

notice, placard or poster— rather like the notices forbidding one to smoke 

in railway waiting- rooms—on which appeared either 

‘You are requested to close the eyes’ 

or, 

‘You are requested to close an eye’. 

8. Freud has previously described a dream in 

which he tells a patient, Irma, “If you still get 

pains, it’s really only your fault”; it is that dream 

that Freud calls “the specimen dream of psychoanalysis.” 

9. The Italian word meaning “secret” is segreto; 

the verb secernere means “to secrete,” in the sense 

of giving off a secretion. 

1. This dream will be found described in greater 

detail in Freud’s letter to [Wilhelm] Fliess (the 

friend in question) of April 28, 1897 [translator’s 

note].


I usually write this in the form: 

the 

‘You are requested to close eye(s).’ 

an 

Each of these two versions had a meaning of its own and led in a different 

direction when the dream was interpreted. I had chosen the simplest possible 

ritual for the funeral, for I knew my father’s own views on such ceremonies. 

But some other members of the family were not sympathetic to such 

puritanical simplicity and thought we should be disgraced in the eyes of 

those who attended the funeral. Hence one of the versions: ‘You are requested 

to close an eye’, i.e. to ‘wink at’ or ‘overlook’. Here it is particularly easy to 

see the meaning of the vagueness expressed by the ‘either— or’. The dreamwork 

failed to establish a unified wording for the dreamthoughts which 

could at the same time be ambiguous, and the two main lines of thought 

consequently began to diverge even in the manifest content of the dream. 2 

In a few instances the difficulty of representing an alternative is got over 

by dividing the dream into two pieces of equal length. 

The way in which dreams treat the category of contraries and contradictories 

is highly remarkable. It is simply disregarded. ‘No’ seems not to exist 

so far as dreams are concerned. They show a par tic u lar preference for combining 

contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same 

thing. Dreams feel themselves at liberty, moreover, to represent any element 

by its wishful contrary; so that there is no way of deciding at a first glance 

whether any element that admits of a contrary is present in the dreamthoughts 

as a positive or as a negative. 3 

* * * 

1900, 1929 

From The “Uncanny” 1 

I 

It is only rarely that a psychoanalyst feels impelled to investigate the subject 

of aesthetics, even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the 

theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other 

strata of mental life and has little to do with the subdued emotional impulses 

2. This dream is reported by Freud in a letter to 

Fliess of November 2, 1896. It is there stated to 

have occurred during the night after the funeral. 

In its first wording the dream referred to closing 

the dead man’s eyes as a filial duty [translator’s 

note]. 

3. [Footnote added 1911:] I was astonished to 

learn from a pamphlet by K. Abel, The Antithetical 

Meaning of Primal Words (1884) (cf. my review 

of it, 1910)— and the fact has been confirmed by 

other philologists— that the most ancient languages 

behave exactly like dreams in this respect. 

In the first instance they have only a single word 

to describe the two contraries at the extreme ends 

of a series of qualities or activities (e.g., “strongweak,” 

“old- young,” “far- near,” “bind- sever”); they 

only form distinct terms for the two contraries by 

a secondary pro cess of making small modifications 

in the common word. Abel demonstrates 

this particularly from Ancient Egyptian; but he 

shows that there are distinct traces of the same 

course of development in the Semitic and Indo- 

Germanic languages as well [Freud’s note]. 

1. Translated by Alix Strachey, who sometimes 

adds a word or phrase in square brackets in the 

text for clarification.

The “Uncanny” / 825 

which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent factors, 

usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. But it does occasionally 

happen that he has to interest himself in some par tic u lar province of that 

subject; and this province usually proves to be a rather remote one, and one 

which has been neglected in the specialist literature of aesthetics. 

The subject of the ‘uncanny’ 2 is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly 

related to what is frightening— to what arouses dread and horror; equally 

certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so 

that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect 

that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special 

conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which 

allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’ certain things which lie within the 

field of what is frightening. 

As good as nothing is to be found upon this subject in comprehensive 

treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to concern themselves with 

what is beautiful, attractive and sublime— that is, with feelings of a positive 

nature— and with the circumstances and the objects that call them forth, 

rather than with the opposite feelings of repulsion and distress. I know of 

only one attempt in medico- psychological literature, a fertile but not exhaustive 

paper by Jentsch (1906). 3 But I must confess that I have not made a very 

thorough examination of the literature, especially the foreign literature, 

relating to this present modest contribution of mine, for reasons which, as 

may easily be guessed, lie in the times in which we live; 4 so that my paper is 

presented to the reader without any claim to priority. 

In his study of the ‘uncanny’ Jentsch quite rightly lays stress on the obstacle 

presented by the fact that people vary so very greatly in their sensitivity 

to this quality of feeling. The writer of the present contribution, indeed, 

must himself plead guilty to a special obtuseness in the matter, where 

extreme delicacy of perception would be more in place. It is long since he 

has experienced or heard of anything which has given him an uncanny 

impression, and he must start by translating himself into that state of feeling, 

by awakening in himself the possibility of experiencing it. Still, such 

difficulties make themselves powerfully felt in many other branches of aesthetics; 

we need not on that account despair of finding instances in which 

the quality in question will be unhesitatingly recognized by most people. 

Two courses are open to us at the outset. Either we can find out what 

meaning has come to be attached to the word ‘uncanny’ in the course of 

its history; or we can collect all those properties of persons, things, senseimpressions, 

experiences and situations which arouse in us the feeling of 

uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what 

all these examples have in common. I will say at once that both courses lead 

to the same result: the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads 

back to what is known of old and long familiar. How this is possible, in what 

circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening, I shall 

show in what follows. Let me also add that my investigation was actually 

begun by collecting a number of individual cases, and was only later 

2. The German word, translated throughout this 

paper by the En glish “uncanny,” is unheimlich, 

literally “unhomely.” The En glish term is not, of 

course, an exact equivalent of the German one 


3. “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” by the 

German psychologist Ernst Jentsch (1867– 1919). 

4. An allusion to the First World War only just 

concluded [translator’s note].


confirmed by an examination of linguistic usage. In this discussion, however, 

I shall follow the reverse course. 

The German word ‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ 

[homely], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’]— the opposite of what is familiar; and we are 

tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because 

it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar 

is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion. We 

can only say that what is novel can easily become frightening and uncanny; 

some new things are frightening but not by any means all. Something has 

to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar in order to make it uncanny. 

On the whole, Jentsch did not get beyond this relation of the uncanny to 

the novel and unfamiliar. He ascribes the essential factor in the production 

of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the 

uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s 

way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less 

readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the 

objects and events in it. 

It is not difficult to see that this definition is incomplete, and we will 

therefore try to proceed beyond the equation ‘uncanny’ = ‘unfamiliar’. We 

will first turn to other languages. But the dictionaries that we consult tell 

us nothing new, perhaps only because we ourselves speak a language that is 

foreign. Indeed, we get an impression that many languages are without a 

word for this par tic u lar shade of what is frightening. 

* * * 

Let us therefore return to the German language. In Daniel Sanders’s 

Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache (1860, 1:729), the following entry, which 

I here reproduce in full, is to be found under the word ‘heimlich’. I have laid 

stress on one or two passages by italicizing them. 

Heimlich, adj., subst. Heimlichkeit (pl. Heimlichkeiten): I. Also heimelich, 

heimelig, belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, 

friendly, etc. 

(a) (Obsolete) belonging to the house or the family, or regarded as so 

belonging (cf. Latin familiaris, familiar): Die Heimlichen, the members of 

the house hold; Der heimliche Rat (Gen. xli, 45; 2 Sam. xxiii. 23; 1 Chron. 

xii. 25; Wisd. viii. 4), now more usually Geheimer Rat [Privy Councillor]. 

(b) Of animals: tame, companionable to man. As opposed to wild, e.g. 

‘Animals which are neither wild nor heimlich’, etc. ‘Wild animals . . . that 

are trained to be heimlich and accustomed to men.’ ‘If these young creatures 

are brought up from early days among men they become quite heimlich, 

friendly’ etc.— So also: ‘It (the lamb) is so heimlich and eats out of my 

hand.’ ‘Nevertheless, the stork is a beautiful, heimelich bird.’ 

(c) Intimate, friendly comfortable; the enjoyment of quiet content, etc., 

arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security as in one within the 

four walls of his house. ‘Is it still heimlich to you in your country where 

strangers are felling your woods?’ ‘She did not feel too heimlich with him.’ 

‘Along a high, heimlich, shady path . . . , beside a purling, gushing and babbling 

woodland brook.’ ‘To destroy the Heimlichkeit of the home.’ ‘I could 

not readily find another spot so intimate and heimlich as this.’ ‘We pictured


it so comfortable, so nice, so cosy and heimlich.’ * * * ‘You go to sleep there 

so soft and warm, so wonderfully heim’lig.’— This form of the word deserves 

to become general in order to protect this perfectly good sense of the word 

from becoming obsolete through an easy confusion with II [see below]. Cf: 

‘ “The Zecks [a family name] are all ‘heimlich’.” (in sense II) “ ‘Heimlich’? . . . 

What do you understand by ‘heimlich’?” “Well, . . . they are like a buried 

spring or a dried- up pond. One cannot walk over it without always having the 

feeling that water might come up there again.” “Oh, we call it ‘unheimlich’; 

you call it ‘heimlich’. Well, what makes you think that there is something 

secret and untrustworthy about this family?” ’ (Gutzkow). 5 

(d) Especially in Silesia: gay, cheerful; also of the weather. 

II. Concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or 

about it, withheld from others. To do something heimlich, i.e. behind someone’s 

back; to steal away heimlich; heimlich meetings and appointments; to 

look on with heimlich plea sure at someone’s discomfiture; to sigh or weep 

heimlich; to behave heimlich, as though there was something to conceal; 

heimlich love- affair, love, sin; heimlich places (which good manners oblige 

us to conceal) (1 Sam. v. 6). ‘The heimlich chamber’ (privy) (2 Kings x. 27). 

Also, ‘the heimlich chair’. ‘To throw into pits or Heimlichkeiten’.—‘Led the 

steeds heimlich before Laomedon.’—‘As secretive, heimlich, deceitful and 

malicious towards cruel masters . . . as frank, open, sympathetic and helpful 

towards a friend in misfortune.’ ‘You have still to learn what is heimlich 

holiest to me.’ ‘The heimlich art’ (magic). * * * 

For compounds see above, Ic. Note especially the negative ‘un-’: eerie, 

weird, arousing gruesome fear: ‘Seeming quite unheimlich and ghostly to 

him.’ ‘The unheimlich, fearful hours of night.’ ‘I had already long since felt 

an unheimlich, even gruesome feeling.’ ‘Now I am beginning to have an 

unheimlich feeling.’ . . . ‘Feels an unheimlich horror.’ ‘Unheimlich and 

motionless like a stone image.’ ‘The unheimlich mist called hill- fog.’ ‘These 

pale youths are unheimlich and are brewing heaven knows what mischief.’ 

“ ‘Unheimlich” is the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . 

secret and hidden but has come to light’ (Schelling). 6 —‘To veil the divine, to 

surround it with a certain Unheimlichkeit.’— Unheimlich is not often used 

as opposite to meaning II (above). 

What interests us most in this long extract is to find that among its different 

shades of meaning the word ‘heimlich’ exhibits one which is identical 

with its opposite, ‘unheimlich’. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. 

(Cf. the quotation from Gutzkow: ‘We call it “unheimlich”; you call it 

“heimlich”.’) In general we are reminded that the word ‘heimlich’ is not unambiguous, 

but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, 

are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, 

and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. 7 ‘Unheimlich’ 

is customarily used, we are told, as the contrary only of the first signification 

5. Karl Gutzkow (1811– 1878), German novelist 

and dramatist. 

6. Friedrich von Schelling (1775– 1854), German 

phi los o pher; quoted from Philosophy of Mythology 

(published 1856). 

7. According to the Oxford En glish Dictionary, a 

similar ambiguity attaches to the En glish “canny,” 

which may mean not only “cosy” but also “endowed 

with occult or magical powers” [translator’s note].


of ‘heimlich’, and not of the second. Sanders tells us nothing concerning a 

possible ge ne tic connection between these two meanings of heimlich. On 

the other hand, we notice that Schelling says something which throws quite 

a new light on the concept of the Unheimlich, for which we were certainly 

not prepared. According to him, everything is unheimlich that ought to have 

remained secret and hidden but has come to light. 

Some of the doubts that have thus arisen are removed if we consult 

Grimm’s dictionary. (1877, 4.2:873ff.) 

We read: 

Heimlich; adj. and adv. vernaculus, occultus; MHG. heimelîch, heimlîch. 

(P. 874.) In a slightly different sense: ‘I feel heimlich, well, free from 

fear.’ . . . 

[3] (b) Heimlich is also used of a place free from ghostly influences . . . 

familiar, friendly, intimate. 

(P.875: ß) Familiar, amicable, unreserved. 

4. From the idea of ‘homelike’, ‘belonging to the house’, the further idea is 

developed of something withdrawn from the eyes of strangers, something concealed, 

secret; and this idea is expanded in many ways . . . 

* * * 

9. The notion of something hidden and dangerous, which is expressed in 

the last paragraph, is still further developed, so that ‘heimlich’ comes to 

have the meaning usually ascribed to ‘unheimlich’. Thus: ‘At times I feel 

like a man who walks in the night and believes in ghosts; every corner is 

heimlich and full of terrors for him’. (Klinger, 8 Theater, 3:298.) 

Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of 

ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich 

is in some way or other a sub- species of heimlich. Let us bear this discovery 

in mind, though we cannot yet rightly understand it, alongside of 

Schelling’s definition of the Unheimlich. If we go on to examine individual 

instances of uncanniness, these hints will become intelligible to us. 

II 

When we proceed to review the things, persons, impressions, events and situations 

which are able to arouse in us a feeling of the uncanny in a particularly 

forcible and definite form, the first requirement is obviously to select a suitable 

example to start on. Jentsch has taken as a very good instance ‘doubts 

whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a 

lifeless object might not be in fact animate’; and he refers in this connection 

to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls 

and automata. To these he adds the uncanny effect of epileptic fits, and of 

manifestations of insanity, because these excite in the spectator the impression 

of automatic, mechanical pro cesses at work behind the ordinary appearance 

of mental activity. Without entirely accepting this author’s view, we will 

take it as a startingpoint for our own investigation because in what follows 

8. Friedrich von Klinger (1752– 1831), German dramatist and novelist.


he reminds us of a writer who has succeeded in producing uncanny effects 

better than anyone else. 

Jentsch writes: ‘In telling a story, one of the most successful devices for 

easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether 

a par tic u lar figure in the story is a human being or an automaton, and to do 

it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, 

so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately. 

That, as we have said, would quickly dissipate the peculiar emotional 

effect of the thing. E. T. A. Hoffmann 9 has repeatedly employed this psychological 

artifice with success in his fantastic narratives.’ 

This observation, undoubtedly a correct one, refers primarily to the story of 

‘The Sand- Man’ in Hoffmann’s Nachtstücken, 1 which contains the original of 

Olympia, the doll that appears in the first act of Offenbach’s opera, Tales of 

Hoffmann. 2 But I cannot think— and I hope most readers of the story will 

agree with me— that the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances 

a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important, element 

that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of 

uncanniness evoked by the story. Nor is this atmosphere heightened by the 

fact that the author himself treats the episode of Olympia with a faint touch 

of satire and uses it to poke fun at the young man’s idealization of his mistress. 

The main theme of the story is, on the contrary, something different, 

something which gives it its name, and which is always re- introduced at critical 

moments: it is the theme of the ‘Sand- Man’ who tears out children’s eyes. 

This fantastic tale opens with the childhood recollections of the student 

Nathaniel. In spite of his present happiness, he cannot banish the memories 

associated with the mysterious and terrifying death of his beloved father. On 

certain eve nings his mother used to send the children to bed early, warning 

them that ‘the Sand- Man was coming’; and, sure enough, Nathaniel would 

not fail to hear the heavy tread of a visitor, with whom his father would then 

be occupied for the eve ning. When questioned about the Sand- Man, his 

mother, it is true, denied that such a person existed except as a figure of 

speech; but his nurse could give him more definite information: ‘He’s a 

wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls 

of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then 

he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the half- moon to feed his 

children. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ 

beaks, and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with.’ 

Although little Nathaniel was sensible and old enough not to credit the 

figure of the Sand- Man with such gruesome attributes, yet the dread of him 

became fixed in his heart. He determined to find out what the Sand- Man 

looked like; and one eve ning, when the Sand- Man was expected again, he 

hid in his father’s study. He recognized the visitor as the lawyer Coppelius, 

a repulsive person whom the children were frightened of when he occasionally 

came to a meal; and he now identified this Coppelius with the dreaded 

Sand- Man. As regards the rest of the scene, Hoffmann already leaves us in 

9. German author of fantastic and often humorous 

tales (1776– 1822). 

1. Night Pieces (1816– 17); “The Sandman” was 

published in vol. 1 (1816). 

2. An 1881 opera based on three tales by Hoffmann, 

by Jacques Offenbach (1819– 1880), a 

German- born French composer of many light 

operas.


doubt whether what we are witnessing is the first delirium of the panicstricken 

boy, or a succession of events which are to be regarded in the story 

as being real. His father and the guest are at work at a brazier with glowing 

flames. The little eavesdropper hears Coppelius call out: ‘Eyes here! Eyes 

here!’ and betrays himself by screaming aloud. Coppelius seizes him and is 

on the point of dropping bits of red- hot coal from the fire into his eyes, and 

then of throwing them into the brazier, but his father begs him off and saves 

his eyes. After this the boy falls into a deep swoon; and a long illness brings 

his experience to an end. Those who decide in favour of the rationalistic 

interpretation of the Sand- Man will not fail to recognize in the child’s phantasy 

the persisting influence of his nurse’s story. The bits of sand that are to 

be thrown into the child’s eyes turn into bits of red- hot coal from the flames; 

and in both cases they are intended to make his eyes jump out. In the course 

of another visit of the Sand- Man’s, a year later, his father is killed in his study 

by an explosion. The lawyer Coppelius disappears from the place without 

leaving a trace behind. 

Nathaniel, now a student, believes that he has recognized this phantom of 

horror from his childhood in an itinerant optician, an Italian called Giuseppe 

Coppola, who at his university town, offers him weatherglasses for sale. 

When Nathaniel refuses, the man goes on: ‘Not weatherglasses? not weatherglasses? 

also got fine eyes, fine eyes!’ The student’s terror is allayed when he 

finds that the proffered eyes are only harmless spectacles, and he buys a 

pocket spyglass from Coppola. With its aid he looks across into Professor 

Spalanzani’s house opposite and there spies Spalanzani’s beautiful, but 

strangely silent and motionless daughter, Olympia. He soon falls in love with 

her so violently that, because of her, he quite forgets the clever and sensible 

girl to whom he is betrothed. But Olympia is an automaton whose clock- work 

has been made by Spalanzani, and whose eyes have been put in by Coppola, 

the Sand- Man. The student surprises the two Masters quarrelling over their 

handiwork. The optician carries off the wooden eyeless doll; and the mechanician, 

Spalanzani, picks up Olympia’s bleeding eyes from the ground and 

throws them at Nathaniel’s breast, saying that Coppola had stolen them from 

the student. Nathaniel succumbs to a fresh attack of madness, and in his 

delirium his recollection of his father’s death is mingled with this new experience. 

‘Hurry up! hurry up! ring of fire!’ he cries. ‘Spin about, ring of fire— 

Hurrah! Hurry up, wooden doll! lovely wooden doll, spin about—.’ He then 

falls upon the professor, Olympia’s ‘father’, and tries to strangle him. 

Rallying from a long and serious illness, Nathaniel seems at last to have 

recovered. He intends to marry his betrothed, with whom he has become 

reconciled. One day he and she are walking through the city marketplace, 

over which the high tower of the Town Hall throws its huge shadow. On the 

girl’s suggestion, they climb the tower, leaving her brother, who is walking 

with them, down below. From the top, Clara’s attention is drawn to a curious 

object moving along the street. Nathaniel looks at this thing through 

Coppola’s spyglass, which he finds in his pocket, and falls into a new 

attack of madness. Shouting ‘Spin about, wooden doll!’ he tries to throw the 

girl into the gulf below. Her brother, brought to her side by her cries, rescues 

her and hastens down with her to safety. On the tower above, the madman 

rushes round, shrieking ‘Ring of fire, spin about!’— and we know the 

origin of the words. Among the people who begin to gather below there 

comes forward the figure of the lawyer Coppelius, who has suddenly


returned. We may suppose that it was his approach, seen through the spyglass, 

which threw Nathaniel into his fit of madness. As the onlookers prepare 

to go up and overpower the madman, Coppelius laughs and says: ‘Wait 

a bit; he’ll come down of himself.’ Nathaniel suddenly stands still, catches 

sight of Coppelius, and with a wild shriek ‘Yes! “Fine eyes— fine eyes”!’ 

flings himself over the parapet. While he lies on the paving- stones with a 

shattered skull the Sand- Man vanishes in the throng. 

This short summary leaves no doubt, I think, that the feeling of something 

uncanny is directly attached to the figure of the Sand- Man, that is, to 

the idea of being robbed of one’s eyes, and that Jentsch’s point of an intellectual 

uncertainty has nothing to do with the effect. Uncertainty whether 

an object is living or inanimate, which admittedly applied to the doll Olympia, 

is quite irrelevant in connection with this other, more striking instance 

of uncanniness. It is true that the writer creates a kind of uncertainty in us 

in the beginning by not letting us know, no doubt purposely, whether he is 

taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation. 

He has, of course, a right to do either; and if he chooses to stage his 

action in a world peopled with spirits, demons and ghosts, as Shakespeare 

does in Hamlet, in Macbeth and, in a different sense, in The Tempest and 

A Midsummer- Night’s Dream, we must bow to his decision and treat his 

setting as though it were real for as long as we put ourselves into his hands. 

But this uncertainty disappears in the course of Hoffmann’s story, and we 

perceive that he intends to make us, too, look through the demon optician’s 

spectacles or spyglass—perhaps, indeed, that the author in his very own 

person once peered through such an instrument. For the conclusion of the 

story makes it quite clear that Coppola the optician really is the lawyer 

Coppelius 3 and also, therefore, the Sand- Man. 

There is no question therefore, of any intellectual uncertainty here: we 

know now that we are not supposed to be looking on at the products of a 

madman’s imagination, behind which we, with the superiority of rational 

minds, are able to detect the sober truth; and yet this knowledge does not 

lessen the impression of uncanniness in the least degree. The theory of 

intellectual uncertainty is thus incapable of explaining that impression. 

We know from psychoanalytic experience, however, that the fear of damaging 

or losing one’s eyes is a terrible one in children. Many adults retain 

their apprehensiveness in this respect, and no physical injury is so much 

dreaded by them as an injury to the eye. We are accustomed to say, too, that 

we will trea sure a thing as the apple of our eye. A study of dreams, phantasies 

and myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going 

blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated. The selfblinding 

of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, 4 was simply a mitigated form of 

the punishment of castration— the only punishment that was adequate for 

him by the lex talionis. 5 We may try on rationalistic grounds to deny that 

fears about the eye are derived from the fear of castration, and may argue that 

it is very natural that so precious an organ as the eye should be guarded by a 

3. Frau Dr. Rank has pointed out the association 

of the name with coppella = crucible, connecting 

it with the chemical operations that caused the 

father’s death; and also with coppo = eye- socket 

[Freud’s note]. Tola Rank (1895– 1967), Polishborn 

wife of Freud’s longtime colleague Otto 

Rank; she also became a member of the Vienna 

Psychoanalytical Society. 

4. Oedipus, a favorite subject of Greek tragedy 

and vase painting, was king of Thebes; he blinded 

himself when he realized that he had killed his 

father and married his mother. 

5. Law of retaliation in kind (Latin).


proportionate dread. Indeed, we might go further and say that the fear of castration 

itself contains no other significance and no deeper secret than a justifiable 

dread of this rational kind. But this view does not account adequately for 

the substitutive relation between the eye and the male organ which is seen to 

exist in dreams and myths and phantasies; nor can it dispel the impression 

that the threat of being castrated in especial excites a peculiarly violent and 

obscure emotion, and that this emotion is what first gives the idea of losing 

other organs its intense colouring. All further doubts are removed when we 

learn the details of their ‘castration complex’ from the analysis of neurotic 

patients, and realize its im mense importance in their mental life. 

Moreover, I would not recommend any opponent of the psychoanalytic 

view to select this par tic u lar story of the Sand- Man with which to support his 

argument that anxiety about the eyes has nothing to do with the castration 

complex. For why does Hoffmann bring the anxiety about eyes into such intimate 

connection with the father’s death? And why does the Sand- Man always 

appear as a disturber of love? He separates the unfortunate Nathaniel from 

his betrothed and from her brother, his best friend; he destroys the second 

object of his love, Olympia, the lovely doll; and he drives him into suicide at 

the moment when he has won back his Clara and is about to be happily 

united to her. Elements in the story like these, and many others, seem arbitrary 

and meaningless so long as we deny all connection between fears about 

the eye and castration; but they become intelligible as soon as we replace the 

Sand- Man by the dreaded father at whose hands castration is expected. 6 

We shall venture, therefore, to refer the uncanny effect of the Sand- Man 

to the anxiety belonging to the castration complex of childhood. But having 

6. In fact, Hoffmann’s imaginative treatment of 

his material has not made such wild confusion of 

its elements that we cannot reconstruct their 

original arrangement. In the story of Nathaniel’s 

childhood, the figures of his father and Coppelius 

represent the two opposites into which the fatherimago 

is split by his ambivalence; whereas the 

one threatens to blind him— that is, to castrate 

him—, the other, the “good” father, intercedes for 

his sight. The part of the complex which is most 

strongly repressed, the death- wish against the 

“bad” father, finds expression in the death of the 

“good” father, and Coppelius is made answerable 

for it. This pair of fathers is represented later, in 

his student days, by Professor Spalanzani and 

Coppola the optician. The Professor is in himself 

a member of the father- series, and Coppola is recognized 

as identical with Coppelius the lawyer. 

Just as they used before to work together over the 

secret brazier, so now they have jointly created 

the doll Olympia; the Professor is even called 

the father of Olympia. This double occurrence 

of activity in common betrays them as divisions 

of the fatherimago: both the mechanician and 

the optician were the father of Nathaniel (and of 

Olympia as well). In the frightening scene in 

childhood, Coppelius, after sparing Nathaniel’s 

eyes, had screwed off his arms and legs as an 

experiment; that is, he had worked on him as a 

mechanician would on a doll. This singular feature, 

which seems quite outside the picture of the 

Sand- Man, introduces a new castration equivalent; 

but it also points to the inner identity of Coppelius 

with his later counterpart, Spalanzani the 

mechanician, and prepares us for the interpretation 

of Olympia. This automatic doll can be nothing 

else than a materialization of Nathaniel’s 

feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy. 

Her fathers, Spalanzani and Coppola, are, after 

all, nothing but new editions, reincarnations of 

Nathaniel’s pair of fathers. Spalanzani’s otherwise 

incomprehensible statement that the optician 

has stolen Nathaniel’s eyes, so as to set them 

in the doll, now becomes significant as supplying 

evidence of the identity of Olympia and Nathaniel. 

Olympia is, as it were, a dissociated complex 

of Nathaniel’s which confronts him as a person, 

and Nathaniel’s enslavement to this complex is 

expressed in his senseless obsessive love for Olympia. 

We may with justice call love of this kind narcissistic, 

and we can understand why someone 

who has fallen victim to it should relinquish the 

real, external object of his love. The psychological 

truth of the situation in which the young man, 

fixated upon his father by his castration complex, 

becomes incapable of loving a woman, is amply 

proved by numerous analyses of patients whose 

story, though less fantastic, is hardly less tragic 

than that of the student Nathaniel. 

Hoffmann was the child of an unhappy marriage. 

When he was three years old, his father left 

his small family, and was never united to them 

again. According to Grisebach, in his biographical 

introduction to Hoffmann’s works, the writer’s 

relation to his father was always a most sensitive 

subject with him [Freud’s note]. Eduard Grisebach 

(1845– 1906), German diplomat, editor, and 

literary historian; his edition of Hoffmann’s Complete 

Works was published in 1905.


reached the idea that we can make an infantile factor such as this responsible 

for feelings of uncanniness, we are encouraged to see whether we can 

apply it to other instances of the uncanny. We find in the story of the Sand- 

Man the other theme on which Jentsch lays stress, of a doll which appears to 

be alive. Jentsch believes that a particularly favourable condition for awakening 

uncanny feelings is created when there is intellectual uncertainty 

whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too 

much like an animate one. Now, dolls are of course rather closely connected 

with childhood life. We remember that in their early games children do not 

distinguish at all sharply between living and inanimate objects, and that 

they are especially fond of treating their dolls like live people. In fact, I have 

occasionally heard a woman patient declare that even at the age of eight she 

had still been convinced that her dolls would be certain to come to life if she 

were to look at them in a par tic u lar, extremely concentrated, way. So that 

here, too, it is not difficult to discover a factor from childhood. But, curiously 

enough, while the Sand- Man story deals with the arousing of an early 

childhood fear, the idea of a ‘living doll’ excites no fear at all; children have 

no fear of their dolls coming to life, they may even desire it. The source of 

uncanny feelings would not, therefore, be an infantile fear in this case, but 

rather an infantile wish or even merely an infantile belief. There seems to be 

a contradiction here; but perhaps it is only a complication, which may be 

helpful to us later on. 

* * * 

At this point I will put forward two considerations which, I think, contain 

the gist of this short study. In the first place, if psychoanalytic theory is 

correct in maintaining that every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, 

what ever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among 

instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening 

element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This 

class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must 

be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally 

frightening or whether it carried some other affect. In the second place, if 

this is indeed the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why 

linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche [‘homely’] into its opposite, das 

Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something 

which is familiar and old- established in the mind and which has 

become alienated from it only through the pro cess of repression. This reference 

to the factor of repression enables us, furthermore, to understand 

Schelling’s definition of the uncanny as something which ought to have 

remained hidden but has come to light. 

It only remains for us to test our new hypothesis on one or two more 

examples of the uncanny. 

Many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to 

death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts. As 

we have seen some languages in use today can only render the German 

expression ‘an unheimlich house’ by ‘a haunted house’. We might indeed have 

begun our investigation with this example, perhaps the most striking of all, of 

something uncanny, but we refrained from doing so because the uncanny in 

it is too much intermixed with what is purely gruesome and is in part overlaid


by it. There is scarcely any other matter, however, upon which our thoughts 

and feelings have changed so little since the very earliest times, and in which 

discarded forms have been so completely preserved under a thin disguise, as 

our relation to death. Two things account for our conservatism: the strength 

of our original emotional reaction to death and the insufficiency of our scientific 

knowledge about it. Biology has not yet been able to decide whether 

death is the inevitable fate of every living being or whether it is only a regular 

but yet perhaps avoidable event in life. It is true that the statement ‘All men 

are mortal’ is paraded in textbooks of logic as an example of a general proposition; 

but no human being really grasps it, and our unconscious has as little 

use now as it ever had for the idea of its own mortality. Religions continue to 

dispute the importance of the undeniable fact of individual death and to 

postulate a life after death; civil governments still believe that they cannot 

maintain moral order among the living if they do not uphold the prospect of 

a better life hereafter as a recompense for mundane existence. In our great 

cities, placards announce lectures that undertake to tell us how to get into 

touch with the souls of the departed; and it cannot be denied that not a few 

of the most able and penetrating minds among our men of science have 

come to the conclusion, especially towards the close of their own lives, that 

a contact of this kind is not impossible. Since almost all of us still think as 

savages do on this topic, it is no matter for surprise that the primitive fear of 

the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface 

on any provocation. Most likely our fear still implies the old belief that the 

dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to 

share his new life with him. Considering our unchanged attitude towards 

death, we might rather enquire what has become of the repression, which 

is the necessary condition of a primitive feeling recurring in the shape of 

something uncanny. But repression is there, too. All supposedly educated 

people have ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as 

spirits, and have made any such appearances dependent on improbable and 

remote conditions; their emotional attitude towards their dead, moreover, 

once a highly ambiguous and ambivalent one, has been toned down in the 

higher strata of the mind into an unambiguous feeling of piety. 

We have now only a few remarks to add— for animism, magic and sorcery, 

the omnipotence of thoughts, man’s attitude to death, involuntary repetition 

and the castration complex comprise practically all the factors which turn 

something frightening into something uncanny. 

We can also speak of a living person as uncanny, and we do so when we 

ascribe evil intentions to him. But that is not all; in addition to this we must 

feel that his intentions to harm us are going to be carried out with the help 

of special powers. A good instance of this is the ‘Gettatore’, 7 that uncanny 

figure of Romanic superstition which Schaeffer, 8 with intuitive poetic feeling 

and profound psychoanalytic understanding, has transformed into a 

sympathetic character in his Josef Montfort. But the question of these secret 

powers brings us back again to the realm of animism. It was the pious 

Gretchen’s intuition that Mephistopheles possessed secret powers of this 

kind that made him so uncanny to her. 

7. Literally “thrower” (of bad luck), or “one who 

casts” (the evil eye) [translator’s note]. 

8. Albrecht Schaeffer (1885– 1950), who published 

the novel Josef Montfort in 1918.

Sie fühlt dass ich ganz sicher ein Genie, 

Vielleicht sogar der Teufel bin. 9 


The uncanny effect of epilepsy and of madness has the same origin. The 

layman sees in them the working of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellowmen, 

but at the same time he is dimly aware of them in remote corners of his 

own being. The Middle Ages quite consistently ascribed all such maladies to 

the influence of demons, and in this their psychology was almost correct. 

Indeed, I should not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysis, which is concerned 

with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to 

many people for that very reason. In one case, after I had succeeded— though 

none too rapidly— in effecting a cure in a girl who had been an invalid for 

many years, I myself heard this view expressed by the patient’s mother long 

after her recovery. 

Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, as in a 

fairy tale of Hauff’s, 1 feet which dance by themselves, as in the book by 

Schaeffer which I mentioned above— all these have something peculiarly 

uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove 

capable of in de pen dent activity in addition. As we already know, this kind of 

uncanniness springs from its proximity to the castration complex. To some 

people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of 

all. And yet psychoanalysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is 

only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying 

about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness— the 

phantasy, I mean, of intra- uterine existence. 

There is one more point of general application which I should like to add, 

though, strictly speaking, it has been included in what has already been said 

about animism and modes of working of the mental apparatus that have been 

surmounted; for I think it deserves special emphasis. This is that an uncanny 

effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination 

and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as 

imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full 

functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on. It is this factor which contributes 

not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to magical practices. The 

infantile element in this, which also dominates the minds of neurotics, is the 

over- accentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality— a 

feature closely allied to the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts. In the 

middle of the isolation of war- time a number of the En glish Strand Magazine 

fell into my hands; and, among other somewhat redundant matter, I read a 

story about a young married couple who move into a furnished house in which 

there is a curiously shaped table with carvings of crocodiles on it. Towards 

eve ning an intolerable and very specific smell begins to pervade the house; 

they stumble over something in the dark; they seem to see a vague form gliding 

over the stairs— in short, we are given to understand that the presence of 

9. “She feels that surely I’m a genius now,— 

Perhaps the very Dev il indeed!” Goethe, Faust, 

Part I [1808], scene 16; Bayard Taylor’s translation 

[1870– 71; translator’s note]. Johann Wolfgang 

von Goethe (1749– 1832), German poet, 

playwright, and dramatist. Mephistopheles is the 

spirit to whom the old Faust promises his soul; 

Gretchen is the young girl whom Faust, made 

young again, falls in love with and seduces. 

1. Die Geschichte von der abgehauenen Hand (The 

Story of the Severed Hand) [translator’s note]. 

Wilhelm Hauff (1802– 1827), German novelist.


the table causes ghostly crocodiles to haunt the place, or that the wooden 

monsters come to life in the dark, or something of the sort. It was a naïve 

enough story, but the uncanny feeling it produced was quite remarkable. 

To conclude this collection of examples, which is certainly not complete, I 

will relate an instance taken from psychoanalytic experience; if it does not 

rest upon mere coincidence, it furnishes a beautiful confirmation of our 

theory of the uncanny. It often happens that neurotic men declare that they 

feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This 

unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all 

human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and 

in the beginning. There is a joking saying that ‘Love is home- sickness’; and 

whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he 

is still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before’, we may 

interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body. In this case 

too, then, the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ 

[‘un-’] is the token of repression. 

III 

In the course of this discussion the reader will have felt certain doubts arising 

in his mind; and he must now have an opportunity of collecting them 

and bringing them forward. 

It may be true that the uncanny [unheimlich] is something which is 

secretly familiar [heimlich- heimisch], which has undergone repression and 

then returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition. 

But the selection of material on this basis does not enable us to solve 

the problem of the uncanny. For our proposition is clearly not convertible. 

Not everything that fulfils this condition— not everything that recalls 

repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory 

of the individual and of the race— is on that account uncanny. 

Nor shall we conceal the fact that for almost every example adduced in 

support of our hypothesis one may be found which rebuts it. The story of the 

severed hand in Hauff’s fairy tale certainly has an uncanny effect, and we 

have traced that effect back to the castration complex; but most readers will 

probably agree with me in judging that no trace of uncanniness is provoked 

by Herodotus’s story of the trea sure of Rhampsinitus, 2 in which the masterthief, 

whom the princess tries to hold fast by the hand, leaves his brother’s 

severed hand behind with her instead. Again, the prompt fulfilment of the 

wishes of Polycrates 3 undoubtedly affects us in the same uncanny way as it 

did the king of Egypt; yet our own fairy stories are crammed with instantaneous 

wish- fulfilments which produce no uncanny effect what ever. In the 

story of ‘The Three Wishes’, the woman is tempted by the savoury smell of a 

sausage to wish that she might have one too, and in an instant it lies on a 

plate before her. In his annoyance at her hastiness her husband wishes it 

may hang on her nose. And there it is, dangling from her nose. All this is 

very striking but not in the least uncanny. Fairy tales quite frankly adopt the 

2. See (Greek historian, ca. 484– ca. 425 b.c.e.) 

Herodotus 2.121. Rhampsinitus was the king of 

Egypt. 

3. Freud discussed the story (told in Herodotus 

3.40– 43) of the uncannily lucky Polycrates, king of 

Samos, in a passage omitted from our selection.


animistic standpoint of the omnipotence of thoughts and wishes, and yet I 

cannot think of any genuine fairy story which has anything uncanny about 

it. We have heard that it is in the highest degree uncanny when an inanimate 

object— a picture or a doll— comes to life; nevertheless in Hans Andersen’s 

4 stories the house hold utensils, furniture and tin soldiers are alive, yet 

nothing could well be more remote from the uncanny. And we should hardly 

call it uncanny when Pygmalion’s beautiful statue comes to life. 5 

Apparent death and the re- animation of the dead have been represented 

as most uncanny themes. But things of this sort too are very common in 

fairy stories. Who would be so bold as to call it uncanny, for instance, when 

Snow- White opens her eyes once more? 6 And the resuscitation of the dead 

in accounts of miracles, as in the New Testament, elicits feelings quite unrelated 

to the uncanny. Then, too, the theme that achieves such an indubitably 

uncanny effect, the unintended recurrence of the same thing, serves other 

and quite different purposes in another class of cases. We have already 

come across one example in which it is employed to call up a feeling of the 

comic; 7 and we could multiply instances of this kind. Or again, it works as a 

means of emphasis, and so on. And once more: what is the origin of the 

uncanny effect of silence, darkness and solitude? Do not these factors point 

to the part played by danger in the genesis of what is uncanny, notwithstanding 

that in children these same factors are the most frequent determinants 

of the expression of fear [rather than of the uncanny]? And are we 

after all justified in entirely ignoring intellectual uncertainty as a factor, seeing 

that we have admitted its importance in relation to death? 

It is evident therefore, that we must be prepared to admit that there are 

other elements besides those which we have so far laid down as determining 

the production of uncanny feelings. We might say that these preliminary 

results have satisfied psychoanalytic interest in the problem of the 

uncanny, and that what remains probably calls for an aesthetic enquiry. But 

that would be to open the door to doubts about what exactly is the value of 

our general contention that the uncanny proceeds from something familiar 

which has been repressed. 

We have noticed one point which may help us to resolve these uncertainties: 

nearly all the instances that contradict our hypothesis are taken from 

the realm of fiction, of imaginative writing. This suggests that we should 

differentiate between the uncanny that we actually experience and the 

uncanny that we merely picture or read about. 

What is experienced as uncanny is much more simply conditioned but 

comprises far fewer instances. We shall find, I think, that it fits in perfectly 

with our attempt at a solution, and can be traced back without exception to 

something familiar that has been repressed. But here, too, we must make a 

certain important and psychologically significant differentiation in our 

material, which is best illustrated by turning to suitable examples. 

Let us take the uncanny associated with the omnipotence of thoughts, with 

the prompt fulfilment of wishes, with secret injurious powers and with the 

4. Hans Christian Andersen (1805– 1875), Danish 

writer best known for his fairy tales. 

5. In Metamorphoses (ca. 10 c.e..), 10.243– 97, the 

Roman poet Ovid tells the story of the sculptor 

Pygmalion, who fell in love with his own creation. 

6. Snow White, believed dead, comes back to life 

when the poisoned apple is dislodged from her 

throat. 

7. That is, in Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad (1880), 

mentioned in a passage omitted from our selection.


return of the dead. The condition under which the feeling of uncanniness 

arises here is unmistakable. We— or our primitive forefathers— once believed 

that these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually 

happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these 

modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old 

ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as 

something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded 

beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we were making 

a judgement something like this: ‘So, after all, it is true that one can kill a 

person by the mere wish!’ or, ‘So the dead do live on and appear on the scene 

of their former activities!’ and so on. Conversely, anyone who has completely 

and finally rid himself of animistic beliefs will be insensible to this type of the 

uncanny. The most remarkable coincidences of wish and fulfilment, the most 

mysterious repetition of similar experiences in a par tic u lar place or on a partic 

u lar date, the most deceptive sights and suspicious noises— none of these 

things will disconcert him or raise the kind of fear which can be described as 

‘a fear of something uncanny’. The whole thing is purely an affair of ‘realitytesting’, 

a question of the material reality of the phenomena. 8 

The state of affairs is different when the uncanny proceeds from repressed 

infantile complexes, from the castration complex, womb- phantasies, etc.; 

but experiences which arouse this kind of uncanny feeling are not of very 

frequent occurrence in real life. The uncanny which proceeds from actual 

experience belongs for the most part to the first group [the group dealt with 

in the previous paragraph]. Nevertheless the distinction between the two 

is theoretically very important. Where the uncanny comes from infantile 

complexes the question of material reality does not arise; its place is taken 

by psychical reality. What is involved is an actual repression of some content 

of thought and a return of this repressed content, not a cessation of belief in 

the reality of such a content. We might say that in the one case what had 

been repressed is a par tic u lar ideational content, and in the other the belief 

in its (material) reality. But this last phrase no doubt extends the term 

‘repression’ beyond its legitimate meaning. It would be more correct to take 

into account a psychological distinction which can be detected here, and to 

say that the animistic beliefs of civilized people are in a state of having 

been (to a greater or lesser extent) surmounted [rather than repressed]. Our 

conclusion could then be stated thus: an uncanny experience occurs either 

when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived 

8. Since the uncanny effect of a “double” also 

belongs to this same group it is interesting to 

observe what the effect is of meeting one’s own 

image unbidden and unexpected. Ernst Mach 

has related two such observations in his Analyse 

der Empfindungen (1900 [Analysis of Sensations]). 

On the first occasion he was not a little startled 

when he realized that the face before him was his 

own. The second time he formed a very unfavorable 

opinion about the supposed stranger who 

had entered the omnibus, and thought “What a 

shabby- looking school- master that man is who is 

getting in!”— I can report a similar adventure. I 

was sitting alone in my wagon- lit compartment 

when a more than usually violent jolt of the train 

swung back the door of the adjoining washingcabinet, 

and an el der ly gentleman in a dressing- 

gown and a travelling cap came in. I assumed 

that in leaving the washingcabinet, which lay 

between the two compartments, he had taken the 

wrong direction and come into my cabinet by 

mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting 

him right, I at once realized to my dismay 

that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection 

in the looking- glass on the open door. I can 

still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his 

appearance. Instead, therefore, of being frightened 

by our doubles, both Mach and I simply 

failed to recognize them as such. Is it not possible, 

though, that our dislike of them was a vestigial 

trace of the archaic reaction which feels the 

“double” to be something uncanny? [Freud’s 

note]. Mach (1838– 1916), Austrian physicist and 

phi los o pher. “Wagon-lit”: sleeping car (French).


by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted 

seem once more to be confirmed. Finally, we must not let our predilection 

for smooth solutions and lucid exposition blind us to the fact that these two 

classes of uncanny experience are not always sharply distinguishable. When 

we consider that primitive beliefs are most intimately connected with infantile 

complexes, and are, in fact, based on them, we shall not be greatly 

astonished to find that the distinction is often a hazy one. 

The uncanny as it is depicted in literature, in stories and imaginative productions, 

merits in truth a separate discussion. Above all, it is a much more 

fertile province than the uncanny in real life, for it contains the whole of 

the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in 

real life. The contrast between what has been repressed and what has been 

surmounted cannot be transposed on to the uncanny in fiction without 

profound modification; for the realm of phantasy depends for its effect on 

the fact that its content is not submitted to realitytesting. The somewhat 

paradoxical result is that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in 

fiction would be so if it happened in real life; and in the second place that 

there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there 

are in real life. 

The imaginative writer has this licence among many others, that he can 

select his world of repre sen ta tion so that it either coincides with the realities 

we are familiar with or departs from them in what particulars he pleases. We 

accept his ruling in every case. In fairy tales, for instance, the world of reality 

is left behind from the very start, and the animistic system of beliefs is 

frankly adopted. Wish- fulfilments, secret powers, omnipotence of thoughts, 

animation of inanimate objects, all the elements so common in fairy stories, 

can exert no uncanny influence here; for, as we have learnt, that feeling cannot 

arise unless there is a conflict of judgement as to whether things which 

have been ‘surmounted’ and are regarded as incredible may not, after all, be 

possible; and this problem is eliminated from the outset by the postulates of 

the world of fairy tales. Thus we see that fairy stories, which have furnished 

us with most of the contradictions to our hypothesis of the uncanny, confirm 

the first part of our proposition— that in the realm of fiction many things are 

not uncanny which would be so if they happened in real life. In the case of 

these stories there are other contributory factors, which we shall briefly 

touch upon later. 

The creative writer can also choose a setting which though less imaginary 

than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by 

admitting superior spiritual beings such as daemonic spirits or ghosts of the 

dead. So long as they remain within their setting of poetic reality, such figures 

lose any uncanniness which they might possess. The souls in Dante’s 

Inferno, or the supernatural apparitions in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth 

or Julius Caesar, may be gloomy and terrible enough, but they are no more 

really uncanny than Homer’s jovial world of gods. 9 We adapt our judgement 

to the imaginary reality imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spir- 

9. Freud names writers from a range of cultures 

and times: dante alighieri (1265– 1321) visits the 

dead in hell in Inferno, the first volume of his 

Divine Comedy; in the tragedies of William Shakespeare 

(1564– 1616) named here, ghosts appear; 

and in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (ca. 8th c. b.c.e.), 

the gods play active roles.


its and ghosts as though their existence had the same validity as our own 

has in material reality. In this case too we avoid all trace of the uncanny. 

The situation is altered as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world 

of common reality. In this case he accepts as well all the conditions operating 

to produce uncanny feelings in real life; and everything that would have an 

uncanny effect in reality has it in his story. But in this case he can even 

increase his effect and multiply it far beyond what could happen in reality, by 

bringing about events which never or very rarely happen in fact. In doing this 

he is in a sense betraying us to the superstitiousness which we have ostensibly 

surmounted; he deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth, and 

then after all overstepping it. We react to his inventions as we would have 

reacted to real experiences; by the time we have seen through his trick it is 

already too late and the author has achieved his object. But it must be added 

that his success is not unalloyed. We retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a 

kind of grudge against the attempted deceit. I have noticed this particularly 

after reading Schnitzler’s Die Weissagung [The Prophecy] 1 and similar stories 

which flirt with the supernatural. However, the writer has one more 

means which he can use in order to avoid our recalcitrance and at the same 

time to improve his chances of success. He can keep us in the dark for a long 

time about the precise nature of the presuppositions on which the world he 

writes about is based, or he can cunningly and ingeniously avoid any definite 

information on the point to the last. Speaking generally, however, we 

find a confirmation of the second part of our proposition— that fiction presents 

more opportunities for creating uncanny feelings than are possible in 

real life. 

Strictly speaking, all these complications relate only to that class of the 

uncanny which proceeds from forms of thought that have been surmounted. 

The class which proceeds from repressed complexes is more resistant and 

remains as powerful in fiction as in real experience, subject to one exception. 

The uncanny belonging to the first class— that proceeding from forms 

of thought that have been surmounted— retains its character not only in 

experience but in fiction as well, so long as the setting is one of material 

reality; but where it is given an arbitrary and artificial setting in fiction, it is 

apt to lose that character. 

We have clearly not exhausted the possibilities of poetic licence and the 

privileges enjoyed by story- writers in evoking or in excluding an uncanny 

feeling. In the main we adopt an unvarying passive attitude towards real 

experience and are subject to the influence of our physical environment. 

But the story- teller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the 

moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, 

to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often 

obtains a great variety of effects from the same material. All this is nothing 

new, and has doubtless long since been fully taken into account by students 

of aesthetics. We have drifted into this field of research half involuntarily, 

through the temptation to explain certain instances which contradicted our 

theory of the causes of the uncanny. Accordingly we will now return to the 

examination of a few of those instances. 

1. A short story (1905) by the Austrian playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler (1862– 1931).

Fetishism / 841 

We have already asked why it is that the severed hand in the story of the 

trea sure of Rhampsinitus has no uncanny effect in the way that the severed 

hand has in Hauff’s story. The question seems to have gained in importance 

now that we have recognized that the class of the uncanny which proceeds 

from repressed complexes is the more resistant of the two. The answer is 

easy. In the Herodotus story our thoughts are concentrated much more on 

the superior cunning of the masterthief than on the feelings of the princess. 

The princess may very well have had an uncanny feeling, indeed she very 

probably fell into a swoon; but we have no such sensations, for we put ourselves 

in the thief’s place, not in hers. In Nestroy’s farce, Der Zerrissene [The 

Torn Man], 2 another means is used to avoid any impression of the uncanny 

in the scene in which the fleeing man, convinced that he is a murderer, lifts 

up one trapdoor after another and each time sees what he takes to be the 

ghost of his victim rising up out of it. He calls out in despair, ‘But I’ve only 

killed one man. Why this ghastly multiplication?’ We know what went before 

this scene and do not share his error, so what must be uncanny to him has 

an irresistibly comic effect on us. Even a ‘real’ ghost, as in Oscar Wilde’s 

Canterville Ghost, 3 loses all power of at least arousing gruesome feelings in 

us as soon as the author begins to amuse himself by being ironical about it 

and allows liberties to be taken with it. Thus we see how in de pen dent emotional 

effects can be of the actual subjectmatter in the world of fiction. In 

fairy stories feelings of fear— including therefore uncanny feelings— are 

ruled out altogether. We understand this, and that is why we ignore any 

opportunities we find in them for developing such feelings. 

Concerning the factors of silence, solitude and darkness, we can only say 

that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from 

which the majority of human beings have never become quite free. This 

problem has been discussed from a psychoanalytic point of view elsewhere. 

1919 

Fetishism 1 

In the last few years I have had an opportunity of studying analytically a 

number of men whose object- choice was dominated by a fetish. There is no 

need to expect that these people came to analysis on account of their fetish. 

For though no doubt a fetish is recognized by its adherents as an abnormality, 

it is seldom felt by them as the symptom of an ailment accompanied by 

suffering. Usually they are quite satisfied with it, or even praise the way in 

which it eases their erotic life. As a rule, therefore, the fetish made its 

appearance in analysis as a subsidiary finding. 

For obvious reasons the details of these cases must be withheld from 

publication; I cannot, therefore, show in what way accidental circumstances 

have contributed to the choice of a fetish. The most extraordinary case 

seemed to me to be one in which a young man had exalted a certain sort of 

2. An 1845 production by the Austrian playwright 

Johann Nestroy (1801– 1862). 

3. A short story (1887) by the Irish- born writer 

wilde (1854– 1900). 

1. Translated by Joan Rivière, who sometimes 

adds a word or phrase in square brackets in the 

text for clarification.


‘shine on the nose’ into a fetishistic precondition. The surprising explanation 

of this was that the patient had been brought up in an En glish nursery 

but had later come to Germany, where he forgot his mother- tongue almost 

completely. The fetish, which originated from his earliest childhood, had to 

be understood in En glish, not German. The ‘shine on the nose’ [in German 

‘Glanz auf der Nase’]— was in reality a ‘glance at the nose’. The nose was 

thus the fetish, which, incidentally, he endowed at will with the luminous 

shine which was not perceptible to others. 

In every instance, the meaning and the purpose of the fetish turned out, 

in analysis, to be the same. It revealed itself so naturally and seemed to me 

so compelling that I am prepared to expect the same solution in all cases 

of fetishism. When now I announce that the fetish is a substitute for the 

penis, I shall certainly create disappointment; so I hasten to add that it is 

not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a par tic u lar and quite special 

penis that had been extremely important in early childhood but had later 

been lost. That is to say, it should normally have been given up, but the 

fetish is precisely designed to preserve it from extinction. To put it more 

plainly: the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that 

the little boy once believed in and— for reasons familiar to us— does not 

want to give up. 2 

What happened, therefore, was that the boy refused to take cognizance of 

the fact of his having perceived that a woman does not possess a penis. No, 

that could not be true: for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession 

of a penis was in danger; and against that there rose in rebellion the 

portion of his narcissism which Nature has, as a precaution, attached to that 

par tic u lar organ. In later life a grown man may perhaps experience a similar 

panic when the cry goes up that Throne and Altar are in danger, and similar 

illogical consequences will ensue. If I am not mistaken, Laforgue would say 

in this case that the boy ‘scotomizes’ his perception of the woman’s lack of a 

penis. 3 A new technical term is justified when it describes a new fact or 

emphasizes it. This is not so here. The oldest word in our psychoanalytic 

terminology, ‘repression’, already relates to this pathological pro cess. If we 

wanted to differentiate more sharply between the vicissitude of the idea as 

distinct from that of the affect and reserve the word ‘Verdrängung’ [‘repression’] 

for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of the 

idea would be ‘Verleugnung’ [‘disavowal’]. ‘Scotomization’ seems to me particularly 

unsuitable, for it suggests that the perception is entirely wiped out, 

so that the result is the same as when a visual impression falls on the blind 

spot in the ret i na. In the situation we are considering, on the contrary, we see 

that the perception has persisted, and that a very energetic action has been 

undertaken to maintain the disavowal. It is not true that, after the child has 

made his observation of the woman, he has preserved unaltered his belief 

2. This interpretation was made as early as 1910, 

in my study on Leonardo da Vinci [Leonardo da 

Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood], without 

any reasons being given for it [Freud’s note]. 

3. I correct myself, however, by adding that I have 

the best reasons for supposing that Laforgue 

would not say anything of the sort. It is clear from 

his own remarks [in “Repression and Scotomization,” 

1926] that “scotomization” is a term which 

derives from descriptions of dementia praecox 

[schizo phre nia], which does not arise from a 

carrying- over of psychoanalytic concepts to the 

psychoses and which has no application to developmental 

pro cesses or to the formation of neuroses. 

In his exposition in the text of his paper, the 

author has been at pains to make this incompatibility 

clear [Freud’s note]. René Laforgue (1894– 

1962), French psychoanalyst. “Scotomize”: to 

form a mental blind spot about.

Fetishism / 843 

that women have a phallus. He has retained that belief, but he has also given 

it up. In the conflict between the weight of the unwelcome perception and 

the force of his counter- wish, a compromise has been reached, as is only possible 

under the dominance of the unconscious laws of thought— the primary 

pro cesses. Yes, in his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; 

but this penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something else has 

taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits 

the interest which was formerly directed to its pre de ces sor. But this interest 

suffers an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration 

has set up a memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute. Furthermore, 

an aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist, to the real female genitals 

remains a stigma indelebile 4 of the repression that has taken place. We can 

now see what the fetish achieves and what it is that maintains it. It remains a 

token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it. It 

also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women 

with the characteristic which makes them tolerable as sexual objects. In later 

life, the fetishist feels that he enjoys yet another advantage from his substitute 

for a genital. The meaning of the fetish is not known to other people, so 

the fetish is not withheld from him: it is easily accessible and he can readily 

obtain the sexual satisfaction attached to it. What other men have to woo and 

make exertions for can be had by the fetishist with no trouble at all. 

Probably no male human being is spared the fright of castration at the 

sight of a female genital. Why some people become homosexual as a consequence 

of that impression, while others fend it off by creating a fetish, and 

the great majority surmount it, we are frankly not able to explain. It is possible 

that, among all the factors at work, we do not yet know those which 

are decisive for the rare pathological results. We must be content if we can 

explain what has happened, and may for the present leave on one side the 

task of explaining why something has not happened. 

One would expect that the organs or objects chosen as substitutes for the 

absent female phallus would be such as appear as symbols of the penis in 

other connections as well. This may happen often enough, but is certainly 

not a deciding factor. It seems rather that when the fetish is instituted some 

pro cess occurs which reminds one of the stopping of memory in traumatic 

amnesia. As in this latter case, the subject’s interest comes to a halt halfway, 

as it were; it is as though the last impression before the uncanny and 

traumatic one is retained as a fetish. Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference 

as a fetish— or a part of it— to the circumstance that the inquisitive 

boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up; fur and 

velvet— as has long been suspected— are a fixation of the sight of the pubic 

hair, which should have been followed by the longed- for sight of the female 

member; pieces of underclothing, which are so often chosen as a fetish, 

crystallize the moment of undressing, the last moment in which the woman 

could still be regarded as phallic. But I do not maintain that it is invariably 

possible to discover with certainty how the fetish was determined. 

An investigation of fetishism is strongly recommended to anyone who 

still doubts the existence of the castration complex or who can still believe 

that fright at the sight of the female genital has some other ground— for 

4. Indelible mark (Latin).


instance, that it is derived from a supposed recollection of the trauma of 

birth. 5 

For me, the explanation of fetishism had another point of theoretical 

interest as well. Recently, along quite speculative lines, I arrived at the 

proposition that the essential difference between neurosis and psychosis 

was that in the former the ego, in the ser vice of reality, suppresses a piece of 

the id, 6 whereas in a psychosis it lets itself be induced by the id to detach 

itself from a piece of reality. I returned to this theme once again later on. 7 

But soon after this I had reason to regret that I had ventured so far. In the 

analysis of two young men I learned that each— one when he was two years 

old and the other when he was ten— had failed to take cognizance of the 

death of his beloved father— had ‘scotomized’ it— and yet neither of them 

had developed a psychosis. Thus a piece of reality which was undoubtedly 

important had been disavowed by the ego, just as the unwelcome fact of 

women’s castration is disavowed in fetishists. I also began to suspect that 

similar occurrences in childhood are by no means rare, and I believed that 

I had been guilty of an error in my characterization of neurosis and psychosis. 

It is true that there was one way out of the difficulty. My formula needed 

only to hold good where there was a higher degree of differentiation in the 

psychical apparatus; things might be permissible to a child which would 

entail severe injury to an adult. 

But further research led to another solution of the contradiction. It 

turned out that the two young men had no more ‘scotomized’ their father’s 

death than a fetishist does the castration of women. It was only one current 

in their mental life that had not recognized their father’s death; there was 

another current which took full account of that fact. The attitude which 

fitted in with the wish and the attitude which fitted in with reality existed 

side by side. In one of my two cases this split had formed the basis of a moderately 

severe obsessional neurosis. The patient oscillated in every situation 

in life between two assumptions: the one, that his father was still alive and 

was hindering his activities; the other, opposite one, that he was entitled to 

regard himself as his father’s successor. I may thus keep to the expectation 

that in a psychosis the one current— that which fitted in with reality— 

would have in fact been absent. 

Returning to my description of fetishism, I may say that there are many 

and weighty additional proofs of the divided attitude of fetishists to the question 

of the castration of women. In very subtle instances both the disavowal 

and the affirmation of the castration have found their way into the construction 

of the fetish itself. This was so in the case of a man whose fetish was an 

athletic support- belt which could also be worn as bathing drawers. This piece 

of clothing covered up the genitals entirely and concealed the distinction 

between them. Analysis showed that it signified that women were castrated 

and that they were not castrated; and it also allowed of the hypothesis that 

men were castrated, for all these possibilities could equally well be concealed 

5. This argument was made by the Austrian psychotherapist 

Otto Rank in The Trauma of Birth 

(1924). 

6. The unconscious (literally, “it”). In the Standard 

Edition, Freud’s German terms das Ich (“the 

I,” or “ego,” referring to the conscious self) and das 

Es (“the it”) are rendered in Latin, as is das Uber- 

Ich (the superego), the internalized voice of conscience 

and judgment directed toward the ego. 

7. “Neurosis and Psychosis” (1924) and “The 

Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis” (1924) 

[Freud’s note].

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE / 845 

under the belt— the earliest rudiment of which in his childhood had been the 

fig- leaf on a statue. A fetish of this sort, doubly derived from contrary ideas, 

is of course especially durable. In other instances the divided attitude shows 

itself in what the fetishist does with his fetish, whether in reality or in his 

imagination. To point out that he reveres his fetish is not the whole story; in 

many cases he treats it in a way which is obviously equivalent to a repre senta 

tion of castration. This happens particularly if he has developed a strong 

identification with his father and plays the part of the latter; for it is to him 

that as a child he ascribed the woman’s castration. Affection and hostility in 

the treatment of the fetish— which run parallel with the disavowal and the 

ac know ledg ment of castration— are mixed in unequal proportions in different 

cases, so that the one or the other is more clearly recognizable. We seem 

here to approach an understanding, even if a distant one, of the behaviour of 

the ‘coupeur de nattes’. 8 In him the need to carry out the castration which he 

disavows has come to the front. His action contains in itself the two mutually 

incompatible assertions: ‘the woman has still got a penis’ and ‘my father has 

castrated the woman’. Another variant, which is also a parallel to fetishism in 

social psychology, might be seen in the Chinese custom of mutilating the 

female foot and then revering it like a fetish after it has been mutilated. It 

seems as though the Chinese male wants to thank the woman for having 

submitted to being castrated. 

In conclusion we may say that the normal prototype of fetishes is a man’s 

penis, just as the normal prototype of inferior organs is a woman’s real small 

penis, the clitoris. 9 1927 

8. A pervert who enjoys cutting off the hair of 

females [translator’s note]. 

9. This is an allusion to Alfred Adler’s insistence 

on “organ- inferiority” as the basis of all neuroses 

[translator’s note]. Adler (1870– 1937), Austrian 

psychiatrist who broke with Freud to form his 

own school of psychoanalysis in 1911. 

FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE 

1857–1913 

Ferdinand de Saussure gave birth to structuralism by means of a book he never 

wrote. The Course in General Linguistics, based on student notes, was compiled by 

colleagues in 1916 after Saussure’s death. Always described as being born into a 

“Swiss family distinguished for its intellectual achievements,” Saussure, it seems, 

had no biography apart from the universities in which he studied or taught and the 

books he failed to write. In fact, Saussure’s untimely death at age fifty- six is considered 

one of the few notable facts about him. Yet this man without a life came to be 

known as “the father of modern linguistics,” and his intellectual progeny affected 

mid- twentieth- century thought in a wide variety of fields. After Saussure, the very 

idea of what it meant to study language was transformed. 

In the late eigh teenth century, the Eu ro pe an study of languages had been revolutionized 

by the encounter with Sanskrit (brought about by the British colonization

846 / FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE 

of India). Comparison between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin suggested a common 

ancestor behind all three, which scholars dubbed Proto- Indo- European. Comparative 

philologists sought to map languages as comparative anatomists had 

mapped organisms. But the generation of Saussure’s teachers, the Neogrammarians, 

had begun to explore the rules of affinity and transformation in a more truly 

historical way. Saussure studied historical linguistics with some of them at the 

University of Leipzig, where he published his only book, Mémoire sur le système 

primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo- européennes (Memoir on the Primitive 

System of Vowels in Indo- European Languages) in 1878, while he was still a graduate 

student. His precocity was recognized by scholars in the field, and his purely 

theoretical description of an unknown vowel was later confirmed by studies of the 

Hittite language. 

After spending a year studying in Berlin and receiving his doctorate from the University 

of Leipzig in 1880, he became a se nior lecturer at the École des Hautes 

Études (School for Advanced Study) in Paris, where he began by teaching Gothic and 

Old High German, later adding Sanskrit (which he had studied since 1874), Latin, 

Persian, and Lithuanian. In 1891 he accepted a professorship at the University of 

Geneva, teaching there for the rest of his life. It was in 1906 that, after the death of a 

colleague, he was asked to add “general linguistics” to his teaching in historical and 

comparative linguistics. 

In a letter written in 1894 to fellow linguist Antoine Meillet, Saussure outlined 

his dissatisfaction with linguistic theory as he knew it: 

For a long time I have been above all preoccupied with the logical classification 

of linguistic facts and with the classification of the points of view from which 

we treat them; and I am more and more aware of the im mense amount of work 

that would be required to show the linguist what he is doing. . . . The utter inadequacy 

of current terminology, the need to reform it and, in order to do that, to 

demonstrate what sort of object language is, continually spoil my plea sure in 

philology, though I have no dearer wish than not to be made to think about the 

nature of language in general. 

Seldom has the condition for a real theoretical breakthrough been described so 

movingly. Saussure had taken “current terminology” to the point where it began to 

raise questions it could not answer. The need to study “the nature of language in 

general” was lived as a spoiled plea sure in philology. 

As Saussure’s originality increased, his scholarly productivity slowed. Searching 

for the best approach, he taught general linguistics in three different ways. Not 

only did he not write up his course, but he did not even keep his lecture notes, 

starting afresh each time. After his death, his young colleagues found themselves 

fabricating a synthesis of three fragmentary sets of student notes, with the result 

that the Saussure who is the author of the Course in General Linguistics is a function 

of the edited text, not its origin. Yet that was the Saussure who changed intellectual 

history. 

What was Saussure’s new theory of language? The diversity of languages, often 

thought to indicate a falling away from one original language (as in the story of 

Babel), indicated to Saussure not a story but a principle: the principle of the “arbitrary” 

(purely conventional) nature of the sign. Since there are thousands of human 

languages, the relation between words and things cannot be based on natural 

resemblances. For example, no inherent affinity or motivation leads people to call 

an avian creature bird or oiseau. Not only that, Saussure went on, but language is 

not a nomenclature. Rather than the world consisting of things that need names 

(the Adamic conception), each language brings into being, by describing, a world 

that it then knows as external. To be sure, the external world exists— but its reality 

remains quite nebulous until language articulates it. The way lines divide concepts


and phrases, the way even concrete items are viewed, is specific to each language; 

each covers all that needs to be said, but in its different way. 

Saussure’s own theory illustrates this point: his terms langage, langue, and 

parole have never been satisfactorily translated into En glish. Le langage (in En glish, 

“language”) is a general human faculty, that which enables us to speak of “body 

language” or “the language of fashion.” La langue, which in En glish is also called 

“language,” is the name for specific languages (la langue anglaise, the En glish language); 

but it is also the most general term for language itself, the term Saussure 

uses to name the object of linguistics. La langue in this sense does not exist: it is a 

theoretical object abstracted from the structures of specific languages. La parole 

(speech) is what Saussure calls “the executive side”: the concrete utterances that 

constitute all acts of language. These individual utterances are excluded from his 

theory of language insofar as they only “execute” possibilities that exist in language 

already, or depart from it for creative purposes without fundamentally changing it. 

But where Saussure uses three terms for these distinctions, En glish only possesses 

two. 

Language, for Saussure, is a structured system of conventional signs, studied in 

their internal complexity as if frozen in time (synchronically) rather than as changing 

over time (diachronically). Saussure saw the study of language as eventually 

forming part of a larger science of signs in culture, which he called semiology, a 

field that later scholars (see roland barthes) went on to develop. The atom of language 

is the sign, which is functionally split into two parts: a signifier (soundimage) 

and a signified (concept), brought inseparably together like the two sides of a sheet 

of paper. The relation between the signifier and the signified is “arbitrary,” not 

“motivated” (by natural resemblance), even in cases of onomatopoiea (words that 

sound like what they mean). The word arbitrary means not that individual speakers 

can just make language up, but precisely that they can’t: the sign is a convention 

that has to be learned and is not subject to individual will. The point is not that 

languages do not change (they are changing all the time), but that the changes 

themselves follow paths that have more to do with the overall structure of the language 

than with any intentional intervention by its speakers. 

Though the signifier and the signified seem to function together as a unit to produce 

signification, each has value only by virtue of the ways in which it differs from 

other terms. Here, the chain of signifiers and the chain of signifieds diverge. A signifier 

differs from other signifiers while its signified distinguishes itself from other signifieds, 

and the networks of connection and distinction are not parallel, as Saussure’s 

misleading diagram of the two realms might suggest. Saussure’s distinction between 

“signification” and “value” is similar to karl marx’s distinction between “use value” 

and “exchange value”: the first appears tied to the characteristics of the object or 

term, whereas the second is entirely a function of the system of exchange or of language. 

Saussure goes so far as to say that everything in language is relational: “in 

language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally 

implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there 

are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure’s emphasis). In other words, 

neither ideas nor sounds exist prior to their combination. This description of a difference 

that does not depend on the prior existence of knowable entities is one of Saussure’s 

most radical declarations. 

Jokes often play on the purely differential aspect of language. A homeowner 

answering the phone and hearing that “The viper is coming” might feel fear, but 

when the voice on the line explains that “he’s coming to vipe your vindows,” what 

had initially been a serpent becomes a benign house hold maintenance worker. A 

foreign accent changes the sounds in a language without changing the system of 

differences. The sound v takes on the differential role of w in this joke as soon as it 

becomes clear to what it is being opposed.


Nevertheless, once combined, the signifier and signified do become a unit, an 

articulus in a system of articulations. The articulations are positive facts— the only 

kind of facts language possesses, since, as Saussure stresses, language is a form and 

not a substance. Once the differential structure has severed any natural connection 

between language and things, the sign becomes a building block of a system of 

oppositions: singular, plural; past, present, future; voiced, unvoiced; masculine, 

feminine. Saussure’s favorite meta phor for the kind of structure he has in mind is 

chess: a rule- bound system of oppositions and differences that governs a closed but 

infinite set of operations. 

In Saussure’s conception of language, the sign is not only arbitrary but also linear 

(he thus uses a spatial term for what is in fact temporal, the succession of signs as 

they unfold in time during speech). Signs are combined like links in a chain to form 

the line of language according to two relations: the syntagmatic (all units present in 

their articulation) and the associative (all related units present in the mind but 

absent from the actual sequence). This distinction, later called syntagmatic and 

paradigmatic, would form an important part of roman jakobson’s theory of metaphor 

and metonymy (see below). For Saussure, some syntagmatic relations beyond 

mere grammatical rules count as language rather than speech. Far from being freely 

chosen by each speaker, they constitute the “idioms” that a newcomer must master 

in order to “know” a language. 

At the end of his life, Saussure was working on another project in which he had 

even less confidence than in his theory of general linguistics. According to notebooks 

published by Jean Starobinski starting in 1964 and eventually collected as Les Mots 

sous les mots (1971; trans. 1979, Words upon Words), Saussure was fascinated by the 

idea that within the verses written by certain Latin poets, deliberately concealed anagrams 

of proper names could be detected. Thus, a hidden poetics of names generated 

textual patterns that appeared to be dictated by the surface meanings of the words 

used as “carriers” for the letters. But Saussure could never be sure of what he found, 

and the notebooks remained hidden away. To compound the difficulty, the anagram 

project entailed a displacement of a major principle of the Course: while the Course 

treated the signifier- signified relation as a unit, the anagrams implied that signifiers 

and signifieds could function separately, that a signifier could serve more than one 

function, and that the signifier could take the lead in the or ga ni za tion of a text. These 

implications, which Saussure viewed with incredulity, had a profound impact on later 

textual theory. 

Saussure’s work provided the groundwork for both structuralism and poststructuralism. 

It was part of the larger “linguistic turn” in twentiethcentury philosophy, 

history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and literary studies. claude lévi- strauss, for 

example, studied myths and kinship systems within different cultures as a system of 

signs to be interpreted. Roland Barthes explored the semiology of fashion, advertising, 

travel, and many other cultural phenomena. jacques derrida, while critiquing 

Saussure’s privileging of spoken language (Saussure called writing secondary, pathological, 

even monstrous with respect to the speech it rec ords), nevertheless took up 

many aspects of Saussure’s system of differences into what he called différance. 

louis althusser understood, on the basis of what Saussure says about language as 

a system, that economic and social structures, too, possess structural (rather than 

transitive) causality. And finally, jacques lacan used Saussure to reformulate Freud 

in linguistic terms, while julia kristeva developed a theory of the anagrammatical 

nature of literature. 

Of course, the very things that made Saussure’s thought so revealing and influential 

also led to the most serious objections. By focusing on the relation between signifier 

and signified, he gained insight into linguistic structure yet eliminated the world. 

“Bracketing the referent”— that is, leaving out the third dimension of the sign, that to 

which it refers— has been criticized by those, like terry ea gleton, who find it impos-


sible to speak of language without speaking of reference, things, history. After all, 

they argue, language is not chess. How can it be studied apart from the world to 

which it refers? How can reference not have a role in structure? In addition, language 

is neither unified nor closed, as deconstructors and poststructuralists were quick to 

point out. Even if it is frozen in time, conflict remains unresolved and essential 

within the system. And the later postmodern critique of the “universal subject” has 

emphasized that speakers are placed in very different positions within language by 

class, gender, race, geography, and so on. In our “viper” joke, for example, a small 

linguistic difference points to a whole system of class, property, ethnicity, and, varying 

with the gender of the homeowner, sexual politics— including an echo of the story 

of Adam, Eve, and the serpent. 

Despite these criticisms, the Course in General Linguistics opened up as never 

before the question of the role of signs in culture and the role of language in the 

mind. As Jonathan Culler put it in Ferdinand de Saussure (1986), “What the study 

of language reveals about mind is not a set of primitive conceptions or natural ideas 

but the general structuring and differentiating operations by which things are made 

to signify.” 

bibliography 

There are two existing En glish translations of the Course in General Linguistics, first 

edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye in 1916. The one that has become 

canonical is by Wade Baskin (1959). Roy Harris’s more recent version (1983) solves 

certain problems but creates as many new ones. A critical edition comparing six different 

sources was published in French by Rudolf Engler (1967). Saussure’s anagram 

project, edited by Jean Starobinski, has been translated as Words upon Words (1979). 

The leading Saussure scholars Simon Bouquet, Rudolf Engler, Carol Sanders, Matthew 

Pires, and Peter Figueroa have edited and translated a newly discovered work 

by Saussure on language, the sign, and per for mance, Writings in General Linguistics 

(2006). As one might expect, there are no biographies. 

Several introductions to Saussure’s work are excellent: Jonathan Culler’s Ferdinand 

de Saussure (rev. ed., 1986) and David Holdcroft’s Saussure: Signs, System, 

and Arbitrariness (1991) are accessible and clear. For an excellent exposition of the 

theories and limits of Saussure and the Rus sian formalists, see Fredric Jameson, 

The Prison- House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Rus sian 

Formalism (1972). Roy Harris’s Reading Saussure: A Critical Commentary of the 

“Cours de linguistique generale” (1987) and Françoise Gadet’s Saussure and Contemporary 

Culture (1987; trans. 1989) offer more information about Saussure in the 

context of linguistics. The even more detailed Re- Reading Saussure: The Dynamics 

of Signs in Social Life (1997) by Paul J. Thibault updates the discussion of many of 

the key concepts. For a confusing but detailed history of linguistics leading up to 

Saussure, see E. F. K. Koerner’s Ferdinand de Saussure: Origin and Development of 

His Linguistic Thought in Western Studies of Language (1973). For a more theoretical 

discussion of Saussure’s place in the history of linguistics, see Hans Aarsleff’s 

insightful but not chronological From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language 

and Intellectual History (1982). A bibliography, Bibliographia Saussureana, 

was compiled by E. F. K. Koerner (1972); more recent items can be found in the 

bibliographies of the Harris and Thibault volumes cited above. Writings in General 

Linguistics includes a comprehensive bibliography on Saussure from 1970 to 2004. 

Carol Sanders has also put together a useful collection of scholarly writings and an 

equally impressive bibliography on Saussure in The Cambridge Companion to Saussure 

(2004).


From Course in General Linguistics 1 

From Introduction 

From chapter iii. the object of linguistics 

2. Place of Language in the Facts of Speech 

* * * 

To summarize, these are the characteristics of language: 

1) Language is a well- defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech 

facts. It can be localized in the limited segment of the speaking- circuit 

where an auditory image becomes associated with a concept. It is the social 

side of speech, outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by 

himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members 

of a community. Moreover, the individual must always serve an apprenticeship 

in order to learn the functioning of language; a child assimilates it only 

gradually. It is such a distinct thing that a man deprived of the use of 

speaking retains it provided that he understands the vocal signs that he 

hears. 

2) Language, unlike speaking, is something that we can study separately. 

Although dead languages are no longer spoken, we can easily assimilate their 

linguistic organisms. We can dispense with the other elements of speech; 

indeed, the science of language is possible only if the other elements are 

excluded. 

3) Whereas speech is heterogeneous, language, as defined, is homogeneous. 

It is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of 

meanings and soundimages, and in which both parts of the sign are psychological. 

4) Language is concrete, no less so than speaking; and this is a help in 

our study of it. Linguistic signs, though basically psychological, are not 

abstractions; associations which bear the stamp of collective approval— and 

which added together constitute language— are realities that have their seat 

in the brain. Besides, linguistic signs are tangible; it is possible to reduce 

them to conventional written symbols, whereas it would be impossible to 

provide detailed photographs of acts of speaking [actes de parole]; the pronunciation 

of even the smallest word represents an infinite number of muscular 

movements that could be identified and put into graphic form only 

with great difficulty. In language, on the contrary, there is only the soundimage, 

and the latter can be translated into a fixed visual image. For if we 

disregard the vast number of movements necessary for the realization of 

soundimages in speaking, we see that each soundimage is nothing more 

than the sum of a limited number of elements or phonemes 2 that can in 

turn be called up by a corresponding number of written symbols. The very 

possibility of putting the things that relate to language into graphic form 

allows dictionaries and grammars to represent it accurately, for language 

is a store house of soundimages, and writing is the tangible form of those 

images. 

1. Edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye 

in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger; translated 

by Wade Baskin, who occasionally includes 

the French in square brackets. 

2. The smallest distinctive unit of sound in a spoken 

language.

Course in General Linguistics / 851 

3. Place of Language in Human Facts: Semiology 

The foregoing characteristics of language reveal an even more important 

characteristic. Language, once its boundaries have been marked off within 

the speech data, can be classified among human phenomena, whereas speech 

cannot. 

We have just seen that language is a social institution; but several features 

set it apart from other po liti cal, legal, etc. institutions. We must call in a 

new type of facts in order to illuminate the special nature of language. 

Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable 

to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf- mutes, symbolic rites, polite 

formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these systems. 

A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it 

would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; 

I shall call it semiology (from Greek semeîon ‘sign’). Semiology would 

show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does 

not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, 

a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only a part of the general science 

of semiology; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to 

linguistics, and the latter will circumscribe a well- defined area within the 

mass of anthropological facts. 

To determine the exact place of semiology is the task of the psychologist. 

The task of the linguist is to find out what makes language a special system 

within the mass of semiological data. This issue will be taken up again 

later; here I wish merely to call attention to one thing: if I have succeeded 

in assigning linguistics a place among the sciences, it is because I have 

related it to semiology. 

Why has semiology not yet been recognized as an in de pen dent science 

with its own object like all the other sciences? Linguists have been going 

around in circles: language, better than anything else, offers a basis for 

understanding the semiological problem; but language must, to put it correctly, 

be studied in itself; heretofore language has almost always been 

studied in connection with something else, from other viewpoints. 

There is first of all the superficial notion of the general public: people see 

nothing more than a name- giving system in language, thereby prohibiting 

any research into its true nature. 

Then there is the viewpoint of the psychologist, who studies the signmechanism 

in the individual; this is the easiest method, but it does not lead 

beyond individual execution and does not reach the sign, which is social. 

Or even when signs are studied from a social viewpoint, only the traits 

that attach language to the other social institutions— those that are more 

or less voluntary— are emphasized; as a result, the goal is by- passed and the 

specific characteristics of semiological systems in general and of language 

in par tic u lar are completely ignored. For the distinguishing characteristic 

of the sign— but the one that is least apparent at first sight— is that in some 

way it always eludes the individual or social will. 

In short, the characteristic that distinguishes semiological systems from 

all other institutions shows up clearly only in language where it manifests 

itself in the things which are studied least, and the necessity or specific 

value of a semiological science is therefore not clearly recognized. But to me 

the language problem is mainly semiological, and all developments derive


their significance from that important fact. If we are to discover the true 

nature of language we must learn what it has in common with all other 

semiological systems; linguistic forces that seem very important at first 

glance (e.g., the role of the vocal apparatus) will receive only secondary consideration 

if they serve only to set language apart from the other systems. 

This procedure will do more than to clarify the linguistic problem. By studying 

rites, customs, etc. as signs, I believe that we shall throw new light on 

the facts and point up the need for including them in a science of semiology 

and explaining them by its laws. 

From Part One. General Principles 

chapter i. nature of the linguistic sign 

1. Sign, Signified, Signifier 

Some people regard language, when reduced to its elements, as a namingprocess 

only— a list of words, each corresponding to the thing that it names. 

For example: 

This conception is open to criticism at several points. It assumes that 

readymade ideas exist before words (on this point, see below); it does not 

tell us whether a name is vocal or psychological in nature (arbor, for instance, 

can be considered from either viewpoint); finally, it lets us assume that the 

linking of a name and a thing is a very simple operation— an assumption 

that is anything but true. But this rather naive approach can bring us near 

the truth by showing us that the linguistic unit is a double entity, one formed 

by the associating of two terms. 

We have seen in considering the speaking- circuit that both terms involved 

in the linguistic sign are psychological and are united in the brain by an 

associative bond. This point must be emphasized. 

The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a 

soundimage. 4 The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, 

3. Tree and horse (the more usual base form is 

equus), respectively (Latin). 

4. The term soundimage may seem to be too 

restricted inasmuch as beside the repre sen ta tion 

of the sounds of a word there is also that of its 

articulation, the muscular image of the phonational 

act. But for F. de Saussure language is 

essentially a depository, a thing received from 

without. The soundimage is par excellence the 

natural repre sen ta tion of the word as a fact of 

potential language, outside any actual use of it in 

speaking. The motor side is thus implied or, in any 

event, occupies only a subordinate role with 

respect to the soundimage [Bally, Sechehaye, and 

Riedlinger’s note].


but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on 

our senses. The soundimage is sensory, and if I happen to call it “material,” 

it is only in that sense, and by way of opposing it to the other term of the 

association, the concept, which is generally more abstract. 

The psychological character of our soundimages becomes apparent when 

we observe our own speech. Without moving our lips or tongue, we can talk to 

ourselves or recite mentally a selection of verse. Because we regard the words 

of our language as soundimages, we must avoid speaking of the “phonemes” 

that make up the words. This term, which suggests vocal activity, is applicable 

to the spoken word only, to the realization of the inner image in discourse. We 

can avoid that misunderstanding by speaking of the sounds and syllables of a 

word provided we remember that the names refer to the soundimage. 

The linguistic sign is then a two- sided psychological entity that can be 

represented by the drawing: 

The two elements are intimately united, and each recalls the other. 

Whether we try to find the meaning of the Latin word arbor or the word 

that Latin uses to designate the concept “tree,” it is clear that only the associations 

sanctioned by that language appear to us to conform to reality, and 

we disregard what ever others might be imagined. 

Our definition of the linguistic sign poses an important question of terminology. 

I call the combination of a concept and a soundimage a sign, but 

in current usage the term generally designates only a soundimage, a word, 

for example (arbor, etc.). One tends to forget that arbor is called a sign only 

because it carries the concept “tree,” with the result that the idea of the 

sensory part implies the idea of the whole. 

Ambiguity would disappear if the three notions involved here were designated 

by three names, each suggesting and opposing the others. I propose to 

retain the word sign [signe] to designate the whole and to replace concept 

and soundimage respectively by signified [signifié] and signifier [signifiant]; 

the last two terms have the advantage of indicating the opposition that separates 

them from each other and from the whole of which they are parts. As 

regards sign, if I am satisfied with it, this is simply because I do not know of 

any word to replace it, the ordinary language suggesting no other.


The linguistic sign, as defined, has two primordial characteristics. In 

enunciating them I am also positing the basic principles of any study of this 

type. 

2. Principle I: The Arbitrary Nature of the Sign 

The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I 

mean by sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier 

with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary. 

The idea of “sister” is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession 

of sounds s-ö- r which serves as its signifier in French; that it could be 

represented equally by just any other sequence is proved by differences 

among languages and by the very existence of different languages: the signified 

“ox” has as its signifier b-ö- f on one side of the border and o-k- s (Ochs) 

on the other. 5 

No one disputes the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign, but it is 

often easier to discover a truth than to assign to it its proper place. Principle 

I dominates all the linguistics of language; its consequences are numberless. 

It is true that not all of them are equally obvious at first glance; 

only after many detours does one discover them, and with them the primordial 

importance of the principle. 

One remark in passing: when semiology becomes or ga nized as a science, 

the question will arise whether or not it properly includes modes of expression 

based on completely natural signs, such as pantomime. Supposing that 

the new science welcomes them, its main concern will still be the whole 

group of systems grounded on the arbitrariness of the sign. In fact, every 

means of expression used in society is based, in principle, on collective 

behavior or— what amounts to the same thing— on convention. Polite formulas, 

for instance, though often imbued with a certain natural expressiveness 

(as in the case of a Chinese who greets his emperor by bowing down to 

the ground nine times), are nonetheless fixed by rule; it is this rule and not 

the intrinsic value of the gestures that obliges one to use them. Signs that 

are wholly arbitrary realize better than the others the ideal of the semiological 

pro cess; that is why language, the most complex and universal of all 

systems of expression, is also the most characteristic; in this sense linguistics 

can become the master- pattern for all branches of semiology although 

language is only one par tic u lar semiological system. 

The word symbol has been used to designate the linguistic sign, or more 

specifically, what is here called the signifier. Principle I in par tic u lar weighs 

against the use of this term. One characteristic of the symbol is that it is 

never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural 

bond between the signifier and the signified. The symbol of justice, a pair of 

scales, could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot. 

The word arbitrary also calls for comment. The term should not imply 

that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker (we shall see 

below that the individual does not have the power to change a sign in any 

way once it has become established in the linguistic community); I mean 

that it is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection 

with the signified. 

5. That is, in Germany.


In concluding let us consider two objections that might be raised to the 

establishment of Principle I: 

1) Onomatopoeia might be used to prove that the choice of the signifier is 

not always arbitrary. But onomatopoeic formations are never organic elements 

of a linguistic system. Besides, their number is much smaller than is 

generally supposed. Words like French fouet ‘whip’ or glas ‘knell’ may strike 

certain ears with suggestive sonority, but to see that they have not always 

had this property we need only examine their Latin forms (fouet is derived 

from fagus ‘beech- tree,’ glas from classicum ‘sound of a trumpet’). The quality 

of their present sounds, or rather the quality that is attributed to them, 

is a fortuitous result of phonetic evolution. 

As for authentic onomatopoeic words (e.g. glug- glug, tick- tock, etc.), not 

only are they limited in number, but also they are chosen somewhat arbitrarily, 

for they are only approximate and more or less conventional imitations 

of certain sounds (cf. En glish bow- wow and French ouaoua). In 

addition, once these words have been introduced into the language, they are 

to a certain extent subjected to the same evolution— phonetic, morphological, 

etc.— that other words undergo (cf. pigeon, ultimately from Vulgar Latin 

pipio, derived in turn from an onomatopoeic formation): obvious proof that 

they lose something of their original character in order to assume that of the 

linguistic sign in general, which is unmotivated. 

2) Interjections, closely related to onomatopoeia, can be attacked on the 

same grounds and come no closer to refuting our thesis. One is tempted to 

see in them spontaneous expressions of reality dictated, so to speak, by 

natural forces. But for most interjections we can show that there is no fixed 

bond between their signified and their signifier. We need only compare two 

languages on this point to see how much such expressions differ from one 

language to the next (e.g. the En glish equivalent of French aïe! is ouch!). 

We know, moreover, that many interjections were once words with specific 

meanings (cf. French diable! ‘darn!’ mordieu! ‘golly!’ from mort Dieu ‘God’s 

death,’ etc.). 

Onomatopoeic formations and interjections are of secondary importance, 

and their symbolic origin is in part open to dispute. 

3. Principle II: The Linear Nature of the Signifier 

The signifier, being auditory, is unfolded solely in time from which it gets 

the following characteristics: (a) it represents a span, and (b) the span is 

mea sur able in a single dimension; it is a line. 

While Principle II is obvious, apparently linguists have always neglected 

to state it, doubtless because they found it too simple; nevertheless, it is 

fundamental, and its consequences are incalculable. Its importance equals 

that of Principle I; the whole mechanism of language depends upon it. In 

contrast to visual signifiers (nautical signals, etc.) which can offer simultaneous 

groupings in several dimensions, auditory signifiers have at their 

command only the dimension of time. Their elements are presented in succession; 

they form a chain. This feature becomes readily apparent when 

they are represented in writing and the spatial line of graphic marks is substituted 

for succession in time. 

Sometimes the linear nature of the signifier is not obvious. When I 

accent a syllable, for instance, it seems that I am concentrating more than


one significant element on the same point. But this is an illusion; the syllable 

and its accent constitute only one phonational act. There is no duality 

within the act but only different oppositions to what precedes and what 

follows. 

From Part Two. Synchronic Linguistics 

chapter iv. linguistic value 

1. Language as Or ga nized Thought Coupled with Sound 

To prove that language is only a system of pure values, it is enough to 

consider the two elements involved in its functioning: ideas and sounds. 

Psychologically our thought— apart from its expression in words— is only a 

shapeless and indistinct mass. Phi los o phers and linguists have always agreed 

in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make 

a clear- cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, 

thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no preexisting ideas, and 

nothing is distinct before the appearance of language. 

Against the floating realm of thought, would sounds by themselves yield 

predelimited entities? No more so than ideas. Phonic substance is neither 

more fixed nor more rigid than thought; it is not a mold into which thought 

must of necessity fit but a plastic substance divided in turn into distinct 

parts to furnish the signifiers needed by thought. The linguistic fact can 

therefore be pictured in its totality— i.e. language— as a series of contiguous 

subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas (A) 

and the equally vague plane of sounds (B). The following diagram gives a 

rough idea of it: 

The characteristic role of language with respect to thought is not to create 

a material phonic means for expressing ideas but to serve as a link between 

thought and sound, under conditions that of necessity bring about the 

reciprocal delimitations of units. Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become 

ordered in the pro cess of its decomposition. Neither are thoughts given material 

form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities; the somewhat 

mysterious fact is rather that “thought- sound” implies division, and that language 

works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses. 

Visualize the air in contact with a sheet of water; if the atmospheric pressure 

changes, the surface of the water will be broken up into a series of divisions, 

waves; the waves resemble the union or coupling of thought with phonic substance.


Language might be called the domain of articulations, using the word as 

it was defined earlier. Each linguistic term is a member, an articulus in 

which an idea is fixed in a sound and a sound becomes the sign of an idea. 

Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: 6 thought is the 

front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the 

back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound 

from thought nor thought from sound; the division could be accomplished 

only abstractedly, and the result would be either pure psychology or pure 

phonology. 

Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound 

and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance. 

These views give a better understanding of what was said before about 

the arbitrariness of signs. Not only are the two domains that are linked by 

the linguistic fact shapeless and confused, but the choice of a given slice of 

sound to name a given idea is completely arbitrary. If this were not true, the 

notion of value would be compromised, for it would include an externally 

imposed element. But actually values remain entirely relative, and that is 

why the bond between the sound and the idea is radically arbitrary. 

The arbitrary nature of the sign explains in turn why the social fact alone 

can create a linguistic system. The community is necessary if values that 

owe their existence solely to usage and general ac cep tance are to be set up; 

by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value. 

In addition, the idea of value, as defined, shows that to consider a term as 

simply the union of a certain sound with a certain concept is grossly misleading. 

To define it in this way would isolate the term from its system; it would 

mean assuming that one can start from the terms and construct the system 

by adding them together when, on the contrary, it is from the interdependent 

whole that one must start and through analysis obtain its elements. 

To develop this thesis, we shall study value successively from the viewpoint 

of the signified or concept (Section 2), the signifier (Section 3), and the 

complete sign (Section 4). 

Being unable to seize the concrete entities or units of language directly, 

we shall work with words. While the word does not conform exactly to the 

definition of the linguistic unit, it at least bears a rough resemblance to the 

unit and has the advantage of being concrete; consequently, we shall use 

words as specimens equivalent to real terms in a synchronic system, and 

the principles that we evolve with respect to words will be valid for entities 

in general. 

2. Linguistic Value from a Conceptual Viewpoint 

When we speak of the value of a word, we generally think first of its property 

of standing for an idea, and this is in fact one side of linguistic value. 

But if this is true, how does value differ from signification? Might the two 

words be synonyms? I think not, although it is easy to confuse them, since 

the confusion results not so much from their similarity as from the subtlety 

of the distinction that they mark. 

From a conceptual viewpoint, value is doubtless one element in signification, 

and it is difficult to see how signification can be dependent upon value 

6. The French expression une feuille de papier literally means “a leaf of paper.”


and still be distinct from it. But we must clear up the issue or risk reducing 

language to a simple namingprocess. 

Let us first take signification as it is generally understood. As the arrows 

in the drawing show, it is only the counterpart of the soundimage. Everything 

that occurs concerns only the soundimage and the concept when we 

look upon the word as in de pen dent and self- contained. 

But here is the paradox: on the one hand the concept seems to be the 

counterpart of the soundimage, and on the other hand the sign itself is in 

turn the counterpart of the other signs of language. 

Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each 

term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others, as in the 

diagram: 

How, then, can value be confused with signification, i.e. the counterpart of 

the soundimage? It seems impossible to liken the relations represented here 

by horizontal arrows to those represented above by vertical arrows. Putting it 

another way— and again taking up the example of the sheet of paper that is 

cut in two— it is clear that the observable relation between the different 

pieces A, B, C, D, etc. is distinct from the relation between the front and 

back of the same piece as in A / A’, B / B’, etc. 

To resolve the issue, let us observe from the outset that even outside language 

all values are apparently governed by the same paradoxical principle. 

They are always composed: 

(1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the 

value is to be determined; and 

(2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value 

is to be determined. 

Both factors are necessary for the existence of a value. To determine what 

a five- franc piece is worth one must therefore know: (1) that it can be 

exchanged for a fixed quantity of a different thing, e.g. bread; and (2) that it 

can be compared with a similar value of the same system, e.g. a one- franc 

piece, or with coins of another system (a dollar, etc.). In the same way a word 

can be exchanged for something dissimilar, an idea; besides, it can be compared 

with something of the same nature, another word. Its value is therefore 

not fixed so long as one simply states that it can be “exchanged” for a 

given concept, i.e. that it has this or that signification: one must also com-


pare it with similar values, with other words that stand in opposition to it. Its 

content is really fixed only by the concurrence of everything that exists outside 

it. Being part of a system, it is endowed not only with a signification but 

also and especially with a value, and this is something quite different. 

A few examples will show clearly that this is true. Modern French mouton 

can have the same signification as En glish sheep but not the same 

value, and this for several reasons, particularly because in speaking of a 

piece of meat ready to be served on the table, En glish uses mutton and not 

sheep. The difference in value between sheep and mouton is due to the fact 

that sheep has beside it a second term while the French word does not. 

Within the same language, all words used to express related ideas limit 

each other reciprocally; synonyms like French redouter ‘dread,’ craindre ‘fear,’ 

and avoir peur ‘be afraid’ have value only through their opposition: if redouter 

did not exist, all its content would go to its competitors. Conversely, some 

words are enriched through contact with others: e.g. the new element introduced 

in décrépit (un vieillard décrépit) results from the co- existence of 

décrépi (un mur décrépi). 7 The value of just any term is accordingly determined 

by its environment; it is impossible to fix even the value of the word 

signifying “sun” without first considering its surroundings: in some languages 

it is not possible to say “sit in the sun.” 

Everything said about words applies to any term of language, e.g. to grammatical 

entities. The value of a French plural does not coincide with that of a 

Sanskrit plural even though their signification is usually identical; Sanskrit 

has three numbers instead of two (my eyes, my ears, my arms, my legs, etc. are 

dual 8 ); it would be wrong to attribute the same value to the plural in Sanskrit 

and in French; its value clearly depends on what is outside and around it. 

If words stood for preexisting concepts, they would all have exact equivalents 

in meaning from one language to the next; but this is not true. French 

uses louer (une maison) ‘let (a house)’ indifferently to mean both “pay for” 

and “receive payment for,” whereas German uses two words, mieten and 

vermieten; there is obviously no exact correspondence of values. The German 

verbs schätzen and urteilen 9 share a number of significations, but that 

correspondence does not hold at several points. 

Inflection offers some particularly striking examples. Distinctions of time, 

which are so familiar to us, are unknown in certain languages. Hebrew does 

not recognize even the fundamental distinctions between the past, present, 

and future. Proto- Germanic has no special form for the future; to say that 

the future is expressed by the present is wrong, for the value of the present 

is not the same in Germanic as in languages that have a future along with 

the present. The Slavic languages regularly single out two aspects of the 

verb: the perfective represents action as a point, complete in its totality; the 

imperfective represents it as taking place, and on the line of time. The categories 

are difficult for a Frenchman to understand, for they are unknown 

in French; if they were predetermined, this would not be true. Instead of 

preexisting ideas then, we find in all the foregoing examples values emanating 

from the system. When they are said to correspond to concepts, it is 

7. The words translated as “decrepit” in “a 

decrepit old man” and “a decrepit wall” come 

from two different sources: décrépit is derived 

from the Latin decrepitus, décrépi from crispus. 

8. A special form applied to 2 of something. 

9. “To value, assess” and “to judge,” respectively.


understood that the concepts are purely differential and defined not by their 

positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the 

system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are 

not. 

Now the real interpretation of the diagram of the signal becomes apparent. 

Thus 

means that in French the concept “to judge” is linked to the soundimage 

juger; in short, it symbolizes signification. But it is quite clear that initially 

the concept is nothing, that is only a value determined by its relations with 

other similar values, and that without them the signification would not exist. 

If I state simply that a word signifies something when I have in mind the 

associating of a soundimage with a concept, I am making a statement that 

may suggest what actually happens, but by no means am I expressing the linguistic 

fact in its essence and fullness. 

3. Linguistic Value from a Material Viewpoint 

The conceptual side of value is made up solely of relations and differences 

with respect to the other terms of language, and the same can be said 

of its material side. The important thing in the word is not the sound alone 

but the phonic differences that make it possible to distinguish this word 

from all others, for differences carry signification. 

This may seem surprising, but how indeed could the reverse be possible? 

Since one vocal image is no better suited than the next for what it is commissioned 

to express, it is evident, even a priori, that a segment of language 

can never in the final analysis be based on anything except its 

noncoincidence with the rest. Arbitrary and differential are two correlative 

qualities. 

The alteration of linguistic signs clearly illustrates this. It is precisely 

because the terms a and b as such are radically incapable of reaching the 

level of consciousness— one is always conscious of only the a / b difference— 

that each term is free to change according to laws that are unrelated to its 

signifying function. No positive sign characterizes the genitive plural in 

Czech žen; still the two forms žena: žen function as well as the earlier forms 

žena: ženb; žen has value only because it is different. 

Here is another example that shows even more clearly the systematic role of 

phonic differences: in Greek, éphen is an imperfect and ésten an aorist 1 although 

both words are formed in the same way; the first belongs to the system of the 

present indicative of phemi ‘I say,’ whereas there is no present *stemi; now it is 

precisely the relation phemi: éphen that corresponds to the relation between the 

1. “Imperfect” and “aorist” are two past tenses of Greek verbs.


present and the imperfect (cf. déiknumi: edéiknun, 2 etc.). Signs function, then, 

not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position. 

In addition, it is impossible for sound alone, a material element, to belong 

to language. It is only a secondary thing, substance to be put to use. All our 

conventional values have the characteristic of not being confused with the 

tangible element which supports them. For instance, it is not the metal in a 

piece of money that fixes its value. A coin nominally worth five francs may 

contain less than half its worth of silver. Its value will vary according to the 

amount stamped upon it and according to its use inside or outside a po litical 

boundary. This is even more true of the linguistic signifier, which is not 

phonic but incorporeal— constituted not by its material substance but by 

the differences that separate its soundimage from all others. 

The foregoing principle is so basic that it applies to all the material elements 

of language, including phonemes. Every language forms its words on 

the basis of a system of sonorous elements, each element being a clearly 

delimited unit and one of a fixed number of units. Phonemes are characterized 

not, as one might think, by their own positive quality but simply by the 

fact that they are distinct. Phonemes are above all else opposing, relative, and 

negative entities. 

Proof of this is the latitude that speakers have between points of convergence 

in the pronunciation of distinct sounds. In French, for instance, general 

use of a dorsal r does not prevent many speakers from using a tongue- tip 

trill; language is not in the least disturbed by it; language requires only that 

the sound be different and not, as one might imagine, that it have an invariable 

quality. I can even pronounce the French r like German ch in Bach, 

doch, etc., but in German I could not use r instead of ch, for German gives 

recognition to both elements and must keep them apart. Similarly, in Russian 

there is no latitude for t in the direction of t' (palatalized t), for the 

result would be the confusing of two sounds differentiated by the language 

(cf. govorit' ‘speak’ and goverit ‘he speaks’), but more freedom may be taken 

with respect to th (aspirated t) since this sound does not figure in the Russian 

system of phonemes. 

Since an identical state of affairs is observable in writing, another system 

of signs, we shall use writing to draw some comparisons that will clarify the 

whole issue. In fact: 

1) The signs used in writing are arbitrary; there is no connection, for 

example, between the letter t and the sound that it designates. 

2) The value of letters is purely negative and differential. The same person 

can write t, for instance, in different ways: 

The only requirement is that the sign for t not be confused in his script with 

the signs used for l, d, etc. 

2. The present and imperfect, respectively, of the Greek verb “to show” (all the forms in this paragraph 

are 1st- person singular).


3) Values in writing function only through reciprocal opposition within a 

fixed system that consists of a set number of letters. This third characteristic, 

though not identical to the second, is closely related to it, for both 

depend on the first. Since the graphic sign is arbitrary, its form matters little 

or rather matters only within the limitations imposed by the system. 

4) The means by which the sign is produced is completely unimportant, 

for it does not affect the system (this also follows from characteristic 1). 

Whether I make the letters in white or black, raised or engraved, with pen 

or chisel— all this is of no importance with respect to their signification. 

4. The Sign Considered in Its Totality 

Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language 

there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally 

implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language 

there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified 

or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before 

the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have 

issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is 

of less importance than the other signs that surround it. Proof of this is that 

the value of a term may be modified without either its meaning or its sound 

being affected, solely because a neighboring term has been modified. 

But the statement that everything in language is negative is true only if 

the signified and the signifier are considered separately; when we consider 

the sign in its totality, we have something that is positive in its own class. A 

linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of 

differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs 

with as many cuts made from the mass of thought engenders a system of 

values; and this system serves as the effective link between the phonic and 

psychological elements within each sign. Although both the signified and 

the signifier are purely differential and negative when considered separately, 

their combination is a positive fact; it is even the sole type of facts that language 

has, for maintaining the parallelism between the two classes of differences 

is the distinctive function of the linguistic institution. 

Certain diachronic facts are typical in this respect. Take the countless 

instances where alteration of the signifier occasions a conceptual change and 

where it is obvious that the sum of the ideas distinguished corresponds in 

principle to the sum of the distinctive signs. When two words are confused 

through phonetic alteration (e.g. French décrépit from decrepitus and décrépi 

from crispus), the ideas that they express will also tend to become confused if 

only they have something in common. Or a word may have different forms 

(cf. chaise ‘chair’ and chaire ‘desk’ 3 ). Any nascent difference will tend invariably 

to become significant but without always succeeding or being successful 

on the first trial. Conversely, any conceptual difference perceived by the 

mind seeks to find expression through a distinct signifier, and two ideas that 

are no longer distinct in the mind tend to merge into the same signifier. 

When we compare signs— positive terms— with each other, we can no 

longer speak of difference; the expression would not be fitting, for it applies 

only to the comparing of two soundimages, e.g. father and mother, or two 

3. Both words derive from the Old French chaiere.


ideas, e.g. the idea “father” and the idea “mother”; two signs, each having a 

signified and signifier, are not different but only distinct. Between them 

there is only opposition. The entire mechanism of language, with which we 

shall be concerned later, is based on oppositions of this kind and on the 

phonic and conceptual differences that they imply. 

What is true of value is true also of the unit. A unit is a segment of the 

spoken chain that corresponds to a certain concept; both are by nature 

purely differential. 

Applied to units, the principle of differentiation can be stated in this 

way: the characteristics of the unit blend with the unit itself. In language, as 

in any semiological system, what ever distinguishes one sign from the others 

constitutes it. Difference makes character just as it makes value and 

the unit. 

Another rather paradoxical consequence of the same principle is this: in 

the last analysis what is commonly referred to as a “grammatical fact” fits 

the definition of the unit, for it always expresses an opposition of terms; it 

differs only in that the opposition is particularly significant (e.g. the formation 

of German plurals of the type Nacht: Nächte). Each term present in the 

grammatical fact (the singular without umlaut or final e in opposition to the 

plural with umlaut and—e) consists of the interplay of a number of oppositions 

within the system. When isolated, neither Nacht nor Nächte is anything: 

thus everything is opposition. Putting it another way, the Nacht: 

Nächte relation can be expressed by an algebraic formula a / b in which a 

and b are not simple terms but result from a set of relations. Language, in a 

manner of speaking, is a type of algebra consisting solely of complex terms. 

Some of its oppositions are more significant than others; but units and 

grammatical facts are only different names for designating diverse aspects 

of the same general fact: the functioning of linguistic oppositions. This 

statement is so true that we might very well approach the problem of units 

by starting from grammatical facts. Taking an opposition like Nacht: Nächte, 

we might ask what are the units involved in it. Are they only the two words, 

the whole series of similar words, a and ä, or all singulars and plurals, etc.? 

Units and grammatical facts would not be confused if linguistic signs 

were made up of something besides differences. But language being what it 

is, we shall find nothing simple in it regardless of our approach; everywhere 

and always there is the same complex equilibrium of terms that mutually 

condition each other. Putting it another way, language is a form and not a 

substance. This truth could not be overstressed, for all the mistakes in our 

terminology, all our incorrect ways of naming things that pertain to language, 

stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon 

must have substance. 

chapter v. syntagmatic and associative relations 

1. Definitions 

In a language- state everything is based on relations. How do they function? 

Relations and differences between linguistic terms fall into two distinct 

groups, each of which generates a certain class of values. The opposition 

between the two classes gives a better understanding of the nature of each


class. They correspond to two forms of our mental activity, both indispensable 

to the life of language. 

In discourse, on the one hand, words acquire relations based on the linear 

nature of language because they are chained together. This rules out 

the possibility of pronouncing two elements simultaneously. The elements 

are arranged in sequence on the chain of speaking. Combinations supported 

by linearity are syntagms. 4 The syntagm is always composed of two 

or more consecutive units (e.g. French re- lire ‘re- read,’ contre tous ‘against 

everyone,’ la vie humaine ‘human life,’ Dieu est bon ‘God is good,’ s’il fait 

beau temps, nous sortirons ‘if the weather is nice, we’ll go out,’ etc.). In the 

syntagm a term acquires its value only because it stands in opposition to 

everything that precedes or follows it, or to both. 

Outside discourse, on the other hand, words acquire relations of a different 

kind. Those that have something in common are associated in the 

memory, resulting in groups marked by diverse relations. For instance, the 

French word enseignement ‘teaching’ will unconsciously call to mind a host 

of other words (enseigner ‘teach,’ renseigner ‘acquaint,’ etc.; or, armement 

‘armament,’ changement ‘amendment,’ etc.; or éducation ‘education,’ apprentissage 

‘apprenticeship,’ etc.). All those words are related in some way. 

We see that the co- ordinations formed outside discourse differ strikingly 

from those formed inside discourse. Those formed outside discourse are not 

supported by linearity. Their seat is in the brain; they are a part of the inner 

store house that makes up the language of each speaker. They are associative 

relations. 

The syntagmatic relation is in praesentia. 5 It is based on two or more 

terms that occur in an effective series. Against this, the associative relation 

unites terms in absentia in a potential mnemonic series. 

From the associative and syntagmatic viewpoint a linguistic unit is like a 

fixed part of a building, e.g. a column. On the one hand, the column has a 

certain relation to the architrave that it supports; the arrangement of the two 

units in space suggests the syntagmatic relation. On the other hand, if the 

column is Doric, it suggests a mental comparison of this style with others 

(Ionic, Corinthian, etc.) although none of these elements is present in space: 

the relation is associative. 

Each of the two classes of co- ordination calls for some specific remarks. 

2. Syntagmatic Relations 

The examples have already indicated that the notion of syntagm applies 

not only to words but to groups of words, to complex units of all lengths and 

types (compounds, derivatives, phrases, whole sentences). 

It is not enough to consider the relation that ties together the different 

parts of syntagms (e.g. French contre ‘against’ and tous ‘everyone’ in contre 

tous, contre and maître ‘master’ in contremaître ‘foreman’); one must also 

bear in mind the relation that links the whole to its parts (e.g. contre tous in 

opposition on the one hand to contre and on the other tous, or contremaître 

in opposition to contre and maître). 

4. It is scarcely necessary to point out that the 

study of syntagms is not to be confused with 

syntax. Syntax is only one part of the study of 

syntagms [Bally, Sechehaye, and Riedlinger’s 

note]. 

5. Present (Latin).


An objection might be raised at this point. The sentence is the ideal type 

of syntagm. But it belongs to speaking, not to language. 6 Does it not follow 

that the syntagm belongs to speaking? I do not think so. Speaking is characterized 

by freedom of combinations; one must therefore ask whether or 

not all syntagms are equally free. 

It is obvious from the first that many expressions belong to language. 

These are the pat phrases in which any change is prohibited by usage, even 

if we can single out their meaningful elements (cf. à quoi bon? ‘what’s the 

use?’ allons donc! ‘nonsense!’). The same is true, though to a lesser degree, of 

expressions like prendre la mouche 7 ‘take offense easily,’ forcer la main à 

quelqu’un ‘force someone’s hand,’ rompre une lance ‘break a lance,’ or even 

avoir mal (à la tête, etc.) ‘have (a headache, etc.),’ à force de (soins, etc.) ‘by 

dint of (care, etc.),’ que vous en semble? ‘how do you feel about it?’ pas n’est 

besoin de . . . ‘there’s no need for . . . ,’ etc., which are characterized by peculiarities 

of signification or syntax. These idiomatic twists cannot be improvised; 

they are furnished by tradition. There are also words which, while 

lending themselves perfectly to analysis, are characterized by some morphological 

anomaly that is kept solely by dint of usage (cf. difficulté ‘difficulty’ 

beside facilité ‘facility,’ etc., and mourrai ‘[I] shall die’ beside dormirai ‘[I] 

shall sleep’). 8 

There are further proofs. To language rather than to speaking belong the 

syntagmatic types that are built upon regular forms. Indeed, since there is 

nothing abstract in language, the types exist only if language has registered 

a sufficient number of specimens. When a word like indécorable 9 arises in 

speaking, its appearance supposes a fixed type, and this type is in turn possible 

only through remembrance of a sufficient number of similar words 

belonging to language (impardonable ‘unpardonable,’ intolérable ‘intolerable,’ 

infatigable ‘indefatigable,’ etc.). Exactly the same is true of sentences 

and groups of words built upon regular patterns. Combinations like la terre 

tourne ‘the world turns,’ que vous dit- il? ‘what does he say to you?’ etc. correspond 

to general types that are in turn supported in the language by 

concrete remembrances. 

But we must realize that in the syntagm there is no clear- cut boundary 

between the language fact, which is a sign of collective usage, and the fact 

that belongs to speaking and depends on individual freedom. In a great 

number of instances it is hard to class a combination of units because both 

forces have combined in producing it, and they have combined in indeterminable 

proportions. 

3. Associative Relations 

Mental association creates other groups besides those based on the comparing 

of terms that have something in common; through its grasp of the 

nature of the relations that bind the terms together, the mind creates as 

many associative series as there are diverse relations. For instance, in enseignement 

‘teaching,’ enseigner ‘teach,’ enseignons ‘(we) teach,’ etc., one element, 

the radical, is common to every term; the same word may occur in a 

6. That is, it belongs to la parole, not to la langue, 

in Saussure’s terms. 

7. Literally, “lay hold of the fly.” 

8. The anomaly of the double r in the future 

forms of certain verbs in French may be compared 

to irregular plurals like oxen in En glish 


9. That is, a word coined by analogy.


different series formed around another common element, the suffix (cf. 

enseignement, armement, changement, etc.); or the association may spring 

from the analogy of the concepts signified (enseignement, instruction, apprentissage, 

éducation, etc.); or again, simply from the similarity of the soundimages 

(e.g. enseignement and justement ‘precisely’). Thus there is at times a 

double similarity of meaning and form, at times similarity only of form or of 

meaning. A word can always evoke everything that can be associated with it 

in one way or another. 

Whereas a syntagm immediately suggests an order of succession and a 

fixed number of elements, terms in an associative family occur neither in 

fixed numbers nor in a definite order. If we associate painful, delightful, 

frightful, etc. we are unable to predict the number of words that the memory 

will suggest or the order in which they will appear. A par tic u lar word is 

like the center of a constellation; it is the point of convergence of an indefinite 

number of coordinated terms. 

But of the two characteristics of the associative series— indeterminate 

order and indefinite number— only the first can always be verified; the second 

may fail to meet the test. This happens in the case of inflectional paradigms, 

which are typical of associative groupings. Latin dominus, domini, 

domino, etc. is obviously an associative group formed around a common 

element, the noun theme domin-, but the series is not indefinite as in the 

case of enseignement, changement, etc.; the number of cases is definite. 

Against this, the words have no fixed order of succession, and it is by a 

purely arbitrary act that the grammarian groups them in one way rather 

than in another; in the mind of speakers the nominative case is by no 

means the first one in the declension, 1 and the order in which terms are 

called depends on circumstances. 

1906–13 1916 

1. In standard grammars of inflected languages 

such as Greek and Latin, tables illustrating the 

case endings of each declension, or class of nouns 

or adjectives sharing the same forms, always 

begin with the nominative case (i.e., the form of 

the subject).

867 

W. E. B. Du BOIS 

1868–1963 

W. E. B. Du Bois excelled in many disciplines and creative endeavors, from sociology 

to social commentary to poetry. He was one of the most accomplished scholaractivists 

and public intellectuals in American history, and his extraordinary life 

spanned ninety- five years. Born, raised, and educated in the latter de cades of the 

nineteenth century, Du Bois was a Romantic visionary and Victorian professional 

writer who de cades later grappled with the po liti cal tensions of the cold war. But he 

was also an African American radical, a Pan- African leader, and eventually a defiant 

Marxist revolutionary. 

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington in western 

Massachusetts, a small town with few African American residents. Raised by his 

mother and her relatives, in his youth he became a lover of books, and he began 

writing early. Before even graduating from high school in 1885, Du Bois served as a 

correspondent for newspapers in Massachusetts and New York City. 

As he explains in his Autobiography (published in 1968, five years after his 

death), Du Bois then “went South,” to “the South of slavery, rebellion, and black 

folk,” earning his B.A. at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1888. Both as 

a student and as a teacher in rural schools during the summers, he came into contact 

with many African African families and communities, later recalling: “Into 

this world I leapt with enthusiasm. A new loyalty and allegiance replaced my Americanism: 

henceforward I was a Negro.” 

Du Bois next attended Harvard University, receiving a second B.A. in 1890 and 

doing graduate work (M.A., 1891; Ph.D., 1895). He also studied at the University 

of Berlin (1892– 94), where he “began to see the race problem in America, the 

problem of the peoples of Africa and Asia, and the po liti cal development of Eu rope 

as one.” 

In the 1890s there were few professional careers open to African Americans. Du 

Bois taught and did research, eventually joining the faculty of Atlanta University, 

where he instructed its African American student body in economics, history, and 

sociology (1897– 1910, 1933– 44). 

Du Bois’s first book, based on his dissertation, was The Suppression of the African 

Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638– 1870 (1896). He was a serious and 

well- trained scholar. But his belief in the transformative power of social scientific 

knowledge was shattered by the virulent racism of turn- of- the- century America, 

when segregation laws increased and anti- black terror and lynching intensified. 

By 1900 Du Bois had already begun to project his vision of race relations outward 

from America’s shores, becoming active in Pan- African organizations and congresses. 

In his major work The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he not only examines the 

history of slavery and segregation in the United States but also emphasizes, more 

generally, that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color 

line.” Still, his focus is American; The Souls of Black Folk includes essays, sketches, 

and stories on African American politics, history, education, music, and culture. Du 

Bois speaks evocatively in it of “the veil” that separates blacks from whites, and he 

describes the “double consciousness” that defines African American identity: “One 

ever feels his twoness— an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled 

strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone 

keeps it from being torn asunder.” 

Du Bois was perhaps best known at this time for his opposition to Booker T. 

Washington (1856– 1915), the found er of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and the 

leading spokesman on the national scene for African Americans— chosen for that

868 / W. E. B. Du BOIS 

position, Du Bois argued in The Souls of Black Folk and elsewhere, because he 

presented the accommodationist message that whites wanted to hear. Du Bois was 

far more militant; not satisfied with limited economic progress, he insisted on 

social and po liti cal rights, access to higher education, and the development of an 

elite African American intellectual and professional class (the “talented tenth”). 

Du Bois’s opposition to Washington led him in 1905 to take a central role in the 

Niagara Movement for full rights for African Americans. He became editor of Horizon: 

A Journal of the Color Line (1907– 10); he helped found the National Association 

for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and served as its 

director of publications and research; and he expanded his role in the international 

Pan- African movement. He was actively publishing books and articles, too, as a 

social critic and theorist, creative writer, and historian. 

From 1910 to 1934 Du Bois was the editor of the NAACP’s monthly magazine, 

The Crisis; by 1919 it reached an audience of 100,000 readers. He was an important 

influence on the writers and artists of the Harlem Re nais sance and the “New 

Negro” movement of the 1920s. In the pages of The Crisis, he repeatedly urged 

readers to see “Beauty in Black,” an imperative that a dazzling array of African 

American authors and artists sought to fulfill. 

These diversely gifted men and women—langston hughes, Jean Toomer, zora 

neale hurston, Duke Ellington, and many others— were forming the intellectual 

vanguard for which Du Bois had called. But because their emphasis was cultural 

rather than po liti cal, he had a mixed response to them. Du Bois welcomed their 

innovative creative work, but he regretted the dependence of African American 

authors, artists, and musicians on white patrons and audiences. While he called for 

greater openness and honesty about sexual themes, he was also quick to criticize 

some African American writers (for example, Claude McKay) for reinforcing white 

ste reo types of black sexual behavior. 

The Depression of the 1930s hit African Americans hard and provoked Du Bois 

to call for “voluntary segregation,” which, he maintained, would lead to economic 

self- sufficiency, solidarity, and self- advancement in a country that was not seeking 

to reach the goal of racial integration. Because of his separatist views, Du Bois was 

forced out of the NAACP in 1934. 

From the 1930s until his death in 1963, Du Bois remained an activist and a prolific 

author. His books include the epic historical study Black Reconstruction in 

America, 1860– 1880 (1935); Dusk of Dawn (1940), which he described as “the autobiography 

of a concept of race”; and Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace 

(1945), one of many writings of the 1940s and 1950s that challenged imperialism 

and made the case for African in de pen dence. Such pioneering, uncompromising 

work made him highly respected on the international scene. But together with his 

ever- deepening interest in Communism and admiration of the Soviet Union, it 

brought Du Bois under suspicion in the United States. In 1951 he was placed on trial 

for being an “unregistered foreign agent”; though he was acquitted, his passport was 

revoked from 1952 to 1958. Embittered by this treatment, in 1961 Du Bois joined 

the Communist Party, renounced his U.S. citizenship, and took up residence in 

Ghana. There, at work on a multivolume Encyclopedia Africana, he died in Accra, 

two years later. 

Du Bois’s writings in literary criticism and theory blend genteel Victorianism, 

literary realism and naturalism, and radical politics. As our selection, “Criteria of 

Negro Art” (1926), indicates, Du Bois believed that “all Art is propaganda and ever 

must be.” In this address he tells African American writers and artists to strive for 

Truth and Beauty. He also stresses the marketplace conditions, and the racism, 

that block and undercut African American literary and cultural achievement, and 

he insists on the need for art to function as agitation, protest, and racial propaganda. 

Underlying his argument is the problem that confronts literary intellectuals

W. E. B. Du BOIS / 869 

who maintain strong po liti cal views: how to resolve the dual demands of art and 

politics. Du Bois affirms that the central duty of African American writers and artists 

is to advance the cause of the race; at the same time, he insists that they express 

the truth about African American life. But someone looking ahead several de cades 

to reader- response theory (see, for example, stanley fish and wolfgang iser) 

might nonetheless propose that Du Bois’s real concern is as much with a work’s 

reception as with its production: How does the work of art affect the general American 

perception of African Americans? What will be the impact of the text on the 

social and po liti cal attitudes of readers? 

The weakness in Du Bois’s position lies in his extreme demand that art must be 

used for propaganda and for nothing else. No doubt he believes that the needs of 

his people mandate this requirement. Yet in “Criteria of Negro Art” it clashes with 

his earlier evocation of the splendid beauty of Cologne’s cathedral and the Venus de 

Milo, which he seems to value for their own sake rather than for any propagandistic 

ser vice they did or might perform. Du Bois’s vision is inclusive, and challengingly 

so: he links the cathedral and the famous Greek statue with a village in West Africa 

and a Negro song or spiritual. But he appears not to recognize the reductive nature 

of his fiery dismissal: “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.” 

Du Bois is one voice in a complex, ongoing African American debate. His 

address can be placed alongside and mea sured against the literary critical ideas 

that Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright articulate, and to which other 

twentiethcentury authors— notably James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, 

and Toni Morrison— contributed. All, in their writings, have acknowledged Du 

Bois’s majestic stature as an intellectual and cultural critic and historian. But all 

are also primarily creative writers— Du Bois was not— and they call for and exemplify 

forms of freedom in artistic expression that for po liti cal reasons he could not 

wholly share. 

bibliography 

The Complete Published Works of W. E. B. Du Bois has been edited by Herbert 

Aptheker (36 vols., 1973– 86). It is supplemented by two other works edited by 

Aptheker: The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois (3 vols., 1973– 78) and Against 

Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887– 1961 (1985). The Du Bois volume 

in the Library of America series, edited by Nathan Irvin Huggins (1986), 

includes The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, The Souls of Black Folk, and 

Dusk of Dawn, as well as a number of essays. A range of selections is also available 

in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis (1995), and The 

Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, edited by Eric J. Sundquist (1996). 

There are several excellent biographies: Manning Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois, 

Black Radical Demo crat (1986), a cogently written survey by an author fully familiar 

with Du Bois’s writings and the major issues in African American social and po litical 

history; Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro- American 

Response to the Cold War, 1944– 1963 (1986), a detailed account of the final phase of 

Du Bois’s career; and David L. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, a comprehensive twovolume 

biography: Biography of a Race, 1868– 1919 (1993) and The Fight for Equality 

and the American Century, 1919– 1963 (2000). 

The best study of Du Bois as a writer is Arnold Rampersad’s Art and Imagination 

of W. E. B. Du Bois (1976), which explores all of Du Bois’s major books. See also the 

extensive chapter on Du Bois in Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the 

Making of American Literature (1993); Keith Eldon Byerman, Seizing the Word: History, 

Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois (1994); Shamoon Zamir, Dark 

Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888– 1903 (1995); Adolph Reed Jr.,

870 / W. E. B. Du BOIS 

W. E. B. Du Bois and American Po liti cal Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line 

(1997); and Raymond Wolters, Du Bois and His Rivals (2002), which examines Du 

Bois’s ideological disputes with Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey. Other 

helpful resources include two collections: Critical Essays on W. E. B. Du Bois, edited 

by William L. Andrews (1985), and W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture, edited by 

Bernard W. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (1996), which sheds light 

on Du Bois’s attitudes toward race, gender equality, and Pan- Africanism. Key bibliographic 

sources include Herbert Aptheker, Annotated Bibliography of the Published 

Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (1973), and Paul G. Partington, W. E. B. Du Bois: A 

Bibliography of His Published Writings (1979). For additional bibliography, reference, 

and context, see W. E. B. Du Bois: An Encyclopedia, edited by Gerald Horne and 

Mary Young (2001). 

Criteria of Negro Art 

So many persons have asked for the complete text of the address delivered by 

Dr. Du Bois at the Chicago Conference of the National Association for the 

Advancement of Colored People that we are publishing the address here. 1 

I do not doubt but there are some in this audience who are a little disturbed 

at the subject of this meeting, and particularly at the subject I have 

chosen. Such people are thinking something like this: “How is it that an 

or ga ni za tion like this, a group of radicals trying to bring new things into the 

world, a fighting or ga ni za tion which has come up out of the blood and dust 

of battle, struggling for the right of black men to be ordinary human beings— 

how is it that an or ga ni za tion of this kind can turn aside to talk about Art? 

After all, what have we who are slaves and black to do with Art?” 

Or perhaps there are others who feel a certain relief and are saying, 

“After all it is rather satisfactory after all this talk about rights and fighting 

to sit and dream of something which leaves a nice taste in the mouth.” 

Let me tell you that neither of these groups is right. The thing we are 

talking about to night is part of the great fight we are carry ing on and it 

represents a forward and an upward look— a pushing onward. You and I 

have been breasting hills; we have been climbing upward; there has been 

progress and we can see it day by day looking back along blood- filled paths. 

But as you go through the valleys and over the foothills, so long as you are 

climbing, the direction,— north, south, east or west,— is of less importance. 

But when gradually the vista widens and you begin to see the world at your 

feet and the far horizon, then it is time to know more precisely whither you 

are going and what you really want. 

What do we want? What is the thing we are after? As it was phrased last 

night it had a certain truth: We want to be Americans, full- fledged Americans, 

with all the rights of other American citizens. But is that all? Do we 

want simply to be Americans? Once in a while through all of us there flashes 

some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of what America really is. We who are 

dark can see America in a way that white Americans can not. And seeing 

our country thus, are we satisfied with its present goals and ideals? 

1. The Crisis; the address was delivered in 1926.

Criteria of Negro Art / 871 

In the high school where I studied we learned most of Scott’s “Lady of 

the Lake” 2 by heart. In after life once it was my privilege to see the lake. It 

was Sunday. It was quiet. You could glimpse the deer wandering in unbroken 

forests; you could hear the soft ripple of romance on the waters. Around 

me fell the cadence of that poetry of my youth. I fell asleep full of the 

enchantment of the Scottish border. A new day broke and with it came a 

sudden rush of excursionists. They were mostly Americans and they were 

loud and strident. They poured upon the little plea sure boat,— men with 

their hats a little on one side and drooping cigars in the wet corners of their 

mouths; women who shared their conversation with the world. They all 

tried to get everywhere first. They pushed other people out of the way. They 

made all sorts of incoherent noises and gestures so that the quiet home folk 

and the visitors from other lands silently and half- wonderingly gave way 

before them. They struck a note not evil but wrong. They carried, perhaps, 

a sense of strength and accomplishment, but their hearts had no conception 

of the beauty which pervaded this holy place. 

If you to night suddenly should become full- fledged Americans; if your 

color faded, or the color line here in Chicago was miraculously forgotten; 

suppose, too, you became at the same time rich and powerful:— what is it 

that you would want? What would you immediately seek? Would you buy the 

most powerful of motor cars and outrace Cook County? 3 Would you buy the 

most elaborate estate on the North Shore? Would you be a Rotarian or a 

Lion or a What- not of the very last degree? 4 Would you wear the most striking 

clothes, give the richest dinners and buy the longest press notices? 

Even as you visualize such ideals you know in your hearts that these are 

not the things you really want. You realize this sooner than the average 

white American because, pushed aside as we have been in America, there 

has come to us not only a certain distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant but 

a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world; if we 

had the true spirit; if we had the Seeing Eye, the Cunning Hand, the Feeling 

Heart; if we had, to be sure, not perfect happiness, but plenty of good hard 

work, the inevitable suffering that always comes with life; sacrifice and waiting, 

all that— but, nevertheless, lived in a world where men know, where 

men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life. It is 

that sort of a world we want to create for ourselves and for all America. 

After all, who shall describe Beauty? What is it? I remember to night four 

beautiful things: The Cathedral at Cologne, 5 a forest in stone, set in light and 

changing shadow, echoing with sunlight and solemn song; a village of the 

Veys 6 in West Africa, a little thing of mauve and purple quiet, lying content 

and shining in the sun; a black and velvet room where on a throne rests, in 

old and yellowing marble; the broken curves of the Venus of Milo; 7 a single 

phrase of music in the Southern South— utter melody, haunting and appealing, 

suddenly arising out of night and eternity, beneath the moon. 

2. A poem in six cantos about early- 16th- century 

knights and ladies (1810), by Sir Walter Scott 

(1771– 1832). 

3. County in which Chicago is located. 

4. The Rotary and Lions clubs are national service 

organizations; Freemasons, a fraternal organization 

with many members in the United States 

and abroad, are described as achieving certain 

degrees. 

5. Magnificent Gothic cathedral in Cologne, Germany, 

begun in 1248 and consecrated in 1322. 

6. One of the Mandingo peoples of Senegal, 

West Africa. 

7. Famous classical statue of Aphrodite, Greek 

goddess of love (2d c. b.c.e. copy of a 4th c. original), 

now armless.

872 / W. E. B. Du BOIS 

Such is Beauty. Its variety is infinite, its possibility is endless. In normal 

life all may have it and have it yet again. The world is full of it; and yet today 

the mass of human beings are choked away from it, and their lives distorted 

and made ugly. This is not only wrong, it is silly. Who shall right this wellnigh 

universal failing? Who shall let this world be beautiful? Who shall 

restore to men the glory of sunsets and the peace of quiet sleep? 

We black folk may help for we have within us as a race new stirrings, stirrings 

of the beginning of a new appreciation of joy, of a new desire to create, 

of a new will to be; as though in this morning of group life we had 

awakened from some sleep that at once dimly mourns the past and dreams 

a splendid future; and there has come the conviction that the Youth that is 

here today, the Negro Youth, is a different kind of Youth, because in some 

new way it bears this mighty prophecy on its breast, with a new realization 

of itself, with new determination for all mankind. 

What has this Beauty to do with the world? What has Beauty to do with 

Truth and Goodness— with the facts of the world and the right actions of 

men? “Nothing,” the artists rush to answer. They may be right. I am but an 

humble disciple of art and cannot presume to say. I am one who tells the 

truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty and for Beauty to set the 

world right. That somehow, somewhere eternal and perfect Beauty sits 

above Truth and Right I can conceive, but here and now and in the world in 

which I work they are for me unseparated and inseparable. 

This is brought to us peculiarly when as artists we face our own past as a 

people. There has come to us— and it has come especially through the man 

we are going to honor tonight 8 — a realization of that past, of which for long 

years we have been ashamed, for which we have apologized. We thought 

nothing could come out of that past which we wanted to remember; which 

we wanted to hand down to our children. Suddenly, this same past is taking 

on form, color and reality, and in a half shamefaced way we are beginning 

to be proud of it. We are remembering that the romance of the world did 

not die and lie forgotten in the Middle Age; that if you want romance to 

deal with you must have it here and now and in your own hands. 

I once knew a man and woman. They had two children, a daughter who 

was white and a daughter who was brown; the daughter who was white 

married a white man; and when her wedding was preparing the daughter 

who was brown prepared to go and celebrate. But the mother said, “No!” 

and the brown daughter went into her room and turned on the gas and 

died. Do you want Greek tragedy swifter than that? 

Or again, here is a little Southern Town and you are in the public square. 

On one side of the square is the office of a colored lawyer and on all the 

other sides are men who do not like colored lawyers. A white woman goes 

into the black man’s office and points to the white- filled square and says, “I 

want five hundred dollars now and if I do not get it I am going to scream.” 

Have you heard the story of the conquest of German East Africa? 9 Listen 

to the untold tale: There were 40,000 black men and 4,000 white men who 

talked German. There were 20,000 black men and 12,000 white men who 

talked En glish. There were 10,000 black men and 400 white men who talked 

8. Carter G. Woodson (1875– 1950), to whom the 

NAACP in 1926 awarded the Spingarn Medal for 

African American achievement, was an African 

American educator and historian who in 1916 

founded the Journal of Negro History. 

9. Du Bois recounts events of World War I.


French. In Africa then where the Mountains of the Moon raised their white 

and snow- capped heads into the mouth of the tropic sun, where Nile and 

Congo rise and the Great Lakes swim, these men fought; they struggled on 

mountain, hill and valley, in river, lake and swamp, until in masses they sickened, 

crawled and died; until the 4,000 white Germans had become mostly 

bleached bones; until nearly all the 12,000 white En glishmen had returned 

to South Africa, and the 400 Frenchmen to Belgium and Heaven; all except 

a mere handful of the white men died; but thousands of black men from 

East, West and South Africa, from Nigeria and the Valley of the Nile, and 

from the West Indies still struggled, fought and died. For four years they 

fought and won and lost German East Africa; and all you hear about it is that 

En gland and Belgium conquered German Africa for the allies! 

Such is the true and stirring stuff of which Romance is born and from 

this stuff come the stirrings of men who are beginning to remember that 

this kind of material is theirs; and this vital life of their own kind is beckoning 

them on. 

The question comes next as to the interpretation of these new stirrings, 

of this new spirit: Of what is the colored artist capable? We have had on the 

part of both colored and white people singular unanimity of judgment in 

the past. Colored people have said: “This work must be inferior because it 

comes from colored people.” White people have said: “It is inferior because 

it is done by colored people.” But today there is coming to both the realization 

that the work of the black man is not always inferior. Interesting stories 

come to us. A professor in the University of Chicago read to a class that had 

studied literature a passage of poetry and asked them to guess the author. 

They guessed a goodly company from Shelley and Robert Browning down 

to Tennyson and Masefield. The author was Countée Cullen. 1 Or again the 

En glish critic John Drinkwater 2 went down to a Southern seminary, one of 

the sort which “finishes” young white women of the South. The students sat 

with their wooden faces while he tried to get some response out of them. 

Finally he said, “Name me some of your Southern poets.” They hesitate. He 

said finally, “I’ll start out with your best: Paul Laurence Dunbar”! 3 

With the growing recognition of Negro artists in spite of the severe handicaps, 

one comforting thing is occurring to both white and black. They are 

whispering, “Here is a way out. Here is the real solution of the color problem. 

The recognition accorded Cullen, Hughes, Fauset, White 4 and others 

shows there is no real color line. Keep quiet! Don’t complain! Work! All will 

be well!” 

I will not say that already this chorus amounts to a conspiracy. Perhaps I 

am naturally too suspicious. But I will say that there are today a surprising 

number of white people who are getting great satisfaction out of these younger 

Negro writers because they think it is going to stop agitation of the Negro 

question. They say, “What is the use of your fighting and complaining; do the 

1. African American poet (1903– 1946); his first 

book, Color (1925), used forms such as the sonnet. 

Du Bois locates him in the company of the En glish 

poets Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792– 1822), Robert 

Browning (1812– 1889), Alfred, Lord Tennyson 

(1809– 1892), and John Masefield (1878– 1967). 

2. En glish poet, dramatist, and critic (1882– 

1937). 

3. African American short story writer and poet 

(1872– 1906). 

4. Walter White (1893– 1955), NAACP leader and 

novelist. langston hughes (1902– 1967), poet, 

fiction writer, and playwright. Jessie Redmon 

Fauset (ca. 1884– 1961), novelist and editor.

874 / W. E. B. Du BOIS 

great thing and the reward is there.” And many colored people are all too 

eager to follow this advice; especially those who are weary of the eternal 

struggle along the color line, who are afraid to fight and to whom the money 

of philanthropists and the alluring publicity are subtle and deadly bribes. 

They say, “What is the use of fighting? Why not show simply what we deserve 

and let the reward come to us?” 

And it is right here that the National Association for the Advancement of 

Colored People comes upon the field, comes with its great call to a new 

battle, a new fight and new things to fight before the old things are wholly 

won; and to say that the Beauty of Truth and Freedom which shall some 

day be our heritage and the heritage of all civilized men is not in our hands 

yet and that we ourselves must not fail to realize. 

There is in New York to night a black woman molding clay by herself in a 

little bare room, because there is not a single school of sculpture in New 

York where she is welcome. Surely there are doors she might burst through, 

but when God makes a sculpture He does not always make the pushing sort 

of person who beats his way through doors thrust in his face. This girl is 

working her hands off to get out of this country so that she can get some 

sort of training. 

There was Richard Brown. 5 If he had been white he would have been 

alive today instead of dead of neglect. Many helped him when he asked but 

he was not the kind of boy that always asks. He was simply one who made 

colors sing. 

There is a colored woman in Chicago who is a great musician. She 

thought she would like to study at Fontainbleau this summer where Walter 

Damrosch 6 and a score of leaders of Art have an American school of music. 

But the application blank of this school says: “I am a white American and I 

apply for admission to the school.” 

We can go on the stage; we can be just as funny as white Americans wish 

us to be; we can play all the sordid parts that America likes to assign to 

Negroes; but for any thing else there is still small place for us. 

And so I might go on. But let me sum up with this: Suppose the only 

Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white 

Americans in the novels and essays they have written. What would people in 

a hundred years say of black Americans? Now turn it around. Suppose you 

were to write a story and put in it the kind of people you know and like and 

imagine. You might get it published and you might not. And the “might not” 

is still far bigger than the “might.” The white publishers catering to white 

folk would say, “It is not interesting”— to white folk, naturally not. They 

want Uncle Toms, Topsies, 7 good “darkies” and clowns. I have in my office a 

story with all the earmarks of truth. A young man says that he started out to 

write and had his stories accepted. Then he began to write about the things 

he knew best about, that is, about his own people. He submitted a story to a 

magazine which said, “We are sorry, but we cannot take it.” “I sat down and 

revised my story, changing the color of the characters and the locale and 

sent it under an assumed name with a change of address and it was accepted 

5. An African American artist (d. 1917). 

6. German American conductor and composer 

(1862– 1950). Fontainbleau: a French resort. 

7. Uncle Tom and Topsy are African American 

characters, a saintly and an impish slave, respectively, 

in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle 

Tom’s Cabin (1852).


by the same magazine that had refused it, the editor promising to take anything 

else I might send in providing it was good enough.” 

We have, to be sure, a few recognized and successful Negro artists; but 

they are not all those fit to survive or even a good minority. They are but the 

remnants of that ability and genius among us whom the accidents of education 

and opportunity have raised on the tidal waves of chance. We black folk 

are not altogether peculiar in this. After all, in the world at large, it is only 

the accident, the remnant, that gets the chance to make the most of itself; 

but if this is true of the white world it is infinitely more true of the colored 

world. It is not simply the great clear tenor of Roland Hayes 8 that opened the 

ears of America. We have had many voices of all kinds as fine as his and 

America was and is as deaf as she was for years to him. Then a foreign land 

heard Hayes and put its imprint on him and immediately America with all 

its imitative snobbery woke up. We approved Hayes because London, Paris 

and Berlin approved him and not simply because he was a great singer. 

Thus it is the bounden duty of black America to begin this great work of 

the creation of Beauty, of the preservation of Beauty, of the realization of 

Beauty, and we must use in this work all the methods that men have used 

before. And what have been the tools of the artists in times gone by? First 

of all, he has used the Truth— not for the sake of truth, not as a scientist 

seeking truth, but as one upon whom Truth eternally thrusts itself as the 

highest handmaid of imagination, as the one great vehicle of universal 

understanding. Again artists have used Goodness— goodness in all its 

aspects of justice, honor and right— not for sake of an ethical sanction but 

as the one true method of gaining sympathy and human interest. 

The apostle of Beauty thus becomes the apostle of Truth and Right not 

by choice but by inner and outer compulsion. Free he is but his freedom is 

ever bounded by Truth and Justice; and slavery only dogs him when he is 

denied the right to tell the Truth or recognize an ideal of Justice. 

Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the 

purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that what ever art I have for 

writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black 

folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for 

propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while 

the other is stripped and silent. 

In New York we have two plays: “White Cargo” and “Congo.” 9 In “White 

Cargo” there is a fallen woman. She is black. In “Congo” the fallen woman 

is white. In “White Cargo” the black woman goes down further and further 

and in “Congo” the white woman begins with degradation but in the end is 

one of the angels of the Lord. 

You know the current magazine story: A young white man goes down to 

Central America and the most beautiful colored woman there falls in love 

with him. She crawls across the whole isthmus to get to him. The white 

man says nobly, “No.” He goes back to his white sweetheart in New York. 

In such cases, it is not the positive propaganda of people who believe 

white blood divine, infallible and holy to which I object. It is the denial of a 

8. African American singer of classical works and 

spirituals (1887– 1976), the son of former slaves. 

9. Kongo (1926), by Kilbourn Gordon and Chester 

DeVonde. White Cargo: White Cargo: A Play of the 

Primitive (1925), by Leon Gordon.

876 / W. E. B. Du BOIS 

similar right of propaganda to those who believe black blood human, lovable 

and inspired with new ideals for the world. White artists themselves suffer 

from this narrowing of their field. They cry for freedom in dealing with 

Negroes because they have so little freedom in dealing with whites. DuBose 

Heyward writes “Porgy” 1 and writes beautifully of the black Charleston 

underworld. But why does he do this? Because he cannot do a similar thing 

for the white people of Charleston, or they would drum him out of town. 

The only chance he had to tell the truth of pitiful human degradation was to 

tell it of colored people. I should not be surprised if Octavus Roy Cohen 2 

had approached the Saturday Eve ning Post and asked permission to write 

about a different kind of colored folk than the monstrosities he has created: 

but if he has, the Post has replied. “No. You are getting paid to write about 

the kind of colored people you are writing about.” 

In other words, the white public today demands from its artists, literary 

and pictorial, racial pre- judgment which deliberately distorts Truth and 

Justice, as far as colored races are concerned, and it will pay for no other. 

On the other hand, the young and slowly growing black public still wants 

its prophets almost equally unfree. We are bound by all sorts of customs 

that have come down as secondhand soul clothes of white patrons. We are 

ashamed of sex and we lower our eyes when people will talk of it. Our religion 

holds us in superstition. Our worst side has been so shamelessly emphasized 

that we are denying we have or ever had a worst side. In all sorts of 

ways we are hemmed in and our new young artists have go to fight their way 

to freedom. 

The ultimate judge has got to be you and you have got to build yourselves 

up into that wide judgment, that catholicity of temper 3 which is going to 

enable the artist to have his widest chance for freedom. We can afford the 

Truth. White folk today cannot. As it is now we are handing everything over 

to a white jury. If a colored man wants to publish a book, he has got to get 

a white publisher and a white newspaper to say it is great; and then you and 

I say so. We must come to the place where the work of art when it appears 

is reviewed and acclaimed by our own free and unfettered judgment. And 

we are going to have a real and valuable and eternal judgment only as we 

make ourselves free of mind, proud of body and just of soul to all men. 

And then do you know what will be said? It is already saying. Just as soon 

as true Art emerges; just as soon as the black artist appears, someone 

touches the race on the shoulder and says, “He did that because he was an 

American, not because he was a Negro; he was born here; he was trained 

here; he is not a Negro— what is a Negro anyhow? He is just human; it is 

the kind of thing you ought to expect.” 

I do not doubt that the ultimate art coming from black folk is going to be 

just as beautiful, and beautiful largely in the same ways, as the art that 

comes from white folk, or yellow, or red; but the point today is that until the 

art of the black folk compels recognition they will not be rated as human. 

And when through art they compel recognition then let the world discover 

if it will that their art is as new as it is old and as old as new. 

1. The 1925 novel by Heyward (1885– 1940) that 

was the basis for the later opera Porgy and Bess 

(1935). 

2. South Carolina playwright, novelist, short 

story writer, and humorist (1891– 1959). 

3. Range of disposition.

LEON TROTSKY / 877 

I had a classmate once who did three beautiful things and died. One of 

them was a story of a folk who found fire and then went wandering in the 

gloom of night seeking again the stars they had once known and lost; suddenly 

out of blackness they looked up and there loomed the heavens; and 

what was it that they said? They raised a mighty cry: “It is the stars, it is the 

ancient stars, it is the young and everlasting stars!” 

1926 

LEON TROTSKY 

1879–1940 

Dedicated to the international workers’ revolution and to Marxist theory, Leon 

Trotsky wrote little in the way of literary criticism, but his Literature and Revolution 

is an important text in the Marxist tradition. In it Trotsky argues against formalist 

critical approaches even as he seeks to prevent literary study from being overtaken 

by the ideological imperatives of the communist state. 

Born in November 1879, the son of a Jewish farm own er in Ukraine, Trotsky’s 

name at birth was Lev Davidovich Bronstein. In his youth he was quickly recognized 

as a brilliant student with a promising future. He was also sympathetic to the 

plight of the farmers and peasants around him, and in the mid- 1890s he turned to 

Marxism. His po liti cal activities led him to be exiled to Siberia in 1900; he 

escaped— with a forged passport that used the name of a jailer in Odessa’s prison, 

Trotsky— and journeyed to London, where he, Vladimir Lenin, and others edited a 

journal, The Spark. In December 1905, having returned to Rus sia, Trotsky (as he 

was now named) was imprisoned again. Once again he escaped, and for the next 

few years, he worked as a journalist in Vienna, Paris, and New York City, where he 

was living when in 1917 the Rus sian Revolution began. 

Trotsky returned to Rus sia, supported Lenin, joined the Bolshevik Party (the 

name derives from the Rus sian word for “majority”), and won election to its Central 

Committee. A superb orator, writer, and agitator, Trotsky first was appointed foreign 

minister and then commissar of war. He commanded the Red Army during the 

civil war that followed the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, and he believed that 

he would be Lenin’s successor. But Joseph Stalin was a shrewder, more vicious 

politician; after Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky, who was 

eventually expelled from the Communist Party (1927) and deported (1929). He 

lived in Turkey (1929– 33), France (1933– 35), Norway (1935– 36), and finally Mexico 

(1935– 40). In August 1940, in Mexico City, a Spanish communist named Ramón 

Mercader assassinated him. 

During the late 1920s and, especially, in the 1930s, a number of prominent communists 

in America rallied behind Trotsky’s criticisms of official Communism and 

Soviet policy. These Trotskyists, including James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman, 

argued that the Soviet Union under Stalin had become undemo cratic and bureaucratized; 

they saw it as no longer committed to the goal of international revolution. 

American Trotskyism enjoyed the support of influential critics and intellectuals, 

including Philip Rahv, William Phillips, and others associated in the mid- to late 

1930s with the literary and po liti cal journal the Partisan Review. The critic irving 

howe was a Trotskyist student leader at City College in New York City, and later in

878 / LEON TROTSKY 

his career he edited a selection of Trotsky’s po liti cal writings (1963) and wrote a 

book about Trotsky (1978). 

Trotsky’s main contribution to Marxist theory is his concept of “permanent revolution.” 

karl marx and friedrich engels had predicted that the proletarian (that 

is, industrial workers’) revolution would occur first in the industrialized nations of 

western Eu rope, but it had taken place instead in unmodernized, industrially undeveloped 

Rus sia. Trotsky stressed that countries could follow different paths— 

developing “unevenly”— in the transition from feudalism to capitalism to socialism 

and communism. But the crucial point, for him, was that a revolution within one 

nation must lead to revolution internationally. For the revolution in Rus sia to succeed, 

it would need the reinforcement, Trotsky maintained, of revolutionary movements 

elsewhere, in par tic u lar in the advanced Eu ro pe an societies. As he explains 

in his book The Permanent Revolution (1930): 

This struggle, under the conditions of an overwhelming predominance of capitalist 

relationships on the world arena, must inevitably lead to explosions, that 

is, internally to civil wars and externally to revolutionary wars. Therein lies the 

permanent character of the socialist revolution as such. . . . The socialist revolution 

begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is 

completed on the world arena. 

Stalin for his part declared that “socialism in one country” was possible, that the 

revolution in the Soviet Union must be defended without qualification, and that 

Trotsky’s commitment to world revolution thus was a form of betrayal, a failure to 

believe in and fight for the revolution in Rus sia. Stalin branded Trotsky the enemy 

of the Rus sian people, and it is generally believed that he ordered Trotsky’s murder. 

Trotsky produced his best literary and historical work— much of it directed against 

Stalinism— during his years in exile in the 1930s. His books of this period include 

an autobiography, My Life (1930; trans. 1930); the History of the Rus sian Revolution 

(3 vols., 1931– 33; trans. 1932– 33); the powerful anti- Stalinist polemic The Revolution 

Betrayed (1937); and many essays on events in Rus sia, Hitler’s rise to power, 

fascism, and the Spanish Civil War. The greatest of these texts is his massive, vividly 

conceived and written History. This stunning, panoramic work is relentless in its 

momentum, im mensely confident in its tone, and breathtaking in its visionary power. 

As a narrative informed by a grand conception of how each agent and incident form 

part of an epic whole, it has never been equaled— and because of Trotsky’s unique 

position in the story and his literary gifts, it never will be. It is, of course, Trotsky’s 

version of the revolution, his account of the creation of a near- paradise that Stalin 

corrupted. It is a brilliant and essentially literary work. 

In our selection from Literature and Revolution (1924), Trotsky begins by saying 

that art is neither self- contained, separate from politics, nor po liti cal, a matter 

solely of ideology. He pays tribute to art (“it brings thought and feeling closer. . . . It 

enriches the spiritual experience”), and, while defining a “Marxist point of view,” he 

affirms that Marxism does not require that we “dominate art by means of decrees 

and orders” or mandate that we esteem only those works of art that celebrate workers. 

We cannot, says Trotsky, prescribe to the literary artist how he or she should 

write. 

At the same time, Trotsky by no means favors allowing art to exist in de pen dently 

of po liti cal judgments, as his adverse commentary on formalism and futurism indicates. 

Rus sian formalism was an early- twentieth- century movement in literary criticism 

that emphasized the analysis of literary language, its formal properties and 

strategies. (On Slavic formalism, see especially boris eichenbaum, mikhail 

bakhtin, and roman jakobson.) It sought to align literary study with the methods of 

the sciences, moving away from biography, impressionism, and historical content

LEON TROTSKY / 879 

and toward the disciplines of rhetoric and structuralist linguistics. Futurism, which 

overlapped formalism in time and to some extent in adherents (e.g., Jakobson was 

involved with both), was a major movement in Rus sian poetry and Italian art; it 

included disparate groups with the common belief that poetry is an autonomous and 

experimental art. Futurist poets sought to direct the language of poetry toward the 

language of the modern city, and they attacked the classic authors of the past, such 

as Aleksandr Pushkin (1799– 1837) and Leo Tolstoy (1828– 1910), whose work was, 

they claimed, outdated and irrelevant. 

Trotsky displays a mea sure of respect for formalism; he appreciates its search for 

precise methods of analysis and evaluation. But he criticizes formalists, Victor Shklovsky 

in par tic u lar, for being narrow and superficial— disconnected, like the futurists, 

from social pro cess. Trotsky contends that new cultural movements cannot, 

and must not, reject the culture of the past; culture must absorb and grow within 

tradition. In the 1920s, when he stated these views, the Bolshevik regime was 

granting some leeway for experimentation and debate in literature and the arts; the 

only condition (soon to be made more strict and comprehensive) was that new art 

not criticize the revolution or party leaders and the state. In keeping with this time 

of relative openness, Trotsky is flexible and nondogmatic in professing that each 

work of art must be judged as art, though he insists that history shapes artistic production 

and that innovation in art arises from the pressures of historical context. 

“Artistic creation,” he states, “is always a complicated turning inside out of old 

forms, under the influence of new stimuli which originate outside of art. . . . The 

effort to set art free from life, to declare it a craft self- sufficient unto itself, devitalizes 

and kills art.” 

Marxism alone, Trotsky believes, can explain the origins of a trend or development 

in the arts. In a later chapter of Literature and Revolution, while discussing 

the “formation of folklore,” he declares that because Marxism emphasizes “the alldetermining 

significance of natural and economic conditions,” it is the only proper 

basis for description and judgment. Thus he endorses censorship and repression: 

“Our standard is, clearly, po liti cal, imperative and intolerant.” Truth is not to 

emerge from debate in which positions are articulated and free to compete; it is 

known in advance, and hence the leadership should prescribe what is and is not to 

be tolerated. 

The Marxist critic terry ea gleton has observed: “In its blend of principled yet 

flexible Marxism and perceptive practical criticism, Literature and Revolution is a 

disquieting text for non- Marxist critics.” But this disquiet results less from Trotsky’s 

showing a laudable respect for artistic autonomy than from the conflict one senses 

between Trotsky’s humanist conception of literature and art and his tendency 

toward dogmatism. As edmund wilson noted in “Marxism and Literature” (1937), 

“even in combatting” the party’s tendency to use politics to appraise art, Trotsky 

himself “cannot avoid passing censure and pinning ribbons.” 

Trotsky would be impatient with such criticisms. Attacking liberal selfrighteousness, 

he stated repeatedly that democracies claiming in theory to honor 

freedom of speech were always ready to repudiate it in practice. But this deflection 

of the argument does not remove the problem embedded in his own position. 

bibliography 

For students of literary criticism, the essential text by Trotsky is Literature and 

Revolution (1924). Selections from his voluminous writings can be found in The 

Basic Writings of Trotsky, edited by Irving Howe (1963); The Age of Permanent Revolution: 

A Trotsky Anthology, edited by Isaac Deutscher (1964); and Leon Trotsky on 

Literature and Art, edited by Paul N. Siegel (1970). The Trotsky Papers, 1917– 1922, 

edited by Jan M. Meijer (2 vols., 1964– 71) contains documents from the Trotsky


Archive, including the Lenin- Trotsky correspondence. But many other sources are 

now becoming available, and studies undertaken in the future will make use of 

archival materials in the former Soviet Union that were inaccessible in the past. 

The classic scholarly biography of Trotsky is the three- volume study by Isaac 

Deutscher: The Prophet Armed, 1879– 1921 (1954), The Prophet Unarmed, 1921– 

1929 (1959), and The Prophet Outcast, 1929– 1940 (1963). A more recent treatment 

is offered by Ronald Segal, Leon Trotsky: A Biography (1979). Geoffrey Swain’s 

Trotsky (2006) is a good brief biography that draws on newly available material from 

the Soviet archives. See also Trotsky’s My Life (1930). 

A cogent survey is Irving Howe, Leon Trotsky (1978). Also important is Dmitri 

Antonovich Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary (1992; trans. 1996). For 

discussions of Trotsky’s po liti cal thought (which intersects with his ideas about literature 

and culture), see Baruch Knei- Paz, The Social and Po liti cal Thought of 

Leon Trotsky (1978); Ernest Mandel, Trotsky: A Study in the Dynamic of His Thought 

(1979); Robert S. Wistrich, Trotsky: Fate of a Revolutionary (1982); and Alex Callinicos, 

Trotskyism (1990). A dated but still useful resource is Louis Sinclair, Leon 

Trotsky: A Bibliography (1972). Trotsky Bibliography: An International Classified List 

of Publications about Leon Trotsky and Trotskyism, 1905– 1997, compiled and edited 

by Wolfgang and Petra Lubitz (3d ed.; 2 vols., 1999), is detailed and comprehensive. 

See also Robert J. Alexander, International Trotskyism, 1929– 1985: A Documented 

Analysis of the Movement (1991). For a more concise listing, the guide for further 

reading in David Renton, Trotsky (2004), is helpful. 

From Literature and Revolution 1 

The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism 

Leaving out of account the weak echoes of prerevolutionary ideologic systems, 

the only theory which has opposed Marxism in Soviet Rus sia these 

years is the Formalist theory of Art. The paradox consists in the fact that 

Rus sian Formalism connected itself closely with Rus sian Futurism, 2 and 

that while the latter was capitulating po liti cally before Communism, Formalism 

opposed Marxism with all its might theoretically. 

Victor Shklovsky 3 is the theorist of Futurism, and at the same time the 

head of the Formalist school. According to his theory, art has always been 

the work of self- sufficient pure forms, and it has been recognized by Futurism 

for the first time. Futurism is thus the first conscious art in history, and 

the Formalist school is the first scientific school of art. Owing to the efforts 

of Shklovsky— and this is not an insignificant virtue!— the theory of art, 

and partly art itself, have at last been raised from a state of alchemy to the 

position of chemistry. The herald of the Formalist school, the first chemist 

of art, gives a few friendly slaps in passing to those Futurist “conciliators” 

who seek a bridge to the Revolution, and who try to find this bridge in the 

materialistic conception of history. Such a bridge is unnecessary; Futurism 

is entirely sufficient unto itself. 

1. Translated by Rose Strunsky. 

2. A revolutionary movement in art and literature 

begun in Italy in 1909, stressing speed, modernity, 

machinery, and rebellion; it quickly found adherents 

in Rus sia. 

3. An important Rus sian formalist critic (1893– 

1984).

Literature and Revolution / 881 

There are two reasons why it is necessary to pause a little before this 

Formalist school. One is for its own sake; in spite of the superficiality and 

reactionary character of the Formalist theory of art, a certain part of the 

research work of the Formalists is useful. The other reason is Futurism 

itself; however unfounded the claims of the Futurists to a monopolistic 

repre sen ta tion of the new art may be, one cannot thrust Futurism out of 

that pro cess which is preparing the art of the future. 

What is the Formalist school? 

As it is represented at present by Shklovsky, Zhirmunsky, Jacobson 4 and 

others, it is extremely arrogant and immature. Having declared form to be 

the essence of poetry, this school reduces its task to an analysis (essentially 

descriptive and semi- statistical) of the etymology and syntax of poems, to the 

counting of repetitive vowels and consonants, of syllables and epithets. This 

analysis which the Formalists regard as the essence of poetry, or poetics, is 

undoubtedly necessary and useful, but one must understand its partial, 

scrappy, subsidiary and preparatory character. It can become an essential element 

of poetic technique and of the rules of the craft. Just as it is useful for a 

poet or a writer to make lists of synonyms for himself and increase their 

number so as to expand his verbal keyboard, so it is useful, and quite necessary 

for a poet, to estimate a word not only in accord with its inner meaning, 

but also in accord with its acoustics, because a word is passed on from man 

to man, first of all by acoustics. The methods of Formalism, confined within 

legitimate limits, may help to clarify the artistic and psychologic peculiarities 

of form (its economy, its movement, its contrasts, its hyperbolism, 5 etc.). 

This, in turn, may open a path— one of the paths— to the artist’s feeling for 

the world, and may facilitate the discovery of the relations of an individual 

artist, or of a whole artistic school, to the social environment. In so far as we 

are dealing with a contemporary and living school which is still developing, 

there is an immediate significance in our transitional stage in probing it by 

means of a social probe and in clarifying its class roots, so that not only the 

reader, but the school itself could orientate itself, that is, know itself, purify 

and direct itself. 

But the Formalists are not content to ascribe to their methods a merely 

subsidiary, ser viceable and technical significance— similar to that which 

statistics has for social science, or the microscope for the biological sciences. 

No, they go much further. To them verbal art ends finally and fully with the 

word, and depictive art with color. A poem is a combination of sounds, a 

painting is a combination of color spots and the laws of art are the laws of 

verbal combinations and of combinations of color spots. The social and 

psychologic approach which, to us, gives a meaning to the microscopic and 

statistical work done in connection with verbal material, is, for the Formalists, 

only alchemy. 

“Art was always free of life, and its color never reflected the color of the 

flag which waved over the fortress of the City.” (Shklovsky.) “Adjustment to 

the expression, the verbal mass, is the one essential element of poetry.” (R. 

Jacobson, in his “Recent Rus sian Poetry”.) “With a new form comes a new 

4. roman jakobson (1896– 1982), literary critic, 

theorist, and found er of the Moscow Linguistic 

Circle. Victor Maksimovich Zhirmunsky (1881– 

1971), Rus sian literary scholar. 

5. Use of exaggeration (hyperbole).


content. Form thus determines content.” (Kruchenikh.) 6 “Poetry means the 

giving of form to the word, which is valuable in itself” (Jacobson), or, as 

Khlebnikov 7 says, “The word which is something in itself”, etc. 

True, the Italian Futurists have sought in the word a means of expressing 

the locomotive, the propeller, electricity, the radio, etc., for their own age. 

In other words, they sought a new form for the new content of life. But it 

turned out that “this was a reform in the field of reporting, and not in the 

field of poetic language”. (Jacobson.) It is quite different with Rus sian 

Futurism; it carries to the end “the adjustment to verbal mass”. For Rus sian 

Futurism, form determines content. 

True, Jacobson is compelled to admit that “a series of new poetic methods 

finds application (?) for itself in urbanism” (in the culture of the city). But this 

is his conclusion: “Hence the urban poems of Mayakovsky 8 and Khlebnikov.” 

In other words: not city culture, which has struck the eye and the ear of the 

poet and which has reeducated them, has inspired him with new form, with 

new images, new epithets, new rhythm, but, on the contrary, the new form, 

originating arbitrarily, forced the poet to seek appropriate material and so 

pushed him in the direction of the city! The development of the “verbal mass” 

went on arbitrarily from the “Odyssey” to “A Cloud in Trousers”; 9 the torch, 

the wax candle, the electric lamp, had nothing to do with it! One has only to 

formulate this point of view clearly to have its childish inadequacy strike the 

eye. But Jacobson tries to insist; he replies in advance that the same Mayakovsky 

has such lines as these: “Leave the cities, you silly people.” And the 

theorist of the Formalist school reasons profoundly: “What is this, a logical 

contradiction? But let others fasten on the poet’s thoughts expressed in his 

works. To incriminate a poet with ideas and feelings is just as absurd as the 

behavior of the medieval public which beat the actor who played Judas.” And 

so on. 

It is quite evident that all this was written by a very capable high- school 

boy who had a very evident and quite “self- significant” intention to “stick the 

pen into our teacher of literature, a notable pedant”. At sticking the pen, our 

bold innovators are masters, but they do not know how to use their pen 

theoretically or grammatically. This is not hard to prove. 

Of course Futurism felt the suggestions of the city— of the tram- car, of 

electricity, of the telegraph, of the automobile, of the propeller, of the night 

cabaret (especially of the night cabaret) much before it found its new form. 

Urbanism (city culture) sits deep in the subconsciousness of Futurism, and 

the epithets, the etymology, the syntax and the rhythm of Futurism are only 

an attempt to give artistic form to the new spirit of the cities which has conquered 

consciousness. And when Mayakovsky exclaims: “Leave the cities, 

you silly people”, it is the cry of a man citified to the very marrow of his 

bones, who shows himself strikingly and clearly a city person, especially 

when he is outside the city, that is, when he “leaves the city” and becomes an 

inhabitant of a summer resort. It is not at all a question of “incriminating” 

6. Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh (1886– 1969), 

Rus sian poet and literary theorist. 

7. Velimir (originally Viktor Vladimirovich) Khlebnikov 

(1885– 1922), poet, poetic theorist, and 

found er of Rus sian futurism. 

8. Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893– 

1930), the leading poet of the Rus sian Revolution 

of 1917 and of the early Soviet period. 

9. A major work (1915) by the Rus sian poet Mayakovsky. 

The Odyssey is one of the earliest epics of 

Western literature (ca. 8th c. b.c.e.).


(this word misses something!) a poet with the ideas and feelings which he 

expresses. Of course the way he expresses them makes the poet. But after 

all, a poet uses the language of the school which he has accepted or which 

he has created to fulfill tasks which lie outside of him. And this is even true 

also when he limits himself to lyricism, to personal love and personal death. 

Though individual shadings of poetic form correspond to individual makeup, 

they do go hand in hand with imitation and routine, in the feeling itself, as 

well as in the method of its expression. A new artistic form, taken in a large 

historic way, is born in reply to new needs. To take an example from intimate 

lyric poetry, one may say that between the physiology of sex and a 

poem about love there lies a complex system of psychological transmitting 

mechanisms in which there are individual, racial and social elements. The 

racial foundation, that is, the sexual basis of man, changes slowly. The social 

forms of love change more rapidly. They affect the psychologic superstructure 

of love, they produce new shadings and intonations, new spiritual 

demands, a need of a new vocabulary, and so they present new demands on 

poetry. The poet can find material for his art only in his social environment 

and transmits the new impulses of life through his own artistic consciousness. 

Language, changed and complicated by urban conditions, gives the 

poet a new verbal material, and suggests or facilitates new word combinations 

for the poetic formulation of new thoughts or of new feelings, which 

strive to break through the dark shell of the subconscious. If there were no 

changes in psychology produced by changes in the social environment, there 

would be no movement in art; people would continue from generation to 

generation to be content with the poetry of the Bible, or of the old Greeks. 

But the phi los o pher of Formalism jumps on us, and says it is merely a 

question of a new form “in the field of reporting and not in the field of 

poetic language”. There he struck us! If you will, poetry is reporting, only in 

a peculiar, grand style. 

The quarrels about “pure art” and about art with a tendency took place 

between the liberals and the “populists”. They do not become us. Materialistic 

dialectics 1 are above this; from the point of view of an objective historical 

pro cess, art is always a social servant and historically utilitarian. It finds the 

necessary rhythm of words for dark and vague moods, it brings thought and 

feeling closer or contrasts them with one another, it enriches the spiritual 

experience of the individual and of the community, it refines feeling, makes 

it more flexible, more responsive, it enlarges the volume of thought in advance 

and not through the personal method of accumulated experience, it educates 

the individual, the social group, the class and the nation. And this it does 

quite in de pen dently of whether it appears in a given case under the flag of a 

“pure” or of a frankly tendencious 2 art. In our Rus sian social development 

tendenciousness was the banner of the intelligentsia which sought contact 

with the people. The helpless intelligentsia, crushed by Tsarism 3 and deprived 

of a cultural environment, sought support in the lower strata of society and 

tried to prove to the “people” that it was thinking only of them, living only for 

1. The Marxist theory that maintains the priority 

of matter over mind, stressing the material basis 

of reality as a changing dialectical pro cess (or 

reciprocal interaction) of matter and mind. 

2. Tendentious. 

3. The autocratic government of Rus sia under 

the czars (tsars). Along with his family, the last of 

the czars, Nicholas II (1868– 1918), was executed 

by the Bolsheviks in July 1918.


them and that it loved them “terribly”. And just as the “populists” who went to 

the people were ready to do without clean linen and without a comb and 

without a toothbrush, so the intelligentsia was ready to sacrifice the “subtleties” 

of form in its art, in order to give the most direct and spontaneous 

expression to the sufferings and hopes of the oppressed. On the other hand, 

“pure” art was the banner of the rising bourgeoisie, which could not openly 

declare its bourgeois character, and which at the same time tried to keep the 

intelligentsia in its ser vice. The Marxist point of view is far removed from 

these tendencies, which were historically necessary, but which have become 

historically passé. Keeping on the plane of scientific investigation, Marxism 

seeks with the same assurance the social roots of the “pure” as well as of the 

tendencious art. It does not at all “incriminate” a poet with the thoughts and 

feelings which he expresses, but raises questions of a much more profound 

significance, namely, to which order of feelings does a given artistic work correspond 

in all its peculiarities? What are the social conditions of these 

thoughts and feelings? What place do they occupy in the historic development 

of a society and of a class? And, further, what literary heritage has 

entered into the elaboration of the new form? Under the influence of what 

historic impulse have the new complexes of feelings and thoughts broken 

through the shell which divides them from the sphere of poetic consciousness? 

The investigation may become complicated, detailed or individualized, 

but its fundamental idea will be that of the subsidiary rôle which art plays in 

the social pro cess. 

Each class has its own policy in art, that is, a system of presenting demands 

on art, which changes with time; for instance, the Macænas- like protection 4 

of court and grand seigneur, the automatic relationship of supply and demand 

which is supplemented by complex methods of influencing the individual, 

and so forth, and so on. The social and even the personal dependence of art 

was not concealed, but was openly announced as long as art retained its 

court character. The wider, more pop u lar, anonymous character of the rising 

bourgeoisie led, on the whole, to the theory of “pure art”, though there were 

many deviations from this theory. As indicated above, the tendencious literature 

of the “populist” intelligentsia was imbued with a class interest; the 

intelligentsia could not strengthen itself and could not conquer for itself a 

right to play a part in history without the support of the people. But in the 

revolutionary struggle, the class egotism of the intelligentsia was turned 

inside out, and in its left wing, it assumed the form of highest self- sacrifice. 

That is why the intelligentsia not only did not conceal art with a tendency, 

but proclaimed it, thus sacrificing art, just as it sacrificed many other things. 

Our Marxist conception of the objective social dependence and social utility 

of art, when translated into the language of politics, does not at all mean a 

desire to dominate art by means of decrees and orders. It is not true that we 

regard only that art as new and revolutionary which speaks of the worker, and 

it is nonsense to say that we demand that the poets should describe inevitably 

a factory chimney, or the uprising against capital! Of course the new art cannot 

but place the struggle of the proletariat 5 in the center of its attention. But 

4. That is, patronage. Maecenas (d. 8 b.c.e.), 

trusted friend and counselor of Augustus Caesar, 

was a great patron of Roman poets (including 

horace and Virgil). 

5. That is, the laboring class; more specifically, 

the class of industrial workers who lack their own 

means of production and who thus must sell their 

labor in order to live.


the plough of the new art is not limited to numbered strips. On the contrary, 

it must plow the entire field in all directions. Personal lyrics of the very smallest 

scope have an absolute right to exist within the new art. Moreover, the 

new man cannot be formed without a new lyric poetry. But to create it, the 

poet himself must feel the world in a new way. If Christ alone or Sabaoth 6 

himself bends over the poet’s embraces (as in the case of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, 

Shkapskaya 7 and others), then this only goes to prove how much behind 

the times his lyrics are and how socially and æsthetically inadequate they are 

for the new man. Even where such terminology is not a survival of experience 

so much as of words, it shows psychologic inertia and therefore stands in contradiction 

to the consciousness of the new man. No one is going to prescribe 

themes to a poet or intends to prescribe them. Please write about anything 

you can think of! But allow the new class which considers itself, and with 

reason, called upon to build a new world, to say to you in any given case: It 

does not make new poets of you to translate the philosophy of life of the Seventeenth 

Century into the language of the Acméists. 8 The form of art is, to a 

certain and very large degree, in de pen dent, but the artist who creates this 

form, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines, one for 

creating form and the other for appreciating it. They are living people, with a 

crystallized psychology representing a certain unity, even if not entirely harmonious. 

This psychology is the result of social conditions. The creation and 

perception of art forms is one of the functions of this psychology. And no 

matter how wise the Formalists try to be, their whole conception is simply 

based upon the fact that they ignore the psychological unity of the social 

man, who creates and who consumes what has been created. 

The proletariat has to have in art the expression of the new spiritual 

point of view which is just beginning to be formulated within him, and to 

which art must help him give form. This is not a state order, but an historic 

demand. Its strength lies in the objectivity of historic necessity. You cannot 

pass this by, nor escape its force. 

The Formalist school seems to try to be objective. It is disgusted, and not 

without reason, with the literary and critical arbitrariness which operates 

only with tastes and moods. It seeks precise criteria for classification and 

valuation. But owing to its narrow outlook and superficial methods, it is 

constantly falling into superstitions, such as graphology and phrenology. 

These two “schools” have also the task of establishing purely objective tests 

for determining human character; such as the number of the flourishes of 

one’s pen and their roundness, and the peculiarities of the bumps on the 

back of one’s head. One may assume that pen- flourishes and bumps do have 

some relation to character; but this relation is not direct, and human character 

is not at all exhausted by them. An apparent objectivism based on 

accidental, secondary and inadequate characteristics leads inevitably to the 

worst subjectivism. In the case of the Formalist school it leads to the superstition 

of the word. Having counted the adjectives, and weighed the lines, 

and mea sured the rhythms, a Formalist either stops silent with the expression 

of a man who does not know what to do with himself, or throws out an 

6. The Lord of Hosts (Hebrew; literally, “hosts”); 

see Romans 9.29 and James 5.4. 

7. Trotsky names major 20th- century Rus sian 

poets: Anna Akhmatova (Anna Andreyevna 

Gorenko, 1888– 1966), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892– 

1941), and Mariya Shkapskaya (1891– 1952). 

8. Members of a small group of 20th- century 

vanguard Rus sian poets.


unexpected generalization which contains five per cent of Formalism and 

ninety- five per cent of the most uncritical intuition. 

In fact, the Formalists do not carry their idea of art to its logical conclusion. 

If one is to regard the pro cess of poetic creation only as a combination 

of sounds or words, and to seek along these lines the solution of all the problems 

of poetry, then the only perfect formula of “poetics” will be this: Arm 

yourself with a dictionary and create by means of algebraic combinations 

and permutations of words, all the poetic works of the world which have 

been created and which have not yet been created. Reasoning “formally” 

one may produce “Eugene Onegin” 9 in two ways: either by subordinating the 

selection of words to a preconceived artistic idea (as Pushkin himself did), or 

by solving the problem algebraically. From the “Formal” point of view, the 

second method is more correct, because it does not depend upon mood, 

inspiration, or other unsteady things, and has besides the advantage that 

while leading to “Eugene Onegin” it may bring one to an incalculable number 

of other great works. All that one needs is infinity in time, called eternity. 

But as neither mankind nor the individual poet have eternity at their 

disposal, the fundamental source of poetic words will remain, as before, the 

preconceived artistic idea understood in the broadest sense, as an accurate 

thought and as a clearly expressed personal or social feeling and as a vague 

mood. In its striving towards artistic materialization, this subjective idea 

will be stimulated and jolted by form and may be sometimes pushed on to a 

path which was entirely unforeseen. This simply means that verbal form is 

not a passive reflection of a preconceived artistic idea, but an active element 

which influences the idea itself. But such an active mutual relationship— in 

which form influences and at times entirely transforms content— is known 

to us in all fields of social and even biologic life. This is no reason at all for 

rejecting Darwinism 1 and Marxism and for the creation of a Formalist 

school either in biology or sociology. 

Victor Shklovsky, who flits lightly from verbal Formalism to the most 

subjective valuations, assumes a very uncompromising attitude towards the 

historico- materialistic theory of art. In a booklet which he published in 

Berlin, under the title of “The March of the Horse”, he formulates in the 

course of three small pages— brevity is a fundamental and, at any rate, an 

undoubted merit of Shklovsky— five (not four and not six, but five) exhaustive 

arguments against the materialist conception of art. Let us examine 

these arguments, because it won’t harm us to take a look and see what kind 

of chaff is handed out as the last word in scientific thought (with the greatest 

variety of scientific references on these same three microscopic pages). 

“If the environment and the relations of production,” says Shklovsky, 

“influenced art, then would not the themes of art be tied to the places 

which would correspond to these relations? But themes are homeless.” 

Well, and how about butterflies? According to Darwin, they also “correspond” 

to definite relations, and yet they flit from place to place, just like an 

unweighted litterateur. 

9. Verse novel (1833) by the Rus sian writer Aleksandr 

Pushkin (1799– 1837). 

1. The biological pro cess of development (through 

natural selection), theorized by Charles Darwin 

(1802– 1882); here presented as parallel to the 

economic and po liti cal theories of karl marx 

(1818– 1883).


It is not easy to understand why Marxism should be supposed to condemn 

themes to a condition of serfdom. The fact that different peoples and different 

classes of the same people make use of the same themes, merely shows 

how limited the human imagination is, and how man tries to maintain an 

economy of energy in every kind of creation, even in the artistic. Every class 

tries to utilize, to the greatest possible degree, the material and spiritual 

heritage of another class. Shklovsky’s argument could be easily transferred 

into the field of productive technique. From ancient times on, the wagon has 

been based on one and the same theme, namely, axles, wheels, and a shaft. 

However, the chariot of the Roman patrician was just as well adapted to his 

tastes and needs as was the carriage of Count Orlov, fitted out with inner 

comforts, to the tastes of this favorite of Catherine the Great. 2 The wagon of 

the Rus sian peasant is adapted to the needs of his house hold, to the strength 

of his little horse, and to the peculiarities of the country road. The automobile, 

which is undoubtedly a product of the new technique, shows, nevertheless, 

the same “theme”, namely, four wheels on two axles. Yet every time a 

peasant’s horse shies in terror before the blinding lights of an automobile 

on the Rus sian road at night, a conflict of two cultures is reflected in the 

episode. 

“If environment expressed itself in novels,” so runs the second argument, 

“Eu ro pe an science would not be breaking its head over the question of 

where the stories of ‘A Thousand and One Nights’ 3 were made, whether in 

Egypt, India, or Persia.” To say that man’s environment, including the artist’s, 

that is, the conditions of his education and life, find expression in his 

art also, does not mean to say that such expression has a precise geographic, 

ethnographic and statistical character. It is not at all surprising that it is 

difficult to decide whether certain novels were made in Egypt, India or Persia, 

because the social conditions of these countries have much in common. 

But the very fact that Eu ro pe an science is “breaking its head” trying to 

solve this question from these novels themselves, shows that these novels 

reflect an environment, even though unevenly. No one can jump beyond 

himself. Even the ravings of an insane person contain nothing that the sick 

man had not received before from the outside world. But it would be an 

insanity of another order to regard his ravings as the accurate reflection of 

an external world. Only an experienced and thoughtful psychiatrist, who 

knows the past of the patient, will be able to find the reflected and distorted 

bits of reality in the contents of his ravings. Artistic creation, of course, is 

not a raving, though it is also a deflection, a changing and a transformation 

of reality, in accordance with the peculiar laws of art. However fantastic art 

may be, it cannot have at its disposal any other material except that which 

is given to it by the world of three dimensions and by the narrower world of 

class society. Even when the artist creates heaven and hell, he merely transforms 

the experience of his own life into his phantasmagorias, almost to 

the point of his landlady’s unpaid bill. 

2. Empress of Rus sia (1729– 1796; reigned 1762– 

96). Gregory Orlov (1734– 1783) was one of her 

court favorites. 

3. A series of anonymous ancient tales in Arabic 

(also titled The Arabian Nights), codified in its 

present form ca. 1450.


“If the features of class and caste are deposited in art,” continues Shklovsky, 

“then how does it come that the various tales of the Great Rus sians 

about their nobleman are the same as their fairy tales about their priest?” 

In essence, this is merely a paraphrase of the first argument. Why cannot 

the fairy tales about the nobleman and about the priest be the same, and how 

does this contradict Marxism? The proclamations which are written by wellknown 

Marxists not infrequently speak of landlords, capitalists, priests, generals 

and other exploiters. The landlord undoubtedly differs from the 

capitalist, but there are cases when they are considered under one head. 

Why, then, cannot folk- art in certain cases treat the nobleman and the priest 

together, as the representatives of the classes which stand above the people 

and which plunder them? In the cartoons of Moor and of Deni, 4 the priest 

often stands side by side with the landlord, without any damage to Marxism. 

“If ethnographic traits were reflected in art,” Shklovsky goes on, “the 

folklore about the peoples beyond the border would not be interchangeable 

and could not be told by any one folk about another.” 

As you see, there is no letting up here. Marxism does not maintain at all 

that ethnographic traits have an in de pen dent character. On the contrary, it 

emphasizes the alldetermining significance of natural and economic conditions 

in the formation of folklore. The similarity of conditions in the development 

of the herding and agricultural and primarily peasant peoples, and 

the similarity in the character of their mutual influence upon one another, 

cannot but lead to the creation of a similar folklore. And from the point of 

view of the question that interests us here, it makes absolutely no difference 

whether these homogeneous themes arose in de pen dently among different 

peoples, as the reflection of a life- experience which was homogeneous in its 

fundamental traits and which was reflected through the homogeneous prism 

of a peasant imagination, or whether the seeds of these fairy tales were carried 

by a favorable wind from place to place, striking root wherever the 

ground turned out to be favorable. It is very likely that, in reality, these 

methods were combined. 

And finally, as a separate argument—“The reason (i.e., Marxism) is incorrect 

in the fifth place”— Shklovsky points to the theme of abduction which 

goes through Greek comedy and reaches Ostrovsky. 5 In other words, our 

critic repeats, in a special form, his very first argument (as we see, even in 

so far as formal logic is concerned, all is not well with our Formalist). Yes, 

themes migrate from people to people, from class to class, and even from 

author to author. This means only that the human imagination is eco nomical. 

A new class does not begin to create all of culture from the beginning, 

but enters into possession of the past, assorts it, touches it up, rearranges it, 

and builds on it further. If there were no such utilization of the “secondhand” 

wardrobe of the ages, historic pro cesses would have no progress at 

all. If the theme of Ostrovsky’s drama came to him through the Egyptians 

and through Greece, then the paper on which Ostrovsky developed his 

theme came to him as a development of the Egyptian papyrus through the 

4. D. S. Moor (1883– 1946) and V. N. Deni 

(1893– 1946) were po liti cal cartoonists and satirists, 

known in par tic u lar for their agitational 

poster art in the de cade after the Bolshevik Revolution. 

Posters mocking the Bolsheviks’ enemies 

frequently grouped together landlords and priests 

(caricatured as fat and ugly). 

5. Aleksandr Ostrovsky (1823– 1886), Rus sian 

dramatist.


Greek parchment. Let us take another and closer analogy: the fact that the 

critical methods of the Greek Sophists, 6 who were the pure Formalists of 

their day, have penetrated the theoretic consciousness of Shklovsky, does 

not in the least change the fact that Shklovsky himself is a very picturesque 

product of a definite social environment and of a definite age. 

Shklovsky’s destruction of Marxism in five points reminds us very much 

of those articles which were published against Darwinism in the magazine 

“The Orthodox Review” in the good old days. If the doctrine of the origin of 

man from the monkey were true, wrote the learned Bishop Nikanor of 

Odessa 7 thirty or forty years ago, then our grandfathers would have had 

distinct signs of a tail, or would have noticed such a characteristic in their 

grandfathers and grandmothers. Second, as everybody knows, monkeys can 

only give birth to monkeys. . . . Fifth, Darwinism is incorrect, because it 

contradicts Formalism— I beg your pardon, I meant to say the formal decisions 

of the universal church conferences. The advantage of the learned 

monk consisted, however, in the fact that he was a frank passéist 8 and took 

his cue from the Apostle Paul and not from physics, chemistry or mathematics, 

as the Futurist, Shklovsky, does. 

It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic 

conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the 

contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. It is very true 

that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether 

to reject or to accept a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, 

be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can 

explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given 

period of history; in other words, who it was who made a demand for such 

an artistic form and not for another, and why. 

It would be childish to think that every class can entirely and fully create 

its own art from within itself, and, particularly, that the proletariat is capable 

of creating a new art by means of closed art guilds or circles, or by the Or gani 

za tion for Proletarian Culture, etc. Generally speaking, the artistic work of 

man is continuous. Each new rising class places itself on the shoulders of its 

preceding one. But this continuity is dialectic, that is, it finds itself by means 

of internal repulsions and breaks. New artistic needs or demands for new 

literary and artistic points of view are stimulated by economics, through the 

development of a new class, and minor stimuli are supplied by changes in the 

position of the class, under the influence of the growth of its wealth and cultural 

power. Artistic creation is always a complicated turning inside out of old 

forms, under the influence of new stimuli which originate outside of art. In 

this large sense of the word, art is a handmaiden. It is not a disembodied element 

feeding on itself, but a function of social man indissolubly tied to his 

life and environment. And how characteristic it is— if one were to reduce 

every social superstition to its absurdity— that Shklovsky has come to the 

idea of art’s absolute in de pen dence from the social environment at a period 

of Rus sian history when art has revealed with such utter frankness its 

6. A group of 5th- century b.c.e. Greek phi los o- 

phers who specialized in logic, argumentation, and 

rhetoric and who were known for their elaborate 

and sometimes specious arguments (see gorgias). 

7. The Rus sian Orthodox archbishop of Kherson 

and Odessa (1827– 1890). 

8. Traditionalist.


spiritual, environmental and material dependence upon definite social 

classes, subclasses and groups! 

Materialism does not deny the significance of the element of form, either 

in logic, jurisprudence, or art. Just as a system of jurisprudence can and 

must be judged by its internal logic and consistency, so art can and must be 

judged from the point of view of its achievements in form, because there 

can be no art without them. However, a juridical theory which attempted to 

establish the in de pen dence of law from social conditions would be defective 

at its very base. Its moving force lies in economics— in class contradictions. 

The law gives only a formal and an internally harmonized expression 

of these phenomena, not of their individual peculiarities, but of their general 

character, that is, of the elements that are repetitive and permanent in 

them. We can see now with a clarity which is rare in history how new law is 

made. It is not done by logical deduction, but by empirical mea sure ment 

and by adjustment to the economic needs of the new ruling class. Literature, 

whose methods and pro cesses have their roots far back in the most 

distant past and represent the accumulated experience of verbal craftsmanship, 

expresses the thoughts, feelings, moods, points of view and hopes of 

the new epoch and of its new class. One cannot jump beyond this. And 

there is no need of making the jump, at least, for those who are not serving 

an epoch already past nor a class which has already outlived itself. 

The methods of formal analysis are necessary, but insufficient. You may 

count up the alliterations in pop u lar proverbs, classify meta phors, count up 

the number of vowels and consonants in a wedding song. It will undoubtedly 

enrich our knowledge of folk art, in one way or another; but if you don’t 

know the peasant system of sowing, and the life that is based on it, if you 

don’t know the part the scythe plays, and if you have not mastered the meaning 

of the church calendar to the peasant, of the time when the peasant 

marries, or when the peasant women give birth, you will have only understood 

the outer shell of folk art, but the kernel will not have been reached. 

The architectural scheme of the Cologne cathedral 9 can be established by 

mea sur ing the base and the height of its arches, by determining the three 

dimensions of its naves, the dimensions and the placement of the columns, 

etc. But without knowing what a mediæval city was like, what a guild was, or 

what was the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, the Cologne cathedral 

will never be understood. The effort to set art free from life, to declare it a 

craft self- sufficient unto itself, devitalizes and kills art. The very need of 

such an operation is an unmistakable symptom of intellectual decline. 

The analogy with the theological arguments against Darwinism which 

was made above may appear to the reader external and anecdotal. That may 

be true, to some extent. But a much deeper connection exists. The Formalist 

theory inevitably reminds a Marxist who has done any reading at all of the 

familiar tunes of a very old philosophic melody. The jurists and the moralists 

(to recall at random the German Stammler, and our own subjectivist 

Mikhailovsky) 1 tried to prove that morality and law could not be determined 

9. The largest Gothic church in northern Eu rope 

(begun in the 13th c.). 

1. Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842– 1904), literary 

critic best known for his essays on Tolstoy and 

other Rus sian novelists; a leader of the liberal 

populists, he engaged in debates with Lenin and 

other Rus sian Marxists. Rudolf Stammler (1856– 

1938), German jurist and legal phi los o pher.


by economics, because economic life was unthinkable outside of juridical 

and ethical norms. True, the formalists of law and morals did not go so far 

as to assert the complete in de pen dence of law and ethics from economics. 

They recognized a certain complex mutual relationship of “factors”, and 

these “factors”, while influencing one another, retained the qualities of in depen 

dent substances, coming no one knew whence. The assertion of complete 

in de pen dence of the æsthetic “factor” from the influence of social 

conditions, as is made by Shklovsky, is an instance of specific hyperbole 

whose roots, by the way, lie in social conditions too; it is the megalomania of 

æsthetic turning our hard reality on its head. Apart from this peculiarity, 

the constructions of the Formalists have the same kind of defective methodology 

that every other kind of idealism has. To a materialist, religion, law, 

morals and art represent separate aspects of one and the same pro cess of 

social development. Though they differentiate themselves from their industrial 

basis, become complex, strengthen and develop their special characteristics 

in detail, politics, religion, law, ethics and æsthetics remain, none the 

less, functions of social man and obey the laws of his social or ga ni za tion. 

The idealist, on the other hand, does not see a unified pro cess of historic 

development which evolves the necessary organs and functions from within 

itself, but a crossing or combining and interacting of certain in de pen dent 

principles— the religious, po liti cal, juridical, æsthetic and ethical substances, 

which find their origin and explanation in themselves. The (dialectic) 

idealism of Hegel 2 arranges these substances (which are the eternal 

categories) in some sequence by reducing them to a ge ne tic unity. Regardless 

of the fact that this unity with Hegel is the absolute spirit, which divides 

itself in the pro cess of its dialectic manifestation into various “factors”, 

Hegel’s system, because of its dialectic character, not because of its idealism, 

gives an idea of historic reality which is just as good as the idea of a 

man’s hand that a glove gives when turned inside out. But the Formalists 

(and their greatest genius was Kant) 3 do not look at the dynamics of development, 

but at a cross- section of it, on the day and at the hour of their own 

philosophic revelation. At the crossing of the line they reveal the complexity 

and multiplicity of the object (not of the pro cess, because they do not think 

of pro cesses). This complexity they analyze and classify. They give names to 

the elements, which are at once transformed into essences, into subabsolutes, 

without father or mother; to wit, religion, politics, morals, law, 

art. Here we no longer have a glove of history turned inside out, but the skin 

torn from the separate fingers, dried out to a degree of complete abstraction, 

and this hand of history turns out to be the product of the “interaction” of 

the thumb, the index, the middle finger, and all the other “factors”. The 

æsthetic “factor” is the little finger, the smallest, but not the least beloved. 

In biology, vitalism 4 is a variation of the same fetish of presenting the 

separate aspects of the world- process, without understanding its inner relation. 

A creator is all that is lacking for a super- social, absolute morality or 

æsthetics, or for a super- physical absolute “vital force”. The multiplicity of 

2. georg wilhelm friedrich hegel (1770– 1831), 

German phi los o pher. 

3. immanuel kant (1724– 1804), German phi loso 

pher. 

4. The theory or doctrine that life pro cesses arise 

from or contain a nonmaterial vital principle and 

cannot be explained entirely as physical and 

chemical phenomena.

892 / VIRGINIA WOOLF 

in de pen dent factors, “factors” without beginning or end, is nothing but a 

masked polytheism. Just as Kantian idealism represents historically a translation 

of Christianity into the language of rationalistic philosophy, so all the 

varieties of idealistic formalization, either openly or secretly, lead to a God, 

as the Cause of all causes. In comparison with the oligarchy of a dozen subabsolutes 

of the idealistic philosophy, a single personal Creator is already an 

element of order. Herein lies the deeper connection between the Formalist 

refutations of Marxism and the theological refutations of Darwinism. 

The Formalist school represents an abortive idealism applied to the questions 

of art. The Formalists show a fast ripening religiousness. They are followers 

of St. John. They believe that “In the beginning was the Word”. 5 But 

we believe that in the beginning was the deed. The word followed, as its phonetic 

shadow. 

5. John 1.1. 

1924 

VIRGINIA WOOLF 

1882–1941 

Invited to address the topic of “women and fiction” at Cambridge University’s 

Newnham and Girton Colleges in October of 1928, Virginia Woolf presented two 

lectures that would later become, after considerable expansion and revision, her 

celebrated book A Room of One’s Own (1929). Working at the intersection of modernism 

and feminism, both of which she stood for, Woolf analyzed the differences 

between women as objects of repre sen ta tion and women as authors of repre sen tation, 

and invited her audience to think about “the books that are not there.” In the 

pro cess, she opened up the entire territory of modern feminist criticism. 

Woolf was a member of a highly literate and artistic family. Born Adeline Virginia 

Stephen, she was the daughter of Leslie Stephen, a distinguished Victorian 

literary figure, and Julia Jackson Duckworth Stephen, a beauty who had once frequented 

pre- Raphaelite circles. It was the second marriage for each. The resultant 

blended family included three Duckworths (George, Stella, and Gerald), one Stephen 

from the first marriage (Laura, mentally incapacitated and later institutionalized), 

and four new Stephens (Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian). Leslie Stephen 

lived in a world of letters: his first wife was the daughter of novelist William Makepeace 

Thackeray; he possessed a large library (in which Virginia got her education); 

he published several books of philosophy and literary history; and he became, 

partly for financial reasons, the first editor of the multivolume Dictionary of National 

Biography in 1882, the year of Virginia’s birth. The Stephen family was or ga nized in 

a typically Victorian way, the father occupying himself with money and intellectual 

matters and the mother attending to the emotional and social needs of her husband 

and eight children. 

Her mother’s death in 1895 was for thirteen- year- old Virginia a terrible loss. 

When Sir Leslie died nine years later, twenty- two- year- old Virginia felt an intense 

though ambivalent liberation, and began to write. The Stephen children moved

VIRGINIA WOOLF / 893 

across London to Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, where they were surrounded by 

Thoby’s Cambridge friends, many of whom had been members of a college group 

known as the Apostles, and who later would become well known: Lytton Strachey, 

a biographer and historian; John Maynard Keynes, an economist; Clive Bell, a critic 

of art and literature; and Leonard Woolf, a writer of novels and po liti cal science. 

In 1906, however, the circle was devastated by the unexpected loss of its connecting 

link: Thoby Stephen died of typhoid fever. Two days after Thoby’s death, Vanessa 

agreed to marry Clive Bell. Virginia and her remaining brother, Adrian, moved 

to 29 Fitzroy Square (London), where Virginia began working on a novel. She had 

also begun to publish reviews for money and do some (unpaid) teaching in a 

working- class college. When she inherited £2,500 from an aunt, she acquired an 

important economic safety net. 

In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, who had just returned from serving as 

an administrator in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). They shared many intellectual interests 

and both felt themselves to be outsiders within their social circle. In response 

to Virginia’s periodic ner vous breakdowns, Leonard was both attentive and controlling: 

she relied on, and raged against, his prescriptions. In the 1920s, Virginia had 

an affair with Victoria (“Vita”) Sackville- West, a fellow writer, who was married to 

Harold Nicolson, a diplomat. The relationship coincided with a period of great productivity 

and originality in Woolf’s writing. 

In 1917 Leonard had had the inspired idea of buying a printing press, originally to 

provide a therapeutic hobby. The Hogarth Press, born of a machine small enough to 

fit on a kitchen table, soon became an important disseminator of modernist texts. It 

published brightly covered books, often designed by Vanessa Bell or Roger Fry, and 

launched T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land (1922); fiction by Maksim Gorky, E. M. Forster, 

and Katherine Mansfield; all the works of Virginia Woolf, beginning with Jacob’s 

Room (1922); and the complete twenty- four- volume translation of the works of sigmund 

freud. The “Woolves,” as their friends called them, had found their outlet. 

Starting with The Voyage Out, her first novel (1915), Woolf wrote a great deal. Her 

novels experiment increasingly with form and style: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), her fourth, 

is set, like James Joyce’s Ulysses in Dublin, in a single day in London, pairing the war 

and the drawing room; To the Light house (1927) is a radical rethinking of what a 

novel can do, a fictional biography of her parents relying on a stream of consciousness 

narrative. Her later novels take diverse approaches to expanding the form, and 

she published three very different “biographies,” including Orlando (1928, a novel 

celebrating her relationship with Vita), whose three- hundred- year- old protagonist 

changes sex in midlife, and Flush (1933), about the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 

spaniel. Woolf also wrote more than four volumes’ worth of essays and short 

fiction and two groundbreaking feminist works: A Room of One’s Own and Three 

Guineas (1938). 

Her productivity was all the more remarkable in that it was often punctuated by 

ner vous illnesses and by treatments, of dubious effectiveness, that required her to 

stop writing. In 1941, with the voices in her head becoming more insistent and the 

war in Eu rope ever more threatening (she and Leonard, who was Jewish, had made 

provisions to kill themselves in the event of a Nazi invasion), she drowned herself. 

People attempting to explain the sources of Woolf’s creativity have written a 

great deal on several topics: her sexuality, her class position, and her madness. 

Much has been said about her sexuality: she had too much of it or too little; her 

androgyny obscured her bisexuality, or vice versa; she idealized motherhood, or 

feared it, or resented Leonard, who was afraid of inherited insanity, for deciding 

that they shouldn’t have children; and so on. Evidence for these arguments comes, 

of course, from her writing itself; their contradictions indicate her success in finding 

textual forms— in her diaries and letters, her fiction and essays— that would 

allow all these forces to do battle.


Both of her feminist treatises link women and money. As one of the “daughters of 

educated men” (as she puts it in Three Guineas), she belonged to a culturally, if not 

eco nom ical ly, privileged class. In A Room of One’s Own she argues that women 

need £500 a year (an amount somewhere between subsistence and comfort), and in 

Three Guineas— a meditation on the ties between war and patriarchal values— she 

responds to a solicitation to sign a petition and contribute money to a society for the 

prevention of war. On the one hand, the link she makes between freedom and property 

can be critiqued from a Marxist perspective; on the other, society’s denial of 

women’s in de pen dent rights over property marks a re sis tance to women’s freedom. 

It is clear that Woolf is breaking a gender taboo, rather than merely claiming a class 

privilege, by going into the economic details of women’s lives. 

Woolf has also been seen as a representative of the sexual sea change that came 

after, and out of, the Victorian era. She grew up, like many others, in a world of exaggerated 

gender roles, secret transgressions, and repressive silence about sexual matters 

(she was apparently abused in childhood by her two stepbrothers). The Bloomsbury 

group, in contrast, broke gender taboos spectacularly— almost all of them had relations 

with both sexes, and they sometimes lived with the people they were not sleeping 

with. Nevertheless, even in liberated Bloomsbury, female creativity could still be 

categorized as “madness” whenever it became too hard to handle (this is the premise 

behind The Madwoman in the Attic, the influential 1979 study by sandra m. gilbert 

and susan gubar). The line between psychopathology and impeded gifts is very hard 

to draw, as Woolf makes clear in her parable of Shakespeare’s sister. 

Our selection contains three celebrated moments from A Room of One’s Own, 

which we have labeled “Shakespeare’s Sister,” “Chloe Liked Olivia,” and “Androgyny.” 

What would have happened, Woolf asks in the first, if Shakespeare had had a 

sister as gifted as himself? She would have lacked even the education he had, she 

answers. Shakespeare’s sister would have been excluded from the Re nais sance stage 

(on which all the parts were played by males); she would probably have found herself 

with child by some man who had taken pity on her; and, crazed by her gifts and her 

prospects, she would probably have ended up committing suicide. Judith Shakespeare 

thus represents one kind of “book that isn’t there.” 

A second kind of missing book may be lurking behind the cover of the fictitious 

novel Woolf is about to open in our second section, Mary Carmichael’s Life’s Adventure. 

“Chloe liked Olivia,” she reads, and looks about her to make sure the room 

contains only women. By wondering whether “that red curtain over there” conceals 

the figure of Sir Chartres Biron— the magistrate presiding at that very moment over 

the censorship trial of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness 

(1928)— Woolf implies that one of the things that keeps women unfree is the law’s 

policing of the relations women can have with women. Women in literature have 

almost always been imagined as only sexual, she argues, and usually only in their 

relations or nonrelations to men, leaving no dealings with each other but as rivals 

(“Cleopatra did not like Octavia”). But, Woolf exclaims, how small a part of any 

woman’s life is the part seen by the other sex and in relation to the other sex! Women 

as authors now have the opportunity to depict “that vast chamber where nobody has 

yet been.” 

Woolf’s idealization of authorial “androgyny” in our third passage would seem to 

fly in the face of her descriptions earlier in the essay of male and female sentences or 

male and female plots. How can she argue both that the exclusion of women from 

the canon has made a difference and that great authors are androgynous? Two 

clarifications need to be made. First, the “woman” in Shakespeare’s brain is not the 

same as the “women” who did not write in history. But second, the women entering 

literature do more than fill up an absence. If the greatest authors used both “sides” 

of their brain, the new authors must do so as well. Her warning that “consciousness 

of sex” destroys literature can be interpreted as both feminist and antifeminist.

VIRGINIA WOOLF / 895 

Writing with “unconsciousness of sex” may very well be taken as “indifference to 

sex”— often seen as a modernist privileging of style over politics. Yet this unconsciousness 

does not preclude gender difference, mandating simply that the gender 

differences that inform good writing not become conscious. If women were free to 

write, would they not open a window on a world of experiences that have remained 

invisible, even to themselves? a world too quickly dismissed or devalued, a world that 

would require different sentences? Woolf presents men, not women, as having 

become overly conscious of their sex as a result of feminism. In arguing for a new 

writerly androgyny, Woolf comes close to what hélène cixous later calls “the other 

bisexuality.” 

A Room of One’s Own is one of the most imitated titles ever devised. Written during 

the trial of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel and published during the same month 

as the stock market crash of 1929, A Room of One’s Own marks an upheaval more 

subtle, yet in some ways as profound, as these. The time was right for it: the book 

was so successful that the proceeds enabled Virginia Woolf to add a room of her 

own onto her house in Sussex. 

bibliography 

Most of Woolf’s works are available in easily accessible editions. A Room of One’s 

Own and Three Guineas, edited by Hermione Lee, were published together in 1984. 

Woolf’s other essays on women’s writing, edited by Michèle Barrett, were published 

as Women and Fiction (1979). In addition to her novels and her feminist essays, 

Woolf collected some of her articles in two volumes called The Common Reader 

(1925, 1932). Before he died in 1969, Leonard Woolf edited her Collected Essays (4 

vols., 1967); he also edited A Writer’s Diary (1953), now superseded by The Diary of 

Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (5 vols., 1977– 84), and A Passionate 

Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897– 1909, edited by Mitchell Leaska (1990). See 

also The Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann 

(6 vols., 1975– 80). The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends, edited by 

S. P. Rosenbaum (2007), gives the reader insight into her inner life and writings. 

There are more than a dozen biographies of Woolf. The first, Virginia Woolf, was 

written by her nephew, Quentin Bell, in 1973. The most even- handed and wellresearched 

recent biography is Hermione Lee’s monumental Virginia Woolf (1996). 

Julia Brigg’s Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005) is in many respects a biography of 

Woolf and her pro cess of writing. The flavor of the many “diagnostic” biographical 

studies can be gleaned from Alma Halbert Bond’s Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography 

(1989), the kind of Freudian reading that has given Freudian readings a 

bad name; Louise de Salvo’s Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse 

on Her Life and Work (1989); and Mitchell Leaska’s Granite and Rainbow (1998), 

which attributes all Woolf’s creativity to her repressed relationship with her father. 

The history of Woolf criticism mirrors the larger changes in twentiethcentury 

criticism. An invaluable collection of contemporary reviews was published as Virginia 

Woolf: The Critical Heritage, edited by Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (1975), 

which includes acerbic reviews in the journal Scrutiny (the most memorable may be 

Q. D. Leavis’s review of Three Guineas). Woolf’s canonization as a modernist is perhaps 

best illustrated by her inclusion in Erich Auerbach’s monumental Mimesis: 

The Repre sen ta tion of Reality in Western Literature (1946). Early feminist criticism 

was often critical of Woolf: Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), 

despite its title, dismisses Woolf’s experience of femininity. But Jane Marcus’s edited 

collections—New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf (1981) and Virginia Woolf: A 

Feminist Slant (1983)— began revising that picture; and when, in her groundbreaking 

Textual / Sexual Politics (1985), Toril Moi contrasted Anglo- American feminism’s 

desire for realism with French feminism’s interest in textuality, she called for a


rereading of Woolf’s style that has continued to this day. See, particularly, Virginia 

Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Margaret Homans (1993); Ellen 

Bayuk Rosenman, A Room of One’s Own: Women Writers and the Politics of Creativity 

(1995); and Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, 

Post- Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (1998). The emergence of gay and 

lesbian studies has focused new attention on the relationship between Virginia Woolf 

and Vita Sackville- West. Suzanne Raitt’s Vita and Virginia (1993) gives a good overview 

of the relationship of the two writers, whose letters were dramatized in 1994 by 

Eileen Atkins in her play Vita and Virginia (starring Atkins and Vanessa Redgrave). 

Other valuable studies include Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis 

(1989); Pamela Caughie, Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism (1991); Gillian 

Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996); and Rachel Bowlby, Feminist 

Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf (1997). Finally, in Virginia Woolf 

and the Victorians (2007), Steve Ellis breaks with the traditional reading of Woolf as 

the consummate modernist to argue that her oeuvre is post- Victorian. 

There are also two useful resources for Woolf studies: Edward Bishop’s day- today 

chronicle of Woolf’s activities, A Virginia Woolf Chronology (1989), and Mark 

Hussey’s dictionary of Woolf information, Virginia Woolf A to Z (1995). The proceedings 

of the annual Virginia Woolf conference are published by Pace University 

Press (1992–). B. J. Kirkpatrick and Stuart N. Clarke compiled A Bibliography of 

Virginia Woolf (1997); a bibliographic update, The Virginia Woolf Miscellany, initially 

published by Sonoma State University (1973– 2002), is now issued by Southern 

Connecticut State University. 

From A Room of One’s Own 

* * * 

[shakespeare’s sister] 

Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened 

had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us 

say. Shakespeare himself went, very probably— his mother was an heiress— 

to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin— Ovid, Virgil and 

Horace 1 — and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, 

a wild boy who poached rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner 

than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighborhood, who 

bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to 

seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he 

began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the 

theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, 

meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practising his art on the boards, 

exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of 

the queen. Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, 

remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see 

the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of 

learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She 

picked up a book now and then, one of her brother’s perhaps, and read a few 

1. The three Roman poets— Ovid (43 b.c.e.– 17 c.e.), Virgil (70– 19 b.c.e.), and horace (65– 8 b.c.e.)— 

were standard authors studied by boys in schools from the Re nais sance on.

A Room of One’s Own / 897 

pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or 

mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. They would 

have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were substantial people who knew 

the conditions of life for a woman and loved their daughter— indeed, more 

likely than not she was the apple of her father’s eye. Perhaps she scribbled 

some pages up in an apple loft on the sly, but was careful to hide them or 

set fire to them. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to 

be betrothed to the son of a neighboring wool- stapler. She cried out that 

marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her 

father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, 

not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain 

of beads or a fine petticoat, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How 

could she disobey him? How could she break his heart? The force of her 

own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, 

let herself down by a rope one summer’s night and took the road to 

London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the hedge were not 

more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her 

brother’s, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. 

She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her 

face. The manager— a fat, loose- lipped man— guffawed. He bellowed something 

about poodles dancing and women acting— no woman, he said, could 

possibly be an actress. 2 He hinted— you can imagine what. She could get no 

training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a tavern or roam 

the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed 

abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. 

At last— for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her 

face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows— at last Nick Greene 3 the 

actor- manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman 

and so— who shall mea sure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart 

when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?— killed herself one winter’s 

night and lies buried at some crossroads where the omnibuses now stop 

outside the Elephant and Castle. 4 

That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in 

Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius. But for my part, I agree 

with the deceased bishop, 5 if such he was— it is unthinkable that any woman 

in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like 

Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It 

was not born in En gland among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born 

today among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among 

women whose work began, according to Professor Trevelyan, 6 almost before 

they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held 

to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have 

2. In the Elizabethan theater, women’s roles were 

played by boys. 

3. Possibly modeled on Robert Greene (1558– 

1592), a dramatist whose 1592 pamphlet contains 

the first literary reference to Shakespeare 

(an attack). 

4. Suicides were often buried at crossroads to 

prevent their spirits from returning. The Elephant 

and Castle was a famous tavern, bombed 

during World War II, that stood at one of the 

busiest intersections in London. 

5. An “old gentleman” who earlier in the essay is 

said to have “declared that it was impossible for 

any woman past, present, or to come, to have the 

genius of Shakespeare.” 

6. George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876– 1962), 

En glish historian; Woolf has already referred to 

his History of En gland (1926).


existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. 

Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert Burns 7 blazes out and proves its 

presence. But certainly it never got itself on to paper. When, however, one 

reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by dev ils, of a wise 

woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, 

then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some 

mute and inglorious Jane Austen, 8 some Emily Brontë who dashed her 

brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed 

with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to 

guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often 

a woman. It was a woman Edward Fitzgerald, 9 I think, suggested who made 

the ballads and the folk- songs, crooning them to her children, beguiling her 

spinning with them, or the length of the winter’s night. 

This may be true or it may be false— who can say?— but what is true in it, 

so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made 

it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would 

certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely 

cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. 

For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who 

had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered 

by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary 

instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. 

* * * 

[chloe liked olivia] 

I am almost sure, I said to myself, that Mary Carmichael 1 is playing a trick 

on us. For I feel as one feels on a switchback railway when the car, instead 

of sinking, as one has been led to expect, swerves up again. Mary is tampering 

with the expected sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she has 

broken the sequence. Very well, she has every right to do both these things 

if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating. 

Which of the two it is I cannot be sure until she has faced herself with a 

situation. I will give her every liberty, I said, to choose what that situation 

shall be; she shall make it of tin cans and old kettles if she likes; but she 

must convince me that she believes it to be a situation; and then when she 

has made it she must face it. She must jump. And, determined to do my 

duty by her as reader if she would do her duty by me as writer, I turned the 

page and read . . . I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men 

present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the 

figure of Sir Chartres Biron 2 is not concealed? We are all women, you 

assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these— 

“Chloe liked Olivia . . .” Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the 

7. Scottish poet (1759– 1796). Brontë (1818– 

1848), En glish novelist and poet. 

8. Probably the most canonical of En glish women 

novelists (1775– 1817); the phrase “some mute and 

inglorious Jane Austen” echoes “some mute inglorious 

Milton,” in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in 

a Country Churchyard” (1751). 

9. En glish scholar and poet (1809– 1883), who 

anonymously translated The Rubáiyát of Omar 

Khayyam (1859). 

1. Woolf’s name for a fictitious contemporary 

author of a novel, Life’s Adventure, which bears a 

resemblance to the novel published by Mary 

Stopes (under the name Mary Carmichael) titled 

Love’s Creation (1928). 

2. The magistrate presiding over the trial that 

was to ban Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness 

(1928) for depicting lesbianism.


privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes 

women do like women. 

“Chloe liked Olivia,” I read. And then it struck me how im mense a 

change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. 

Cleopatra did not like Octavia. 3 And how completely Antony and Cleopatra 

would have been altered had she done so! As it is, I thought, letting my 

mind, I am afraid, wander a little from Life’s Adventure, the whole thing is 

simplified, conventionalised, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra’s only 

feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does 

she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it 

would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more 

complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly 

recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much 

has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the 

course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is 

an attempt at it in Diana of the Crossways. 4 They are confidantes, of course, 

in Racine 5 and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and 

daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to 

men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until 

Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation 

to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how 

little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or 

rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar 

nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror; 

her alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity— for 

so a lover would see her as his love rose or sank, was prosperous or unhappy. 

This is not so true of the nineteenthcentury novelists, of course. Woman 

becomes much more various and complicated there. Indeed it was the 

desire to write about women perhaps that led men by degrees to abandon 

the poetic drama which, with its violence, could make so little use of them, 

and to devise the novel as a more fitting receptacle. Even so it remains obvious, 

even in the writing of Proust, 6 that a man is terribly hampered and 

partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men. 

Also, I continued, looking down at the page again, it is becoming evident 

that women, like men, have other interests besides the perennial interests 

of domesticity. “Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together. . . .” 

I read on and discovered that these two young women were engaged in 

mincing liver, which is, it seems, a cure for pernicious anaemia: although 

one of them was married and had— I think I am right in stating— two small 

children. Now all that, of course, has had to be left out, and thus the splendid 

portrait of the fictitious woman is much too simple and much too monotonous. 

Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature 

as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, 

dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to 

3. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1606– 

07), Antony loves Cleopatra but marries Octavia 

to cement a po liti cal alliance; Cleopatra interrogates 

a messenger about Octavia’s height, voice, 

gait, and hair color (3.3). 

4. An 1885 novel by George Meredith, who had 

been a friend of Woolf’s father. 

5. Jean Racine (1639– 1699), French dramatist. 

6. Marcel Proust (1871– 1922), French novelist, 

whose multivolume À la recherche du temps 

perdu (1913– 27, Remembrance of Things Past) 

Woolf read with great appreciation.


them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; 

and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, 

no Jaques 7 — literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature 

is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut 

upon women. Married against their will, kept in one room, and to one occupation, 

how could a dramatist give a full or interesting or truthful account of 

them? Love was the only possible interpreter. The poet was forced to be passionate 

or bitter, unless indeed he chose to “hate women,” which meant 

more often than not that he was unattractive to them. 

Now if Chloe likes Olivia and they share a laboratory, which of itself will 

make their friendship more varied and lasting because it will be less personal; 

if Mary Carmichael knows how to write, and I was beginning to enjoy 

some quality in her style; if she has a room to herself, of which I am not 

quite sure; if she has five hundred a year of her own— but that remains to be 

proved— then I think that something of great importance has happened. 

For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she 

will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been. It is all half 

lights and profound shadows like those serpentine caves where one goes with 

a candle peering up and down, not knowing where one is stepping. And I 

began to read the book again, and read how Chloe watched Olivia put a jar on 

a shelf and say how it was time to go home to her children. That is a sight that 

has never been seen since the world began, I exclaimed. And I watched too, 

very curiously. For I wanted to see how Mary Carmichael set to work to catch 

those unrecorded gestures, those unsaid or half- said words, which form themselves, 

no more palpably than the shadows of moths on the ceiling, when 

women are alone, unlit by the capricious and coloured light of the other sex. 

She will need to hold her breath, I said, reading on, if she is to do it; for women 

are so suspicious of any interest that has not some obvious motive behind it, so 

terribly accustomed to concealment and suppression, that they are off at the 

flicker of an eye turned observingly in their direction. The only way for you to 

do it, I thought, addressing Mary Carmichael as if she were there, would be to 

talk of something else, looking steadily out of the window, and thus note, not 

with a pencil in a notebook, but in the shortest of shorthand, in words that are 

hardly syllabled yet, what happens when Olivia— this organism that has been 

under the shadow of the rock these million years— feels the light fall on it, and 

sees coming her way a piece of strange food— knowledge, adventure, art. And 

she reaches out for it, I thought, again raising my eyes from the page, and has 

to devise some entirely new combination of her resources, so highly developed 

for other purposes, so as to absorb the new into the old without disturbing the 

infinitely intricate and elaborate balance of the whole. 

* * * 

[androgyny] 

But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it 

gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corre- 

7. All characters in Shakespeare’s plays, from Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, King 

Lear, and As You Like It.


sponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be 

united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness. And I went on 

amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers 

preside, one male, one female; and in the man’s brain, the man predominates 

over the woman, and in the woman’s brain, the woman predominates 

over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the 

two live in harmony together, spiritually cooperating. If one is a man, still 

the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman also must have 

intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge 8 perhaps meant this when he 

said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that 

the mind is fully fertilised and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is 

purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine, 

I thought. But it would be well to test what one meant by manwomanly, 

and conversely by woman- manly, by pausing and looking at a book 

or two. 

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is 

androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a 

mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps 

the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the 

single- sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant 

and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is 

naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to 

Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the manwomanly 

mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of 

women. And if it be true that it is one of the tokens of the fully developed 

mind that it does not think specially or separately of sex, how much harder 

it is to attain that condition now than ever before. Here I came to the books 

by living writers, and there paused and wondered if this fact were not at the 

root of something that had long puzzled me. No age can ever have been as 

stridently sex- conscious as our own; those innumerable books by men about 

women in the British Museum 9 are a proof of it. The Suffrage campaign 1 

was no doubt to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire 

for self- assertion; it must have made them lay an emphasis upon their own 

sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to think 

about had they not been challenged. And when one is challenged, even by a 

few women in black bonnets, one retaliates, if one has never been challenged 

before, rather excessively. That perhaps accounts for some of the 

characteristics that I remember to have found here, I thought, taking down 

a new novel by Mr. A, who is in the prime of life and very well thought of, 

apparently, by the reviewers. I opened it. Indeed, it was delightful to read a 

man’s writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of 

women. It indicated such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence 

in himself. One had a sense of physical wellbeing in the presence of 

this well- nourished, well- educated, free mind, which had never been 

thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in 

what ever way it liked. All this was admirable. But after reading a chapter or 


En glish Romantic poet and critic; see Table Talk, 

September 1, 1832. 

9. That is, in the Reading Room of the British 

Museum (in Bloomsbury), where Woolf did her 

research. 

1. The movement to obtain the vote for women 

succeeded in En gland in 1918.


two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight dark bar, a 

shadow shaped something like the letter “I.” One began dodging this way 

and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was 

indeed a tree or a woman walking 2 I was not quite sure. Back one was always 

hailed to the letter “I.” One began to be tired of “I.” Not but what this “I” was 

a most respectable “I”; honest and logical; as hard as a nut, and polished for 

centuries by good teaching and good feeding. I respect and admire that “I” 

from the bottom of my heart. But— here I turned a page or two, looking for 

something or other— the worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter “I” all 

is shapeless as mist. Is that a tree? No, it is a woman. But . . . she has not a 

bone in her body, I thought, watching Phoebe, for that was her name, coming 

across the beach. Then Alan got up and the shadow of Alan at once 

obliterated Phoebe. For Alan had views and Phoebe was quenched in the 

flood of his views. And then Alan, I thought, has passions; and here I turned 

page after page very fast, feeling that the crisis was approaching, and so it 

was. It took place on the beach under the sun. It was done very openly. It 

was done very vigorously. Nothing could have been more indecent. But . . . I 

had said “but” too often. 3 One cannot go on saying “but.” One must finish 

the sentence somehow, I rebuked myself. Shall I finish it, “But— I am bored!” 

But why was I bored? Partly because of the dominance of the letter “I” and 

the aridity, which, like the giant beech tree, it casts within its shade. Nothing 

will grow there. And partly for some more obscure reason. There seemed 

to be some obstacle, some impediment of Mr. A’s mind which blocked the 

fountain of creative energy and shored it within narrow limits. And remembering 

the lunch party at Oxbridge, and the cigarette ash and the Manx cat 

and Tennyson and Christina Rossetti 4 all in a bunch, it seemed possible that 

the impediment lay there. As he no longer hums under his breath, “There 

has fallen a splendid tear from the passion- flower at the gate,” when Phoebe 

crosses the beach, and she no longer replies, “My heart is like a singing bird 

whose nest is in a water’d shoot,” when Alan approaches what can he do? 

Being honest as the day and logical as the sun, there is only one thing he can 

do. And that he does, to do him justice, over and over (I said, turning the 

pages) and over again. And that, I added, aware of the awful nature of the 

confession, seems somehow dull. Shakespeare’s indecency uproots a thousand 

other things in one’s mind, and is far from being dull. But Shakespeare 

does it for plea sure; Mr. A, as the nurses say, does it on purpose. He does it 

in protest. He is protesting against the equality of the other sex by asserting 

his own superiority. He is therefore impeded and inhibited and selfconscious 

as Shakespeare might have been if he too had known Miss Clough and Miss 

Davies. 5 Doubtless Elizabethan literature would have been very different 

from what it is if the woman’s movement had begun in the sixteenth century 

and not in the nineteenth. 

2. Possibly an allusion to Mark 8.24: “I see men 

as trees, walking.” 

3. The first word of A Room of One’s Own is 

“But.” 

4. In the book’s first chapter, Woolf discusses the 

missing tails of Manx cats along with the poems 

(quoted here) “Maud” (1855) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson 

(1809– 1892), and “A Birthday” (1862), by 

Christina Rossetti (1830– 1894), which represent 

what men and women, respectively, hummed at 

garden parties before the war. “Oxbridge”: an 

invented place, blending Oxford and Cambridge 

Universities. 

5. Anne Jemima Clough (1820– 1892) and Emily 

Davies (1830– 1921), leaders in the movement to 

promote women’s education. Clough was the first 

principal of Newnham Hall, the first institution 

for women at Cambridge University; Davies helped 

found and was the first mistress of Girton College, 

the second such institution at Cambridge.


What, then, it amounts to, if this theory of the two sides of the mind 

holds good, is that virility has now become selfconscious—men, that is to 

say, are now writing only with the male side of their brains. It is a mistake 

for a woman to read them, for she will inevitably look for something that 

she will not find. It is the power of suggestion that one most misses, I 

thought, taking Mr. B the critic in my hand and reading, very carefully and 

very dutifully, his remarks upon the art of poetry. Very able they were, 

acute and full of learning; but the trouble was, that his feelings no longer 

communicated; his mind seemed separated into different chambers; not a 

sound carried from one to the other. Thus, when one takes a sentence of 

Mr. B into the mind it falls plump to the ground— dead; but when one takes 

a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all 

kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can 

say that it has the secret of perpetual life. 

But what ever the reason may be, it is a fact that one must deplore. For it 

means— here I had come to rows of books by Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. 

Kipling 6 — that some of the finest works of our greatest living writers fall 

upon deaf ears. Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that fountain 

of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that 

they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of 

men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a 

woman incomprehensible. It is coming, it is gathering, it is about to burst 

on one’s head, one begins saying long before the end. That picture will fall 

on old Jolyon’s head; he will die of the shock; the old clerk will speak over 

him two or three obituary words; and all the swans on the Thames will 

simultaneously burst out singing. But one will rush away before that happens 

and hide in the gooseberry bushes, for the emotion which is so deep, 

so subtle, so symbolical to a man moves a woman to wonder. So with Mr. 

Kipling’s officers who turn their backs; and his Sowers who sow the Seed; 

and his Men who are alone with their Works; and the Flag— one blushes at 

all these capital letters as if one had been caught eavesdropping at some 

purely masculine orgy. The fact is that neither Mr. Galsworthy nor Mr. 

Kipling has a spark of the woman in him. Thus all their qualities seem to a 

woman, if one may generalise, crude and immature. They lack suggestive 

power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the 

surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within. 

And in that restless mood in which one takes books out and puts them 

back again without looking at them I began to envisage an age to come of 

pure, of self- assertive virility, such as the letters of professors (take Sir Walter 

Raleigh’s 7 letters, for instance) seem to forebode, and the rulers of Italy 

have already brought into being. For one can hardly fail to be impressed in 

Rome by the sense of unmitigated masculinity; and what ever the value of 

unmitigated masculinity upon the state, one may question the effect of it 

upon the art of poetry. At any rate, according to the newspapers, there is a 

certain anxiety about fiction in Italy. There has been a meeting of academicians 

whose object it is “to develop the Italian novel.” “Men famous by birth, 

6. Rudyard Kipling (1865– 1936), En glish poet 

and novelist. John Galsworthy (1867– 1933), 

En glish novelist and playwright. Jolyon is a character 

in his Forsyte Saga (1906– 22). 

7. En glish essayist and critic (1861– 1922), the 

first professor of En glish literature at Oxford; his 

letters were published in 1926.


or in finance, industry or the Fascist corporations” came together the other 

day and discussed the matter, and a tele gram was sent to the Duce 8 expressing 

the hope “that the Fascist era would soon give birth to a poet worthy of 

it.” We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can 

come out of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. 

The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one 

sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town. Such monsters never 

live long, it is said; one has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass 

in a field. Two heads on one body do not make for length of life. 

However, the blame for all this, if one is anxious to lay blame, rests no 

more upon one sex than upon the other. All seducers and reformers are 

responsible, Lady Bessborough when she lied to Lord Granville; Miss 

Davies when she told the truth to Mr. Greg. 9 All who have brought about a 

state of sex- consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I 

want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age, before 

Miss Davies and Miss Clough were born, when the writer used both sides 

of his mind equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare 

was androgynous; and so was Keats and Sterne and Cowper and 

Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson 

had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. 1 

In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much 

of a woman. But that failing is too rare for one to complain of it, since without 

some mixture of the kind the intellect seems to predominate and the 

other faculties of the mind harden and become barren. However, I consoled 

myself with the reflection that this is perhaps a passing phase; much of 

what I have said in obedience to my promise to give you the course of my 

thoughts will seem out of date; much of what flames in my eyes will seem 

dubious to you who have not yet come of age. 

Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing 

over to the writing- table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, 

is that it is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be 

a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman- manly or manwomanly. 

It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to 

plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a 

woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious 

bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilised. Brilliant and effective, 

powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither 

at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to 

take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of 

creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. 

The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the 

sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. 

8. Benito Mussolini (1883– 1945), Italian dictator. 

9. Probably the En glish essayist William Rathbone 

Greg (1809– 1891), who in a text of 1862 

asked, “Why Are Women Redundant?” Lady 

Bessborough (1761– 1821) is Henrietta, countess 

of Bessborough, the lover of Lord Granville 

Leveson- Gower (1773– 1846). 

1. All canonical authors, in varying degrees: John 

Keats (1795– 1821), En glish poet; Laurence Sterne 

(1713– 1768), En glish novelist; William Cowper 

(1731– 1800), En glish poet; Charles Lamb (1775– 

1834), En glish essayist and critic; percy bysshe 

shelley (1792– 1822), En glish poet; John Milton 

(1608– 1674), En glish poet; Ben Jonson (1572– 

1637), En glish poet and playwright; william 

wordsworth (1770– 1850), En glish poet; and Leo 

Tolstoy (1828– 1910), Rus sian novelist and moral 

phi los o pher.

GYÖRGY LUKÁCS / 905 

There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, 

not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn. The writer, I thought, 

once his experience is over, must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials 

in darkness. He must not look or question what is being done. Rather, 

he must pluck the petals from a rose or watch the swans float calmly down 

the river. And I saw again the current which took the boat and the undergraduate 

and the dead leaves; and the taxi took the man and the woman, 2 I 

thought, seeing them come together across the street, and the current swept 

them away, I thought, hearing far off the roar of London’s traffic, into that 

tremendous stream. 

* * * 

1929 

2. Scenes described earlier in the book. 

GYÖRGY LUKÁCS 

1885–1971 

The Marxist phi los o pher and aes the ti cian György Lukács played a fundamental 

role in the early development of Marxist literary and cultural theory. His original 

analysis of the commodity form in History and Class Consciousness (1923) continues 

to influence Marxist cultural theory, especially in the wide- ranging work of 

fredric jameson. In the area of aesthetics, Lukács remains influential as well, not 

only because of his participation in the so- called realism debate of the 1930s, 

which involved such Marxist luminaries as theodor adorno, walter benjamin, 

and Bertolt Brecht, but also because of his sophisticated historical approach to literature, 

best exemplified in The Historical Novel (1937). 

Growing out of eighteenthcentury realism, the historical novel in the early nineteenth 

century is, for Lukács, the product of the broad Eu ro pe an social transformation 

initiated by the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. The mass experience of 

history and the consolidation of nationalist sensibilities throughout Eu rope constitute 

the preconditions for the emergence of a new type of realist writing most notably 

exemplified by the works of Sir Walter Scott (1771– 1832) and others such as Alessandro 

Manzoni (1785– 1873), Aleksandr Pushkin (1799– 1837), and Honoré de 

Balzac (1799– 1850). According to Lukács, the historical novel of this time presents 

an expansive picture (the concrete totality) of society, including the class factions and 

struggles shaping it. History is no longer a mere element of decor or a pure object of 

abstraction as in Romantic and earlier literature: it is now a pro cess assuming artistic 

form that shapes the past to comprehend the present and to sketch possible futures. 

To this aesthetic and po liti cal cause, Lukács devoted much of his professional life, 

securing his reputation as the most passionate defender of literary realism and critic 

of modernistic experimental work during the mid– twentieth century. 

Born to an affluent Jewish family in Budapest, György Lukács displayed at an early 

age a repugnance for his parents’ middleclass values. His father, József Lowinger, was 

the director of the Hungarian General Credit Bank, a leading financial institution of

906 / GYÖRGY LUKÁCS 

Austria- Hungary; Lowinger changed his last name to Lukács in 1890 to reflect his 

assimilation to Hungarian culture. Lukács’s mother, Adél Wertheimer, derived her 

ancestry from one of the oldest and wealthiest Jewish families in Eastern Eu rope. In 

his youth Lukács embraced the fin de siècle attitudes inspired by the nineteenthcentury 

writers Søren Kierkegaard, friedrich nietz sche, and Fyodor Dostoyevski, 

among others. His intellectual interests eventually took him to Germany, where he 

studied under the sociologists Georg Simmel and Max Weber. Characterized by an 

anguished Romanticism, this initial phase of Lukács’s career is reflected in his two 

early works, Soul and Form (1911) and The Theory of the Novel (1916), both published 

in German under the German version of his name, Georg Lukács. With its typology 

of forms indebted to g. w. f. hegel, the latter work became influential in large part 

because it interestingly historicized the novel; but Lukács later renounced it for developing 

a bleak view of the novel as fragmentary and ironic. 

The barbarism of World War I, the promise of the Rus sian Revolution of 1917, 

and the subsequent demise of the Austro- Hungarian Empire precipitated Lukács’s 

conversion to Marxism in 1918. He was a deeply committed communist, but he 

often ran into trouble with the Communist Party. He found his History and Class 

Consciousness, for example, censured by the Comintern Congress in Moscow. In 

this crucial work, which later became an important text for the student uprisings of 

the 1960s, Lukács addressed the widespread sense of fragmentation and alienation 

under capitalism, out of which emerged his conception of “reification”— the sense 

of objectification experienced by individuals who are subordinated to the rationalizing 

pro cesses of commodity production and reduced to the status of things. He 

achieved an original synthesis of marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Weber’s 

concept of rationalization, and Hegel’s philosophy of the dialectic. However, the 

Comintern objected to the unorthodox Hegelian (idealist) emphasis on the consciousness 

of the proletariat, thus setting the stage for Lukács’s “autocriticisms,” or 

public recantations of his own published writings. 

From the 1930s onward, Lukács directed considerable effort toward the construction 

and defense of a Marxist realist aesthetic conceived in materialist terms 

and opposed to the idealist tradition from friedrich von schiller (1759– 1805) 

to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788– 1860). However, during Joseph Stalin’s consolidation 

of power in the 1930s and up to the “thaw” of the 1950s, Lukács sometimes 

employed a coded language to express his unorthodox opinions on realism, because 

the theory and practice of literature in the Soviet Union had been increasingly 

regulated by the policy of Proletkult, the Bolshevik Party Central Committee, and 

the All Rus sian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP)— all of which endorsed 

the view that writers must serve the interests of the party. The result was a growing 

intolerance that prompted the exile of such figures as the revolutionary and cultural 

theorist leon trotsky and the noted Rus sian formalist roman jakobson. Intellectual 

constraints were also imposed on boris eichenbaum, another formalist. At 

issue was the theory of “socialist realism,” which was devised by Maksim Gorky in 

consultation with Stalin, promulgated by A. A. Zhdanov, and sanctioned by the 

Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. In theory, socialist realism insisted that realistic 

novels must be overtly didactic, serving the interests of socialism and the working 

class. Trotsky thought such a definition of realism was too narrow, and Lukács 

himself would have nothing to do with it because he opposed overt didacticism and 

admired such Eu ro pe an novelists as Sir Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac, and Thomas 

Mann (1875– 1955), classifying them as “critical realists.” After Stalin’s death in 

1953, Lukács was able to work more openly, summing up his views in Die Eigenart 

des Ästhetischen (1963, The Specificity of the Aesthetic). 

In “The Classical Form of the Historical Novel,” our selection from the first 

chapter of The Historical Novel, Lukács offers an orthodox Marxist analysis of the 

underlying socioeconomic and po liti cal conditions governing the rise of the historical 

novel in early- nineteenth- century Eu rope. The emergence of bourgeois society

GYÖRGY LUKÁCS / 907 

and the simultaneous awakening of national sensibility during the Enlightenment 

entail, in Lukács’s view, a decisive shift in the understanding of social existence 

from feudal absolutist inertia to modern demo cratic progress linked with increasing 

industrialization, urbanization, and capitalism. In the wake of the widespread 

revolutionary and in de pen dence movements triggered by the French Revolution 

and Napoleonic wars, broad segments of the Eu ro pe an population begin to experience 

a growing sense of historical awareness. As modern warfare is integrated into 

society in the form of large national armies drawn from the population and shaped 

by po liti cal propaganda, people see their lives for the first time as historically 

embedded in a changing reality that is self- created rather than pregiven. Later 

frantz fanon would confirm the role of war in the development of nationstates 

while similarly highlighting the internal tensions of class struggle, and benedict 

anderson would add spreading literacy as a key factor in the creation of nationstates 

and national consciousness during the nineteenth century. 

The historical novel, according to Lukács, is a major catalyst of national cohesion 

and class consciousness. At its best, as exemplified by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, 

it reflects the totality of social relationships by creating “types” or representative 

characters. Unlike some Romantic literature, which offers reactionary descriptions 

of the past, abstract and idealistic, realist historical accounts are rooted in the concrete 

socioeconomic conditions of the present and are committed to the objective 

depiction of the socially formative forces in history. Lukács faults Romanticism for 

overlooking pop u lar life as it superficially derives the spirit of an age from biographies 

of leading historical figures. At the same time, he praises Scott for placing at 

the center of his epic- scale narratives prosaic, mediocre heroes, who engage in dialogue 

and typify social trends while displaying the po liti cal potential of the masses. 

Lukács here distinguishes between the complex reality depicted in Scott’s novels 

and the author’s own conservative po liti cal views, as he will later do with other novelists 

like Balzac. Unlike socialist realism, the historical novel in Lukács’s handling 

is not a programmed genre directed by a po liti cal party. Like seismographs, the great 

historical realists register present social tremors and often those to come through 

instinct. For Lukács, historical realism constitutes an aesthetic vanguard of works 

whose portrayals anticipate where social developments are headed. 

For Lukács, historical realism is distinguished not only from reactionary romanticism 

but also from expressionism and other modernist artistic movements such as 

symbolism and surrealism, all of which regressively emphasize subjectivity, alienation, 

and fragmentation. In texts such as “Realism in the Balance” (1938), Lukács 

faults modernism, especially expressionism, for being content merely to depict 

immediate sense impressions and fragmentary subjective states, as demonstrated by 

its practitioners’ preference for montage. In “juxtaposing heterogeneous, unrelated 

pieces of reality torn from their context,” expressionism attends only to the uncomprehended 

surfaces and appearances of things, producing opaque, chaotic, and plotless 

works. It thus abandons the goal of mirroring objective reality and its underlying 

socioeconomic laws, becoming instead a passive depiction of the alienation of people 

under capitalism. More important, by universalizing alienation (rather than seeing it 

as an effect of capitalism), the movement provides no basis for progressive politics. 

Lukács also distinguishes realism from other ostensibly realistic movements such 

as naturalism and impressionism, both of which focus on immediate and random 

sense perceptions. In his opinion, the entire historical progression of modern literary 

periods— naturalism, impressionism, symbolism, expressionism, and surrealism— 

marks an increasing dissolution of the objectivity of classic early- nineteenth- century 

realism, as represented by Scott’s and Balzac’s fiction, which occupies the opposite 

end of the spectrum from James Joyce’s de cadent modernist fiction. The historical 

basis for this undermining of classic realism is fully developed in Lukács’s The Historical 

Novel. His great hope is that twentiethcentury realists like Thomas Mann can 

stem the tide of this reactionary pro cess by providing the basis for a truly accessible


pop u lar literature attuned to objectivity and adaptable to leftist po liti cal co ali tions 

and pop u lar fronts. 

Lukács’s advocacy of realism came under immediate and per sis tent criticism. Perhaps 

best known is that of Bertolt Brecht, who accuses Lukács of inadvertently lapsing 

into formalism by privileging the form of an outdated nineteenthcentury genre 

above all others. More severe are the criticisms directed at Lukács’s central conceptions 

of totality and typicality. With the advent of postmodernism, totalizing theories 

in general have come under attack; for instance, the leading phi los o pher of the 

postmodern, jean- françois lyotard, famously urged his readers to “wage a war on 

totality” and to critique “grand narratives” that purport to explain everything within 

a single theoretical framework. Moreover, in light of the postmodern questioning of 

historical objectivity, exemplified by the work of hayden white, Lukács’s theory of 

history can seem one- dimensional. In spite of all this, Lukács’s work has made 

important contributions to contemporary debates; his influence is clear in the roles 

that reification, realism, and periodization play in the work of Fredric Jameson, the 

most important American theorist of postmodernism. Lukács’s historical account of 

the gradual and complex rise of the modern middle class (the Eu ro pe an nationalist 

bourgeoisies portrayed by leading realists) is stunning in its breadth and detail. 

bibliography 

The standard edition of Lukács’s writings is the German Georg Lukács Werke (18 

vols., 1926– 86). A number of scholarly edited texts are also available in Hungarian. 

A substantial collection of his letters, taped interviews, photos, unpublished works, 

and miscellaneous materials, plus his 10,000- volume personal library, is housed in 

the Lukács Archive in Budapest. En glish translations are Soul and Form (1910; 

trans. 1974), The Theory of the Novel (1916, trans. 1971), History and Class Consciousness 

(1923; trans. 1971), Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought (1924; 

trans. 1971), The Historical Novel (1937; trans. 1962), Studies in Eu ro pe an Realism: 

A So cio log i cal Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki, and 

Others (1945; trans. 1950), Goethe and His Age (1947; trans. 1978), Essays on 

Thomas Mann (1947; trans. 1965), The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between 

Dialectics and Economics (1948; trans. 1976), Essays on Realism (1948; trans. 1981), 

German Realists in the Nineteenth Century (1951; trans. 1993), The Destruction of 

Reason (1954; trans. 1981), The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1958; trans. 

1963), Conversations with Lukács (1967; trans. 1975), Tactics and Ethics: Po liti cal 

Writings, 1919– 1929 (1968; trans. 1972), Solzhenitsyn (1969; trans. 1971), Writer 

and Critic and Other Essays (trans. 1970), The Ontology of Social Being (2 vols., 

1976; trans. 1978), Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch (1981; trans. 1983), 

The Pro cess of Demo cratization (1985; trans. 1991), and A Defence of History and 

Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (1996; trans. 2000). A sampling of 

essays is available in The Lukács Reader, edited by Arpad Kadarkay (1995). For a 

detailed biography, see Kadarkay’s Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics (1991). 

On Lukács’s theory of the novel, see Lucien Goldmann, Towards a Sociology of 

the Novel (1964; trans. 1975), and J. M. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: 

Lukács, Marxism, and the Dialectic of Form (1984). For critical responses to Lukács’s 

involvement in the realism debate, see the essays by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, 

Bertolt Brecht, and Ernst Bloch in the often- cited Aesthetics and Politics, 

edited by the New Left Review (1977). Also helpful in this regard is Eugene Lunn’s 

Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and 

Adorno (1982). Fredric Jameson’s most developed account of Lukács’s work appears 

in his Marxism and Form (1971). Béla Királyfalvi’s Aesthetics of György Lukács 

(1975) offers a systematic examination of Lukács’s aesthetic theories, while Terry 

Ea gleton’s introductory Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) and his Ideology of 

the Aesthetic (1990) present some suggestive critical remarks on Lukács. Andrew

The Historical Novel / 909 

Arato and Paul Breines’s The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism 

(1979) and Martin Jay’s Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from 

Lukács to Habermas (1984) situate Lukács’s work within the tradition of Western 

Marxism. Galin Tihanov’s The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas 

of Their Time (2000) offers a comparative study focusing on intellectual background 

and historical context, while also introducing unknown archival material 

and overlooked texts by Lukács and Bakhtin. For a survey of contemporary Marxist 

critics’ assessments of Lukács, see the interviews gathered in Lukács After Communism, 

edited by Eva L. Corredor (1997). Bibliographies of Lukács’s writing and 

criticism of it can be found in Peter Murphy’s Writings by and about Georg Lukács: 

A Bibliography (1976), François Lapointe’s Georg Lukács and His Critics (1910– 

1982) (1983), and Kadarkay’s reader and biography mentioned above. 

From The Historical Novel 1 

From Chapter One. 

The Classical Form of the Historical Novel 

1. Social and Historical Conditions for the Rise 

of the Historical Novel 

The historical novel arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century at 

about the time of Napoleon’s 2 collapse (Scott’s Waverley 3 appeared in 

1814). Of course, novels with historical themes are to be found in the seventeenth 

and eigh teenth centuries, too, and, should one feel inclined, one 

can treat medieval adaptations of classical history or myth as “precursors” 

of the historical novel and indeed go back still further to China or India. 

But one will find nothing here that sheds any real light on the phenomenon 

of the historical novel. The so- called historical novels of the seventeenth 

century (Scudéry, Calpranède, 4 etc.) are historical only as regards 

their purely external choice of theme and costume. Not only the psychology 

of the characters, but the manners depicted are entirely those of the 

writer’s own day. And in the most famous “historical novel” of the eighteenth 

century, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, 5 history is likewise treated as 

mere costumery: it is only the curiosities and oddities of the milieu that 

matter, not an artistically faithful image of a concrete historical epoch. 

What is lacking in the so- called historical novel before Sir Walter Scott is 

precisely the specifically historical, that is, derivation of the individuality 

of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age. The great critic 

Boileau, 6 who judged the historical novels of his contemporaries with 

much scepticism, insisted only that characters should be socially and psychologically 

true, demanding that a ruler make love differently from a 

1. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. 

2. Napoléon Bonaparte (1769– 1821), French 

military and po liti cal leader who attempted to 

create a Eu ro pe an empire. 

3. The first in a long series of some two dozen 

books that would come to be called the Waverly 

Novels, by the Scottish historical novelist and 

poet Sir Walter Scott (1771– 1832). 

4. Gautier de Costes, seigneur de la Calprenède 

(ca. 1610– 63), French novelist and dramatist. 

Madeleine de Scudéry (1607– 1701), French 

writer. 

5. The pioneering Gothic novel (1764) by the 

En glish man of letters Horace Walpole (1717– 

97). 

6. Nicolas Boileau (1636– 1711), French poet and 

critic.


shepherd, and so on. The question of historical truth in the artistic reflection 

of reality still lies beyond his horizon. 

However, even the great realistic social novel of the eigh teenth century, 

which in its portrayal of contemporary morals and psychology, accomplished 

a revolutionary breakthrough to reality for world literature is not 

concerned to show its characters as belonging to any concrete time. The 

contemporary world is portrayed with unusual plasticity and truth- to- life, 

but is accepted naïvely as something given: whence and how it has developed 

have not yet become problems for the writer. This abstractness in the 

portrayal of historical time also affects the portrayal of historical place. 

Thus Lesage 7 is able to transfer his highly truthful pictures of the France of 

his day to Spain and still feel quite at ease. Similarly, Swift, Voltaire and 

even Diderot 8 set their satirical novels in a “never and nowhere” which nevertheless 

faithfully reflects the essential characteristics of contemporary 

En gland and France. These writers, then, grasp the salient features of their 

world with a bold and penetrating realism. But they do not see the specific 

qualities of their own age historically. 

This basic attitude remains essentially unchanged despite the fact that 

realism continues to bring out the specific features of the present with ever 

greater artistic power. Think of novels like Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, 9 etc. 

Their broad, realistic portrayal of the present takes in here and there 

important events of contemporary history which it links with the fortunes 

of the characters. In this way, particularly in Smollett 1 and Fielding, time 

and place of action acquire much greater concreteness than was customary 

in the earlier period of the social novel or in most contemporary French 

writing. Fielding indeed is to some extent aware of this development, this 

increasing concreteness of the novel in its grasp of the historical peculiarity 

of characters and events. His definition of himself as a writer is that of an 

historian of bourgeois society. 2 

Altogether, when analyzing the prehistory of the historical novel, one must 

break with the Romantic- reactionary legend which denies to the Enlightenment 

any sense or understanding of history and attributes the invention of 

historical sense to the opponents of the French Revolution, Burke, de Maistre 

3 etc. One need only think of the extraordinary historical achievements 

of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon, 4 etc., in order to cut this legend down to 

size. 

What matters for us, however, is to concretize the par tic u lar character of 

this sense of history both before and after the French Revolution in order to 

see clearly what was the social and ideological basis from which the his- 

7. Alain- René Lesage (1668– 1747), French novelist 

and playwright. 

8. Denis Diderot (1713– 84), French phi los o pher 

and writer. Jonathan Swift (1667– 1745), Anglo- 

Irish satirist, poet, and cleric. Voltaire: pen name 

of François- Marie Arouet (1694– 1778), French 

Enlightenment essayist and phi los o pher. 

9. A comic novel (1749), by the En glish playwright 

and novelist Henry Fielding (1707– 54). Moll Flanders 

(1772), a novel by the En glish novelist and 

journalist Daniel Defoe (ca. 1660– 1731). 

1. Tobias George Smollett (1721– 71), Scottish 

author, best known for his picaresque novels. 

2. That is, postfeudal middleclass society. 

3. Joseph- Marie, comte de Maistre (1753– 1821), 

a French- speaking Savoyard diplomat and writer. 

edmund burke (1729– 97), Anglo- Irish statesman, 

po liti cal theorist, and phi los o pher. Both 

were conservatives who strongly opposed the 

aims of the French Revolution (1789– 99). 

4. Edward Gibbon (1737- 1794), En glish historian 

and member of Parliament. Charles- Louis de 

Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu 

(1689– 1755), French Enlightenment social commentator 

and po liti cal theorist.


torical novel was able to emerge. And here we must stress that the history 

writing of the Enlightenment was, in its main trend, an ideological preparation 

for the French Revolution. The often superb historical construction, 

with its discovery of numerous new facts and connections, serves to demonstrate 

the necessity for transforming the “unreasonable” society of feudal 

absolutism; and the lessons of history provide the principles with whose 

help a “reasonable” society, a “reasonable” state may be created. For this 

reason the classical world 5 is central to both the historical theory and the 

practice of the Enlightenment. To ascertain the causes of the greatness and 

decline of the classical states is one of the most important theoretical preliminaries 

for the future transformation of society. 

This applies above all to France, the spiritual leader during the period of 

militant Enlightenment. The position in En gland is somewhat different. 

Eco nom ical ly, eigh teenth century En gland indeed finds itself in the midst 

of the greatest transformation, the creation of the economic and social preconditions 

for the Industrial Revolution. Po liti cally, however, En gland is 

already a postrevolutionary country. 6 Thus where it is a question of mastering 

bourgeois society theoretically and subjecting it to criticism, of working 

out the principles of po liti cal economy, history is grasped as history more 

concretely than in France. But where it is a question of conscious and consistent 

application of such specifically historical viewpoints, they occupy an 

episodic position in the development as a whole. The really dominating 

economic theorist towards the end of the eigh teenth century is Adam 

Smith. 7 James Steuart, 8 who posed the problem of capitalist economy far 

more historically and who investigated the pro cess by which capital came 

into being, was soon forgotten. Marx 9 characterizes the difference between 

these two important economists in the following way: Steuart’s “contribution 

to the concept of capital is to have shown how the pro cess of separation 

takes place between the conditions of production, as the property of 

definite classes, and labour- power. He gives a great deal of attention to this 

pro cess of the birth of capital—without as yet directly comprehending it as 

such (my italics G.L.), although he sees it as the condition of large- scale 

industry. He examines the pro cess particularly in agriculture; and he correctly 

presents manufacturing industry proper as dependent on this prior 

pro cess of separation in agriculture. In Adam Smith’s works this pro cess of 

separation is assumed as already completed.” This unawareness of the significance 

of the historical sense already present in practice, of the possibility 

of generalizing the historical peculiarity of the immediate present, which 

had been correctly observed by instinct, characterizes the position which 

the great social novel of En gland occupies in the development of our problem. 

It drew the attention of writers to the concrete (i.e. historical) significance 

of time and place, to social conditions and so on, it created the 

realistic, literary means of expression for portraying this spatiotemporal 

5. That is, the civilizations of ancient Greece and 

Rome (ca. 5th c. b.c.e.– ca. 5th c. c.e.). 

6. During the En glish Civil War (1642– 49), royal 

forces were defeated by a parliamentary army, the 

monarchy and the House of Lords were temporarily 

abolished, the king was executed for treason, 

and a republican Commonwealth was established. 

7. Scottish moral phi los o pher and pioneering 

po liti cal economist (1723– 1790); his major work 

was The Wealth of Nations (1776). 

8. Scottish lawyer and economist (1713– 1780). 

9. karl marx (1818– 1883), German phi los o pher, 

po liti cal economist, and revolutionary; Lukács 

quotes from Marx’s Capital, vol. 4 (1905), which 

discusses Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of 

Po liti cal Oeconomy (1767).


(i.e. historical) character of people and circumstances. But this, as in the 

economics of Steuart, was a product of realistic instinct and did not amount 

to a clear understanding of history as a pro cess, of history as the concrete 

precondition of the present. 

It is only during the last phase of the Enlightenment that the problem of 

the artistic reflection of past ages emerges as a central problem of literature. 

This occurs in Germany. Initially, it is true, the ideology of the German 

Enlightenment follows in the wake of that of France and En gland: the 

great achievements of Winckelmann and Lessing 1 do not in the main 

diverge from the general trend of the Enlightenment. Lessing, whose important 

contributions to the clarification of the problem of historical drama we 

shall discuss at length later, still defines the relationship of writer to history 

entirely in the spirit of Enlightenment philosophy. He maintains that for 

the great dramatist history is no more than a “repertory” of names. 

But soon after Lessing, in the Sturm und Drang, 2 the problem of the 

artistic mastery of history already appears as a conscious one. Goethe’s 

Götz von Berlichingen 3 not only ushers in a new flowering of historical 

drama, but has a direct and powerful influence on the rise of the historical 

novel in the work of Sir Walter Scott. This conscious growth of historicism, 

which receives its first theoretical expression in the writings of Herder, 4 has 

its roots in the special position of Germany, in the discrepancy between 

Germany’s economic and po liti cal backwardness and the ideology of the 

German Enlighteners, who, standing on the shoulders of their En glish and 

French pre de ces sors, developed the ideas of the Enlightenment to a higher 

level. As a result not only do the general contradictions underlying the 

whole ideology of the Enlightenment appear more sharply there than in 

France, but the specific contrast between these ideas and German reality is 

thrust vigorously into the foreground. 

In En gland and France, the economic, po liti cal and ideological preparation 

and completion of the bourgeois revolution and the setting- up of a 

national state are one and the same pro cess. So that in looking to the past, 

however intense the bourgeois- revolutionary patriotism and however important 

the works it produces (Voltaire’s Henriade 5 ), the chief concern is inevitably 

the Enlightenment critique of the “unreasonable”. Not so in Germany. 

Here revolutionary patriotism comes up against national division, against 

the po liti cal and economic fragmentation 6 of a country which imports its 

cultural and ideological means of expression from France. For everything 

that was produced in the small German courts in the way of culture and 

particularly in the way of pseudo- culture was nothing more than a slavish 

imitation of the French court. Thus the small courts constitute not only a 

po liti cal obstacle to German unity, but also an ideological hindrance to the 

development of a culture stemming from the needs of German middleclass 

life. The German form of Enlightenment necessarily engages in sharp 

1. gotthold ephraim lessing (1729– 1781), 

German phi los o pher, dramatist, and art critic. 

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717– 1768), 

German art historian and archaeologist. 

2. Storm and Stress (German), a movement in 

German literature and music (late 1760s– early 

1780s) characterized by a focus on subjectivity 

and extremes of emotion. 

3. Götz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand (1773), 

a drama by the German poet, dramatist, novelist, 

and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749– 

1832). 

4. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744– 1803), 

German phi los o pher, poet, and literary critic. 

5. An epic poem on Henry IV of France (1723). 

6. Germany’s twenty- five states were not unified 

until 1871.


polemic with this French culture; and it preserves this note of revolutionary 

patriotism even where the real content of the ideological battle is simply the 

conflict between different stages in the development of the Enlightenment 

(Lessing’s struggle against Voltaire). 

The inevitable result of this situation is to turn to German history. Partly 

it is the reawakening of past national greatness which gives strength to 

hopes of national rebirth. It is a requirement of the struggle for this national 

greatness that the historical causes for the decline, the disintegration of 

Germany should be explored and artistically portrayed. As a result, in Germany, 

which in the preceding centuries had been no more than an object of 

historical changes, art becomes historical earlier and more radically than 

in the eco nom ical ly and po liti cally more advanced countries of the West. 

It was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall 

of Napoleon, 7 which for the first time made history a mass experience, and 

moreover on a Eu ro pe an scale. During the de cades between 1789 and 1814 

each nation of Eu rope underwent more upheavals than they had previously 

experienced in centuries. And the quick succession of these upheavals gives 

them a qualitatively distinct character, it makes their historical character 

far more visible than would be the case in isolated, individual instances: 

the masses no longer have the impression of a “natural occurrence”. One 

need only read over Heine’s reminiscences of his youth in Buch le Grand, 8 

to quote just one example, where it is vividly shown how the rapid change of 

governments affected Heine as a boy. Now if experiences such as these are 

linked with the knowledge that similar upheavals are taking place all over 

the world, this must enormously strengthen the feeling first that there is 

such a thing as history, that it is an uninterrupted pro cess of changes and 

finally that it has a direct effect upon the life of every individual. 

This change from quantity into quality appears, too, in the differences of 

these wars from all preceding ones. The wars of absolute states in the pre- 

Revolutionary period were waged by small professional armies. They were 

conducted so as to isolate the army as sharply as possible from the civilian 

population, supplies from depots, fear of desertion, etc. Not for nothing did 

Frederick II 9 of Prus sia declare that war should be waged in such a manner 

that the civilian population simply would not notice it. “To keep the peace 

is the first duty of the citizen” was the motto of the wars of absolutism. 

This changes at one stroke with the French Revolution. In its defensive 

struggle against the co ali tion of absolute monarchies, the French Republic 

was compelled to create mass armies. The qualitative difference between 

mercenary and mass armies is precisely a question of their relations with the 

mass of the population. If in place of the recruitment or pressing into professional 

ser vice of small contingents of the declassed, a mass army is to be created, 

then the content and purpose of the war must be made clear to the 

masses by means of propaganda. This happens not only in France itself during 

the defence of the Revolution and the later offensive wars. The other 

states, too, if they transfer to mass armies, are compelled to resort to the 

same means. (Think of the part played by German literature and philosophy 

7. The dominant figure in continental Eu rope 

between 1799 and 1815. 

8. Ideas: The Book of Le Grand (1827), a prose 

work by the German Romantic poet, journalist, 

and essayist Heinrich Heine (1797– 1856). 

9. King of Prus sia (1712– 1786; reigned 1740– 86).


in this propaganda after the battle of Jena. 1 ) Such propaganda cannot possibly, 

however, restrict itself to the individual, isolated war. It has to reveal the 

social content, the historical presuppositions and circumstances of the struggle, 

to connect up the war with the entire life and possibilities of the nation’s 

development. It is sufficient to point to the importance of the defence of 

Revolutionary achievements in France and to the connection between the 

creation of a mass army and po liti cal and social reforms in Germany and in 

other countries. 

The inner life of a nation is linked with the modern mass army in a way it 

could not have been with the absolutist armies of the earlier period. In 

France the estate barrier 2 between nobleman, officer and common soldier 

disappears: the highest positions in the army are open to all and it is well 

known that this barrier fell as a direct result of the Revolution. And even in 

those countries fighting against the Revolution, estate barriers were inevitably 

breached to some extent. One need only read the writings of Gneisenau 3 

to see how clearly these reforms were connected with the new historical 

situation created by the French Revolution. Further, the war inevitably 

destroyed the former separation of army from people. It is impossible to 

maintain mass armies on a depot basis. Since they have to maintain themselves 

by requisition they inevitably come into direct and permanent contact 

with the people of the country where the war is being waged. Of course, this 

contact very often consists of robbery and plunder. But not always. And it 

must not be forgotten that the wars of the Revolution and, to some extent, 

those of Napoleon were waged as conscious propaganda wars. 

Finally, the enormous quantitative expansion of war plays a qualitatively 

new role, bringing with it an extraordinary broadening of horizons. Whereas 

the wars fought by the mercenary armies of absolutism consisted mostly of 

tiny manoeuvres around fortresses etc., now the whole of Eu rope becomes 

a war arena. French peasants fight first in Egypt, then in Italy, again in 

Rus sia; German and Italian auxiliary troops take part in the Rus sian campaign; 

German and Rus sian troops occupy Paris after Napoleon’s defeat, 

and so forth. What previously was experienced only by isolated and mostly 

adventurous- minded individuals, namely an acquaintance with Eu rope or 

at least certain parts of it, becomes in this period the mass experience of 

hundreds of thousands, of millions. 

Hence the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence 

as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something 

which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them. 

There is no point in dealing here with the social transformations in France 

itself. It is quite obvious the extent to which the economic and cultural life of 

the entire nation was disrupted by the huge, rapidly successive changes of the 

period. It should be mentioned, however, that the Revolutionary armies and 

later those of Napoleon, too, did liquidate, completely or partially, the remnants 

of feudalism in many of the places they conquered, as for example in 

the Rhineland and Northern Italy. The social and cultural contrast between 

1. City in east- central Germany; in this battle, in 

1806, the forces of Napoleon I defeated those of 

Frederick William III of Prus sia. 

2. That is, the division of classes; before the revolution, 

the French legislative assembly represented 

the three estates: the clergy, nobles, and 

commons. 

3. August Neidhardt von Gneisenau (1760– 1831), 

Prus sian field marshal who helped reform the 

Prus sian army after its defeat at Jena.


the Rhineland and the rest of Germany, still very noticeable at the time of the 

’48 Revolution, 4 is a legacy handed down from the Napoleonic era, and the 

broad masses were conscious of the connection between these social changes 

and the French Revolution. To mention once again some of the literary 

reflexes: besides Heine’s remembrances of his youth, it is most instructive to 

read the first chapters of Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme 5 to see what a 

lasting impression was evoked by French rule in Northern Italy. 

It is in the nature of a bourgeois revolution that, if seriously carried through 

to its conclusion, the national idea becomes the property of the broadest 

masses. In France it was only as a result of the Revolution and Napoleonic 

rule 6 that a feeling of nationhood became the experience and property of the 

peasantry, the lower strata of the petty bourgeoisie and so on. For the first 

time they experienced France as their own country, as their self- created 

motherland. 

But the awakening of national sensibility and with it a feeling and understanding 

for national history occurs not only in France. The Napoleonic 

wars everywhere evoked a wave of national feeling, of national re sis tance to 

the Napoleonic conquests, an experience of enthusiasm for national in depen 

dence. To be sure, these movements are mostly, as Marx says, a compound 

of “regeneration and reaction”, 7 as in Spain, Germany etc. In Poland, 

on the other hand, the struggle for in de pen dence, the flare- up of national 

feeling is essentially progressive. But what ever the proportions of “regeneration 

and reaction” in individual national movements, it is clear that these 

movements— real mass movements— inevitably conveyed a sense and experience 

of history to broad masses. The appeal to national in de pen dence and 

national character is necessarily connected with a reawakening of national 

history, with memories of the past, of past greatness, of moments of national 

dishonour, whether this results in a progressive or reactionary ideology. 

Thus in this mass experience of history the national element is linked on 

the one hand with problems of social transformation; and on the other, 

more and more people become aware of the connection between national 

and world history. This increasing consciousness of the historical character 

of development begins to influence judgments on economic conditions and 

class struggle. In the eigh teenth century it was only the odd critic of 

nascent capitalism, the wit and paradox-monger, who compared the exploitation 

of workers by Capital with forms of exploitation in earlier periods in 

order to expose Capitalism as the more inhumane form (Linguet 8 ). In the 

ideological struggle against the French Revolution a similar comparison, 

admittedly shallow in economic terms and reactionary in tendency, between 

society before and after the Revolution or, on a wider scale, between Capitalism 

and Feudalism becomes the war- cry of Legitimist Romanticism. 9 

The inhumanity of Capitalism, the chaos of competition, the destruction 

of the small by the big, the debasement of culture by the transformation of 

all things into commodities— all this is contrasted, in a manner generally 

reactionary in tendency, with the social idyll of the Middle Ages, seen as a 

4. A series of po liti cal uprisings in France, the 

German states, the Hapsburg states, and Italy in 

1848. 

5. The Charter house of Parma (1839), by Stendhal, 

pen name of French writer Henri- Marie 

Beyle (1784– 1842). 

6. The rule of Napoléon I (1799– 1815). 

7. From Marx, “Revolutionary Spain” (1854). 

8. Simon- Nicolas- Henri Linguet (1736– 1794), 

French journalist and lawyer. 

9. Legitimists were French Royalists— those who 

believe in or advocate rule by hereditary right.


period of peaceful co- operation among all classes, an age of the organic 

growth of culture. But if mostly a reactionary tendency prevails in these 

polemical writings, it should not be forgotten that it was in this period that 

the notion of Capitalism as a definite, historical era of human development 

first arose, and this occurred not in the works of the great theorists of 

Capitalism, but in those of their enemies. It suffices to mention Sismondi 1 

here, who despite theoretical confusion over fundamental questions, raised 

certain individual historical problems of economic development with great 

clarity. One has only to think of his dictum that while in antiquity the proletariat 

lived at the expense of society, in modern times it is society which 

lives at the expense of the proletariat. 

It is already clear from these remarks that the tendencies towards a conscious 

historicism reach their peak after the fall of Napoleon, at the time of 

the Restoration and the Holy Alliance. 2 Admittedly, the spirit of historicism 

which at first prevails and gains official status is reactionary and by its 

nature pseudo- historical. The historical interpretation, publicist writings 

and belles lettres of Legitimism develop the historical spirit in radical opposition 

to the Enlightenment and the ideas of the French Revolution. The 

ideal of Legitimism is to return to pre- Revolutionary conditions, that is, to 

eradicate from history the greatest historical events of the epoch. 

According to this interpretation history is a silent, imperceptible, natural, 

“organic” growth, that is, a development of society which is basically 

stagnation, which alters nothing in the time- honoured, legitimate institutions 

of society and, above all, alters nothing consciously. Man’s activity in 

history is ruled out completely. The German historical school of law even 

denies nations the right to make new laws for themselves, it prefers to leave 

the old motley feudal laws of custom to their “organic growth”. 

Thus under the banner of historicism and of a struggle against the 

“abstract, unhistorical” spirit of the Enlightenment, there arises a pseudohistoricism, 

an ideology of immobility, of return to the Middle Ages. In the 

interests of these reactionary po liti cal aims, historical development is ruthlessly 

distorted. And the inner falsity of the reactionary ideology is intensified 

by the fact that the Restoration in France is compelled for economic 

reasons to come to terms socially with the Capitalism which has grown up 

in the meantime, indeed even to seek its partial support, eco nom ical ly and 

po liti cally. (The situation of the reactionary governments in Prus sia, Austria 

etc. is similar.) These then are the foundations on which history is to be 

written afresh. Chateaubriand 3 tries hard to revise classical history in order 

to depreciate historically the old revolutionary ideal of the Jacobin 4 and 

Napoleonic period. He and other pseudo- historians of reaction furnish a 

falsely idyllic picture of the unsurpassed, harmonious society of the Middle 

Ages. This historical interpretation of the Middle Ages determines the portrayal 

of feudal times in the Romantic novel of the Restoration. 

1. Jean Charles Léonard Sismondi (1773– 1842), 

Swiss economist and historian. 

2. A somewhat vague agreement, initially signed 

in 1815 by the rulers of Rus sia, Austria, and 

Prus sia, that was intended to reestablish order in 

Eu rope after the fall of Napoléon. Restoration: in 

French history, the restoration (1814– 30) of the 

Bourbon dynasty after Napoléon. 

3. François- Auguste- René de Chateaubriand 

(1768– 1848), French writer, politician, and diplomat. 

4. That is, the Reign of Terror (1793– 94), a period 

marked by mass executions of “enemies of the 

revolution”; it was spearheaded by members of the 

Jacobin Club (1789– 94), the largest and most 

powerful po liti cal club of the French Revolution.


Despite this ideological mediocrity of Legitimist pseudohistoricism, it 

exerts an extraordinarily powerful influence. Admittedly distorted and 

mendacious, it is nevertheless an historically necessary expression of the 

great period of transformation which sets in with the French Revolution. 

And the new stage of development, which begins precisely with the Restoration, 

compels the defenders of human progress to forge for themselves a 

new ideological armour. We have seen with what undaunted vigour the 

Enlightenment fought the historical legitimacy and continuity of feudal survivals. 

Similarly, we have seen how post- Revolutionary Legitimism regarded 

precisely their conservation as the content of history. The defenders of 

progress after the French Revolution had necessarily to reach a conception 

which would prove the historical necessity of the latter, furnish evidence 

that it constituted a peak in a long and gradual historical development and 

not a sudden eclipse of human consciousness, not a Cuvier- like “natural 

catastrophe” in human history, 5 and that this was the only course open to 

the future development of mankind. 

This, however, means a big change of outlook in the interpretation of 

human progress in comparison with the Enlightenment. Progress is no longer 

seen as an essentially unhistorical struggle between humanist reason 

and feudal- absolutist unreason. According to the new interpretation the 

reasonableness of human progress develops ever increasingly out of the 

inner conflict of social forces in history itself; according to this interpretation 

history itself is the bearer and realizer of human progress. The most 

important thing here is the increasing historical awareness of the decisive 

role played in human progress by the struggle of classes in history. The new 

spirit of historical writing, which is most clearly visible in the important 

French historians of the Restoration period, concentrates precisely on this 

question: on showing historically how modern bourgeois society arose out 

of the class struggles between nobility and bourgeoisie, out of class struggles 

which raged throughout the entire “idyllic Middle Ages” and whose 

last decisive stage was the great French Revolution. These ideas produce 

the first attempt at a rational periodization of history, an attempt to comprehend 

the historical nature and origins of the present rationally and scientifically. 

The first large- scale attempt at such a periodization had already 

been undertaken by Condorcet 6 in the middle of the French Revolution, in 

his historico- philosophical major work. These ideas are further developed 

and scientifically enlarged in the Restoration period. Indeed, in the works 

of the great Utopians 7 the periodization of history already transcends the 

horizon of bourgeois society. And if this transition, this step beyond Capitalism 

follows fantastic paths, its critical- historical basis is nonetheless 

linked— especially in the case of Fourier 8 — with a devastating critique of 

the contradictions of bourgeois society. In Fourier, despite the fantastic 

nature of his ideas about Socialism and of the ways to Socialism, the picture 

of Capitalism is shown with such overwhelming clarity in all its 

5. A cataclysmic event of the kind that— according 

to advocates of catastrophism, such as the French 

naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769– 1832)—explained 

geological features and the extinction of species. 

6. Jean- Antoine- Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de 

Condorcet (1743– 1794), French phi los o pher, 

mathematician, and early po liti cal scientist; his 

“major work” was Sketch for a Historical Picture 

of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795). 

7. Proponents of utopian socialism, the dominant 

branch of socialism in the first quarter of 

the 19th century. 

8. Charles Fourier (1772– 1837), French utopian 

social phi los o pher.


contradiction that the idea of the transitory nature of this society appears 

tangibly and plastically before us. 

This new phase in the ideological defence of human progress found its 

philosophical expression in Hegel. 9 As we have seen, the central historical 

question was to demonstrate the necessity of the French Revolution, to show 

that revolution and historical development are not opposed to one another, as 

the apologists of feudal Legitimism maintained. The philosophy of Hegel 

provides the philosophic basis for this conception of history. Hegel’s discovery 

of the universal law of transformation of quantity into quality is, seen 

historically, a philosophic methodology for the idea that revolutions constitute 

necessary, organic components of evolution and that without such a 

“nodal line of proportions” 1 true evolution is impossible in reality and unthinkable 

philosophically. 

On this basis, the Enlightenment conception of man is philosophically 

cancelled, preserved and raised to a higher level (aufgehoben). 2 The greatest 

obstacle to an understanding of history lay in the Enlightenment’s conception 

of man’s unalterable nature. Thus, any change in the course of history 

had meant, in extreme cases, merely a change of costume and, in general, 

merely the moral ups and down of the same man. Hegelian philosophy draws 

all the inferences from the new progressive historicism. It sees man as a 

product of himself and of his own activity in history. And even if this historical 

pro cess seems to stand idealistically upon its head, even if the bearer of 

the pro cess is mystified into a “world spirit”, Hegel nevertheless sees this 

world spirit as embodying the dialectics of historical development. “Thus the 

spirit opposes itself (i.e. in history G.L.) and has to overcome itself, as the 

really hostile obstacle to its own purpose: the evolution . . . in the spirit . . . is 

a hard, unceasing struggle against itself. What the spirit desires is to realize 

its own idea, yet it conceals this idea from itself, is proud and full of selfenjoyment 

in this alienation of its own self . . . With the spiritual form it is 

different (from what it is in nature G.L.); here the change takes place not 

merely on the surface, but in the idea. It is the idea itself which is corrected.” 3 

Hegel gives an apt description here— admittedly in an idealist and abstract 

fashion— of the ideological change which has occurred in his age. The 

thought of the earlier period oscillated antinomously between a fatalistic lawconforming 

conception of all social occurrence and an over- estimation of the 

possibilities of conscious intervention in social development. But on both 

sides of the antinomy 4 the principles were considered to be “supra- historical”, 

stemming from the “eternal” nature of “reason”. Hegel, however, sees a process 

in history, a pro cess propelled, on the one hand, by the inner motive 

forces of history and which, on the other, extends its influence to all the phenomena 

of human life, including thought. He sees the total life of humanity 

as a great historical pro cess. 

Thus there arose, in both a concrete historical as well as philosophic 

manner, a new humanism, a new concept of progress. A humanism which 

wished to preserve the achievements of the French Revolution as the imper- 

9. georg wilhelm friedrich hegel (1770– 

1831), German phi los o pher. 

1. A phrase from Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812– 

16). 

2. A technical term from Hegelian dialectics, 

usually translated “sublation”: the pro cess by 

which a thesis, though canceled by its antithesis, 

is partially preserved in a higher synthesis. 

3. From Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History 

(1837). 

4. Mutual incompatibility of two terms.


ishable basis of future human development, which regarded the French 

Revolution (and revolutions in history altogether) as an indispensable component 

of human progress. Of course, this new historical humanism was 

itself a child of its age and unable to transcend the limits of that age— 

except in a fantastical form, as was the case with the great Utopians. The 

important bourgeois humanists of this period find themselves in a paradoxical 

situation: while they comprehend the necessity of revolutions in the 

past and see in them the foundation for all that is reasonable and worthy of 

affirmation in the present, nevertheless they interpret future development 

in terms of a henceforth peaceful evolution on the basis of these achievements. 

As M. Lifschitz very rightly shows in his article on Hegel’s aesthetics, 

5 they seek the positive things in the new world order created by the 

French Revolution and do not consider any new revolution to be necessary 

for the final realization of these positive things. 

This conception of the last great intellectual and artistic period of bourgeois 

humanism has nothing to do with the barren and shallow apologia of 

capitalism which sets in later (and to some extent simultaneously). It is 

founded upon a ruthlessly truthful investigation and disclosure of all the 

contradictions of progress. There is no criticism of the present from which 

it will shrink. And even if it cannot consciously transcend the spiritual 

horizon of its time, yet the constantly oppressive sense of the contradictions 

of its own historical situation casts a profound shadow over the whole historical 

conception. This feeling that— contrary to the consciously philosophic 

and historical conception which proclaims unceasing and peaceful 

progress— one is experiencing a last brief, irretrievable intellectual prime 

of humanity manifests itself in the greatest representatives of this period in 

very different ways, in keeping with the unconscious character of this feeling. 

Yet for the same reason the emotional accent is very similar. Think of 

the old Goethe’s theory of “abnegation”, of Hegel’s “Owl of Minerva” which 

takes flight only at dusk, of Balzac’s 6 sense of universal doom, etc. It was 

the 1848 Revolution which for the first time placed before the surviving 

representatives of this epoch the choice of either recognizing the perspective 

held out by the new period in human development and of affirming it, 

even if with a tragic cleavage of spirit, like Heine, or of sinking into the 

position of apologists for declining capitalism, as Marx, immediately after 

the 1848 Revolution, critically demonstrated in the case of such important 

figures as Guizot and Carlyle. 7 

2. sir walter scott 

Such was the historical basis upon which Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel 

arose. But one must never think of this relationship in terms of the idealist 

“history of the spirit” (Geistesgeschichte). In the latter we should find shrewd 

hypotheses to show the devious routes by which Hegelian ideas, for example, 

found their way to Scott; and some forgotten writer would be discovered 

5. “Hegel’s Aesthetics and Dialectical Materialism,” 

written in 1931, on the centennial anniversary 

of Hegel’s death, by the Rus sian phi los o pher 

and art historian Mikhail Lifschitz (1905– 1983). 

6. Honoré de Balzac (1799– 1850), French novelist 

and playwright. Hegel wrote of the “Owl of 

Minerva” (the Roman goddess of wisdom) in the 

preface to Philosophy of Right (1821). 

7. Thomas Carlyle (1795– 1881), Scottish essayist, 

satirist, and historian. François Pierre Guillaume 

Guizot (1787– 1874), French historian, 

orator, and statesman.


who contained the common source of Scott’s and Hegel’s historicism. It is 

certain that Scott had no knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy and had he come 

across it would probably not have understood a word. The new historical 

conception of the great historians of the Restoration actually makes its 

appearance later than the works of Scott and some of its problems are influenced 

by them. The fashionable philosophic- cum- philologic hunting down 

of individual “influences” is no more fruitful for the writing of history than 

the old philological hunting down of the effects of individual writers on one 

another. With Scott, in par tic u lar, it was the fashion to quote a long list of 

second and third- rate writers (Radcliffe, 8 etc.), who were supposed to be 

important literary forerunners of his. All of which brings us not a jot nearer 

to understanding what was new in Scott’s art, that is in his historical novel. 

We have attempted to outline the general framework of those economic 

and po liti cal transformations which occurred throughout Eu rope as a result 

of the French Revolution; in the preceding remarks we briefly sketched the 

latter’s ideological consequences. These events, this transformation of men’s 

existence and consciousness throughout Eu rope form the economic and 

ideological basis for Scott’s historical novel. Biographical evidence of the 

individual instances which enabled Scott to become aware of these trends 

offers nothing of importance to the real history of the rise of the historical 

novel. The less so, as Scott ranks among those great writers whose depth is 

manifest mainly in their work, a depth which they often do not understand 

themselves, because it has sprung from a truly realistic mastery of their 

material in conflict with their personal views and prejudices. 

Scott’s historical novel is the direct continuation of the great realistic 

social novel of the eigh teenth century. Scott’s studies on eigh teenth century 

writers, on the whole not very penetrating theoretically, reveal an intensive 

knowledge and detailed study of this literature. Yet his work, in comparison 

with theirs, signifies something entirely new. His great contemporaries clearly 

recognized this new quality. Pushkin 9 writes of him: . . . “The influence of 

Walter Scott can be felt in every province of the literature of his age. The new 

school of French historians formed itself under the influence of the Scottish 

novelist. He showed them entirely new sources which had so far remained 

unknown despite the existence of the historical drama of Shakespeare 1 and 

Goethe . . .” And Balzac, in his criticism of Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de 

Parme, emphasizes the new artistic features which Scott’s novel introduced 

into epic literature: the broad delineation of manners and circumstances 

attendant upon events, the dramatic character of action and, in close connection 

with this, the new and important role of dialogue in the novel. 

It is no accident that this new type of novel arose in En gland. We have 

already mentioned, in dealing with the literature of the eigh teenth century, 

important realistic features in the En glish novel of this period, and we 

described them as necessary consequences of the postrevolutionary character 

of En gland’s development at the time, in contrast to France and Germany. 

Now, in a period when the whole of Eu rope, including its progressive 

classes and their ideologists, are swayed (temporarily) by a postrevolutionary 

8. Ann Radcliffe (1764– 1823), En glish author 

who was a pioneer of the Gothic novel. 

9. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799– 1837), 

Rus sian Romantic poet. 

1. Many of the plays of William Shakespeare 

(1564– 1616) treat history (especially En glish history).

Boris Eichenbaum / 921 

ideology, these features in En gland must stand out with more than usual 

distinctness. For En gland has now once more become the model land of 

development for the majority of continental ideologists, though of course in 

a different sense from that of the eigh teenth century. Then, the fact that 

bourgeois freedoms had actually been realized, served as an example to the 

Continental Enlighteners. Now, in the eyes of the historical ideologists of 

progress, En gland appears as the classic example of historical development 

in their sense. The fact that En gland had fought out its bourgeois revolution 

in the seventeenth century 2 and had from then on experienced a peaceful, 

upward development, lasting over centuries, on the basis of the Revolution’s 

achievements, showed En gland to be the practical, model example for the 

new style of historical interpretation. The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, 3 

likewise, inevitably presented itself as an ideal to the bourgeois ideologists 

who were combating the Restoration in the name of progress. 

On the other hand, however, honest writers, keenly observant of the real 

facts of social development, like Scott, were made to see that this peaceful 

development was peaceful only as the ideal of an historical conception, 

only from the bird’s-eye view of a philosophy of history. The organic character 

of En glish development is a resultant made up of the components of 

ceaseless class struggles and their bloody resolution in great or small, successful 

or abortive uprisings. The enormous po liti cal and social transformations 

of the preceding de cades awoke in En gland, too, the feeling for 

history, the awareness of historical development. 

* * * 

1937 

2. That is, during the En glish Civil War. 

3. The almost bloodless outster of the Catholic 

king James II; he was replaced by William III and 

Mary II, who were made joint rulers in a newly 

defined constitutional monarchy that decisively 

shifted power to Parliament. 

BORIS EICHENBAUM 

1886–1959 

The literary critics and theorists known as the Rus sian formalists flourished during a 

remarkable period in modern history, one that witnessed the Rus sian Revolution of 

1917 and the first large- scale institution of a socialist state, the Union of Soviet 

Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). This was also an extraordinarily fertile time for experiment 

and innovation in the arts, as avant- garde modernist literary movements such 

as symbolism, futurism, and acmeism flourished. Although their movement ended in 

the late 1920s with the rise of Joseph Stalin and the suppression of ideas perceived to 

be noncommunist, the Rus sian formalists constitute the first group of theorists 

whom many contemporary literary scholars recognize as modern in their theoretical 

investigations of literary language, innovation, and history. Boris Eichenbaum was a 

leading figure among the Rus sian formalists, and his famous “Theory of the ‘Formal 

Method’ ” (1926) surveys their history and their central theoretical concepts.

922 / Boris Eichenbaum 

At St. Petersburg University, Eichenbaum initially planned to become a medical 

doctor but switched his studies to language and literature; he graduated in 1912. 

After teaching at a private secondary school, in 1918 he returned to the university— 

in 1924 renamed, with the city, Leningrad University in honor of the revolution’s 

leader, V. I. Lenin— as a professor. In 1949 he was dismissed for “eclecticism and 

cosmopolitanism,” but he was reinstated in 1956 at the Institute of Rus sian Literature 

at the university, where he taught until his death. Eichenbaum’s involvement 

with the formalist movement represents only one phase, dating from the mid- 1910s 

to 1928, in a long career as a critic and scholar. After 1928 his work shifted from the 

analytical approach of formalism to a series of biographical studies of the great Russian 

novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828– 1910). 

Like all of his colleagues who continued to work in the Stalinist era, Eichenbaum 

knew that if he wished to continue writing criticism, he would have to support 

socialist realism. He, like many ex- formalists, chose instead to turn to scholarly 

research; but unlike them, he faced continued persecution even after abandoning 

his theoretical work. The reason given was always his early record as a formalist, 

but probably the real motive, never directly stated, was anti- Semitism. Although 

Eichenbaum sustained a career on the margins of Soviet academic literary studies, 

he completed relatively little work after 1930. The final volume of his Tolstoy project 

appeared only posthumously, and the draft of another volume was lost during 

the German army’s siege of Leningrad during World War II. 

In “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method,’ ” Eichenbaum takes stock of the first 

de cade of work of the formalist movement. By using scare quotes around “formal 

method,” he signals that he has adopted for con ve nience a label coined not by those 

within the movement but by opponents who criticized their focus on literary language 

and formal innovations. Most notably, the formalists were attacked in a 

famous analysis by the Marxist leon trotsky (see above), an early leader of the Russian 

Revolution as well as a powerful writer on history and literature, who castigated 

them for their lack of attention to the social significance of literary works. In actuality, 

those joined under the mantle of formalism were not a tightly unified school but 

a heterogeneous movement. Although Eichenbaum is careful to say that his essay is 

not a “dogmatic codification” of formalism, it has regularly been construed as such. 

Originally there were two different Rus sian formalist groups, which later came 

in close contact. The first was the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which initially gathered 

in 1914 and was led by roman jakobson until his departure for Prague in 

1920. Primarily a group of researchers, the circle applied new scientific developments 

in linguistics to the study of literature. Other important members of the 

Moscow group were Osip Brik and Boris Tomashevsky. Meanwhile, in 1916 the 

Society for the Study of Poetic Language (known by the Rus sian acronym Opoyaz) 

first gathered in St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd), led by Victor Shklovsky, 

Eichenbaum, and Yury Tynyanov. Trained as literary scholars, they were less interested 

in linguistics and more concerned with literary history, although they rebelled 

against traditional biographical approaches. Both groups were influenced by the 

heady climate of the Rus sian Revolution and avant- garde art and literature in Russia, 

a context that promoted sweeping new ideas in all areas of life and culture. 

(Another group that flourished in Leningrad simultaneously with Opoyaz was the 

so- called Bakhtin Circle, or ga nized around the philosopher- turned- critic mikhail 

bakhtin). Vladimir Propp, a folklorist who worked apart from both groups, is frequently 

associated with Rus sian formalism by present- day critics. 

The first five of nine main sections of “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’ ” survey 

the themes and issues addressed by formalists during what Eichenbaum calls 

the movement’s initial “years of struggle and polemics,” 1916 to 1921. The remaining 

four sections cover the years 1922 to 1926. Overall, there is a heady as well as 

combative tone to the essay, recounting in sometimes heightened rhetoric the for-

Boris Eichenbaum / 923 

malists’ accomplishments and struggles against their antagonists (“We had to 

demolish the academic tradition”), who ranged from academic literary historians, 

biographers, and cultural critics to Rus sian symbolist poets and theoreticians, aesthe 

ti cians, and dogmatic Marxists. Eichenbaum singles out several key opponents, 

especially Aleksandr Potebnya and Aleksandr Veselovsky, prominent literary scholars 

who represented the status quo of traditional criticism and thus served as foils. 

At one point Eichenbaum admits that “the basic passion for our historical- literary 

work had to be a passion for destruction and negation, and such was the original 

tone of our theoretical attacks.” 

“The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’ ” provides a comprehensive review of the 

preoccupations of the formalists: the desire for a science or “poetics” of literature 

(hence Eichenbaum cites a biologist in the epigraph to the essay); the linguistic basis 

of literature and especially of poetry (drawing on Jakobson and others); the distinctive 

attributes of literature, its “literariness” and its autonomous history; the stress 

on literary devices; the view of literary history as an evolutionary accretion of innovative 

devices; the concept of the “dominant” (the focusing element of each literary 

structure, to which other elements are subordinate); the insistence on form and 

technique as part of content; and the nature of narrative (notably the key distinction 

between “story” or fabula, the raw chronological events of a narrative, and “plot” or 

syuzhet, the artistic arrangement of events, frequently out of chronological order). 

Eichenbaum emphasizes Victor Shklovsky’s role as the intellectual leader of the 

formalist movement, the first to identify and tackle its major concerns. While this 

stress has perhaps led later critics to overestimate Shklovsky’s importance, his contributions 

were significant. Most influential is his concept of “defamiliarization” 

(ostraneniye in Rus sian), both as a goal of art and as a category of critical analysis. 

Using the example of a walk down a familiar street, Shklovsky points out that one’s 

perceptions become automatic, so that one notices only what is out of the ordinary. 

But, he observes, literary artists take this tendency into account and show things out 

of the ordinary, thereby freshening and renewing readers’ perceptions. This pro cess 

of defamiliarization becomes a formalist mea sure of aesthetic value, privileging literary 

works that make the familiar strange and break the “automatism” of normal 

expectation; for Shklovsky, literary history builds on such aesthetic innovations. 

The Rus sian formalists’ theoretical focus, stress on the functional role of literary 

devices, and conception of the evolution of literary history distinguish them from 

other early- and mid- twentieth- century schools of criticism concerned with form, 

such as the American New Critics. The New Critics largely provided readings of 

individual literary works, focusing on what william k. wimsatt jr. called “the verbal 

icon,” whereas the Rus sian formalists were more interested in making theoretical 

generalizations about the nature of literature and in defining the range of 

technical linguistic devices common to literary works. Moreover, the Rus sian formalists 

proposed an original model of literary history, combining the scientific schematization 

of devices with an account of historical change. 

Although the formalist movement was suppressed, it has continued to wield broad 

influence. It was a progenitor of the Prague school of structuralism that flourished 

from the mid- 1920s to 1948, especially through the mediation of Jakobson after his 

arrival there and through the work of Jan Mukařovský. After tzvetan todorov recovered 

and translated key formalist texts, they provided an important model of analysis 

for the literary wing of French structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s— notably for the 

structuralist narratology of Todorov, roland barthes, and Gérard Genette, which in 

turn influenced later Anglo- American theorists of narrative. Contemporary narrative 

theory continues to look back to the work of Shklovsky, Eichenbaum, and Propp. The 

formalist theory of literary history has been foundational for contemporary reception 

theory, particularly for the work of hans robert jauss, whose central concept of 

the “horizon of expectation” draws on formalist notions of defamiliarization. The


evolutionary theory of literary history has also influenced Marxist accounts of aesthetics, 

despite Marxist reservations about the formalist view of the autonomy of literature. 

While in recent years interest in formal approaches to literature has declined, 

the Rus sian formalists remain foundational for contemporary theory in their emphases 

on making theoretical generalizations about the nature of literary works; their use 

of linguistics and their desire for a more exact, scientific study of literature; and their 

account of literary history and aesthetic innovation. 

bibliography 

“The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’ ” originally appeared in 1926 (in Ukrainian; the 

Rus sian text translated here dates from 1927). Our selection, the best translation in 

En glish, is taken from Rus sian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated and 

edited by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (1965), which offers a good place to start 

investigating Rus sian formalism. Though uncollected, a number of other key essays 

from Eichenbaum’s formalist period are available in En glish in diverse sources, 

among them his important “How Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’ Is Made” (1919), in Gogol from 

the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays (trans. and ed. Robert A. Maguire, 1974); and 

“O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story” (1925), “Literary Environment” 

(1927), and a different translation of “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method,’ ” all in 

Readings in Rus sian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, edited by Ladislav 

Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (1971), which is the most comprehensive anthology 

of formalist writings in En glish. Additionally, Eichenbaum’s monographs include 

The Young Tolstoy (1922; trans. 1972), Lermontov (1924; trans. 1977), Tolstoy in the 

Fifties (1928; untranslated), Tolstoy in the Sixties (1931; trans. 1982), and Tolstoy in 

the Seventies (1960; trans. 1982). The early Tolstoy volume is an analytical study of 

literary conventions, but its sequels replace formalist method with a biographical 

orientation. An exemplary biographical study, Carol Any’s Boris Eichenbaum: Voices 

of a Rus sian Formalist (1994), traces several phases of Eichenbaum’s career. 

The standard critical account in En glish of Rus sian formalism as a whole, Victor 

Erlich’s Rus sian Formalism: History— Doctrine (3d ed., 1981) devotes substantial 

attention to Eichenbaum’s role in it. For a retrospective assessment from a colleague, 

see Roman Jakobson, “Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum,” International Journal of 

Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 6 (1963). Perhaps the most influential critical introduction 

of Rus sian formalism to contemporary English- Language theory, Fredric 

Jameson’s Prison- House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian 

Formalism (1972), credits Eichenbaum with being “the most pugnacious and 

combative of the group.” In “The Changing Focus of Eikhenbaum’s Tolstoi Criticism,” 

Rus sian Review 37 (1978), Harold K. Schefski discusses Eichenbaum’s shift 

away from formalism. See also Peter Steiner’s Rus sian Formalism: A Metapoetics 

(1984) and Juri Streidter’s Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value: Rus sian Formalism 

and Czech Structuralism (1989), which offer significant commentary on Eichenbaum. 

Galin Tihanov, “Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and 

Eastern Eu rope? (And Why Is It Now Dead?),” Common Knowledge 10 (2004), provides 

an interesting look at the context within which formalism developed. For comprehensive 

bibliographies, consult the entries on Eichenbaum in David Gorman’s 

“Bibliography of Rus sian Formalism in En glish,” Style 26 (1992), and his “Supplement 

to a Bibliography of Rus sian Formalism in En glish,” Style 29 (1995).

925 

From The Theory of the “Formal Method” 1 

The worst, in my opinion, are those who describe science as if 

it were settled. 

[Le pire, à mon avis, est celui qui représente la science comme 

faite.]— 

A. de Candolle 2 

The so- called “formal method” grew out of a struggle for a science of literature 

that would be both in de pen dent and factual; it is not the outgrowth of 

a par tic u lar methodology. The notion of a “method” has been so exaggerated 

that it now suggests too much. In principle the question for the Formalist 

3 is not how to study literature, but what the subject matter of literary 

study actually is. We neither discuss methodology nor quarrel about it. We 

speak and may speak only about theoretical principles suggested to us not 

by this or that readymade methodology, but by the examination of specific 

material in its specific context. The Formalists’ works in literary theory and 

literary history show this clearly enough, but during the past ten years so 

many new questions and old misunderstandings have accumulated that I 

feel it advisable to try to summarize some of our work— not as a dogmatic 

system but as a historical summation. I wish to show how the work of the 

Formalists began, how it evolved, and what it evolved into. 

The evolutionary character of the development of the formal method is 

important to an understanding of its history; our opponents and many of our 

followers overlook it. We are surrounded by eclectics and late- comers who 

would turn the formal method into some kind of inflexible “formalistic” system 

in order to provide themselves with a working vocabulary, a program, 

and a name. A program is a very handy thing for critics, but not at all characteristic 

of our method. Our scientific approach has had no such prefabricated 

program or doctrine, and has none. In our studies we value a theory 

only as a working hypothesis to help us discover and interpret facts; that is, 

we determine the validity of the facts and use them as the material of our 

research. We are not concerned with definitions, for which the late- comers 

thirst; nor do we build general theories, which so delight eclectics. We posit 

specific principles and adhere to them insofar as the material justifies them. 

If the material demands their refinement or change, we change or refine 

them. In this sense we are quite free from our own theories— as science 

must be free to the extent that theory and conviction are distinct. There is 

no readymade science; science lives not by settling on truth, but by overcoming 

error. 

This essay is not intended to argue our position. The initial period of 

scientific struggle and journalistic polemics is past. Such attacks as that in 

1. Translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. 

Reis, who trimmed the text slightly and added 

the headings to the section numbers in the original; 

they sometimes include clarifying words or 

phrases in brackets in the text. 

2. Alphonse de Candolle (1806– 1893), Swiss 

botanist. 

3. By “Formalists” I mean in this essay only that 

group of theoreticians who made up the Society for 

the Study of Poetic Language (the Opoyaz) and 

who began to publish their studies in 1916 [Eichenbaum’s 

note]. Some of the author’s notes have been 

edited and some omitted. Led by Victor Shklovsky 

(1893– 1984), Eichenbaum, and Yury Tynyanov 

(1894– 1943), Opoyaz was centered in St. Petersburg, 

but Eichenbaum also includes members of 

the Moscow Linguistic Circle in his account. Arising 

in de pen dently in 1914 but soon coming into 

contact with the Petersburg group, the circle was 

led by roman jakobson (1896– 1982), Osip Brik 

(1888– 1945), and Boris Tomashevsky (1890– 

1957).


The Press and the Revolution 4 (with which I was honored) can be answered 

only by new scientific works. My chief purpose here is to show how the formal 

method, by gradually evolving and broadening its field of research, 

spread beyond the usual “methodological” limits and became a special science 

of literature, a specific ordering of facts. Within the limits of this science, 

the most diverse methods may develop, if only because we focus on 

the empirical study of the material. Such study was, essentially, the aim of 

the Formalists from the very beginning, and precisely that was the significance 

of our quarrel with the old traditions. The name “formal method,” 

bestowed upon the movement and now firmly attached to it, may be tentatively 

understood as a historical term; it should not be taken as an accurate 

description of our work. Neither “Formalism” as an aesthetic theory nor 

“methodology” as a finished scientific system characterizes us; we are characterized 

only by the attempt to create an in de pen dent science of literature 

which studies specifically literary material. We ask only for recognition of 

the theoretical and historical facts of literary art as such. 

1. The Origins of Formalism 

Representatives of the formal method were frequently reproached by various 

groups for their lack of clarity or for the inadequacy of their principles— for 

indifference to general questions of aesthetics, sociology, psychology, and so 

on. These reproofs, despite their varying merit, are alike in that they correctly 

grasp that the chief characteristic of the Formalists is indeed their 

deliberate isolation both from “aesthetics from above” and from all readymade 

or self- styled general theories. This isolation (particularly from aesthetics) 

is more or less typical of all contemporary studies of art. Dismissing a 

whole group of general problems (problems of beauty, the aims of art, etc.), 

the contemporary study of art concentrates on the concrete problems of aesthetics. 

Without reference to socio- aesthetic premises, it raises questions 

about the idea of artistic “form” and its evolution. It thereby raises a series of 

more specific theoretical and historical questions. Such familiar slogans as 

Wölfflin’s 5 “history of art without names” characterized experiments in the 

empirical analysis of style and technique (like Voll’s 6 “experiment in the comparative 

study of paintings”). In Germany especially the study of the theory 

and history of the visual arts, which had had there an extremely rich history 

of tradition and experiment, occupied a central position in art studies and 

began to influence the general theory of art and its separate disciplines— in 

par tic u lar, the study of literature. In Rus sia, apparently for local historical 

reasons, literary studies occupied a place analogous to that of the visual arts 

in Germany. 

The formal method has attracted general attention and become controversial 

not, of course, because of its distinctive methodology, but rather 

because of its characteristic attitude toward the understanding and the 

study of technique. The Formalists advocated principles which violated solidly 

entrenched traditional notions, notions which had appeared to be “axiomatic” 

not only in the study of literature, but in the study of art generally. 

4. A literary and intellectual journal of the period 

following the Rus sian Revolution of 1917; the 

attack on Eichenbaum occurred in 1924. 

5. Heinrich Wölfflin (1864– 1945), German art 

historian. 

6. Karl Voll (1867– 1917), German art historian.

The Theory of the “Formal Method” / 927 

Because they adhered to their principles so strictly, they narrowed the distance 

between par tic u lar problems of literary theory and general problems 

of aesthetics. The ideas and principles of the Formalists, for all their concreteness, 

were pointedly directed towards a general theory of aesthetics. 

Our creation of a radically unconventional poetics, 7 therefore, implied more 

than a simple reassessment of par tic u lar problems; it had an impact on the 

study of art generally. It had its impact because of a series of historical developments, 

the most important of which were the crisis in philosophical aesthetics 

and the startling innovations in art (in Rus sia most abrupt and most 

clearly defined in poetry). Aesthetics seemed barren and art deliberately 

denuded— in an entirely primitive condition. Hence, Formalism and Futurism 

8 seemed bound together by history. 

But the general historical significance of the appearance of Formalism 

comprises a special theme; I must speak of something else here because I 

intend to show how the principles and problems of the formal method 

evolved and how the Formalists came to their present position. 

Before the appearance of the Formalists, academic research, quite ignorant 

of theoretical problems, made use of antiquated aesthetic, psychological, 

and historical “axioms” and had so lost sight of its proper subject that 

its very existence as a science had become illusory. There was almost no 

struggle between the Formalists and the Academicians, 9 not because the 

Formalists had broken in the door (there were no doors), but because we 

found an open passageway instead of a fortress. The theoretical heritage 

which Potebnya and Veselovsky 1 left to their disciples seemed to lay like 

dead capital— a trea sure which they were afraid to touch, the brilliance of 

which they had allowed to fade. In fact, authority and influence had gradually 

passed from academic scholarship to the “scholarship” of the journals, 

to the work of the Symbolist 2 critics and theoreticians. Actually, between 

1907 and 1912 the books and essays of Vyacheslav Ivanov, Bryusov, Merezhkovsky, 

Chukovsky, 3 and others, were much more influential than the 

scholarly studies and dissertations of the university professors. This journalistic 

“scholarship,” with all its subjectivity and tendentiousness, was 

supported by the theoretical principles and slogans of the new artistic 

movements and their propagandists. Such books as Bely’s Simvolizm 4 (1910) 

naturally meant much more to the younger generation than the monographs 

on the history of literature which sprang up from no set of principles 

and which showed that the authors completely lacked both a scientific temperament 

and a scientific point of view. 

The historical battle between the two generations [the Symbolists and 

the Formalists]— a battle which was fought over principles and was extraordinarily 

intense— was therefore resolved in the journals, and the battle line 

7. That is, a scientific theory of literature. 

8. A revolutionary movement in art and literature 

begun in Italy in 1909, stressing speed, modernity, 

and rebellion; it quickly found adherents in 

Rus sia. 

9. The established university- based literary 

scholars against whom the formalists rebelled. 

1. Aleksandr Potebnya (1835– 1891) and Aleksandr 

Veselovsky (1838– 1906), Rus sian literary 

scholars. 

2. A movement (with origins in 1870s France) that 

aimed at renovating Rus sian poetry at the beginning 

of the 20th century; it emphasized mysticism 

and aestheticism, in an impressionistic style. 

3. All Rus sian literary figures associated with 

symbolism: Ivanov (1866– 1949), Valery Bryusov 

(1873– 1924), Dmitri Merezhkovsky (1865– 1941), 

and Korney Chukovsky (1882– 1969). 

4. Symbolism (Rus sian). Andrey Bely: the pseudonym 

of Boris Bugayev (1880– 1934), a Rus sian 

novelist, poet, and critic.


was drawn over Symbolist theory and Impressionistic criticism 5 rather than 

over any work being done by the Academicians. We entered the fight against 

the Symbolists in order to wrest poetics from their hands— to free it from 

its ties with their subjective philosophical and aesthetic theories and to 

direct it toward the scientific investigation of facts. We were raised on their 

works, and we saw their errors with the greatest clarity. At this time, the 

struggle became even more urgent because the Futurists (Khlebnikov, 

Kruchenykh, and Mayakovsky), 6 who were on the rise, opposed the Symbolist 

poetics and supported the Formalists. 

The original group of Formalists was united by the idea of liberating 

poetic diction from the fetters of the intellectualism and moralism which 

more and more obsessed the Symbolists. The dissension among the Symbolist 

theoreticians (1910– 1911) and the appearance of the Acmeists 7 prepared 

the way for our decisive rebellion. We knew that all compromises 

would have to be avoided, that history demanded of us a really revolutionary 

attitude— a categorical thesis, merciless irony, and bold rejections of 

what ever could not be reconciled with our position. We had to oppose the 

subjective aesthetic principles espoused by the Symbolists with an objective 

consideration of the facts. Hence our Formalist movement was characterized 

by a new passion for scientific positivism 8 — a rejection of philosophical 

assumptions, of psychological and aesthetic interpretations, etc. Art, considered 

apart from philosophical aesthetics and ideological theories, dictated 

its own position on things. We had to turn to facts and, abandoning 

general systems and problems, to begin “in the middle,” with the facts 

which art forced upon us. Art demanded that we approach it closely; science, 

that we deal with the specific. 

2. The Science of Literature: 

The In de pen dent Value of Poetic Sound 

The establishment of a specific and factual literary science was basic to the 

or ga ni za tion of the formal method. All of our efforts were directed toward 

disposing of the earlier position which, according to Alexander Veselovsky, 

made of literature an abandoned thing [a res nullius]. This is why the position 

of the Formalists could not be reconciled with other approaches and 

was so unacceptable to the eclectics. In rejecting these other approaches, 

the Formalists actually rejected and still reject not the methods, but rather 

the irresponsible mixing of various disciplines and their problems. The 

basis of our position was and is that the object of literary science, as such, 

must be the study of those specifics which distinguish it from any other 

material. (The secondary, incidental features of such material, however, 

may reasonably and rightly be used in a subordinate way by other scientific 

disciplines.) Roman Jakobson formulated this view with perfect clarity: 

5. Unsystematic, subjective criticism; elsewhere 

Eichenbaum calls it “journalistic” criticism. 

6. Three Rus sian poets and critics: Velimir Khlebnikov 

(1885– 1922), Alexey Kruchenykh (1886– 

1968), and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893– 1930). 

7. The Acmeists, like the Futurists, rebelled 

against the principles and practices of the Symbolists. 

But unlike the Futurists, they attempted 

a highly controlled, polished style of poetry. The 

best- known Acmeists were Anna Akhmatova 

[1889– 1966] and Osip Mandelstam [1891– 1938]. 

The movement did not survive World War I 

[translators’ note]. 

8. The view that knowledge and meaning derive 

solely from what can be empirically observed.


The object of the science of literature is not literature, but literariness— 

that is, that which makes a given work a work of literature. Until now 

literary historians have preferred to act like the policeman who, intending 

to arrest a certain person, would, at any opportunity, seize any and 

all persons who chanced into the apartment, as well as those who passed 

along the street. The literary historians used everything— anthropology, 

psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of literature, they 

created a conglomeration of homespun disciplines. They seemed to 

have forgotten that their essays strayed into related disciplines— the 

history of philosophy, the history of culture, of psychology, etc.— and 

that these could rightly use literary masterpieces only as defective, secondary 

documents. 9 

To apply and strengthen this principle of specificity and to avoid speculative 

aesthetics, we had to compare literary facts with other kinds of facts, 

extracting from a limitless number of important orders of fact that order 

which would pertain to literature and would distinguish it from the others 

by its function. This was the method Leo Jakubinsky 1 followed in his essays 

in the first Opoyaz collection, in which he worked out the contrast between 

poetic and practical language that served as the basic principle of the Formalists’ 

work on key problems of poetics. As a result, the Formalists did not 

look, as literary students usually had, toward history, culture, sociology, psychology, 

or aesthetics, etc., but toward linguistics, a science bordering on 

poetics and sharing material with it, but approaching it from a different perspective 

and with different problems. Linguistics, for its part, was also interested 

in the formal method in that what was discovered by comparing poetic 

and practical language could be studied as a purely linguistic problem, as 

part of the general phenomena of language. The relationship between linguistics 

and the formal method was somewhat analogous to that relation of 

mutual use and delimitation that exists, for example, between physics and 

chemistry. Against this background, the problems posed earlier by Potebnya 

and taken for granted by his followers were reviewed and reinterpreted. 

Leo Jakubinsky’s first essay, “On the Sounds of Poetic Language,” 2 compared 

practical and poetic language and formulated the difference between 

them: 

The phenomena of language must be classified from the point of view 

of the speaker’s par tic u lar purpose as he forms his own linguistic pattern. 

If the pattern is formed for the purely practical purpose of communication, 

then we are dealing with a system of practical language 

(the language of thought) in which the linguistic pattern (sounds, morphological 

features, etc.) have no in de pen dent value and are merely a 

means of communication. But other linguistic systems, systems in 

which the practical purpose is in the background (although perhaps not 

entirely hidden) are conceivable; they exist, and their linguistic patterns 

acquire in de pen dent value. 

9. Roman Jakobson, Noveyshaya russkaya poeziya 

[Modern Rus sian Poetry] (Prague, 1921), p. 11 

[Eichenbaum’s note]. 

1. Rus sian linguist and critic (1892– 1945), associated 

with Opoyaz but not a member. 

2. Leo Jakubinsky, “O zvukakh poeticheskovo 

yazyka,” Sborniki 1 (1916) [Eichenbaum’s note].


The establishment of this distinction was important both for the construction 

of a poetics and for understanding the Futurist’s preference for 

“nonsense language” 3 as revealing the furthest extension of the sheer “in depen 

dent” value of words, the kind of value partially observed in the language 

of children, in the glossolalia of religious sects, 4 and so on. The 

Futurist experiments in nonsense language were of prime significance as a 

demonstration against Symbolism which, in its theories, went no further 

than to use the idea of “instrumentation” to indicate the accompaniment of 

meaning by sound and so to de- emphasize the role of sound in poetic language. 

The problem of sound in verse was especially crucial because it was 

on this point that the Formalists and Futurists united to confront the theorists 

of Symbolism. Naturally, the Formalists gave battle at first on just that 

issue; the question of sound had to be disposed of first if we were to oppose 

the aesthetic and philosophical tendencies of the Symbolists with a system 

of precise observations and to reach the underlying scientific conclusions. 

This accounts for the content of the first volume of Opoyaz, a content 

devoted entirely to the problem of sound and nonsense language. 

Victor Shklovsky, along with Jakubinsky, in “On Poetry and Nonsense 

Language,” 5 cited a variety of examples which showed that “even words 

without meaning are necessary.” He showed such meaninglessness to be 

both a widespread linguistic fact and a phenomenon characteristic of poetry. 

“The poet does not decide to use the meaningless word; usually ‘nonsense’ is 

disguised as some kind of frequently delusive, deceptive content. Poets are 

forced to acknowledge that they themselves do not understand the content 

of their own verses.” Shklovsky’s essay, moreover, transfers the question 

from the area of pure sound, from the acoustical level (which provided the 

basis for impressionistic interpretations of the relation between sound and 

the description of objects or the emotion represented), to the level of pronunciation 

and articulation. “In the enjoyment of a meaningless ‘nonsense 

word,’ the articulatory aspect of speech is undoubtedly important. Perhaps 

generally a great part of the delight of poetry consists in pronunciation, in 

the in de pen dent dance of the organs of speech.” The question of meaningless 

language thus became a serious scientific concern, the solution of which 

would help to clarify many problems of poetic language in general. Shklovsky 

also formulated the general question: 

If we add to our demand of the word as such that it serve to clarify 

understanding, that it be generally meaningful, then of course “meaningless” 

language, as a relatively superficial language, falls by the wayside. 

But it does not fall alone; a consideration of the facts forces one to 

wonder whether words always have a meaning, not only in meaningless 

speech, but also in simple poetic speech— or whether this notion is only 

a fiction resulting from our inattention. 

The natural conclusion of these observations and principles was that poetic 

language is not only a language of images, that sounds in verse are not at all 

merely elements of a superficial euphony, and that they do not play a mere 

“accompaniment” to meaning, but rather that they have an in de pen dent 

3. Language used solely for its sound, ignoring its 

sense. 

4. That is, speaking in tongues: ecstatic languagelike 

utterances. 

5. Victor Shklovsky, “O poezii i zaumnom yazyke,” 

Sborniki 1 (1916) [Eichenbaum’s note].


significance. The purpose of this work was to force a revision of Potebnya’s 

general theory, which had been built on the conviction that poetry is 

“thought in images.” Potebnya’s analysis of poetry, the analysis which the 

Symbolists had adopted, treated the sound of verse as “expressive” of something 

behind it. Sound was merely onomatopoetic, merely “aural description.” 

The works of Andrey Bely (who discovered the complete sound picture 

that champagne makes when poured from a bottle into a glass in two lines 

from Pushkin, and who also discovered the “noisomeness of a hangover” in 

Blok’s 6 repetition of the consonantal cluster rdt) were quite typical. Such 

attempts to “explain” alliteration, bordering on parody, required a rebuff 

and an attempt to produce concrete evidence showing that sounds in verse 

exist apart from any connection with imagery, that they have an in de pendent 

oral function. 

Leo Jakubinsky, in his essays, provided linguistic support for [our arguments 

in favor of] the in de pen dent value of sound in verse. Osip Brik’s essay 

on “Sound Repetitions” 7 illustrated the same point with quotations from 

Pushkin and Lermontov 8 arranged to present a variety of models. Brik 

doubted the correctness of the common opinion that poetic language is a 

language of “images”: 

No matter how one looks at the interrelationship of image and sound, 

there is undoubtedly only one conclusion possible— the sounds, the harmonies, 

are not only euphonious accessories to meaning; they are also 

the result of an in de pen dent poetic purpose. The superficial devices of 

euphony do not completely account for the instrumentation of poetic 

speech. Such instrumentation represents on the whole an intricate product 

of the interaction of the general laws of harmony. Rhyme, alliteration, 

etc., are only obvious manifestations, par tic u lar cases, of the basic 

laws of euphony. 

In opposing the work of Bely, Brik, in the same essay, made no comment at 

all on the meaning of this or that use of alliteration, but merely affirmed 

that repetition in verse is analogous to tautology in folklore— that is, that 

repetition itself plays something of an aesthetic role: “Obviously we have 

here diverse forms of one general principle, the principle of simple combination, 

by which either the sounds of the words or their meanings, or now one 

and now the other, serve as the material of the combination.” Such an extension 

of one device to cover the various forms of poetic material is quite characteristic 

of the work of the Formalists during their initial period. After the 

pre sen ta tion of Brik’s essay the question of sound in verse lost something of 

its urgency, and the Formalists turned to questions of poetics in general. 

3. Content and Correspondent Form Versus Technique as Content 

The Formalists began their work with the question of the sounds of verse— 

at that time the most controversial and most basic question. Behind this 

par tic u lar question of poetics stood more general theses which had to be 

6. Aleksandr Blok (1880– 1921), Rus sian poet 

associated with symbolism. Aleksandr Pushkin 

(1799– 1837), great Rus sian writer of fiction, 

plays, and especially poetry. 

7. Osip Brik, “Zvukovye povtory,” Sborniki 2 

(1917) [Eichenbaum’s note]. 

8. Mikhail Lermontov (1814– 1841), Rus sian poet 

and novelist.


formulated. The distinction between systems of poetic and practical language, 

which defined the work of the Formalists from the very beginning, 

was bound to result in the formulation of a whole group of basic questions. 

The idea of poetry as “thought by means of images” and the resulting formula, 

“Poetry = Imagery,” clearly did not coincide with our observations 

and contradicted our tentative general principles. Rhythm, sound, syntax— 

all of these seemed secondary from such a point of view; they seemed 

uncharacteristic of poetry and necessarily extraneous to it. The Symbolists 

accepted Potebnya’s general theory because it justified the supremacy of the 

image- symbol; yet they could not rid themselves of the notorious theory of 

the “harmony of form and content” even though it clearly contradicted 

their bent for formal experimentation and discredited it by making it seem 

mere “aestheticism.” The Formalists, when they abandoned Potebnya’s 

point of view, also freed themselves from the traditional correlation of 

“form and content” and from the traditional idea of form as an envelope, a 

vessel into which one pours a liquid (the content). The facts of art demonstrate 

that art’s uniqueness consists not in the “parts” which enter into it 

but in their original use. Thus the notion of form was changed; the new 

notion of form required no companion idea, no correlative. 

Even before the formation of the Opoyaz in 1914, at the time of the public 

per for mances of the Futurists, Shklovsky had published a monograph, The 

Resurrection of the Word, 9 in which he took exception partly to the concepts 

set forth by Potebnya and partly to those of Veselovsky (the question of imagery 

was not then of major significance) to advance the principle of perceptible 

form as the specific sign of artistic awareness: 

We do not experience the commonplace, we do not see it; rather, we recognize 

it. We do not see the walls of our room; and it is very difficult for 

us to see errors in proofreading, especially if the material is written in a 

language we know well, because we cannot force ourselves to see, to read, 

and not to “recognize” the familiar word. If we have to define specifically 

“poetic” perception and artistic perception in general, then we suggest 

this definition: “Artistic” perception is that perception in which we experience 

form— perhaps not form alone, but certainly form. 

Perception here is clearly not to be understood as a simple psychological 

concept (the perception peculiar to this or that person), but, since art does 

not exist outside of perception, as an element in art itself. The notion of 

“form” here acquires new meaning; it is no longer an envelope, but a complete 

thing, something concrete, dynamic, self- contained, and without a 

correlative of any kind. Here we made a decisive break with the Symbolist 

principle that some sort of “content” is to shine through the “form.” And we 

broke with “aestheticism”— the preference for certain elements of form 

consciously isolated from “content.” 

But these general acknowledgements that there are differences between 

poetic and practical language and that the specific quality of art is shown 

in its par tic u lar use of the material were not adequate when we tried to deal 

with specific works. We had to find more specific formulations of the principle 

of perceptible form so that they could make possible the analysis of 

9. Victor Shklovsky, Voskresheniye slova (Petersburg, 1914) [Eichenbaum’s note].


form itself— the analysis of form understood as content. We had to show 

that the perception of form results from special artistic techniques which 

force the reader to experience the form. Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” 

presenting its own manifesto of the Formalist method, offered a perspective 

for the concrete analysis of form. Here was a really clear departure 

from Potebnya and Potebnyaism and, at the same time, from the theoretical 

principles of Symbolism. The essay began with objections to Potebnya’s 

basic view of imagery and its relation to content. Shklovsky indicates, 

among other things, that images are almost always static: 

The more you understand an age, the more convinced you become that 

the images a given poet used and which you thought his own were taken 

almost unchanged from another poet. The works of poets are classified 

or grouped according to the new techniques they discover and share, and 

according to their arrangement and development of the resources of language; 

poets are much more concerned with arranging images than creating 

them. Images are given to poets; the ability to remember them is 

far more important than the ability to create them. Imagistic thought 

does not, in any case, include all aspects of art or even all aspects of 

verbal art. A change in imagery is not essential to the development of 

poetry. 1 

He further pointed out the difference between poetic and nonpoetic images. 

The poetic image is defined as one of the devices of poetic language— as a 

device which, depending upon the problem, is as important as such other 

devices of poetic language as simple and negative parallelism, comparison, 

repetition, symmetry, hyperbole, etc., but no more important. Thus imagery 

becomes a part of a system of poetic devices and loses its theoretical dominance. 

Shklovsky likewise repudiated the principle of artistic economy, a principle 

which had been strongly asserted in aesthetic theory, and opposed it with the 

device of “defamiliarization” 2 and the notion of “roughened form.” That is, he 

saw art as increasing the difficulty and span of perception “because the process 

of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged”; 3 he 

saw art as a means of destroying the automatism of perception; the purpose 

of the image is not to present the approximate meaning of its object to our 

understanding, but to create a special perception of the object— the creation 

of its “vision,” and not the “recognition” of its meaning. Hence the image is 

usually connected with the pro cess of defamiliarization. 

The break with Potebnya was formulated definitely in Shklovsky’s essay 

“Potebnya.” 4 He repeats once more that imagery— symbolization—does not 

constitute the specific difference between poetic and prosaic (practical) 

language: 

1. Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917), in 

Rus sian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. 

and ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: 

University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 7. 

2. A formalist technical term (ostraneniye in Russian, 

also translated as “making strange”) for making 

a familiar word, image, or event seem strange, 

thus countering habituated perception or “automatism” 

and provoking renewed aesthetic response. 

A related concept is that of “roughened” (zatrudyonny) 

form. 

3. Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” p. 12. 

4. Victor Shklovsky, “Potebnya,” Poetika (1919) 

[Eichenbaum’s note].


Poetic language is distinguished from practical language by the perception 

of its structure. The acoustical, articulatory, or semantic aspects of 

poetic language may be felt. Sometimes one feels the verbal structure, 

the arrangement of the words, rather than their texture. The poetic 

image is one of the ways, but only one of the ways, of creating a perceptible 

structure designed to be experienced within its very own fabric. . . . 

The creation of a scientific poetics must begin inductively with a hypothesis 

built on an accumulation of evidence. That hypothesis is that poetic 

and prosaic languages exist, that the laws which distinguish them exist, 

and, finally, that these differences are to be analyzed. 

These essays are to be read as the summation of the first phase of the 

Formalists’ work. The main achievement of this period consisted in our 

establishment of a series of theoretical principles which provided working 

hypotheses for a further investigation of the data for the defeat of the current 

theories based on Potebnyaism. The chief strength of the Formalists, as 

these essays show, was neither the direction of their study of so- called “forms” 

nor the construction of a special “method”; their strength was founded 

securely on the fact that the specific features of the verbal arts had to be 

studied and that to do so it was first necessary to sort out the differing uses of 

poetic and practical language. Concerning form, the Formalists thought it 

important to change the meaning of this muddled term. It was important to 

destroy these traditional correlatives and so to enrich the idea of form with 

new significance. The notion of “technique,” 5 because it has to do directly 

with the distinguishing features of poetic and practical speech, is much more 

significant in the long- range evolution of formalism than is the notion of 

“form.” 

4. Applications of Theory: Questions of Plot and Literary Evolution 

The preliminary stage of our theoretical work had passed. We had proposed 

general principles bearing directly upon factual material. We now had to 

move closer to the material and to make the problems themselves specific. 

At the center stood those questions of theoretical poetics that had previously 

been outlined only in general form. We had to move from questions 

about the sound of verse to a general theory of verse. The questions about 

the sound of verse, when originally posed, were meant only as illustrations 

of the difference between poetic and practical language. We had to move 

from questions about “technique- in- general” to the study of the specific 

devices of composition, to inquiry about plot, and so on. Our interest in 

opposing Veselovsky’s general view and, specifically, in opposing his theory 

of plot, developed side by side with our interest in opposing Potebnya’s. 

At this time, the Formalists quite naturally used literary works only as 

material for supporting and testing their theoretical hypothesis; we had put 

aside questions of convention, literary evolution, etc. Now we felt it important 

to widen the scope of our study, to make a preliminary survey of the 

data, and to allow it to establish its own kind of “laws.” In this way we freed 

5. A formalist technical term (priyom in Rus sian, also translated as “device”) for any of the basic elements 

that have a function in an artistic composition.


ourselves from the necessity of resorting to abstract premises and at the 

same time mastered the materials without losing ourselves in details. 

Shklovsky, with his theory of plot and fiction, was especially important 

during this period. He demonstrated the presence of special devices of “plot 

construction” and their relation to general stylistic devices in such diverse 

materials as the skaz, Oriental tales, 6 Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Tolstoy’s 

works, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 7 and so on. I do not wish to go into 

details— those should be treated in specialized works and not in a general 

essay such as this on the Formalist method— but I do wish to cover those 

ideas in Shklovsky’s treatment of plot which have a theoretical significance 

beyond any relationship they might have to par tic u lar problems of plots as 

such. Traces of those ideas can be found in the most advanced pieces of 

Formalist criticism. 

The first of Shklovsky’s works on plot, “The Relation of Devices of Plot 

Construction to General Devices of Style,” 8 raised a whole series of such 

ideas. In the first place, the proof that special devices of plot arrangement 

exist, a proof supported by the citation of great numbers of devices, changed 

the traditional notion of plot as a combination of a group of motifs 9 and 

made plot a compositional rather than a thematic concept. Thus the very 

concept of plot was changed; plot was no longer synonymous with story. 1 

Plot construction became the natural subject of Formalist study, since plot 

constitutes the specific peculiarity of narrative art. The idea of form had 

been enriched, and as it lost its former abstractness, it also lost its controversial 

meaning. Our idea of form had begun to coincide with our idea of 

literature as such, with the idea of the literary fact. 

Furthermore, the analogies which we established between the devices of 

plot construction and the devices of style had theoretical significance, for 

the step- by- step structure usually found in the epic was found to be analogous 

to sound repetition, tautology, tautological parallelism, and so on. All 

illustrated a general principle of verbal art based on parceling out and 

impending the action. 

For instance, Roland’s three blows on the stone in the Song of Roland 2 

and the similar triple repetition common in tales may be compared, as a 

single type of phenomenon, with Gogol’s 3 use of synonyms and with such 

linguistic structures as “hoity- toity,” “a diller, a dollar,” etc. 4 “These variations 

6. Folktales with exotic settings in India, Persia, 

and Arabic countries, like those collected in the 

Arabian Nights, written in Arabic but first translated 

and published in Eu rope in the eigh teenth 

century. Skaz: a Rus sian literary form; perhaps 

best translated “yarn.” 

7. The works of three novelists working in different 

languages and periods: in Spanish, Miguel de 

Cervantes (1567– 1616), also a poet and playwright, 

best- known for Don Quixote (1606, 

1616); in Rus sian, Leo Tolstoy (1828– 1910), who 

wrote plays and moral philosophy as well as novels, 

including War and Peace (1863– 69); and in 

En glish, Laurence Sterne (1713– 1768), whose 

Tristram Shandy (1759– 67) is a deliberately 

eccentric “life” of its hero. 

8. First published in Rus sian in 1919; translated 

in Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin 

Sher (1990). 

9. The smallest isolatable units of narrative (a 

term from folklore study). 

1. A seminal formalist distinction in narrative 

theory: “story” (fabula, Latin) designates the 

events in their chronological sequence; “plot” 

(syuzhet, Rus sian) refers to the events in the order 

they are arranged by the author. 

2. An 11th- century French epic; Roland, one of 

Charlemagne’s paladins, attempts three times to 

break his sword against a stone to keep it from his 

enemies’ hands. 

3. Nikolay Gogol (1809– 1852), Rus sian novelist 

and dramatist. 

4. Eichenbaum gives two nonsense phrases here, 

kudy- mudy and plyushki- mlyushki. The point is 

that repetition of sound alone may keep alive certain 

otherwise meaningless expressions [translators’ 

note].


of step- by- step construction usually do not all occur together, and attempts 

have been made to give each case a special explanation.” Shklovsky shows 

how we attempt to demonstrate that the same device may reappear in diverse 

materials. Here we clashed with Veselovsky, who in such cases usually avoided 

theory and resorted to historical- genetic hypotheses. For instance, he 

explained epic repetition as a mechanism for the original per for mance (as 

embryonic song). But an explanation of the ge ne tics of such a phenomenon, 

even if true, does not clarify the phenomenon as a fact of literature. Veselovsky 

and other members of the ethnographic school 5 used to explain the 

peculiar motifs and plots of the skaz by relating literature and custom; Shklovsky 

did not object to making the relationship but challenged it only as an 

explanation of the peculiarities of the skaz— he challenged it as an explanation 

of a specifically literary fact. The study of literary ge ne tics can clarify 

only the origin of a device, nothing more; poetics must explain its literary 

function. The ge ne tic point of view fails to consider the device as a selfdetermined 

use of material; it does not consider how conventional materials 

are selected by an author, how conventional devices are transformed, or how 

they are made to play a structural role. The ge ne tic point of view does not 

explain how a convention may disappear and its literary function remain. 

The literary function remains not as a simple experience but as a literary 

device retaining a significance over and beyond its connection with the convention. 

Characteristically, Veselovsky had contradicted himself by considering 

the adventures of the Greek romance 6 as purely stylistic devices. 

The Formalists naturally opposed Veselovsky’s “ethnographism” because 

it ignored the special characteristic of the literary device and because it 

replaced the theoretical and evolutionary point of view with a ge ne tic point 

of view. 

Veselovsky saw “syncretism” 7 as a phenomenon of primitive poetry, a 

result of custom, and he later was censured for this in B. Kazansky’s “The 

Concept of Historical Poetics.” 8 Kazansky repudiated the ethnographic point 

of view by affirming the presence of syncretic tendencies in the very nature 

of each art, a presence especially obvious in some periods. The Formalists 

naturally could not agree with Veselovsky when he touched upon general 

questions of literary evolution. If the clash with the Potebnyaists clarified 

basic principles of poetics, the clash with Veselovsky’s general view and 

with that of his followers clarified the Formalists’ views on literary evolution 

and, thereby, on the structure of literary history. 

Shklovsky began to deal with the subject of literary evolution in the essay 

I cited previously, “The Relation of Devices of Plot Construction to General 

Devices of Style.” He had encountered Veselovsky’s formula, a formula 

broadly based on the ethnographic principle that “the purpose of new form 

is to express new content,” and he decided to advance a completely different 

point of view: 

5. That is, those explaining literary material in 

terms of cultural background; ethnography is a 

field of anthropology. 

6. Prose narratives introduced in the 1st century 

b.c.e., characterized by complicated adventures, 

terrifying dangers, and eroticism. 

7. The combination of forms and beliefs. 

8. Published in Rus sian in 1926 by Boris Kazansky 

(1891– 1973), associated with the Opoyaz 

group.


The work of art arises from a background of other works and through 

association with them. The form of a work of art is defined by its relation 

to other works of art, to forms existing prior to it. . . . Not only 

parody, but also any kind of work of art is created parallel to and opposed 

to some kind of form. The purpose of the new form is not to express new 

content, but to change an old form which has lost its aesthetic quality. 9 

Shklovsky supported this thesis with B[roder] Christiansen’s 1 demonstration 

of “differentiated perceptions” or “perceptions of difference.” He sees that 

the dynamism characteristic of art is based on this and is manifested in 

repeated violations of established rules. At the close of his essay, he quotes 

F[erdinand] Brunetière’s 2 statements that “of all the influences active in the 

history of literature, the chief is the influence of work on work,” and that 

“one should not, without good cause, increase the number of influences 

upon literature, under the assumption that literature is the expression of 

society, nor should one confuse the history of literature with the history of 

morals and manners. These are entirely different things.” 

Shklovsky’s essay marked the changeover from our study of theoretical 

poetics to our study of the history of literature. Our original assumptions 

about form had been complicated by our observation of new features of evolutionary 

dynamics and their continuous variability. Our moving into the 

area of the history of literature was no simple expansion of our study; it 

resulted from the evolution of our concept of form. We found that we could 

not see the literary work in isolation, that we had to see its form against a 

background of other works rather than by itself. Thus the Formalists definitely 

went beyond “Formalism,” if by “Formalism” one means (as some 

poorly informed critics usually did) some fabricated system which permitted 

us to be “classified,” some system which zealously adapted itself to logicchopping, 

or some system which joyously welcomed any dogma. Such scholastic 

“Formalism” was neither historical nor essentially connected with the 

work of the Opoyaz. We were not responsible for it; on the contrary, we were 

irreconcilably its enemies on principle. 

5. Prose Fiction: “Motivation” and Exposed Structure 

Later I shall return to the historical- literary work of the Formalists, but 

now I wish to conclude the survey of those theoretical principles and problems 

contained in the early work of the Opoyaz. The Shklovsky essay I 

referred to above contains still another idea which figured prominently in 

the subsequent study of the novel— the idea of “motivation.” 3 The discovery 

of various techniques of plot construction (step- by- step structure, parallelism, 

framing, the weaving of motifs, etc.) clarified the difference between 

the elements used in the construction of a work and the elements comprising 

its material (its story, the choice of motifs, the characters, the themes, 

etc.). Shklovsky stressed this difference at that time because the basic problem 

was to show the identity of individual structural devices in the most 

9. See Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, p. 20. 

1. German aes the ti cian (1869– 1942). 

2. French literary historian (1846– 1906). 

3. A formalist technical term for the functional 

reason governing the use of a par tic u lar device, 

ranging from a way to shock readers to the insertion 

of specific props required to further events 

in the action.


diverse materials imaginable. The old scholarship worked exclusively with 

the material, taking it as the “content” and treating the remainder as an 

“external form” either totally without interest or of interest only to the dilettante. 

Hence the naive and pathetic aesthetics of our older literary critics 

and historians, who found “neglect of form” in Tyutchev’s 4 poetry and simply 

“bad form” in Nekrasov and Dostoevsky. 5 The literary reputations of 

these authors were saved because their intensity of thought and mood 

excused their formlessness. Naturally, during the years of struggle and 

polemics against such a position, the Formalists directed all their forces to 

showing the significance of such compositional devices as motivation and 

ignored all other considerations. In speaking of the formal method and its 

evolution, we must constantly remember that many of the principles 

advanced by the Formalists in the years of tense struggle were significant 

not only as scientific principles, but also as slogans, as paradoxes sharpened 

for propaganda and controversy. To ignore this fact and to treat the work of 

the Opoyaz (between 1916 and 1921) in the same way as one would treat 

the academic scholarship is to ignore history. 

The concept of motivation permitted the Formalists to approach literary 

works (in par tic u lar, novels and short stories) more closely and to observe 

the details of their structure, which Shklovsky did in two later works, Plot 

Development and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the Theory of the Novel. 6 In 

these works, he studied the relationship between technique and motivation 

in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. He uses Tristram 

Shandy as material for the study of the structure of the short story and the 

novel apart from literary history, and he studies Don Quixote as an instance 

of the transition from collections of tales (like the Decameron 7 ) to the novel 

with a single hero whose travels justify or “motivate” its episodic structure. 

Don Quixote was chosen because the devices it contains and their motivation 

are not fully integrated into the entire context of the novel. Material is 

often simply inserted, not welded in; devices of plot construction and methods 

of using material to further the plot structure stand out sharply, whereas 

later structures tend “more and more to integrate the material tightly into 

the very body of the novel.” While analyzing “how Don Quixote was made,” 

Shklovsky also showed the instability of the hero and concluded that his 

“type” appeared “as the result of the business of constructing the novel.” 

Thus the dominance of structure, of plot over material, was emphasized. 

Neither a work fully “motivated” nor an art which deliberately does away 

with motivation and exposes the structure provides the most suitable material 

for the illumination of such theoretical problems. But the very existence 

of a work such as Don Quixote, with a deliberately exposed structure, 

confirms the relevance of these problems, confirms the fact that the problems 

need to be stated as problems, and confirms the fact that they are significant 

literary problems. Moreover, we were able to explain works of 

literature entirely in the light of these theoretical problems and principles, 

4. Fyodor Tyutchev (1803– 1873), Rus sian poet. 

5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821– 1881), major Russian 

novelist. Nikolay Nekrasov (1821– 1878), 

Rus sian poet and editor. 

6. Both essays were first published in Rus sian in 

1921, and are translated in Shklovsky, Theory of 

Prose. The latter, translated as “Sterne’s Tristram 

Shandy: Stylistic Commentary,” also appears in 

Lemon and Reis, Rus sian Formalist Criticism, pp. 

25– 57. 

7. A collection of 100 tales in a frame story 

(1351– 53), the most famous work of the Italian 

prose writer and poet giovanni boccaccio.


as Shklovsky did with Tristram Shandy. Shklovsky not only used the book to 

illustrate our theoretical position, he gave it new significance and once 

more attracted attention to it. Studied against the background of an interest 

in the structure of the novel, Sterne became a contemporary; people 

spoke about him, people who previously had found in his novel only boring 

chatter or eccentricities, or who had prejudged it from the point of view of 

its notorious “sentimentalism,” a characteristic for which Sterne is as little 

to blame as Gogol for “realism.” 

Shklovsky pointed out Sterne’s deliberate laying bare 8 of his methods of 

constructing Tristram Shandy and asserted that Sterne had “exaggerated” 

the structure of the novel. He had shown his awareness of form by his manner 

of violating it and by his manner of assembling the novel’s contents. In 

his conclusion to the essay, Shklovsky formulated the difference between 

plot and story: 

The idea of plot is too often confused with the description of events— 

with what I propose provisionally to call the story. The story is, in fact, 

only material for plot formulation. The plot of Eugeny Onegin 9 is, therefore, 

not the romance of the hero with Tatyana, but the fashioning of 

the subject of this story as produced by the introduction of interrupting 

digressions. . . . 

The forms of art are explainable by the laws of art; they are not justified, 

by their realism. Slowing the action of a novel is not accomplished 

by introducing rivals, for example, but by simply transposing parts. In so 

doing the artist makes us aware of the aesthetic laws which underlie 

both the transposition and the slowing down of the action. 1 

My essay “How Gogol’s ‘Greatcoat’ Was Made,” 2 also considers the structure 

of the novel, comparing the problem of plot with the problem of the 

skaz— the problem of structure based upon the narrator’s manner of telling 

what had happened. I tried to show that Gogol’s text “was made up of living 

speech patterns and vocalized emotions,” that words and sentences are 

selected and joined by Gogol as they are in the oral skaz, in which articulation, 

mimicry, sound gestures, and so on, play a special role. From this point 

of view I showed how the structure of “The Greatcoat” imparts a grotesque 

tone to the tale by replacing the usual humor of the skaz (with its anecdotes, 

puns, etc.) with sentimental- melodramatic declamation. I discussed, in this 

connection, the end of “The Greatcoat” as the apotheosis of the grotesque— 

not unlike the mute scene in The Inspector General. 3 The traditional line of 

argument about Gogol’s “romanticism” and “realism” proved unnecessary 

and unilluminating. 

Thus we began to make some progress with the problem of the study of 

prose. The line between the idea of plot as structure and the idea of the 

story as material was drawn; this explanation of the typical techniques of 

8. A formalist technical term (obnazheniye, Russian) 

for introducing an element in a composition 

without any artistic justification, thereby signaling 

that element’s functional role (e.g., presenting 

a meeting as pure coincidence rather than 

trying to explain it). 

9. An 1833 novel in verse by Pushkin (the title is 

usually translated Eugene Onegin); Tatyana is its 

heroine. 

1. Shklovsky, “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,” p. 57. 

2. First published in Rus sian in 1919. “The 

Greatcoat” (1842) is Gogol’s best- known story. 

3. An 1836 play by Gogol; it ends with a minute 

and a half of silence as the curtain falls.


plot construction opened the door for work on the history and theory of the 

novel; and furthermore, the skaz was treated as the structural basis of the 

plotless short story. These works have influenced a whole series of recent 

studies by persons not directly connected with the Opoyaz. 

6. Poetry: Meter versus a Complete Linguistic Prosody: Syntax, 

Intonation, Phonemics 

As our theoretical work broadened and deepened it naturally became 

specialized— the more so because persons who were only beginning their 

work or who had been working in de pen dently joined the Opoyaz group. 

Some of them specialized in the problems of poetry, others in the problems 

of prose. The Formalists insisted upon keeping clear the demarcation 

between poetry and prose in order to counterbalance the Symbolists, who 

were then attempting to erase the boundary line both in theory and in practice 

by painstakingly attempting to discover meter in prose. 

The earlier sections of this essay show the intensity of our work on prose. 

We were pioneers in the area. Several Western works resembled ours (in 

par tic u lar, such observations on story material as Wilhelm Dibelius’ Englische 

Romankunst, 4 1910), but they had little relevance to our theoretical 

problems and principles. In our work on prose we felt almost free from tradition, 

but in dealing with verse the situation was different. The great number 

of works by Western and Rus sian literary theorists, the numerous 

practical and theoretical experiments of the Symbolists, and the special 

literature of the controversies over the concepts of rhythm and meter (produced 

between 1910 and 1917) complicated our study of poetry. The Futurists, 

in that same period, were creating new verse forms, and this complicated 

things still more. Given such conditions, it was difficult for us to pose the 

right problems. Many persons, instead of returning to basic questions, were 

concerned with special problems of metrics or with trying to put the accumulation 

of systems and opinions in good order. Meanwhile, we had no 

general theory of poetry: no theoretical elucidations of verse rhythm, of the 

connection of rhythm and syntax, of the sounds of verse (the Formalists 

had indicated only a few linguistic premises), of poetic diction and semantics, 

and so on. In other words, the nature of verse as such remained essentially 

obscure. We had to draw away from par tic u lar problems of metrics 

and to approach verse from some more disciplined perspective. We had, 

first of all, to pose the problem of rhythm so that it did not rest on metrics 

and would include a more substantial part of poetic speech. 

Here, as in the previous section, I shall dwell upon the problem of verse 

only insofar as its exploration led to a new theoretical view of verbal art or a 

new view of the nature of poetic speech. Our position was stated first in 

Osip Brik’s “On Rhythmic- Syntactic Figures” [1920], an unpublished lecture 

delivered before the Opoyaz group and, apparently, not even written 

out. 5 Brik demonstrated that verse contained stable syntactical figures indissolubly 

connected with rhythm. Thus rhythm was no longer thought of as an 

abstraction; it was made relevant to the very linguistic fabric of verse— the 

4. Art of the En glish Novel (German). Dibelius 

(1876– 1931), German literary scholar. 

5. Brik’s lecture was published in 1927 in New 

Left [translators’ note].


phrase. Metrics became a kind of background, significant, like the alphabet, 

for the reading and writing of verse. Brik’s step was as important for the 

study of verse as the discovery of the relation of plot to structure was for the 

study of prose. The discovery that rhythmic patterns are related to the grammatical 

patterns of sentences destroyed the notion that rhythm is a superficial 

appendage, something floating on the surface of speech. Our theory of 

verse was founded on the analysis of rhythm as the structural basis of verse, 

a basis which of itself determined all of its parts— both acoustical and nonacoustical. 

A superior theory of verse, which would make metrics but a kindergarten 

preparation, was in sight. The Symbolists and the group led by 

Bely, despite their attempts, could not travel our road because they still saw 

the central problem as metrics in isolation. 

But Brik’s work merely hinted at the possibility of a new way; like his first 

essay, “Sound Repetitions,” 6 it was limited to showing examples and arranging 

them into groups. From Brik’s lecture one could move either into new 

problems or into the simple classification and cata loging, or systematizing, 

of the material. The lecture was not necessarily an expression of the formal 

method. V[ictor] Zhirmunsky continued the work of classification, in The 

Composition of Lyric Verse. 7 Zhirmunsky, who did not share the theoretical 

principles of the Opoyaz, was interested in the formal method as only one 

of the possible scientific approaches to the division of materials into various 

groups and headings. Given his understanding of the formal method, he 

could do nothing else; he accepted any superficial feature as a basis for the 

grouping of materials. Hence the unvarying cata loging and the pedantic 

tone of all of Zhirmunsky’s theoretical work. Such works were not a major 

influence in the general evolution of the formal method; in themselves they 

merely emphasized the tendency (evidently historically inevitable) to give 

the formal method an academic quality. It is not surprising, therefore, that 

Zhirmunsky later completely withdrew from the Opoyaz over a difference of 

opinion about the principles he stated repeatedly in his last works (especially 

in his introduction to the translation of O[skar] Walzel’s 8 The Problem 

of Form in Poetry [1923]). 

My book, Verse Melody, 9 which was prepared as a study of the phonetics 

of verse and so was related to a whole group of Western works (by Sievers, 

Saran, 1 etc.), was relevant to Brik’s work on rhythmic- syntactic figures. I 

maintained that stylistic differences were usually chiefly lexical: 

With that we drop the idea of versification as such, and take up poetic 

language in general. . . . We have to find something related to the poetic 

phrase that does not also lead us away from the poetry itself, something 

bordering on both phonetics and semantics. This “something” is syntax. 

I did not examine the rhythmic- syntactic phenomena in isolation, but as 

part of an examination of the structural significance of metrical and 

vocal intonation. I felt it especially important both to assert the idea of a 

6. Published in Rus sian in 1919. 

7. Published in Rus sian in 1921. Zhirmunsky 

(1891– 1971), Rus sian critic specializing in 

poetry; associated with but not a member of the 

formalist movement. 

8. German literary historian (1864– 1944). 

9. Boris Eichenbaum, Melodika russkovo liricheskovo 

stikha (Petrograd, 1922) [Eichenbaum’s note]. 

1. Franz Saran (1866– 1931), German verse theorist. 

Eduard Sievers (1850– 1932), German linguist.


dominant, 2 upon which a given poetic style is or ga nized, and to isolate the 

idea of “melody” as a system of intonations from the idea of the general 

“musicality” of verse. On this basis, I proposed to distinguish three fundamental 

styles of lyric poetry: declamatory (oratorical), melodic, and conversational. 

My entire book is devoted to the peculiarities of the melodic 

style— to peculiarities in the material of the lyrics of Zhukovsky, Tyutchev, 

Lermontov, and Fet. 3 Avoiding readymade schematizations, I ended the 

book with the conviction that “in scientific work, I consider the ability to 

see facts far more important than the construction of a system. Theories 

are necessary to clarify facts; in reality, theories are made of facts. Theories 

perish and change, but the facts they help discover and support remain.” 

The tradition of specialized metrical studies still continued among the 

Symbolist theoreticians (Bely, Bryusov, Bobrov, 4 Chudovsky, and others), 

but it gradually turned into precise statistical enumeration and lost what 

had been its dominant characteristic. Here the metrical studies of Boris 

Tomashevsky, concluded in his text Rus sian Versification, 5 played the most 

significant role. Thus, as the study of metrics became secondary, a subsidiary 

discipline with a very limited range of problems, the general theory of 

verse entered its first stage. 

Tomashevsky’s “Pushkin’s Iambic Pentameter” 6 outlined the entire previous 

course of developments within the formal method, including its attempt 

to broaden and enrich the notion of poetic rhythm and to relate it to the 

structure of poetic language. The essay also attempted to go beyond the 

idea of meter in language. Hence the basic charge against Bely and his 

school: “The problem of rhythm is not conformity to imaginary meters; it is 

rather the distribution of expiratory energy within a single wave— the line 

itself.” 7 In “The Problems of Poetic Rhythm” Tomashevsky expressed this 

with perfect clarity of principle. Here the earlier conflict between meter 

and rhythm is resolved by applying the idea of rhythm in verse to all of the 

elements of speech that play a part in the structure of verse. The rhythms 

of phrasal intonation and euphony (alliterations, etc.) are placed side by 

side with the rhythm of word accent. Thus we came to see the line as a 

special form of speech which functions as a single unit in the creation of 

poetry. We no longer saw the line as something which could create a 

“rhythmic variation” by resisting or adjusting to the metrical form (a view 

which Zhirmunsky continued to defend in his new work, Introduction to 

Metrics 8 ). Tomashevsky wrote that: 

Poetic speech is or ga nized in terms of its sounds. Taken singly, any 

phonetic element is subject to rules and regulations, but sound is a 

complex phenomenon. Thus classical metrics singles out accent and 

normalizes it by its rules. . . . But it takes little effort to shake the 

authority of traditional forms, because the notion persisted that the 

2. A formalist technical term for the element in a 

composition to which other elements are subordinate; 

for the formalists, a composition is not 

merely a set of elements but a hierarchy of them. 

3. Afanasy Fet (1820– 1892), Rus sian lyric poet. 

Vasily Zhukovsky (1783– 1852), Rus sian poet and 

translator. 

4. Sergei Bobrov (1889– 1971), Rus sian poet, 

critic, and novelist. 

5. Published in Rus sian in 1923. 

6. Boris Tomashevsky, “Pyatistopny iamb Pushkina,” 

Ocherki po poetike Pushkina [Essays on the 

Poetics of Pushkin] (Berlin, 1923) [Eichenbaum’s 

note]. 

7. Boris Tomashevsky, “Problema stikhotvornovo 

ritma,” Literaturnaya mysl [Literary Thought] 2 

(1922) [Eichenbaum’s note]. 

8. Published in Rus sian in 1925.


nature of verse is not fully explained by a single distinguishing feature, 

that poetry exists in “secondary” features, that a recognizable rhythm 

exists alongside meter, that poetry can be created by imposing a pattern 

on only these secondary features, and that speech without meter may 

sound like poetry. 

The important idea of a “rhythmic impulse” (which had figured earlier in 

Brik’s work) with a general rhythmic function is maintained here: 

Rhythmic devices may participate in various degrees in the creation of 

an artistic- rhythmic effect; this or that device may dominate various 

works— this or that means may be the dominant. The use of a given 

rhythmic device determines the character of the par tic u lar rhythm of 

the work. On this basis poetry may be classified as accented- metrical 

poetry (e.g., the description of the Battle of Poltava 9 ), intoned- melodic 

poetry (the verses of Zhukovsky), or harmonic poetry (common during 

the recent years of Rus sian Symbolism). 

Poetic form, so understood, is not contrasted with anything outside itself— 

with a “content” which has been laboriously set inside this “form”— but is 

understood as the genuine content of poetic speech. Thus the very idea of 

form, as it had been understood in earlier works, emerged with a new and 

more adequate meaning. 

7. Toward a More Complete Prosody 

In his essay “On Czech Versification” Roman Jakobson pointed out new 

problems in the general theory of poetic rhythm. 1 He opposed the [earlier] 

theory that “verse adapts itself completely to the spirit of the language,” that 

is, that “form does not resist the material [it shapes]” with the theory that 

“poetic form is the or ga nized coercion of language.” He applied this refinement 

of the more orthodox view— a refinement in keeping with the formalist 

method— to the question of the difference between the phonetic qualities of 

practical language and those of poetic language. Although Jakubinsky had 

noted that the dissimilation of liquid consonants 2 is relatively infrequent in 

poetry, Jakobson showed that it existed in both poetic and practical language 

but that in practical language it is “accidental”; in poetic language it is, “so 

to speak, contrived; these are two distinct phenomena.” 

In the same essay Jakobson also clarified the principle distinction between 

emotional and poetic language (a distinction he had previously considered 

in his first book, Modern Rus sian Poetry): 

Although poetry may use the methods of emotive language, it uses them 

only for its own purposes. The similarities between the two kinds of language 

and the use of poetic language in the way that emotive language is 

used frequently leads to the assumption that the two are identical. The 

9. In Pushkin’s epic Poltava (1829); in 1709 Russian 

forces led by Peter I defeated the troops of 

Charles VII of Sweden at Poltava, in Ukraine. 

1. Roman Jakobson, O cheshskom stikhe preimuschestvenno 

v sopostavlenii s russkim (Berlin, 

1923) [Eichenbaum’s note]. 

2. Consonants, such as En glish l and r, that are 

articulated without friction and can be sustained 

indefinitely.


assumption is mistaken because it fails to consider the radical difference 

of function between the two kinds of language. 

In this connection Jakobson refuted the attempts of [Maurice] Grammont 3 

and other prosodists to explain the phonetic structure of poetry in terms 

either of onomatopoeia or of the emotional connection between sounds and 

images. “Phonetic structure,” he wrote, “is not always a structure of audible 

images, nor is a structure of audible images always a method of emotional 

language.” Jakobson’s book was typical because it constantly went beyond 

the limits of its par tic u lar, special theme (the prosody of Czech verse) and 

shed light on general questions about the theory of poetic language and 

verse. Thus his book ends with a whole essay on Mayakovsky, an essay 

complemented by his earlier piece on Khlebnikov. 

In my own work on Anna Akhmatova 4 I also attempted to raise basic theoretical 

questions about the theory of verse— questions of the relation of 

rhythm to syntax and intonation, the relation of the sound of verse to its 

articulation, and lastly, the relation of poetic diction to semantics. Referring 

to a book which Yury Tynyanov was then preparing, I pointed out that “as 

words get into verse they are, as it were, taken out of ordinary speech. They 

are surrounded by a new aura of meaning and perceived not against the background 

of speech in general but against the background of poetic speech.” I 

also indicated that the formation of collateral meanings, which disrupts ordinary 

verbal associations, is the chief peculiarity of the semantics of poetry. 

Until then, the original connection between the formal method and linguistics 

had been growing considerably weaker. The difference that had 

developed between our problems was so great that we no longer needed the 

special support of the linguists, especially the support of those who were 

psychologically oriented. In fact, some of the work of the linguists was 

objectionable in principle. Tynyanov’s The Problem of Poetic Language, 5 

which had appeared just then, emphasized the difference between the 

study of psychological linguistics and the study of poetic language and 

style. This book showed the intimate relation that exists between the meanings 

of words and the poetic structure itself; it added new meaning to the 

idea of poetic rhythm and initiated the Formalists’ investigation not only of 

acoustics and syntax, but also of the shades of meaning peculiar to poetic 

speech. In the introduction Tynyanov says: 

The study of poetry has of late been quite rewarding. Undoubtedly the 

prospect in the near future is for development in the whole field, 

although we all remember the systematic beginning of the study. But 

the study of poetry has been kept isolated from questions of poetic language 

and style; the study of the latter is kept isolated from the study of 

the former. The impression is given that neither the poetic language 

itself nor the poetic style itself has any connection with poetry, that the 

one does not depend upon the other. The idea of “poetic language,” 

which was advanced not so long ago and is now changing, undoubtedly 

invited a certain looseness by its breadth and by the vagueness of its 

content, a content based on psychological linguistics. 

3. French linguist (1865– 1946). 

4. Boris Eichenbaum, Anna Akhmatova (Petrograd, 


5. Yury Tynyanov, Problema stikhotvornovo yazyka 

(Leningrad, 1924) [Eichenbaum’s note].


Among the general questions of poetics revived and illuminated by this 

book, that of the idea of the “material” is most fundamental. The generally 

accepted view saw an opposition between form and content; when the distinction 

was made purely verbal, it lost its meaning. In fact, as I have 

already mentioned, our view gave form the significance of a thing complete 

in itself and strengthened it by considering the work of art in relation to its 

purpose. Our concept of form required no complement— except that other, 

artistically insignificant, kind of form. Tynyanov showed that the materials 

of verbal art were neither all alike nor all equally important, that “one feature 

may be prominent at the expense of the rest, so that the remainder is 

deformed and sometimes degraded to the level of a neutral prop.” Hence 

the conclusion that “the idea of ‘material’ does not lie beyond the limits of 

form; the material itself is a formal element. To confuse it with external 

structural features is a mistake.” After this, Tynyanov could make the 

notion of form more complex by showing that form is dynamic: 

The unity of the work is not a closed, symmetrical whole, but an unfolding, 

dynamic whole. Its elements are not static indications of equality 

and complexity, but always dynamic indications of correlation and integration. 

The form of literary works must be thought of as dynamic. 

Rhythm is here presented as the fundamental specific factor which permeates 

all the elements of poetry. The objective sign of poetic rhythm is the 

establishment of a rhythmic group whose unity and richness exist side by 

side with each other. And again, Tynyanov affirms the principal distinction 

between prose and poetry: 

Poetry, as opposed to prose, tends toward unity and richness ranged 

around an uncommon object. This very “uncommonness” prevents the 

main point of the poem from being smoothed over. Indeed, it asserts the 

object with a new force. . . . Any element of prose brought into the poetic 

pattern is transformed into verse by that feature of it which asserts its 

function and which thus has two aspects: the emphasis of the structure— 

the versification— and the deformation of the uncommon object. 

Tynyanov also raises the question of semantics: “In verse are not the ordinary 

semantic meanings of the words so distorted (a fact which makes 

complete paraphrase impossible) that the usual principles governing their 

arrangement no longer apply?” The entire second part of Tynyanov’s book 

answers this question by defining the precise relation between rhythm and 

semantics. The facts show clearly that oral pre sen ta tions are unified in part 

by rhythm. “This is shown in a more forceful and more compact integration 

of connectives than occurs in ordinary speech; words are made correlative 

by their positions”; prose lacks this feature. 

Thus the Formalists abandoned Potebnya’s theory and accepted the conclusions 

connected with it on a new basis, and a new perspective opened on 

to the theory of verse. Tynyanov’s work permitted us to grasp even the 

remotest implications of these new problems. It became clear even to those 

only casually acquainted with the Opoyaz that the essence of our work consisted 

not in some kind of static “formal method,” but in a study of the 

specific peculiarities of verbal art— we were not advocates of a method, but 

students of an object. Again, Tynyanov stated this:


The object of a study claiming to be a study of art ought to be so specific 

that it is distinguished from other areas of intellectual activity and uses 

them for its own materials and tools. Each work of art represents a 

complex interaction of many factors; consequently, the job of the student 

is the definition of the specific character of this interaction. 

8. Style, Genre, and Historical Criticism 

Earlier I noted that the problem of the diffusion and change of form— the 

problem of literary evolution— is raised naturally along with theoretical 

problems. The problem of literary evolution arises in connection with a 

reconsideration of Veselovsky’s view of skaz motifs and devices; the answer 

(“new form is not to express new content, but to replace old form”) led to a 

new understanding of form. If form is understood as the very content, constantly 

changing according to its dependence upon previous “images,” then 

we naturally had to approach it without abstract, readymade, unalterable, 

classical schemes; and we had to consider specifically its historical sense 

and significance. The approach developed its own kind of dual perspective: 

the perspective of theoretical study (like Shklovsky’s “Development of Plot” 

and my “Verse Melody”), which centered on a given theoretical problem 

and its applicability to the most diverse materials, and the perspective of 

historical studies— studies of literary evolution as such. The combination 

of these two perspectives, both organic to the subsequent development of 

the formal school, raised a series of new and very complex problems, many 

of which are still unsolved and even undefined. 

Actually, the original attempt of the Formalists to take a par tic u lar structural 

device and to establish its identity in diverse materials became an 

attempt to differentiate, to understand, the function of a device in each given 

case. This notion of functional significance was gradually pushed toward the 

foreground and the original idea of the device pushed into the background. 

This kind of sorting out of its own general ideas and principles has been 

characteristic of our work throughout the evolution of the formal method. 

We have no dogmatic position to bind us and shut us off from facts. We do 

not answer for our schematizations; they may require change, refinement, or 

correction when we try to apply them to previously unknown facts. Work on 

specific materials compelled us to speak of functions and thus to revise our 

idea of the device. The theory itself demanded that we turn to history. 

Here again we were confronted with the traditional academic sciences 

and the preferences of critics. In our student days the academic history of 

literature was limited chiefly to biographical and psychological studies of 

various writers— only the “greats,” of course. Critics no longer made attempts 

to construct a history of Rus sian literature as a whole, attempts which evidenced 

the intention of bringing the great historical materials into a system; 

nevertheless, the traditions established by earlier histories (like A. N. 

Pypin’s 6 History of Rus sian Literature) retained their scholarly authority, the 

more so because the following generation had decided not to pursue such 

broad themes. Meanwhile, the chief role was played by such general and 

6. Aleksandr N. Pypin (1833– 1904), Rus sian literary historian; his History was published in Rus sian in 

1898– 99.


somewhat vague notions as “realism” and “romanticism” (realism was said to 

be better than romanticism); evolution was understood as gradual perfection, 

as progress (from romanticism to realism); succession [of literary 

schools] as the peaceful transfer of the inheritance from father to son. But 

generally, there was no notion of literature as such; material taken from the 

history of social movements, from biography, etc. had replaced it entirely. 

This primitive historicism, which led away from literature, naturally provoked 

the Symbolist theoreticians and critics into a denial of any kind of 

historicism. Their own discussions of literature, consequently, developed 

into impressionistic “études” 7 and “silhouettes,” and they indulged in a 

widespread “modernization” of old writers, transforming them into “eternal 

companions.” The history of literature was silently (and sometimes aloud) 

declared unnecessary. 

We had to demolish the academic tradition and to eliminate the bias of 

the journalists. 8 We had to advance against the first a new understanding of 

literary evolution and of literature itself— without the idea of progress and 

peaceful succession, without the ideas of realism and romanticism, without 

materials foreign to literature— as a specific order of phenomena, a specific 

order of material. We had to act against the second by pointing out concrete 

historical facts, fluctuating and changing forms, by pointing to the necessity 

of taking into account the specific functions of this or that device— in a 

word, we had to draw the line between the literary work as a definite historical 

fact and a free interpretation of it from the standpoint of contemporary 

literary needs, tastes, or interests. Thus the basic passion for our 

historical- literary work had to be a passion for destruction and negation, and 

such was the original tone of our theoretical attacks; our work later assumed 

a calmer note when we went on to solutions of par tic u lar problems. 

That is why the first of our historical- literary pronouncements came in the 

form of theses expressed almost against our will in connection with some 

specific material. A par tic u lar question would unexpectedly lead to the formulation 

of a general problem, a problem that inextricably mixed theoretical 

and historical considerations. In this sense Tynyanov’s Dostoevsky and Gogol 

and Shklovsky’s Rozanov 9 were typical. 

Tynyanov’s basic problem was to show that Dostoevsky’s The Village of 

Stepanchikovo is a parody, that behind its first level is hidden a second— it is 

a parody of Gogol’s Correspondence with Friends. 1 But his treatment of this 

par tic u lar question was overshadowed by a whole theory of parody, a theory 

of parody as a stylistic device (stylized parody) and as one of the manifestations 

(having great historical- literary significance) of the dialectical development 

of literary groups. With this arose the problem of “succession” and 

“tradition” and, hence, the basic problems of literary evolution were posed: 

When one speaks of “literary tradition” or “succession” . . . usually one 

implies a certain kind of direct line uniting the younger and older representatives 

of a known literary branch. Yet the matter is much more complicated. 

There is no continuing direct line; there is rather a departure, 

7. Studies (French). 

8. A derogatory reference to impressionist and 

symbolist critics. 

9. Yury Tynyanov, Dostoevsky i Gogol (Petrograd, 

1921); Victor Shklovsky, Rozanov (Petrograd, 


1. An 1847 collection of real and fictitious letters; 

Dostoyevsky’s short novel was published in 1859.


a pushing away from the known point— a struggle. . . . Any literary succession 

is first of all a struggle, a destruction of old values and a reconstruction 

of old elements. 

“Literary evolution” was complicated by the notion of struggle, of periodic 

uprisings, and so lost its old suggestion of peaceful and gradual development. 

Against this background, the literary relationship between Dostoevsky 

and Gogol was shown to be that of a complicated struggle. 

In his Rozanov, Shklovsky showed, almost in the absence of basic themes, 

a whole theory of literary evolution which even then reflected the current 

discussion of such problems in Opoyaz. Shklovsky showed that literature 

moves forward in a broken line: 

In each literary epoch there is not one literary school, but several. They 

exist simultaneously, with one of them representing the high point of 

the current orthodoxy. The others exist uncanonized, mutely; in Pushkin’s 

time, for example, the courtly tradition of [Wilhelm] Kuchelbecker 

and [Alexander] Greboyedov 2 existed simultaneously with the tradition 

of Rus sian vaudev ille verse and with such other traditions as that of the 

pure adventure novel of Bulgarin. 3 

The moment the old art is canonized, new forms are created on a lower 

level. A “young line” is created which 

grows up to replace the old, as the vaudev illist Belopyatkin is transformed 

into a Nekrasov (see Brik’s discussion of the relationship); a direct descendent 

of the eigh teenth century, Tolstoy, creates a new novel (see the work 

of Boris Eichenbaum); Blok makes the themes and times of the gypsy 

ballad acceptable, and Chekhov 4 introduces the “alarm clock” into Russian 

literature. Dostoevsky introduced the devices of the dime novel into 

the mainstream of literature. Each new literary school heralds a revolution, 

something like the appearance of a new class. But, of course, this is 

only an analogy. The vanquished line is not obliterated, it does not cease 

to exist. It is only knocked from the crest; it lies dormant and may again 

arise as a perennial pretender to the throne. Moreover, in reality the matter 

is complicated by the fact that the new hegemony is usually not a pure 

revival of previous forms but is made more complex by the presence of 

features of the younger schools and with features, now secondary, inherited 

from its pre de ces sors on the throne. 

Shklovsky is discussing the dynamism of genres, and he interprets Rozanov’s 

books as embodiments of a new genre, as a new type of novel in which the 

parts are unconnected by motivation. “Thematically, Rozanov’s books are 

characterized by the elevation of new themes; compositionally, by the 

revealed device.” As part of this general theory, we introduced the notion of 

the “dialectical self- creation 5 of new forms,” that is, hidden in the new form 

we saw both analogies with other kinds of cultural development and proof 

2. Kuchelbecker (1797– 1846) and Greboyedov 

(1795– 1829), Rus sian writers. 

3. Faddey Bulgarin (1789– 1859), Polish- born 

Rus sian pop u lar novelist, journalist, and critic. 

4. Anton Chekhov (1860– 1904), Rus sian dramatist 

and short story writer; the reference is to The 

Alarm Clock, a comic newspaper. 

5. That is, creation through reciprocal interaction 

of a thing and its opposite.


of the in de pen dence of the phenomena of literary evolution. In a simplified 

form, this theory quickly changed hands and, as always happens, became a 

simple and fixed scheme— very handy for critics. Actually, we have here 

only a general outline of evolution surrounded by a whole series of complicated 

conditions. From this general outline the Formalists moved on to a 

more consistent solution of historical- literary problems and facts, specifying 

and refining their original theoretical premises. 

9. Literary History and Literary Evolution 

Given our understanding of literary evolution as the dialectical change of 

forms, we did not go back to the study of those materials which had held 

the central position in the oldfashioned historical- literary work. We studied 

literary evolution insofar as it bore a distinctive character and only to 

the extent that it stood alone, quite in de pen dent of other aspects of culture. 

In other words, we stuck exclusively to facts in order not to pass into an 

endless number of indefinite “connections” and “correspondences” which 

would do nothing at all to explain literary evolution. We did not take up 

questions of the biography and psychology of the artist because we assumed 

that these questions, in themselves serious and complex, must take their 

places in other sciences. We felt it important to find indications of historical 

regularity in evolution— that is why we ignored all that seemed, from 

this point of view, “circumstantial,” not concerned with [literary] history. 

We were interested in the very pro cess of evolution, in the very dynamics of 

literary form, insofar as it was possible to observe them in the facts of the 

past. For us, the central problem of the history of literature is the problem 

of evolution without personality— the study of literature as a self- formed 

social phenomenon. As a result, we found extremely significant both the 

question of the formation and changes of genres and the question of how 

“second- rate” and “pop u lar” literature contributed to the formation of 

genres. Here we had only to distinguish that pop u lar literature which prepared 

the way for the formation of new genres from that which arose out of 

their decay and which offered material for the study of historical inertia. 

On the other hand, we were not interested in the past, in isolated historical 

facts, as such; we did not busy ourselves with the “restoration” of 

this or that epoch because we happened to like it. History gave us what the 

present could not— a stable body of material. But, precisely for this reason, 

we approached it with a stock of theoretical problems and principles suggested 

in part by the facts of contemporary literature. The Formalists, then, 

characteristically had a close interest in contemporary literature and also 

reconciled criticism and scholarship. The earlier literary historians had, to 

a great extent, kept themselves aloof from contemporary literature; the 

Symbolists had subordinated scholarship to criticism. We saw in the history 

of literature not so much a special theoretical subject as a special 

approach, a special cross section of literature. The character of our 

historical- literary work involved our being drawn not only to historical conclusions, 

but also to theoretical conclusions— to the posing of new theoretical 

problems and to the testing of old. 

From 1922 to 1924 a whole series of Formalist studies of literary history 

was written, many of which, because of contemporary market conditions,


remain unpublished and are known only as reports. * * * 6 There is, of course, 

not space enough here to speak of such works in detail. They usually took up 

“secondary” writers (those who form the background of literature) and carefully 

explained the traditions of their work, noting changes in genres, styles, 

and so on. As a result, many forgotten names and facts came to light, current 

estimates were shown to be inaccurate, traditional ideas changed, and, 

chiefly, the very pro cess of literary evolution became clearer. The working 

out of this material has only begun. A new series of problems is before us: 

further differentiation of theoretical and historical literary ideas, introduction 

of new material, posing new questions, and so on. 

I shall conclude with a general summary. The evolution of the formal 

method, which I have tried to present, has the look of a sequential development 

of theoretical principles— apart from the individual roles each of us 

played. Actually, the work of the Opoyaz group was genuinely collective. It 

was this way, obviously, because from the very beginning we understood 

the historical nature of our task; we did not see it as the personal affair of 

this or that individual. This was our chief connection with the times. Science 

itself is still evolving, and we are evolving with it. I shall indicate 

briefly the evolution of the formal method during these ten years: 

1. From the original outline of the conflict of poetic language with practical 

we proceeded to differentiate the idea of practical language by its 

various functions (Jakubinsky) and to delimit the methods of poetic and 

emotional languages (Jakobson). Along with this we became interested in 

studying oratorical speech because it was close to practical speech but distinguished 

from it by function, and we spoke about the necessity of a revival 

of the poetic of rhetoric. 

2. From the general idea of form, in its new sense, we proceeded to the 

idea of technique, and from here, to the idea of function. 

3. From the idea of poetic rhythm as opposed to meter we proceeded to 

the idea of rhythm as a constructive element in the total poem and thus to 

an understanding of verse as a special form of speech having special linguistic 

(syntactical, lexical, and semantic) features. 

4. From the idea of plot as structure we proceeded to an understanding 

of material in terms of its motivation, and from here to an understanding of 

material as an element participating in the construction but subordinate to 

the character of the dominant formal idea. 

5. From the ascertainment of a single device applicable to various materials 

we proceeded to differentiate techniques according to function and 

from here to the question of the evolution of form— that is, to the problem 

of historical- literary study. 

A whole new series of problems faces us, as Tynyanov’s latest essay, “Literary 

Fact,” shows. 7 Here the question of the relation between life and literature 

is posed, a question which many persons “answer” on the basis of a 

simple- minded dilettantism. Examples of how life becomes literature are 

shown and, conversely, of how literature passes into life: 

During the period of its deterioration a given genre is shoved from the 

center toward the periphery, but in its place, from the trivia of litera- 

6. This deletion by the translators contains a long 

list of various formalist works. 

7. Lef [Left] 2.6 (1925) [Eichenbaum’s note].

T. S. ELIOT / 951 

ture, from literature’s backyard, and from life itself, new phenomena 

flow into the center. 

Although I deliberately called this essay “The Theory of the ‘Formal 

Method,’ ” I gave, obviously, a sketch of its evolution. We have no theory that 

can be laid out as a fixed, readymade system. For us theory and history 

merge not only in words, but in fact. We are too well trained by history itself 

to think that it can be avoided. When we feel that we have a theory that 

explains everything, a readymade theory explaining all past and future 

events and therefore needing neither evolution nor anything like it— then we 

must recognize that the formal method has come to an end, that the spirit of 

scientific investigation has departed from it. As yet, that has not happened. 

1926, 1927 

T. S. ELIOT 

1888–1965 

T. S. Eliot is the central Anglo- American poet and critic of the twentieth century. He 

is the author of the most influential poem, The Waste Land (1922), and the most 

authoritative literary essays and reviews. In the history of literary theory and criticism, 

Eliot belongs— with samuel johnson, samuel taylor coleridge, and matthew 

arnold— among the poet- critics who have defined the critical standards of an era, 

recast the literary tradition, and established key terms for analysis and evaluation. 

So im mense was Eliot’s authority that the poet Dylan Thomas referred to him as 

“the Pope” and the critic Delmore Schwartz dubbed him a “literary dictator.” 

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the seventh and youn gest 

child of Henry Ware Eliot, a businessman, and Charlotte Stearns Eliot, an amateur 

poet and volunteer social worker. From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy 

in St. Louis, a preparatory school where his studies included Greek and Latin, 

rhetoric, French, and German, and during 1905– 06 he was a student at Milton 

Academy, in Milton, Massachusetts. In 1906 he entered Harvard University, receiving 

his bachelor’s degree in 1909 and his master’s in 1910. 

At Harvard, Eliot became keenly interested in philosophy and comparative 

literature—dante’s Divine Comedy was a sublime discovery for him. Important influences 

on his intellectual development include the phi los o pher, poet, and humanist 

George Santayana, from whom Eliot took a course on modern philosophy, and the 

literary scholar Irving Babbitt, a relentless foe of Romanticism, with whom Eliot studied 

nineteenthcentury French literary criticism. A strong influence on his early verse 

was the theory of the dynamic flux and movement of consciousness propounded by 

the French phi los o pher Henri Bergson (1859– 1941). But for Eliot’s poetry and criticism, 

the crucial experience of his Harvard years was his reading in December 1908 

of Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), which introduced 

French symbolist poetry to En glish and American readers. Eliot was busy writing 

verse himself, publishing some of it in The Harvard Advocate; between 1909 and 

1911, he worked on two of his best poems, “Portrait of a Lady” and “The Love Song 

of J. Alfred Prufrock,” drawing on the style of irony and symbolism he had encountered 

in the nineteenthcentury French poets— especially charles baudelaire, 

Arthur Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue— whom Symons quoted and discussed.

952 / T. S. ELIOT 

Eliot was a self- made modernist; as his friend Ezra Pound later said, Eliot had 

“trained himself and modernized himself on his own.” In his introduction to Pound’s 

Selected Poems (1928), Eliot made much the same point: “the form in which I began 

to write, in 1908 or 1909, was directly drawn from the study of Laforgue together 

with the later Elizabethan drama; and I do not know anyone who started from 

exactly that point.” He read widely, modifying (and sometimes parodying) the verbal 

techniques of other poets. 

After a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, Eliot returned to Harvard to pursue graduate 

work and serve as a teaching assistant. For his dissertation topic, he focused on 

the writings of the British idealist phi los o pher F. H. Bradley, the author of Appearance 

and Reality (1893). His research led him to the University of Marburg in Germany, 

in the summer of 1914; but as the threat of world war loomed, he relocated to 

Merton College, Oxford. He was to settle in En gland permanently. 

In September 1914 Eliot met Pound, who quickly became his adviser, editor, and 

literary agent. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published in Poetry magazine 

in June 1915; in the following month, Eliot married Vivien (sometimes Vivienne) 

Haigh- Wood. The marriage proved unhappy and, as Vivien’s mental and physical illnesses 

deepened in the 1920s and 1930s, it was harrowing for both of them. His 

despair is reflected in the torment, bitterness, and isolation expressed in much of his 

poetry. “No artist produces great art,” Eliot claimed, “by a deliberate attempt to 

express his personality. He expresses his personality indirectly through concentrating 

upon a task which is a task in the same sense as the making of an efficient engine or 

the turning of a jug or a table- leg” (Selected Essays, 1917– 1932). From one angle, 

Eliot’s work is itself impersonal and objective; it is filled— especially the poetry— with 

masks, role- playing, and multiple voices. Yet it is saturated everywhere, too, with displaced 

personal pain, regret, sexual desire, and emotional and spiritual yearning. 

For two years Eliot taught in grammar schools, gave lectures on literature, and 

wrote dense, technical articles and reviews on philosophy. In March 1917, tired of 

makeshift teaching, he took a job at Lloyd’s Bank. He held this position for the next 

eight years, while laboring on his poetry— his first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, 

appeared in 1917— and on literary criticism, publishing striking essays and 

book reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and other leading periodicals. A 

number are included in The Sacred Wood (1920), a landmark collection of criticism 

and theory. 

Work and worry brought Eliot near a ner vous breakdown, and to recuperate he 

went first to Margate, in southeast En gland, and then to a sanatorium in Lausanne, 

Switzerland, where he worked on the draft of a long poem he had started years earlier. 

In Paris, on his way back to London, he showed the draft to Ezra Pound, who 

edited it skillfully and turned it (in Eliot’s words) from “a jumble of good and bad 

passages into a poem”—The Waste Land. Allusive, experimental, and technically 

daring, showily learned and archly witty, The Waste Land is a primary text of literary 

modernism. The poem was published in The Criterion— a new literary and 

cultural quarterly edited by Eliot— in October 1922. For many writers, critics, 

intellectuals, and general readers, The Waste Land evoked the waste and sterility of 

a Western world ravaged by the horrors of World War I, which had brought carnage 

on an unpre ce dented scale: more than 8.5 million soldiers and perhaps 13 million 

civilians had died. The Waste Land is not a poem about the war, but the war’s 

trauma informs it from beginning to end. 

Eliot was a literary and cultural force throughout the 1920s and 1930s. As editor 

of the quarterly The Criterion until the journal’s demise in 1939, he published leading 

En glish modernists (including virginia woolf and James Joyce) and was the 

first to publish in En glish such significant Eu ro pe an writers as Jean Cocteau and 

Marcel Proust. In 1925 Eliot accepted a position in the firm of Faber and Gwyer 

(later, Faber and Faber), which became a leading publisher of poets from Ezra 

Pound to Sylvia Plath. He began writing plays in the 1930s, with Murder in the

T. S. ELIOT / 953 

Cathedral (1935), and he enjoyed considerable pop u lar success with his dramas of 

the 1950s, including The Cocktail Party (1950). 

In 1927 Eliot became a British citizen and joined the Church of En gland; in the 

following year, he announced in For Lancelot Andrewes, a collection of critical essays, 

that he was “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo- Catholic in religion.” 

Eliot was conservative, even reactionary, and sometimes he drifted close to 

fascism and into racism and anti- Semitism. In his social and cultural writings and 

in much of his literary criticism of the 1930s and 1940s, Eliot is austere and sometimes 

censorious in attitude and pontificating in tone. From 1932 to 1933, he held 

the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard, where he delivered the 

lectures that became The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933). Much of his 

late cultural criticism, gloomily resentful and hectoring, is today unread, but it does 

not diminish the force and influence of the best of Eliot’s poetry and literary criticism. 

In 1948 he was awarded the Order of Merit by King George VI and the Nobel 

Prize in Literature. 

Our first selection, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), begins: “In 

En glish writing we seldom speak of tradition.” The poise and authority of Eliot’s 

critical voice, backed up by his masterful per for mances as a poet, soon made “tradition” 

a key topic for poets, critics, intellectuals, and teachers of literature in the 

academy. Two of the canonical texts of modern Anglo- American literary criticism, 

F. R. Leavis’s Revaluation: Tradition and Development in En glish Poetry (1936) and 

cleanth brooks’s Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), were expansions of 

Eliot’s ideas about tradition, and many other books (and countless syllabi) were 

similarly based on the terms that he had articulated. 

For Eliot, each poem exists within the tradition from which it takes shape and 

which it, in turn, redefines. Thus tradition is both something to which the poet 

must be “faithful” and something that he or she actively makes: novelty emerges out 

of being steeped in tradition. Some later critics, such as harold bloom, have characterized 

Eliot as a “weak” poet- critic because of the priority that he assigns to 

tradition, but in doing so they overlook the extent to which the poet challenges and 

revises the tradition to which he or she defers: “What happens when a new work of 

art is created,” he says, “is something that happens simultaneously to all the works 

of art that preceded it.” Eliot has also been criticized for picturing tradition as variously 

a “simultaneous order,” a “living whole,” an “ideal order,” and the “mind of 

Eu rope,” thereby idealizing its conflicts, contradictions, and omissions. 

“The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) is another central work in the history of modern 

criticism. Almost as soon as it appeared, the difficult seventeenth- century metaphysical 

poets— John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and their contemporaries, whom Eliot 

described as “more often named than read, and more often read than profitably 

studied”— became models of good poetry. Eliot’s essay is condensed in its argument, 

highly suggestive, and extraordinarily ambitious. In it he deploys the evaluative terms 

that in the eigh teenth century Samuel Johnson had used against the metaphysical 

poets (“the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”) to elevate the 

poets whom his eminent precursor had assailed, insisting that modern poetry must be 

difficult. He packs “The Metaphysical Poets” with unelaborated argument and assertion, 

stressing in par tic u lar the seventeenth century’s disastrous “dissociation of 

sensibility” into “thought” and “feeling.” In the pro cess, he illustrates how “tradition” 

is made, is forced, into the form that later generations of writers require. Many of 

Eliot’s readers took his generalizations as literal truths, and even skeptics, such as 

the En glish critic Frank Kermode (see The Romantic Image, 1957), judged that refuting 

Eliot demanded full- scale scholarly and critical demonstration. 

Eliot liked being a troublemaker, saying outrageous things from on high and 

often not quite clarifying whether he meant them seriously. In “Hamlet and His 

Problems” (1920), for instance, Eliot presents his brilliant theory of the “objective 

correlative”: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an

954 / T. S. ELIOT 

‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events 

which shall be the formula for that par tic u lar emotion; such that, when the external 

facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is 

immediately evoked.” Eliot uses Hamlet as a test case, surprisingly labeling the play 

an “artistic failure” precisely because in it the “emotions” that Shakespeare evokes 

are “in excess” of the facts of the story, the dramatic action. It is a perverse judgment, 

in which Eliot may not have believed, but which he uttered with such assurance 

that it is still cited and debated. 

Eliot was adept at formulating the nature and function of literary criticism, and 

the New Critics (such as john crowe ransom and Brooks) invoked his critical 

practice as a model. He described criticism as “the disinterested exercise of intelligence 

. . . the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste . . . the common 

pursuit of true judgment,” and the New Critics followed his injunction to center 

arguments in analysis of specific passages and poems. “Comparison and analysis,” 

Eliot said, “are the chief tools of the critic,” enabling a precise perception of literary 

effects, relationships, and values. By the 1950s, Eliot was lamenting the rise of 

copiously detailed interpretation of texts— which he called “lemon- squeezing”—but 

more than anyone else he had launched the new movement. “Honest criticism and 

sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry,” Eliot 

states in section II of “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In such sentences, we can 

see the origins of the New Criticism, with its abiding concern for the words on the 

page— in R. P. Blackmur’s formulation, “the words and the motions of the words . . . 

all the technical devices of literature.” 

For many critics in the 1970s and after, Eliot— Anglican, conservative, New 

Critical formalist— has been the archenemy. Bloom, for example, has derided Eliot’s 

poetry and criticism and sought to revitalize the Romantic tradition that Eliot had 

shunned. Explicitly or implicitly, many others arguing for the inclusion of women 

and minority writers within the literary canon have attacked his judgments about 

literary and cultural tradition. Eliot’s and the New Critics’ “tradition,” they maintain, 

is narrow and elitist, enshrining a limited range of authors and presenting to 

students a partial, misleading literary history. 

While these critics have exposed Eliot’s failings, they have not lessened his importance. 

Now that the critical sifting has been done, it may be possible to return to 

Eliot in order to see anew, and appreciate again, the scale of his accomplishments in 

poetry and prose. Literary modernism is unimaginable without Eliot, and the best of 

his work has remained extraordinarily influential. 

bibliography 

Among Eliot’s books of criticism, the key texts are The Sacred Wood (1920), Selected 

Essays (3d ed., 1972), and On Poetry and Poets (1957). Other important publications 

include Homage to John Dryden (1924), in which appear the brilliant essays “John 

Dryden,” “The Metaphysical Poets,” and “Andrew Marvell.” A good selection is 

Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode (1975). There are hundreds of 

reviews, introductions to books, essays, and other critical pieces that have not yet 

been collected. For further insight into Eliot’s development as a critic, one should 

also consult the posthumous book The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, edited by 

Ronald Schuchard (1993). 

The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1 (covering 1898 to 1922), expertly edited by his 

second wife, Valerie Eliot (1988), is an essential source. Eliot did not want to be 

made the subject of a biography, and his estate has so far been true to his wishes: 

much source material is either sealed or is unavailable for citation. Despite these 

limitations, Peter Ackroyd’s T. S. Eliot (1984) is a valuable, crisply written book. 

Also useful are Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s Early Years (1977) and Eliot’s New Life 

(1988); she presents Eliot’s life as a spiritual journey and is perceptive on the

Tradition and the Individual Talent / 955 

poetry, but pays little attention to the criticism. Tony Sharpe, T. S. Eliot: A Literary 

Life (1991), is also recommended. 

A good place to begin study of Eliot is T. S. Eliot: Critical Assessments, edited by 

Graham Clarke (4 vols., 1990). The fourth volume includes commentaries on Eliot’s 

critical writings. A number of older studies, which include discussion of Eliot’s criticism, 

remain useful: F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay 

on the Nature of Poetry (1935; 3d ed., 1958); Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. 

Eliot (1959); Northrop Frye, T. S. Eliot (1967); and Bernard Bergonzi, T. S. Eliot 

(1972). 

On Eliot and the modernist movement in literature, see John D. Margolis, T. S. 

Eliot’s Intellectual Development, 1922– 1939 (1972); Piers Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual 

and Poetic Development, 1909– 1922 (1982); Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix 

of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth- Century Thought (1985); Louis 

Menand, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context (1987; 2d ed., 2007); 

T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, edited by Ronald Bush (1991), which includes 

a good essay by Michael North on Eliot and György Lukács; Gail McDonald, Learning 

to Be Modern: Pound, Eliot, and the American University (1993); and Jewel 

Spears Brooker, Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism 

(1994). Though somewhat dated in approach, C. K. Stead’s New Poetic: Yeats to 

Eliot (rev. ed., 1987) and Pound, Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Movement (1986) 

are informative and acute in judgment. Of the many collections of essays on Eliot, 

the best is the special issue of the Southern Review 21.4 (autumn 1985). 

The studies of Eliot’s criticism are disappointing, but some good work can be 

found in The Literary Criticism of T. S. Eliot: New Essays, edited by David Newton- 

Molina (1977). In T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism (1988), Richard Shusterman 

describes Eliot as a postmodernist and relates his work to that of Theodor 

Adorno, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, and other phi los o phers and theorists. The 

social, cultural, and economic contexts for Eliot’s poetry and criticism and the 

modernist movement are described in Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: 

Literary Elites and Public Culture (1998). T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, 

edited by Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding (2007), includes a number of cogent 

essays on “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” 

Other resources include The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, edited by A. D. 

Moody (1994); Caroline Behr, T. S. Eliot: A Chronology of His Life and Works 

(1983); and T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, edited by Michael Grant (1982). For 

bibliography, see Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (rev. ed., 1969); Mildred 

Martin, A Half- Century of Eliot Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and 

Articles in En glish, 1916– 1965 (1972); and Beatrice Ricks, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography 

of Secondary Works (1980). 

Tradition and the Individual Talent 

I 

In En glish writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally 

apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to ‘the tradition’ 

or to ‘a tradition’; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry 

of So- and- so is ‘traditional’ or even ‘too traditional’. Seldom, perhaps, does 

the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely 

approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing 

archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable 

to En glish ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science 

of archaeology.

956 / T. S. ELIOT 

Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or 

dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its 

own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings 

and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We 

know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has 

appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; 

we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are ‘more 

critical’ than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, 

as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might 

remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we 

should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we 

read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in 

their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process 

is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of 

his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of 

his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence 

of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his 

pre de ces sors, especially his immediate pre de ces sors; we endeavour to find 

something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach 

a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but 

the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, 

his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean 

the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity. 

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following 

the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence 

to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged. We have seen 

many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than 

repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be 

inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in 

the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to 

anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty- fifth year; and 

the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, 

but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely 

with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the 

literature of Eu rope from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of 

his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous 

order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the 

temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a 

writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely 

conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. 

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, 

his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead 

poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast 

and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, 

not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he 

shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created 

is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded 

it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, 

which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of 

art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives;


for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing 

order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, 

values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity 

between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of 

order, of the form of Eu ro pe an, of En glish literature will not find it preposterous 

that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present 

is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of 

great difficulties and responsibilities. 

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged 

by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not 

judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not 

judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which 

two things are mea sured by each other. To conform merely would be for the 

new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore 

not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable 

because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value— a test, it is true, 

which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible 

judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps 

individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly 

likely to find that it is one and not the other. 

To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to 

the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor 

can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he 

form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, 

the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a 

pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious 

of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most 

distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that 

art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He 

must be aware that the mind of Europe— the mind of his own country— a 

mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private 

mind— is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development 

which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either 

Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. 

1 That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is 

not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even 

an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the 

extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication 

in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present 

and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a 

way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show. 

Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so 

much more than they did’. Precisely, and they are that which we know. 

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for 

the métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous 

amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to 

the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning 

1. Artists of the late Paleolithic period who created the cave paintings discovered at La Madeleine, France. 

The epic poems attributed to Homer were composed ca. 8th century b.c.e.

958 / T. S. ELIOT 

deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in 

believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his 

necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine 

knowledge to what ever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, 

drawing- rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can 

absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired 

more essential history from Plutarch 2 than most men could from the whole 

British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop 

or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to 

develop this consciousness throughout his career. 

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment 

to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual 

self- sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. 

There remains to define this pro cess of depersonalization and its relation 

to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to 

approach the condition of science. I therefore invite you to consider, as a suggestive 

analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum 

is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide. 

II 

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet 

but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper 

critics and the susurrus of pop u lar repetition that follows, we shall hear the 

names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue- book knowledge 3 but 

the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. I have 

tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems 

by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of 

all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal 

theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an 

analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature 

one not precisely in any valuation of ‘personality’, not being necessarily more 

interesting, or having ‘more to say’, but rather by being a more finely perfected 

medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter 

into new combinations. 

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously 

mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form 

sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; 

nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and 

the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, 

and unchanged. 4 The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may 

partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, 

the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the 

2. Greek phi los o pher and biographer (ca. 50– ca. 

120 c.e.); his Lives of important Greeks and 

Romans provided Shakespeare with source material 

for his Roman plays. 

3. That is, the ability to name- drop, gleaned from 

the social register (or “blue book”). Also, a report 

on knowledge or an examination written in a blue 

note book. 

4. In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 

(1933), Eliot cited with approval an observation 

in an 1817 letter by the Romantic poet John 

Keats: “Men of Genius are great as certain etherial 

Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral 

intellect— but they have not any individuality, 

any determined Character.”


man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the 

mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. 

The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence 

of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The 

effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different 

in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one 

emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering 

for the writer in par tic u lar words or phrases or images, may be added to 

compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct 

use of any emotion what ever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of 

the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) 5 is a working up of the emotion evident in the 

situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained 

by considerable complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a 

feeling attaching to an image, which ‘came’, 6 which did not develop simply 

out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet’s 

mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet’s 

mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, 

phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite 

to form a new compound are present together. 

If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you 

see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely 

any semi- ethical criterion of ‘sublimity’ misses the mark. 7 For it is not the 

‘greatness’, the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity 

of the artistic pro cess, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion 

takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca 8 employs a 

definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different 

from what ever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression 

of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of 

Ulysses, 9 which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety 

is possible in the pro cess of transmutation of emotion: the murder of 

Agamemnon, 1 or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently 

closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon, 

the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in 

Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between 

art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of 

Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In 

either case there has been a fusion of elements. The ode of Keats 2 contains a 

number of feelings which have nothing par tic u lar to do with the nightingale, 

but which the nightingale, partly perhaps because of its attractive name, and 

partly because of its reputation, served to bring together. 

5. During his journey through hell in the Inferno 

(1321), dante alighieri meets his former master 

Brunetto Latini, whom he still admires, confined 

in the seventh circle (for committing sodomy). 

6. Dante likens Latini to the winner of the annual 

footrace in Verona. 

7. Eliot is seeking to distinguish his notion of the 

sublime not only from that of longinus and 

edmund burke, who stressed “greatness,” but 

also from that of matthew arnold, who had 

argued that the sublime effects of the highest 

poetry could and should function as a form of (or 

even a substitute for) religion. 

8. Illicit lovers, who were murdered by Francesca’s 

husband; Dante meets them in the second 

circle of hell (Inferno 6.38– 142). 

9. Ulysses, suffering in hell for his false counsel, 

describes to Dante the voyage— after his return 

to Ithaca— that ended in his death. 

1. The story of the Greek warrior king Agamemnon, 

murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, is told 

by the tragedian Aeschylus in Agamemnon (458 

b.c.e.). Shakespeare’s Othello was written in 

1603– 04. 

2. “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), by John Keats 

(1795– 1821).

960 / T. S. ELIOT 

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to 

the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning 

is, that the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a par tic u lar medium, 

which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and 

experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences 

which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, 

and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible 

part in the man, the personality. 

I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with 

fresh attention in the light— or darkness— of these observations: 

And now methinks I could e’en chide myself 

For doating on her beauty, though her death 

Shall be revenged after no common action. 

Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours 

For thee? For thee does she undo herself? 

Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships 

For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute? 

Why does yon fellow falsify highways, 

And put his life between the judge’s lips, 

To refine such a thing— keeps horse and men 

To beat their valours for her? . . . 3 

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination 

of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward 

beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted 

with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the 

dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone 

is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by 

the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a 

number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means 

superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion. 

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by par tic u lar 

events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His 

par tic u lar emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his 

poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions 

of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, 

in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; 

and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. 

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary 

ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not 

in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will 

serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe 

that ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ 4 is an inexact formula. For it is neither 

emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. 

It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, 

of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person 

would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does 

not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not ‘recol- 

3. Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), 

3.5.67– 78. Some scholars now credit this play, in 

whole or in part, to Thomas Middleton. 

4. Quoted from william wordsworth, Preface 

to Lyrical Ballads (1800; see above).

The Metaphysical Poets / 961 

lected’, and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is ‘tranquil’ only in that 

it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole 

story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious 

and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to 

be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors 

tend to make him ‘personal’. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an 

escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape 

from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions 

know what it means to want to escape from these things. 

III 

δϵ νους σως θειτερν τι καί παθϵ ς στιν. 5 

This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and 

confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible 

person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the 

poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual 

poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression 

of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can 

appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is an expression 

of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in 

the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot 

reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work 

to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in 

what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he 

is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living. 

1919 

The Metaphysical Poets 

By collecting these poems from the work of a generation more often named 

than read, and more often read than profitably studied, Professor Grierson 

has rendered a ser vice of some importance. 1 Certainly the reader will meet 

with many poems already preserved in other anthologies, at the same time 

that he discovers poems such as those of Aurelian Townshend or Lord Herbert 

of Cherbury here included. But the function of such an anthology as this 

is neither that of Professor Saintsbury’s admirable edition of Caroline poets 2 

nor that of the Oxford Book of En glish Verse. Mr. Grierson’s book is in itself a 

piece of criticism, and a provocation of criticism; and we think that he was 

right in including so many poems of Donne, elsewhere (though not in many 

editions) accessible, as documents in the case of ‘metaphysical poetry’. 3 The 

phrase has long done duty as a term of abuse, or as the label of a quaint and 

5. The mind is doubtless something more divine 

and unaffected (Greek). From aristotle, De 

Anima (On the Soul), 1.4, 408b. 

1. Eliot is reviewing the groundbreaking collection 

Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth 

Century: Donne to Butler (1921), edited by 

Herbert J. C. Grierson (1866– 1960). 

2. Minor Poets of the Caroline Period (1905– 21), 

3 vols., edited by George Saintsbury (1845– 1933). 

3. For the term, see samuel johnson, Life of 

Cowley (1783; above). John Donne (1572– 1631), 

En glish poet, prose writer, and clergyman.

962 / T. S. ELIOT 

pleasant taste. The question is to what extent the so- called metaphysicals 

formed a school (in our own time we should say a ‘movement’), and how far 

this so- called school or movement is a digression from the main current. 

Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult 

to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses. The poetry 

of Donne (to whom Marvell and Bishop King 4 are sometimes nearer than 

any of the other authors) is late Elizabethan, its feeling often very close to 

that of Chapman. The ‘courtly’ poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed 

liberally from the Latin; it expires in the next century with the sentiment 

and witticism of Prior. 5 There is finally the devotional verse of Herbert, 

Vaughan, and Crashaw (echoed long after by Christina Rossetti and Francis 

Thompson); 6 Crashaw, sometimes more profound and less sectarian than 

the others, has a quality which returns through the Elizabethan period to 

the early Italians. It is difficult to find any precise use of meta phor, simile, 

or other conceit, which is common to all the poets and at the same time 

important enough as an element of style to isolate these poets as a group. 

Donne, and often Cowley, 7 employ a device which is sometimes considered 

characteristically ‘metaphysical’; the elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) 

of a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can 

carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world 

to a chess- board through long stanzas (To Destiny), and Donne, with more 

grace, in A Valediction, 8 the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. 

But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a 

comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires 

considerable agility on the part of the reader. 

On a round ball 

A workeman that hath copies by, can lay 

An Eu rope, Afrique, and an Asia, 

And quickly make that, which was nothing, All, 

So doth each teare, 

Which thee doth weare, 

A globe, yea world by that impression grow, 

Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow 

This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so. 9 

Here we find at least two connexions which are not implicit in the first figure, 

but are forced upon it by the poet: from the geographer’s globe to the tear, and 

the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of Donne’s most successful 

and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts: 

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone, 1 

where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of associations 

of ‘bright hair’ and of ‘bone’. This telescoping of images and multi- 

4. Henry King (1592– 1669), En glish poet and 

Anglican bishop. Andrew Marvell (1621– 1678), 

En glish poet and satirist. 

5. Matthew Prior (1664– 1721), En glish poet, epigrammatist, 

and diplomat. George Chapman (ca. 

1559– 1634), En glish poet, scholar, and playwright. 

Ben Jonson (1572– 1637), En glish poet 

and playwright. 

6. En glish poet (1859– 1907), as are all those 

named here: George Herbert (1593– 1633), the 

Welsh- born Henry Vaughan (1622– 1695), Richard 

Crashaw (1612– 1649), and Rossetti (1830– 1894). 

7. Abraham Cowley (1618– 1667), En glish poet 

and essayist. 

8. Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” 

(1633). Grierson gives the title of Cowley’s poem 

as “Destinie.” 

9. Donne, “A Valediction: Of Weeping” (1633), 

lines 10– 18. 

1. Donne, “The Relic” (1633), line 6.


plied associations is characteristic of the phrase of some of the dramatists of 

the period which Donne knew: not to mention Shakespeare, it is frequent in 

Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, 2 and is one of the sources of the vitality 

of their language. 

Johnson, who employed the term ‘metaphysical poets’, apparently having 

Donne, Cleveland, and Cowley chiefly in mind, remarks of them that 

‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. 3 The force of 

this impeachment lies in the failure of the conjunction, the fact that often 

the ideas are yoked but not united; and if we are to judge of styles of poetry 

by their abuse, enough examples may be found in Cleveland to justify Johnson’s 

condemnation. But a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled 

into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind is omnipresent in poetry. We 

need not select for illustration such a line as: 

Notre âme est un trois- mâts cherchant son Icarie; 4 

we may find it in some of the best lines of Johnson himself (The Vanity of 

Human Wishes): 

His fate was destined to a barren strand, 

A petty fortress, and a dubious hand; 

He left a name at which the world grew pale, 

To point a moral, or adorn a tale. 5 

where the effect is due to a contrast of ideas, different in degree but the 

same in principle, as that which Johnson mildly reprehended. And in one of 

the finest poems of the age (a poem which could not have been written in 

any other age), the Exequy of Bishop King, the extended comparison is used 

with perfect success: the idea and the simile become one, in the passage in 

which the Bishop illustrates his impatience to see his dead wife, under the 

figure of a journey: 

Stay for me there; I will not faile 

To meet thee in that hollow Vale. 

And think not much of my delay; 

I am already on the way, 

And follow thee with all the speed 

Desire can make, or sorrows breed. 

Each minute is a short degree, 

And ev’ry houre a step towards thee. 

At night when I betake to rest, 

Next morn I rise nearer my West 

Of life, almost by eight houres sail, 

Than when sleep breath’d his drowsy gale. . . . 

But heark! My Pulse, like as a soft Drum 

Beats my approach, tells Thee I come; 

And slow ho were my marches be, 

I shall at last sit down by Thee. 6 

2. All En glish dramatists: Thomas Middleton 

(1580– 1627), John Webster (ca. 1580– ca. 1625), 

and Cyril Tourneur (ca. 1575– 1626). 

3. Johnson, Life of Cowley. John Cleveland 

(1613– 1658), poet and satirist. 

4. Our soul is a three- masted ship searching for 

her Icarie (French). From charles baudelaire, 

“Le Voyage” (1861). Icarie: a utopia described in 

the French socialist Étienne Cabet’s novel Voyage 

en Icarie (1840). 

5. Johnson, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” 

(1749), lines 219– 22, slightly misquoted (“fate” 

should be “fall”). 

6. King, “The Exequy” (1657), lines 89– 114.

964 / T. S. ELIOT 

(In the last few lines there is that effect of terror which is several times 

attained by one of Bishop King’s admirers, Edgar Poe. 7 ) Again, we may justly 

take these quatrains from Lord Herbert’s Ode, 8 stanzas which would, we 

think, be immediately pronounced to be of the metaphysical school: 

So when from hence we shall be gone, 

And be no more, nor you, nor I, 

As one another’s mystery, 

Each shall be both, yet both but one. 

This said, in her up- lifted face, 

Her eyes, which did that beauty crown, 

Were like two starrs, that having faln down, 

Look up again to find their place: 

While such a moveless silent peace 

Did seize on their becalmed sense, 

One would have thought some influence 

Their ravished spirits did possess. 

There is nothing in these lines (with the possible exception of the stars, a 

simile not at once grasped, but lovely and justified) which fits Johnson’s 

general observations on the metaphysical poets in his essay on Cowley. A 

good deal resides in the richness of association which is at the same time 

borrowed from and given to the word ‘becalmed’; but the meaning is clear, 

the language simple and elegant. It is to be observed that the language of 

these poets is as a rule simple and pure; in the verse of George Herbert this 

simplicity is carried as far as it can go— a simplicity emulated without success 

by numerous modern poets. The structure of the sentences, on the 

other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is a fidelity 

to thought and feeling. The effect, at its best, is far less artificial than 

that of an ode by Gray. 9 And as this fidelity induces variety of thought and 

feeling, so it induces variety of music. We doubt whether, in the eigh teenth 

century, could be found two poems in nominally the same metre, so dissimilar 

as Marvell’s Coy Mistress and Crashaw’s Saint Teresa; 1 the one producing 

an effect of great speed by the use of short syllables, and the other 

an ecclesiastical solemnity by the use of long ones: 

Love, thou art absolute sole lord 

Of life and death. 

If so shrewd and sensitive (though so limited) a critic as Johnson failed to 

define metaphysical poetry by its faults, it is worth while to inquire whether 

we may not have more success by adopting the opposite method: by assuming 

that the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) 2 were 

the direct and normal development of the pre ce dent age; and, without 

7. edgar allan poe (1809– 1849), American 

poet, critic, and short story writer. 

8. “An Ode upon a Question Moved, Whether 

Love Should Continue Forever?” by Lord Herbert 

of Cherbury (1583– 1648). Eliot quotes lines 

129– 40. 

9. Thomas Gray (1716– 1771), “Elegy Written in a 

Country Churchyard” (1751), a poem of mourning 

and reflection. 

1. Crashaw, “A Hymn to the Name and Honor of 

the Admirable Saint Teresa” (1652); Eliot quotes 

its opening lines. Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress” 

(1681). 

2. Either the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when 

James II was replaced by William and Mary, or 

the En glish Civil War, which climaxed in the 

execution of Charles I in 1649; scholars disagree 

on Eliot’s reference.

prejudicing their case by the adjective ‘metaphysical’, consider whether 

their virtue was not something permanently valuable, which subsequently 

disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared. Johnson has hit, perhaps by 

accident, on one of their peculiarities, when he observes that ‘their attempts 

were always analytic’; he would not agree that, after the dissociation, they 

put the material together again in a new unity. 

It is certain that the dramatic verse of the later Elizabethan and early 

Jacobean poets expresses a degree of development of sensibility which is not 

found in any of the prose, good as it often is. If we except Marlowe, a man of 

prodigious intelligence, these dramatists were directly or indirectly (it is at 

least a tenable theory) affected by Montaigne. 3 Even if we except also Jonson 

and Chapman, these two were notably erudite, and were notably men who 

incorporated their erudition into their sensibility: their mode of feeling was 

directly and freshly altered by their reading and thought. In Chapman especially 

there is a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of 

thought into feeling, which is exactly what we find in Donne: 

in this one thing, all the discipline 

Of manners and of manhood is contained; 

A man to join himself with th’ Universe 

In his main sway, and make in all things fit 

One with that All, and go on, round as it; 

Not plucking from the whole his wretched part, 

And into straits, or into nought revert, 

Wishing the complete Universe might be 

Subject to such a rag of it as he; 

But to consider great Necessity. 4 

We compare this with some modern passage: 


No, when the fight begins within himself, 

A man’s worth something. God stoops o’er his head, 

Satan looks up between his feet— both tug— 

He’s left, himself, i’ the middle; the soul wakes 

And grows. Prolong that battle through his life! 5 

It is perhaps somewhat less fair, though very tempting (as both poets are 

concerned with the perpetuation of love by offspring), to compare with the 

stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert’s Ode the following from Tennyson: 

One walked between his wife and child, 

With mea sured footfall firm and mild, 

And now and then he gravely smiled. 

The prudent partner of his blood 

Leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good, 

Wearing the rose of womanhood. 

And in their double love secure, 

The little maiden walked demure, 

3. Michel de Montaigne (1533– 1592), French 

moralist and essayist. Christopher Marlowe 

(1564– 1593), En glish dramatist and poet. 

4. Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois (ca. 

1610), 4.1.137– 46. 

5. “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” (1855), lines 

693– 97, by Robert Browning (1812– 1889).

966 / T. S. ELIOT 

Pacing with downward eyelids pure. 

These three made unity so sweet, 

My frozen heart began to beat, 

Remembering its ancient heat. 6 

The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something 

which had happened to the mind of En gland between the time of 

Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; 

it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. 

Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel 

their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was 

an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly 

equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; 

the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter 

falls in love, or reads Spinoza, 7 and these two experiences have nothing to do 

with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; 

in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. 8 

We may express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the 

seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed 

a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. 

They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their pre de ces sors 

were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino. 9 

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which 

we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated 

by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton 

and Dryden. 1 Each of these men performed certain poetic functions so 

magnificently well that the magnitude of the effect concealed the absence 

of others. The language went on and in some respects improved; the best 

verse of Collins, Gray, Johnson, and even Goldsmith 2 satisfies some of our 

fastidious demands better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while 

the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The 

feeling, the sensibility, expressed in the Country Churchyard (to say nothing 

of Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the Coy Mistress. 

The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from the 

first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age began 

early in the eigh teenth century, and continued. The poets revolted against 

the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; 

they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley’s Triumph of Life, in the second 

Hyperion, 3 there are traces of a struggle toward unification of sensibility. 

But Keats and Shelley died, and Tennyson and Browning ruminated. 

6. “The Two Voices” (1832), lines 412– 23, by 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809– 1892). 

7. Benedict de Spinoza (1632– 1677), Dutch philos 

o pher and theologian, whose major work is 

Ethics (1677). 

8. Compare samuel taylor coleridge, 

Biographia Literaria (1817; see above), chap. 14: 

“[The poet] diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, 

that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, 

by that synthetic and magical power, to which we 

have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.” 

9. Italian poets (roughly contemporary) known 

for their dolce stil nuovo (sweet new style): dante 

alighieri (1265– 1321), Guido Cavalcanti (1250– 

1300), Guido Guinicelli (1220– 1276), and Cino 

da Pistoia (1270– 1336). 

1. john dryden (1631– 1700), En glish poet, dramatist, 

and critic. John Milton (1608– 1674), En glish 

writer of poetry and prose, and author of Paradise 

Lost (1667). 

2. Oliver Goldsmith (1731– 1774), Irish- born 

En glish poet, playwright, and novelist. William 

Collins (1721– 1759), En glish poet. 

3. “Hyperion, a fragment” and “The Fall of Hyperion” 

(written 1818– 19), fragments of epic poems 

by John Keats (1795– 1821). “The Triumph of Life” 

(written in 1822), an unfinished visionary poem by 

percy bysshe shelley (1792– 1822).

After this brief exposition of a theory— too brief, perhaps, to carry conviction— 

we may ask, what would have been the fate of the ‘metaphysical’ had 

the current of poetry descended in a direct line from them, as it descended in 

a direct line to them? They would not, certainly, be classified as metaphysical. 

The possible interests of a poet are unlimited; the more intelligent he is 

the better; the more intelligent he is the more likely that he will have interests: 

our only condition is that he turn them into poetry, and not merely 

meditate on them poetically. A philosophical theory which has entered into 

poetry is established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and 

its truth in another sense is proved. The poets in question have, like other 

poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to 

find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling. And this means both 

that they are more mature, and that they wear better, than later poets of certainly 

not less literary ability. 

It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, 

or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets 

in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization 

comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, 

playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. 

The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more 

indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. 

(A brilliant and extreme statement of this view, with which it is not 

requisite to associate oneself, is that of M. Jean Epstein, La Poésie d’ aujourdhui.) 

4 Hence we get something which looks very much like the conceit— we 

get, in fact, a method curiously similar to that of the ‘metaphysical poets’, 

similar also in its use of obscure words and of simple phrasing. 

O géraniums diaphanes, guerroyeurs sortilèges, 

Sacrilèges monomanes! 

Emballages, dévergondages, douches! O pressoirs 

Des vendanges des grands soirs! 

Layettes aux abois, 

Thyrses au fond des bois! 

Transfusions, représailles, 

Relevailles, compresses et l’ éternal potion, 

Angélus! n’ en pouvoir plus 

De débâcles nuptiales! de débâcles nuptiales! 5 

The same poet could write also simply: 


Elle est bien loin, elle pleure, 

Le grand vent se lamente aussi . . . 6 

Jules Laforgue, and Tristan Corbière 7 in many of his poems, are nearer to the 

‘school of Donne’ than any modern En glish poet. But poets more classical 

4. The Poetry of Today (French), published in 1921. 

5. O translucent geraniums, warring wizardry, / 

Monomaniac impieties! / Enwrappings, licentiousness, 

showers! O winepresses / Of grape 

harvestings on great eve nings! / Layettes at bay, / 

Thrysis deep in the woods! / Transfusion, repayings, 

/ Churchings, compresses and the eternal 

potion, / Angelus! can’t bear any more / Those 

bursting nuptials! Bursting nuptials! (French; 

trans. June Guicharnaud). From Derniers vers X 

(1890, Last Poems), by the French symbolist poet 

Jules Laforgue (1860– 1887). 

6. She is far away, she weeps / The great wind also 

mourns (French). From Laforgue, Derniers vers 

XI, “Sur une défunte” (“On a Dead Woman”). 

7. French symbolist poet (1845– 1875).

968 / T. S. ELIOT 

than they have the same essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, 

of transforming an observation into a state of mind. 

Pour l’ enfant, amoureux de cartes et d’ estampes, 

L’ univers est égal à son vaste appétit. 

Ah, que le monde est grand à la clarté des lampes! 

Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit! 8 

In French literature the great master of the seventeenth century— Racine 9 — 

and the great master of the nineteenth— Baudelaire—are in some ways 

more like each other than they are like anyone else. The greatest two masters 

of diction are also the greatest two psychologists, the most curious 

explorers of the soul. It is interesting to speculate whether it is not a misfortune 

that two of the greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and 

Dryden, triumph with a dazzling disregard of the soul. If we continued to 

produce Miltons and Drydens it might not so much matter, but as things are 

it is a pity that En glish poetry has remained so incomplete. Those who object 

to the ‘artificiality’ of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to ‘look into our 

hearts and write’. 1 But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne 

looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the ce rebral 

cortex, the ner vous system, and the digestive tracts. 

May we not conclude, then, that Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert and 

Lord Herbert, Marvell, King, Cowley at his best, are in the direct current of 

En glish poetry, and that their faults should be reprimanded by this standard 

rather than coddled by antiquarian affection? They have been enough 

praised in terms which are implicit limitations because they are ‘metaphysical’ 

or ‘witty’, ‘quaint’ or ‘obscure,’ though at their best they have not these 

attributes more than other serious poets. On the other hand, we must not 

reject the criticism of Johnson (a dangerous person to disagree with) without 

having mastered it, without having assimilated the Johnsonian canons 

of taste. In reading the celebrated passage in his essay on Cowley we must 

remember that by wit he clearly means something more serious than we 

usually mean today; in his criticism of their versification we must remember 

in what a narrow discipline he was trained, but also how well trained; 

we must remember that Johnson tortures chiefly the chief offenders, Cowley 

and Cleveland. It would be a fruitful work, and one requiring a substantial 

book, to break up the classification of Johnson (for there has been none 

since) and exhibit these poets in all their difference of kind and of degree, 

from the massive music of Donne to the faint, pleasing tinkle of Aurelian 

Townshend 2 — whose Dialogue between a Pilgrim and Time is one of the few 

regrettable omissions from the excellent anthology of Professor Grierson. 

1921 

8. For the child in love with maps and prints, the 

universe matches his vast appetite. Ah, how big the 

world is, in the lamplight; but how small, viewed 

through the eyes of memory (French; trans. Francis 

Scarfe). From Baudelaire, “Le Voyage.” 

9. Jean Racine (1639– 1699), French playwright. 

1. A slight recasting of the final words of the first 

sonnet in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and 

Stella (1591), by sir philip sidney. 

2. Poet and writer of court masques (ca. 1583– 

1643).

969 

JOHN CROWE RANSOM 

1888–1974 

The poet, critic, and editor John Crowe Ransom is perhaps the central figure in the 

institutionalization of the New Criticism, the formalist theory and practice that 

dominated U.S. teaching and literary criticism in the mid– twentieth century. Through 

his essays on literary theory, his important work as an editor of the prestigious journal 

the Kenyon Review, and his friendships with many noteworthy authors and critics, 

Ransom was able to gain a wide and respectful hearing for his and the other 

New Critics’ literary views and values. By the 1950s or even earlier, the New Critical 

focus on “the text itself” had become the basic method of literary criticism and of 

college and university pedagogy. 

Ransom was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, the son of a Methodist minister. He was 

a brilliant student at Bowen School (a private academy) and then at Vanderbilt University 

in Nashville, where he received rigorous training in the classics. He studied 

Greek and Roman literature and history at Christ Church, Oxford University, on a 

Rhodes Scholarship from 1910 to 1913, and in 1914 joined the faculty of Vanderbilt’s 

En glish Department. He became the leader of Nashville’s literary and cultural community, 

which in the 1920s and 1930s included the poets Allen Tate and Donald 

Davidson, the poet, novelist, and critic Robert Penn Warren, and the critic cleanth 

brooks. 

In the early 1920s Ransom was one of the Fugitive poets, a group that came 

together in Nashville as “fugitives” both from preachy, sentimental nineteenthcentury 

verse and from contemporary verse that struck them as far removed from 

the Southern regionalist values they embraced. They focused on the language, 

forms, and techniques of poetry and published in the bimonthly the Fugitive (1922– 

25); many of Ransom’s best poems as well as a number of critical essays appeared in 

this journal. Later in the de cade, Ransom played a prominent role in the Agrarian 

movement; he contributed both the introduction and a chapter to the Agrarian manifesto 

I’ll Take My Stand (1930), a spirited attack on science and industrialization and 

a defense of Southern tradition and an agricultural economy. 

During the Agrarian phase of his career, Ransom wrote many essays on social 

and cultural criticism, including “The South— Old or New?” (1928), “The Aesthetics 

of Regionalism” (1934), and “What Does the South Want?” (1936). But the Agrarian 

cause never won widespread support among Southerners, and by the late 1930s, 

Ransom was himself shifting away from sociocultural commentary. In 1937 he left 

Vanderbilt for a position in the En glish Department at Kenyon College in Ohio, a 

move that coincided with his sharp turn toward literary criticism and the reforms 

needed to give it precision and clarity as an autonomous academic discipline. In a 

1937 letter to Allen Tate, Ransom noted that the new journal he hoped to launch at 

Kenyon should “stick to literature entirely. . . . In the severe field of letters there is 

vocation enough for us: in criticism, in poetry, in fiction.” 

For two de cades, beginning in 1939, Ransom edited the Kenyon Review; this 

journal, which became one of the best U.S. literary quarterlies, was among his 

greatest achievements. Moreover, his distinguished reputation as an editor as well 

as a poet and critic enabled him to gain much institutional support for his ideas and 

programs. During the late 1940s, the Rocke fel ler Foundation provided funds for a 

series of Kenyon Review Fellows (scholars) and for the Kenyon School of En glish, 

which had on its faculty important intellectuals, creative writers, and critics— among 

the first (in 1948) were Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, and William Empson. The 

Kenyon Review also offered fellowships each year to a poet, a writer of fiction, and 

a critic; prominent recipients included Flannery O’Connor, Howard Nemerov, and

970 / John Crowe Ransom 

irving howe. The New Criticism was not simply a body of theory and practice but 

a network of programs, journals, and institutions, and Ransom was involved in 

nearly all of them. 

Our selection from The World’s Body, “Criticism, Inc.” (1938), is, as its title suggests, 

Ransom’s attempt to define the business of criticism— what it is not and what 

it should be. He lists a number of false or misleading types of current criticism— 

including the “ethical” approach of the New Humanism and Marxism— but he 

focuses on the teaching of literature in universities by literary historians and scholars 

who stress backgrounds, sources, and influences rather than the poems themselves. 

Historical study, he contends, dominates at the expense of a truly “critical” 

approach, preventing students from acquiring the skills needed for them to understand 

the “technical effects” of literary works. As a result, they cannot respond in a 

direct, rigorous way to contemporary literature or, for that matter, to any poem 

placed before them. 

Ransom urges teachers and students to concentrate on “technical studies of 

poetry.” By this, he means studies of imagery, meta phor, and meter— the stylistic 

devices through which the poet differentiates the language of his or her text from 

that of prose. Ransom calls for a revitalized department of En glish that will make 

literary history, scholarship, and linguistics secondary to criticism. In his view, 

criticism must be rescued from book reviewers and amateurs who focus on feelings, 

not the artistic object itself, and reduce texts to paraphrases with a moral message. 

Advocating disciplinary coherence and integrity, Ransom is a harbinger of the professionalization 

of literary analysis that characterized mid- and late- twentieth- century 

U.S. literary culture. 

These arguments had great appeal to many teachers and students, and Ransom’s 

approach was so helpful for readers grappling with exacting modern poets that its 

limits were overlooked at first. By defining the work of literary studies, he supplied 

a clear procedure: the teacher- critic should concentrate on the text itself and not be 

distracted by nonliterary contexts and issues. But Ransom and the other New Critics, 

opponents pointed out, excluded too much; in giving literary studies a disciplinary 

identity, they failed to clarify how it could engage with social, cultural, and 

historical issues in a meaningful way. In a sense Ransom allowed the opposition to 

dictate the terms of his own approach— literary criticism is defined against, not in 

relation to, other fields, subjects, and disciplines. But why should the analysis of 

specific literary texts require the exclusion of other kinds of analytical work? Ransom 

defined the enterprise of “Criticism, Inc.” with brilliant precision but narrowly, 

as though the forms of social and cultural critique he had embarked on in his 

Agrarian writing were wholly incompatible with literary criticism. 

To be sure, in stressing that critics should explore how the poem “removes itself 

from history” Ransom had a specific target: the practice of making history rather 

than the poem the object of attention in the classroom. Neither he nor the other 

New Critics asserted that history was irrelevant, or that teachers and students 

should ignore everything except “the words on the page”; they assumed that teachers 

would be well- trained and knowledgeable about much more, as they were themselves. 

Those in the first generation of New Critics were later dismayed at the 

reductive, mechanical criticism and teaching practiced in their name. 

As the New Criticism came under widespread attack in the 1960s and 1970s, it 

lost the authority it had enjoyed when Ransom, I. A. Richards, and Brooks first 

promoted it. Its emphasis on the text in and for itself seemed far removed from the 

crises and social movements— civil rights, antiwar, and women’s— that were tearing 

American society apart. The New Critical canon was too limited (male and white) 

to prove acceptable to feminists, African American critics, and other theorists. In 

addition, by the 1970s poststructuralists were arguing that the New Critical distinction 

between what was inside and outside the text could not be maintained: thus the

Criticism, Inc. / 971 

discrete poetic text that was to be the basis of literary studies seemed no longer to 

exist. Soon, from another direction, New Historicist scholars began to recuperate 

and renovate historical analysis; by demonstrating that close reading could be 

extended to all kinds of texts and documents, they made possible a richer, more 

diverse approach to history than that found in the earlier literary historians whom 

Ransom, Brooks, and the others had displaced. 

A crucial tenet of the New Critical program survives: the emphasis on “close 

reading,” the central focus of the new business for literary studies that Ransom 

advocates in “Criticism, Inc.” In this respect, the New Criticism has not so much 

faded as become the foundation that modern approaches build upon. 

bibliography 

Ransom’s books include The World’s Body (1938), The New Criticism (1941), Poems 

and Essays (1955), and Beating the Bushes (1971). See also Ransom’s Selected Essays, 

edited by Thomas Daniel Young and John Hindle (1984), and Selected Letters, 

edited by Young and George Core (1985). He also edited The Kenyon Critics: Studies 

in Modern Literature from “The Kenyon Review” (1951). Thomas Daniel Young 

has written an excellent biography: Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John 

Crowe Ransom (1976). See also John Crowe Ransom: Critical Essays and a Bibliography, 

edited by Young (1968). 

On the Agrarian movement and its relationship to the New Criticism, see John 

Lincoln Stewart, The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians (1965); Alexander 

Karanikas, Tillers of a Myth: Southern Agrarians as Social and Literary Critics 

(1966); Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (1993); and 

Charlotte H. Beck, The Fugitive Legacy: A Critical History (2001). Detailed information 

about Ransom and the New Critics can also be found in Marian Janssen, 

The Kenyon Review, 1939– 1970: A Critical History (1990). The New Criticism and 

Contemporary Literary Theory: Connections and Continuities, edited by William J. 

Spurlin and Michael Fischer (1995), examines the history of modern criticism from 

the New Critics to later poststructuralist theorists. For bibliography of primary and 

secondary sources, consult Thomas Daniel Young, John Crowe Ransom: An Annotated 

Bibliography (1982). 

Criticism, Inc. 

It is strange, but nobody seems to have told us what exactly is the proper 

business of criticism. There are many critics who might tell us, but for the 

most part they are amateurs. So have the critics nearly always been amateurs; 

including the best ones. They have not been trained to criticism so 

much as they have simply undertaken a job for which no specific qualifications 

were required. It is far too likely that what they call criticism when 

they produce it is not the real thing. 

There are three sorts of trained performers who would appear to have 

some of the competence that the critic needs. The first is the artist himself. 

He should know good art when he sees it; but his understanding is intuitive 

rather than dialectical— he cannot very well explain his theory of the thing. 

It is true that literary artists, with their command of language, are better 

critics of their own art than are other artists; probably the best critics of 

poetry we can now have are the poets. But one can well imagine that any 

artist’s commentary on the artwork is valuable in the degree that he sticks


to its technical effects, which he knows minutely, and about which he can 

certainly talk if he will. 

The second is the phi los o pher, who should know all about the function of 

the fine arts. But the phi los o pher is apt to see a lot of wood and no trees, for 

his theory is very general and his acquaintance with the par tic u lar works of 

art is not per sis tent and intimate, especially his acquaintance with their 

technical effects. Or at least I suppose so, for phi los o phers have not proved 

that they can write close criticism by writing it; and I have the feeling that 

even their handsome generalizations are open to suspicion as being grounded 

more on other generalizations, those which form their prior philosophical 

stock, than on acute study of particulars. 

The third is the university teacher of literature, who is styled professor, 

and who should be the very professional we need to take charge of the critical 

activity. He is hardly inferior as critic to the phi los o pher, and perhaps 

not on the whole to the poet, but he is a greater disappointment because we 

have the right to expect more of him. Professors of literature are learned but 

not critical men. The professional morale of this part of the university staff 

is evidently low. It is as if, with conscious or unconscious cunning, they had 

appropriated every avenue of escape from their responsibility which was 

decent and official; so that it is easy for one of them without public reproach 

to spend a lifetime in compiling the data of literature and yet rarely or never 

commit himself to a literary judgment. 

Nevertheless it is from the professors of literature, in this country the 

professors of En glish for the most part, that I should hope eventually for 

the erection of intelligent standards of criticism. It is their business. 

Criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic, and 

this means that it must be developed by the collective and sustained effort 

of learned persons— which means that its proper seat is in the universities. 

Scientific: but I do not think we need be afraid that criticism, trying to be 

a sort of science, will inevitably fail and give up in despair, or else fail without 

realizing it and enjoy some hollow and pretentious career. It will never 

be a very exact science, or even a nearly exact one. But neither will psychology, 

if that term continues to refer to psychic rather than physical phenomena; 

nor will sociology, as Pareto, 1 quite contrary to his intention, appears 

to have furnished us with evidence for believing; nor even will economics. 

It does not matter whether we call them sciences or just systematic studies; 

the total effort of each to be effective must be consolidated and kept going. 

The studies which I have mentioned have immeasurably improved in understanding 

since they were taken over by the universities, and the same career 

looks possible for criticism. 

Rather than occasional criticism by amateurs, I should think the whole 

enterprise might be seriously taken in hand by professionals. Perhaps I use 

a distasteful figure, but I have the idea that what we need is Criticism, Inc., 

or Criticism, Ltd. 

The principal re sis tance to such an idea will come from the present incumbents 

of the professorial chairs. But its adoption must come from them too. 

The idea of course is not a private one of my own. If it should be adopted 

1. Vilfredo Pareto (1848– 1923), French- born Italian economist and sociologist.


before long, the credit would probably belong to Professor Ronald S. Crane, 2 

of the University of Chicago, more than to any other man. He is the first of 

the great professors to have advocated it as a major policy for departments 

of En glish. It is possible that he will have made some important academic 

history. 

2 

Professor Crane published recently a paper of great note in academic circles, 

on the reform of the courses in En glish. It appeared in The En glish 

Journal, under the title: “History Versus Criticism in the University Study 

of Literature.” He argues there that historical scholarship has been overplayed 

heavily in En glish studies, in disregard of the law of diminishing 

returns, and that the emphasis must now be shifted to the critical. 

To me this means, simply: the students of the future must be permitted 

to study literature, and not merely about literature. But I think this is what 

the good students have always wanted to do. The wonder is that they have 

allowed themselves so long to be denied. But they have not always been amiable 

about it, and the whole affair presents much comic history. 

At the University of Chicago, I believe that Professor Crane, with some 

others, is putting the revolution into effect in his own teaching, though for 

the time being perhaps with a limited programme, mainly the application 

of Aristotle’s critical views. (My information is not at all exact.) The university 

is an opulent one, not too old to experience waves of reformational zeal, 

uninhibited as yet by bad traditions. Its department of En glish has sponsored 

plenty of old- line scholarship, but this is not the first time it has gone 

in for criticism. If the department should now systematically and intelligently 

build up a general school of literary criticism, I believe it would score 

a triumph that would be, by academic standards, spectacular. I mean that 

the alive and brilliant young En glish scholars all over the country would be 

saying they wanted to go there to do their work. That would place a new distinction 

upon the university, and it would eventually and profoundly modify 

the practices of many other institutions. It would be worth even more than 

Professor Crane’s careful pre sen ta tion of the theory. 

This is not the first time that En glish professors have tilted against the 

historians, or “scholars,” in the dull sense which that word has acquired. 

They did not score heavily, at those other times. Probably they were themselves 

not too well versed in the historical studies, so that it could be said 

with honest concern that they scarcely had the credentials to judge of such 

matters. At the same time they may have been too unproductive critically to 

offer a glowing alternative. 

The most important recent diversion from the orthodox course of literary 

studies was that undertaken by the New Humanists. 3 I regret to think that 

2. The leader (1886– 1967) of the Chicago School 

of neo- Aristotelian criticism, whose views were 

influenced by the restructuring of the undergraduate 

curriculum of the University of Chicago in 

the 1930s, to a focus on interdisciplinary studies 

and “Great Books.” He published “History Versus 

Criticism” (discussed below) in 1935. 

3. Members of an early- 20th- century critical 

movement in the United States that attacked the 

de cadence of modern life and the immorality of 

contemporary literature, condemning the influence 

of Romanticism and appealing for classical 

values. The leaders of New Humanism were Paul 

Elmer More (1864– 1937), a critic, editor, and lecturer 

at Prince ton University, and Irving Babbitt 

(1865– 1933), professor of Romance languages at 

Harvard University.


it was not the kind of diversion which I am advocating; nor the kind approved 

by Professor Crane, who comments briefly against it. Unquestionably the 

Humanists did divert, and the refreshment was grateful to anybody who 

felt resentful for having his literary predilections ignored under the schedule 

of historical learning. But in the long run the diversion proved to be 

nearly as unliterary as the round of studies from which it took off at a tangent. 

No picnic ideas were behind it. 

The New Humanists were, and are, moralists; more accurately, historians 

and advocates of a certain moral system. Criticism is the attempt to define 

and enjoy the æsthetic or characteristic values of literature, but I suppose 

the Humanists would shudder at “æsthetic” as hard as ordinary historical 

scholars do. Did an official Humanist ever make any official play with the 

term? I do not remember it. The term “art” is slightly more ambiguous, and 

they have availed themselves of that; with centuries of loose usage behind 

it, art connotes, for those who like, high seriousness, and high seriousness 

connotes moral selfconsciousness, and an inner check, and finally either 

Plato or Aristotle. 

Mr. Babbitt consistently played on the terms classical and romantic. 

They mean any of several things each, so that unquestionably Mr. Babbitt 

could make war on romanticism for purely moral reasons; and his preoccupation 

was ethical, not æsthetic. It is perfectly legitimate for the moralist 

to attack romantic literature if he can make out his case; for example, on 

the ground that it deals with emotions rather than principles, or the ground 

that its author discloses himself as flabby, intemperate, escapist, unphilosophical, 

or simply adolescent. The moral objection is probably valid; a 

romantic period testifies to a large- scale failure of adaptation, and defense 

of that failure to adapt, to the social and po liti cal environment; unless, if 

the Humanists will consent, it sometimes testifies to the failure of society 

and state to sympathize with the needs of the individual. But this is certainly 

not the charge that Mr. T. S. Eliot, a literary critic, brings against romanticism. 

4 His, if I am not mistaken, is æsthetic, though he may not ever care to 

define it very sharply. In other words, the literary critic also has something 

to say about romanticism, and it might come to something like this: that 

romantic literature is imperfect in objectivity, or “æsthetic distance,” and that 

out of this imperfection comes its weakness of structure; that the romantic 

poet does not quite realize the æsthetic attitude, and is not the pure artist. 

Or it might come to something else. It would be quite premature to say that 

when a moralist is obliged to disapprove a work the literary critic must disapprove 

it too. 

Following the excitement produced by the Humanist diversion, there is 

now one due to the Leftists, or Proletarians, 5 who are also diversionists. 

Their diversion is likewise moral. It is just as proper for them to ferret out 

class- consciousness in literature, and to make literature serve the cause of 

loving- comradeship, as it is for the Humanists to censure romanticism and 

to use the topic, and the literary exhibit, as the occasion of reviving the 

Aristotelian moral canon. I mean that these are procedures of the same 

4. At Harvard, eliot (1888– 1965) was taught by 

Babbitt, who reinforced Eliot’s own anti- Romantic 

tendencies. 

5. Marxist critics who emphasized the class struggle 

between workers (proletarians) and own ers, 

and the problems of poverty and racism.


sort. Debate could never occur between a Humanist and a Leftist on æsthetic 

grounds, for they are equally intent on ethical values. But the debate on 

ethical grounds would be very spirited, and it might create such a stir in a 

department conducting En glish studies that the conventional scholars there 

would find themselves slipping, and their pupils deriving from literature new 

and seductive excitements which would entice them away from their scheduled 

En glish exercises. 

On the whole, however, the moralists, distinguished as they may be, are 

like those who have quarrelled with the ordinary historical studies on purer 

or more aesthetic grounds: they have not occupied in En glish studies the 

positions of professional importance. In a department of En glish, as in any 

other going business, the proprietary interest becomes vested, and in old 

and reputable departments the vestees have uniformly been gentlemen who 

have gone through the historical mill. Their laborious Ph.D.’s and historical 

publications are their patents. Naturally, quite spontaneously, they would 

tend to perpetuate a system in which the power and the glory belonged to 

them. But En glish scholars in this country can rarely have better credentials 

than those which Professor Crane has earned in his extensive field, the eighteenth 

century. It is this which makes his disaffection significant. 

It is really atrocious policy for a department to abdicate its own selfrespecting 

identity. The department of En glish is charged with the understanding 

and the communication of literature, an art, yet it has usually 

forgotten to inquire into the peculiar constitution and structure of its product. 

En glish might almost as well announce that it does not regard itself as 

entirely autonomous, but as a branch of the department of history, with the 

option of declaring itself occasionally a branch of the department of ethics. 

It is true that the historical and the ethical studies will cluster round objects 

which for some reason are called artistic objects. But the thing itself the 

professors do not have to contemplate; and only last spring the head of 

En glish studies in a graduate school fabulously equipped made the following 

impromptu disclaimer to a victim who felt aggrieved at having his own studies 

forced in the usual direction: “This is a place for exact scholarship, and 

you want to do criticism. Well, we don’t allow criticism here, because that is 

something which anybody can do.” 

But one should never speak impromptu in one’s professional capacity. 

This speech may have betrayed a fluttery private apprehension which should 

not have been made public: that you can never be critical and be exact at 

the same time, that history is firmer ground than æsthetics, and that, to tell 

the truth, criticism is a painful job for the sort of mind that wants to be very 

sure about things. Not in that temper did Aristotle labor towards a critique 

in at least one branch of letters; 6 nor in that temper are strong young minds 

everywhere trying to sharpen their critical apparatus into precision tools, in 

this de cade as never before. 

It is not anybody who can do criticism. And for an example, the more eminent 

(as historical scholar) the professor of En glish, the less apt he is to be 

able to write decent criticism, unless it is about another professor’s work of 

historical scholarship, in which case it is not literary criticism. The professor 

may not be without æsthetic judgments respecting an old work, especially if 

6. In the Poetics (see above).


it is “in his period,” since it must often have been judged by authorities whom 

he respects. Confronted with a new work, I am afraid it is very rare that 

he finds anything par tic u lar to say. Contemporary criticism is not at all in 

the hands of those who direct the En glish studies. Contemporary literature, 

which is almost obliged to receive critical study if it receives any at all, since 

it is hardly capable of the usual historical commentary, is barely officialized 

as a proper field for serious study. 

Here is contemporary literature, waiting for its criticism; where are the 

professors of literature? They are watering their own gardens; elucidating 

the literary histories of their respective periods. So are their favorite pupils. 

The persons who save the occasion, and rescue contemporary literature 

from the humiliation of having to go without a criticism, are the men who 

had to leave the university before their time because they felt themselves 

being warped into mere historians; or those who finished the courses and 

took their punishment but were tough, and did not let it engross them and 

spoil them. They are homemade critics. Naturally they are not too wise, 

these amateurs who furnish our reviews and critical studies. But when they 

distinguish themselves, the universities which they attended can hardly 

claim more than a trifling share of the honor. 

It is not so in economics, chemistry, sociology, theology, and architecture. 

In these branches it is taken for granted that criticism of the per for mance 

is the prerogative of the men who have had formal training in its theory and 

technique. The historical method is useful, and may be applied readily to any 

human per for mance what ever. But the exercise does not become an obsession 

with the university men working in the other branches; only the literary 

scholars wish to convert themselves into pure historians. This has gone far to 

nullify the usefulness of a departmental personnel larger, possibly, than any 

other, and of the lavish endowment behind it. 

3 

Presumably the departments of En glish exist in order to communicate the 

understanding of the literary art. That will include both criticism and also 

what ever may be meant by “appreciation.” This latter term seems to stand 

for the kind of understanding that is had intuitively, without benefit of 

instruction, by merely being constrained to spend time in the presence of 

the literary product. It is true that some of the best work now being done in 

departments is by the men who do little more than read well aloud, enforcing 

a private act of appreciation upon the students. One remembers how good a 

ser vice that may be, thinking perhaps of Professor Copeland of Harvard, or 

Dean Cross at Greeley Teachers College. 7 And there are men who try to get 

at the same thing in another way, which they would claim is surer: by requiring 

a great deal of memory work, in order to enforce familiarity with fine 

poetry. These might defend their strategy by saying that at any rate the work 

they required was not as vain as the historical rigmarole which the scholars 

made their pupils recite, if the objective was really literary understanding 

7. “Dean Cross” is Neal Cross, who taught in the 

En glish department at Greeley Teachers College 

(now the University of Northern Colorado) from 

1941 to 1979. Charles Townsend Copeland (1860– 

1952), member of the En glish department at 

Harvard.


and not external information. But it would be a misuse of terms to employ 

the word instruction for the offices either of the professors who read aloud 

or of those who require the memory work. The professors so engaged are 

properly curators, and the museum of which they have the care is furnished 

with the cherished literary masterpieces, just as another museum might be 

filled with paintings. They conduct their squads from one work to another, 

making appropriate pauses or reverent gestures, but their own obvious 

regard for the masterpieces is somewhat contagious, and contemplation is 

induced. Naturally they are grateful to the efficient staff of colleagues in 

the background who have framed the masterpieces, hung them in the 

proper schools and in the chronological order, and prepared the booklet of 

information about the artists and the occasions. The colleagues in their 

turn probably feel quite happy over this division of labor, thinking that they 

have done the really productive work, and that it is appropriate now if less 

able men should undertake a little salesmanship. 

Behind appreciation, which is private, and criticism, which is public and 

negotiable, and represents the last stage of En glish studies, is historical 

scholarship. It is indispensable. But it is instrumental and cannot be the 

end itself. In this respect historical studies have the same standing as linguistic 

studies: language and history are aids. 

On behalf of the historical studies. Without them what could we make of 

Chaucer, for instance? I cite the familiar locus of the “hard” scholarship, 

the center of any program of advanced studies in En glish which intends to 

initiate the student heroically, and once for all, into the historical discipline. 

Chaucer writes allegories for historians to decipher, he looks out 

upon institutions and customs unfamiliar to us. 8 Behind him are many 

writers in various tongues from whom he borrows both forms and materials. 

His thought bears constant reference to classical and mediæval philosophies 

and sciences which have passed from our effective knowledge. An 

im mense labor of historical adaptation is necessary before our minds are 

ready to make the æsthetic approach to Chaucer. 

Or to any author out of our own age. The mind with which we enter into 

an old work is not the mind with which we make our living, or enter into a 

contemporary work. It is under sharp restraints, and it is quite differently 

furnished. Out of our actual contemporary mind we have to cancel a great 

deal that has come there under modern conditions but was not in the earlier 

mind at all. This is a technique on the negative side, a technique of 

suspension; difficult for practical persons, literal scientists, and aggressive 

moderns who take pride in the “truth” or the “progress” which enlightened 

man, so well represented in their own instance, has won. Then, on the 

positive side, we must supply the mind with the precise beliefs and ways of 

thought it had in that former age, with the specific content in which history 

instructs us; this is a technique of make- believe. The whole act of historical 

adaptation, through such techniques, is a marvellous feat of flexibility. Certainly 

it is a thing hard enough to justify university instruction. But it is not 

sufficient for an En glish program. 

8. Chaucer’s allegories include the dream- poems The Book of the Duchess (1369) and The House of Fame 

(ca. 1374– 85).


The achievement of modern historical scholarship in the field of En glish 

literature has been, in the aggregate, prodigious; it should be very proud. A 

good impression of the volume of historical learning now available for the 

students of En glish may be quickly had from inspecting a few chapters of 

the Cambridge History, 9 with the bibliographies. Or, better, from inspecting 

one of a large number of works which have come in since the Cambridge 

History: the handbooks, which tell all about the authors, such as 

Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and carry voluminous bibliographies; or the 

period books, which tell a good deal about whole periods of literature. 

There is one sense in which it may be justly said that we can never have 

too much scholarship. We cannot have too much of it if the critical intelligence 

functions, and has the authority to direct it. There is hardly a critical 

problem which does not require some arduous exercises in fact- finding, but 

each problem is quite specific about the kind of facts it wants. Mountains 

of facts may have been found already, but often they have been found for no 

purpose at all except the purpose of piling up into a big exhibit, to offer 

intoxicating delights to the academic population. 

To those who are æsthetically minded among students, the rewards of 

many a historical labor will have to be disproportionately slight. The official 

Chaucer course is probably over ninety- five per cent historical and linguistic, 

and less than five per cent aesthetic or critical. A thing of beauty is a joy 

forever. 1 But it is not improved because the student has had to tie his tongue 

before it. It is an artistic object, with a heroic human labor behind it, and 

on these terms it calls for public discussion. The dialectical possibilities are 

limitless, and when we begin to realize them we are engaged in criticism. 

4 

What is criticism? Easier to ask, What is criticism not? It is an act now 

notoriously arbitrary and undefined. We feel certain that the critical act is 

not one of those which the professors of literature habitually perform, and 

cause their students to perform. And it is our melancholy impression that it 

is not often cleanly performed in those loose compositions, by writers of 

perfectly indeterminate qualifications, that appear in print as reviews of 

books. 

Professor Crane excludes from criticism works of historical scholarship 

and of Neo- Humanism, but more exclusions are possible than that. I should 

wish to exclude: 

1. Personal registrations, which are declarations of the effect of the artwork 

upon the critic as reader. The first law to be prescribed to criticism, if 

we may assume such authority, is that it shall be objective, shall cite the 

nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject. Therefore it is 

hardly criticism to assert that the proper literary work is one that we can 

read twice; or one that causes in us some remarkable physiological effect, 

such as oblivion of the outer world, the flowing of tears, visceral or laryngeal 

sensations, and such like; or one that induces perfect illusion, or brings us 

into a spiritual ecstasy; or even one that produces a catharsis of our emotions. 

9. The Cambridge History of En glish Literature 

(14 vols., 1907– 17); and The Cambridge History 

of American Literature (4 vols., 1917– 21). 

1. John Keats, Endymion (1818), 1.1.


Aristotle concerned himself with this last in making up his definition of 

tragedy 2 — though he did not fail to make some acute analyses of the objective 

features of the work also. I have read that some modern Broadway producers 

of comedy require a reliable person to seat himself in a trial audience 

and count the laughs; their method of testing is not so subtle as Aristotle’s, 

but both are concerned with the effects. Such concern seems to reflect the 

view that art comes into being because the artist, or the employer behind 

him, has designs upon the public, whether high moral designs or box- office 

ones. It is an odious view in either case, because it denies the autonomy of 

the artist as one who interests himself in the artistic object in his own right, 

and likewise the autonomy of the work itself as existing for its own sake. (We 

may define a chemical as something which can effect a certain cure, but that 

is not its meaning to the chemist; and we may define toys, if we are weary 

parents, as things which keep our children quiet, but that is not what they are 

to engineers.) Furthermore, we must regard as uncritical the use of an extensive 

vocabulary which ascribes to the object properties really discovered in 

the subject, as: moving, exciting, entertaining, pitiful; great, if I am not mistaken, 

and admirable, on a slightly different ground; and, in strictness, beautiful 

itself. 

2. Synopsis and paraphrase. The high- school classes and the women’s 

clubs delight in these procedures, which are easiest of all the systematic 

exercises possible in the discussion of literary objects. I do not mean that the 

critic never uses them in his analysis of fiction and poetry, but he does not 

consider plot or story as identical with the real content. Plot is an abstract 

from content. 

3. Historical studies. These have a very wide range, and include studies 

of the general literary background; author’s biography, of course with special 

reference to autobiographical evidences in the work itself; bibliographical 

items; the citation of literary originals and analogues, and therefore what, in 

general, is called comparative literature. Nothing can be more stimulating 

to critical analysis than comparative literature. But it may be conducted only 

superficially, if the comparisons are perfunctory and mechanical, or if the 

scholar is content with merely making the parallel citations. 

4. Linguistic studies. Under this head come those studies which define 

the meaning of unusual words and idioms, including the foreign and 

archaic ones, and identify the allusions. The total benefit of linguistics for 

criticism would be the assurance that the latter was based on perfect logical 

understanding of the content, or “interpretation.” Acquaintance with all 

the languages and literatures in the world would not necessarily produce a 

critic, though it might save one from damaging errors. 

5. Moral studies. The moral standard applied is the one appropriate to 

the reviewer; it may be the Christian ethic, or the Aristotelian one, or the 

new proletarian gospel. But the moral content is not the whole content, 

which should never be relinquished. 

6. Any other special studies which deal with some abstract or prose content 

taken out of the work. Nearly all departments of knowledge may conceivably 

find their own materials in literature, and take them out. Studies 

2. aristotle (384– 322 b.c.e.), Poetics 6, 1449b (see above).


have been made of Chaucer’s command of mediæval sciences, of Spenser’s 

view of the Irish question, of Shakespeare’s understanding of the law, of 

Milton’s geography, of Hardy’s place- names. 3 The critic may well inform 

himself of these materials as possessed by the artist, but his business as critic 

is to discuss the literary assimilation of them. 

5 

With or without such useful exercises as these, probably assuming that the 

intelligent reader has made them for himself, comes the critical act itself. 

Mr. Austin Warren, 4 whose writings I admire, is evidently devoted to the 

academic development of the critical project. Yet he must be a fair representative 

of what a good deal of academic opinion would be when he sees 

no reason why criticism should set up its own house, and try to dissociate 

itself from historical and other scholarly studies; why not let all sorts of 

studies, including the critical ones, flourish together in the same act of 

sustained attention, or the same scheduled “course”? But so they are supposed 

to do at present; and I would only ask him whether he considers that 

criticism prospers under this arrangement. It has always had the chance to 

go ahead in the hands of the professors of literature, and it has not gone 

ahead. A change of policy suggests itself. Strategy requires now, I should 

think, that criticism receive its own charter of rights and function in de pendently. 

If he fears for its foundations in scholarship, the scholars will always 

be on hand to reprove it when it tries to function on an unsound scholarship. 

I do not suppose the reviewing of books can be reformed in the sense of 

being turned into pure criticism. The motives of the reviewers are as much 

mixed as the per for mance, and indeed they condition the mixed per formance. 

The reviewer has a job of pre sen ta tion and interpretation as well as 

criticism. The most we can ask of him is that he know when the criticism 

begins, and that he make it as clean and definitive as his business permits. 

To what authority may he turn? 

I know of no authority. For the present each critic must be his own authority. 

But I know of one large class of studies which is certainly critical, and 

necessary, and I can suggest another sort of study for the critic’s consideration 

if he is really ambitious. 

Studies in the technique of the art belong to criticism certainly. They 

cannot belong anywhere else, because the technique is not peculiar to any 

prose materials discoverable in the work of art, nor to anything else but 

the unique form of that art. A very large volume of studies is indicated by 

this classification. They would be technical studies of poetry, for instance, the 

art I am specifically discussing, if they treated its metric; its inversions, 

solecisms, lapses from the prose norm of language, and from close prose 

logic; its tropes; its fictions, or inventions, by which it secures “æsthetic distance” 

and removes itself from history; or any other devices, on the general 

3. Much of the fiction of Thomas Hardy (1840– 

1928) is set in “Wessex,” a thinly fictionalized version 

of his native Dorsetshire. “The Irish question”: 

The status of the Irish within the British Empire. 

The poet Edmund Spenser (1552– 1599) wrote a 

defense of the current repressive policy, A View 

of the Present State of Ireland (1596). 

4. American teacher and critic (1899– 1986).


understanding that any systematic usage which does not hold good for prose 

is a poetic device. 

A device with a purpose: the superior critic is not content with the compilation 

of the separate devices; they suggest to him a much more general 

question. The critic speculates on why poetry, through its devices, is at 

such pains to dissociate itself from prose at all, and what it is trying to represent 

that cannot be represented by prose. 

I intrude here with an idea of my own, which may serve as a starting point 

of discussion. Poetry distinguishes itself from prose on the technical side by 

the devices which are, precisely, its means of escaping from prose. Something 

is continually being killed by prose which the poet wants to preserve. 

But this must be put philosophically. (Philosophy sounds hard, but it deals 

with natural and fundamental forms of experience.) 

The critic should regard the poem as nothing short of a desperate ontological 

or metaphysical manœuvre. The poet himself, in the agony of composition, 

has something like this sense of his labors. The poet perpetuates in 

his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crumbling 

beneath his touch. His poem celebrates the object which is real, individual, 

and qualitatively infinite. He knows that his practical interests will reduce 

this living object to a mere utility, and that his sciences will disintegrate it for 

their con ve nience into their respective abstracts. The poet wishes to defend 

his object’s existence against its enemies, and the critic wishes to know what 

he is doing, and how. The critic should find in the poem a total poetic or 

individual object which tends to be universalized, but is not permitted to 

suffer this fate. His identification of the poetic object is in terms of the universal 

or commonplace object to which it tends, and of the tissue, or totality 

of connotation, which holds it secure. How does he make out the universal 

object? It is the prose object, which any forthright prosy reader can discover 

to him by an immediate paraphrase; it is a kind of story, character, thing, 

scene, or moral principle. And where is the tissue that keeps it from coming 

out of the poetic object? That is, for the laws of the prose logic, its superfluity; 

and I think I would even say, its irrelevance. 

A poet is said to be distinguishable in terms of his style. It is a comprehensive 

word, and probably means: the general character of his irrelevances, or 

tissues. All his technical devices contribute to it, elaborating or individualizing 

the universal, the core- object; likewise all his material detail. For each 

poem even, ideally, there is distinguishable a logical object or universal, but 

at the same time a tissue of irrelevance from which it does not really emerge. 

The critic has to take the poem apart, or analyze it, for the sake of uncovering 

these features. With all the finesse possible, it is rude and patchy business by 

comparison with the living integrity of the poem. But without it there could 

hardly be much understanding of the value of poetry, or of the natural history 

behind any adult poem. 

The language I have used may sound too formidable, but I seem to find 

that a profound criticism generally works by some such considerations. 

However the critic may spell them, the two terms are in his mind: the prose 

core to which he can violently reduce the total object, and the differentia, 

residue, or tissue, which keeps the object poetical or entire. The character 

of the poem resides for the good critic in its way of exhibiting the residuary 

quality. The character of the poet is defined by the kind of prose object to

982 / Martin Heidegger 

which his interest evidently attaches, plus his way of involving it firmly in 

the residuary tissue. And doubtless, incidentally, the wise critic can often 

read behind the poet’s public character his private history as a man with a 

weakness for lapsing into some special form of prosy or scientific bondage. 

Similar considerations hold, I think, for the critique of fiction, or of the 

nonliterary arts. I remark this for the benefit of phi los o phers who believe, 

with propriety, that the arts are fundamentally one. But I would prefer to 

leave the documentation to those who are better qualified. 

1938 

MARTIN HEIDEGGER 

1889–1976 

One of the most influential phi los o phers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger 

spent much of his long career preoccupied by the age- old philosophical question 

of the meaning of “being.” He made his reputation with the publication of his magnum 

opus, Being and Time (1927, Sein und Zeit), a groundbreaking amalgam and 

extension of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859– 1938) and the hermeneutics 

of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833– 1911) that analyzes “what we really mean by the word 

‘being.’ ” His later philosophical reflections on Being, the writings that are most relevant 

for literary theorists and critics, are bound up inextricably with the experience 

and the analysis of poetry and language. For the later Heidegger, language and poetry 

are not simply devices employed to describe an already- existing world. Instead, “language 

is the house of Being,” and poetry is the means by which humankind creates 

the worlds. 

Heidegger was born to a poor Catholic family in the small town of Messkirch, 

Germany. His education at the high schools in Konstanz and Freiburg was largely a 

preparation for the priesthood. While at Freiburg, he first became interested in philosophy 

following his reading of Franz Brentano’s On the Various Meanings of Being 

according to Aristotle (1862) and Carl Braig’s On Being: An Outline of Ontology 

(1896). He left high school in 1909 to become a Jesuit novice, but he was discharged 

within a month, most likely because he felt a lack of vocation for the priesthood. He 

instead entered Freiburg University, where he studied theology and scholastic philosophy. 

In 1911 a spiritual crisis prompted Heidegger to discontinue his training in 

theology and concentrate on philosophy. He was particularly influenced by Edmund 

Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900), a treatise that attempted a systematic inquiry 

into consciousness (what its author called “phenomenology”). In timely fashion, 

Heidegger completed his dissertation, The Theory of the Judgment in Psychologism 

(1913), and his habilitation thesis, Duns Scotus’s Theory of Categories and Meaning 

(1915). 

In 1919 Heidegger further distanced himself from Catholicism by officially announcing 

his breach with its theological system. Following World War I, he became a lecturer 

at Freiburg and an assistant to Husserl. He soon began to acquire a reputation 

as a brilliant teacher for his lectures on aristotle, St. Paul, St. augustine, and phenomenology. 

In 1923 he became an associate professor at Marburg University, where 

he lectured on Greek, medieval, and German idealist philosophy. The year after the 

publication of his celebrated Being and Time, he succeeded Husserl at Freiburg.

Martin Heidegger / 983 

In the early 1930s Heidegger developed sympathy for the Nazi cause, joining the 

National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1933, shortly after he was elected rector 

of Freiburg University. Understandably, this aspect of his career is extremely 

controversial. It is complicated by Heidegger’s refusal following World War II to 

discuss his involvement with the Nazis. He did permit an interview on the subject 

in the 1960s, subsequently titled “Only a God Can Save Us Now,” but on the condition 

that it not appear during his lifetime; it was published in 1976. 

Heidegger’s early work significantly broadened the field of hermeneutics, the 

theory and art of interpretation. Whereas friedrich schleiermacher (1768– 1834) 

and Dilthey conceived of hermeneutics as the objective exegesis of a specific text or 

utterance, Heidegger proposed that hermeneutics was central to understanding in 

general, linking traditional modes of textual interpretation to phenomenology’s focus 

on the contents of consciousness. In effect, he connected the apprehension of Being 

and the dynamics of language as co- constituents. 

Through the 1930s Heidegger turned his attention more and more to the subject 

of art: one central outcome was his long lecture “The Origin of the Work of Art” 

(1935)— a main text for the later Heidegger. This development is commonly referred 

to as the “turn” (Kehre), because Heidegger became less concerned with the everyday 

human existence discussed in his Being and Time and increasingly preoccupied 

with the examination of language and poetry. Another distinguishing trait of the 

turn is that Heidegger changed his analytical discourse to a poetic prose style 

attentive to the multiple meanings of words. His late prose became performative: it 

followed the paths of thinking, including its false twists and turns, and broke down 

the traditional distinction between poetry and philosophy. Some of the major poets 

who figure prominently in his late lectures are the Germans Friedrich Hölderlin 

(1770– 1843), Stefan George (1868– 1933), and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875– 1926) 

plus the Austrian Georg Trakl (1887– 1914). 

Our selection, “Language” (1950), is a work of Heidegger’s later years. In it he propounds 

his celebrated view that “language speaks man.” Language brings man and 

his world into conscious existence; it is inaugural speaking in that it grants an abode 

or a dwelling for the being of mortals in the larger context of what Heidegger cryptically 

calls the “fourfold world” (comprising earth, sky, divinities, and mortals). In this 

account, language is neither mimetic nor expressive: it does not represent an external 

reality, nor does it express a preexisting feeling or thought. Language shapes consciousness 

and perception, calling things into being; it does not merely designate or 

label objects. In poetry, Heidegger argues, the essence of language is manifested with 

par tic u lar clarity, since poetry is less concerned with communication and expression 

than with imaginative creation. 

In our selection, Heidegger presents a now famous explication of Georg Trakl’s 

poem “A Winter Eve ning.” As a poetic or imaginative act, Trakl’s poem, he argues, 

founds and fashions a world. It bids things to appear as things; things as things are 

constituted in language and thus revealed and made near. But for Heidegger, as he 

notes while discussing the last stanza of the poem, a “difference” between thing 

and world subsists. This difference is a fundamental threshold where the gathering 

of things and world in stillness happens. Poetry allows for meditation on the difference, 

and thus it distinguishes itself from the worn- out instrumental language of 

everyday speech. This phenomenological account of language as inaugural and 

performative prefigures later poststructuralist accounts of textuality and discourse 

developed by paul de man, jacques derrida, and other admirers of Heidegger. 

Heidegger has often been criticized for his views, especially for his mysticism and 

his quietism, both of which suggest that he never abandoned his youthful religious 

sensibilities. His late poetic style, moreover, has been criticized as repetitive and 

obscure, a form of smoke and mirrors. His focus on poetry as pure speech ignores 

the so cio log i cal or “dialogical” dimensions of discourse depicted, most famously, by 

his contemporary mikhail bakhtin. But the major criticism of Heidegger is that he


involved himself with the Nazi Party and remained publicly silent about it for the 

remainder of his life, raising the issue of whether his vast corpus of writings reflects 

Nazi ideology or sensibility. Some critics separate his philosophy from his politics 

yet others see the two as fundamentally related. While it is unlikely that this debate 

will be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, all acknowledge that Heidegger has had 

a tremendous influence on philosophy, particularly in Eu rope, as exemplified powerfully 

in the existentialism of jeanpaul sartre, the phenomenological hermeneutics 

of Hans- Georg Gadamer, and the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida. 

In this context, Heidegger is widely believed to be the most important Continental 

phi los o pher of the twentieth century. 

bibliography 

The standard edition of Heidegger’s collected works in German is the Gesamtausgabe 

(1976–), which is projected to reach 102 volumes. Approximately six dozen 

have been published. An introductory collection of texts in En glish is available in 

Basic Writings, translated by various hands and edited by David Farrell Krell (rev. 

and expanded, 2008). En glish versions of Heidegger’s writings bearing directly on 

his understanding of poetry and language are available in Existence and Being, 

edited by Werner Brock and translated by Douglas Scott (1949); Poetry, Language, 

Thought, edited and translated by Albert Hofstadter (1971); and On the Way to Language, 

translated by Peter D. Hertz and Joan Stambaugh (1971). Philosophical texts 

translated into En glish (with the date of German publication given first) include 

What Is Philosophy? (1956; 1956); An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated first by 

Ralph Manheim (1953; 1959), and then (as Introduction to Metaphysics) by Gregory 

Fried and Richard Polt (2000); Being and Time, translated first by John Macquarrie 

and Edward Robinson (1927; 1962), and then by Joan Stambaugh (1996); What Is 

a Thing? (1962; 1967); Identity and Difference (1957; 1969); On Time and Being 

(1969; 1972); The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated 

by William Lovitt (1977); Nietz sche (2 vols., 1961; 4 vols., 1979– 87); History of the 

Concept of Time: Prolegomena (1979; 1985); Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1980; 

1988); Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929; 1990); The Concept of Time 

(1992; 1992); Basic Concepts (1981; 1993); The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: 

World, Finitude, Solitude (1983; 1995); Pathmarks (1967; 1998); Contributions 

to Philosophy: From Enowning [a term that translates Ereignis, “appropriation”] 

(1989; 1999); Towards the Definition of Philosophy (1987; 2000); Supplements: From 

the Earliest Essays to “Being and Time” and Beyond, edited by John van Buren (2002); 

Four Seminars (1977; 2003); and Mindfulness (1997; 2006). A translation of Heidegger’s 

interview on his Nazi past, “Only a God Can Save Us Now,” can be found in the 

journal Philosophy Today 20 (Winter 1976). For biographical sources, see Hugo Ott’s 

Martin Heidegger: A Po liti cal Life (1993); Rüdiger Safranski’s Martin Heidegger: 

Between Good and Evil (1994; trans. 1998); and James K. Lyon’s Paul Celan and Martin 

Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation, 1951– 1970 (2006), which draws on documentary 

material to offer the first systematic analysis of the troubled and unfinished 

relationship between the two. 

For general introductions, see George Steiner’s Martin Heidegger (2d ed., 1991); 

The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, edited by Charles Guignon (1993); Michael 

Inwood’s Heidegger (1997); and Heidegger Reexamined, edited by Hubert Dreyfus 

and Mark Wrathall (4 vols., 2002). Among the important studies and applications 

of Heidegger’s views on language and poetry are On Heidegger and Language, edited 

by Joseph J. Kockelmans (1972); David A. White, Heidegger and the Language of 

Poetry (1978); Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature: Toward a Postmodern 

Literary Hermeneutics, edited by William V. Spanos (1979); Paul A. Bové, Destructive 

Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry (1980); David Halliburton, Poetic 

Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger (1981); Joseph Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art

Language / 985 

and Art Works (1985); Gerald L. Bruns, Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth, 

and Poetry in the Later Writings (1989); Hans- Georg Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways 

(1983; trans. 1994); Marc Froment- Meurice, That Is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics (1996; 

trans. 1998); Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry (2002; 

trans. 2007); and Jennifer Anna Gosetti- Ferencei, Heidegger, Hölderin, and the 

Subject of Poetic Language: Toward a New Poetics of Dasein (2004). On Heidegger 

and the Nazi question, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Po liti cal Ontology of Martin Heidegger 

(1975; trans. 1991); Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (1987; trans. 1990); 

Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (1987; trans. 1990); Philippe 

Lacoue- Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Po liti cal (1987; 

trans. 1990); Jean- François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews” (1988; trans. 1990); 

The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, edited by Richard Wolin (1992); Fred 

Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (1993); Hans D. Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy 

and Politics in Nazi Germany (1993); Julian Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism 

(1997); Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger & the Po liti cal: Dystopias (1998); and James 

Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (2005). For bibliographies, 

see Hans- Martin Sass, Martin Heidegger: Bibliography and Glossary (1982); 

Joan Nordquist, Martin Heidegger: A Bibliography (1990) and Martin Heidegger (II): A 

Bibliography (1996); The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, cited above; and Miles 

Groth, The Voice That Thinks: Heidegger Studies with a Bibliography of En glish Translations, 

1949– 1996 (1997). 

Language 1 

Man speaks. We speak when we are awake and we speak in our dreams. We 

are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but 

merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly listening or 

speaking but are attending to some work or taking a rest. We are continually 

speaking in one way or another. We speak because speaking is natural 

to us. It does not first arise out of some special volition. Man is said to have 

language by nature. It is held that man, in distinction from plant and animal, 

is the living being capable of speech. This statement does not mean only 

that, along with other faculties, man also possesses the faculty of speech. It 

means to say that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as 

man. It is as one who speaks that man is— man. These are Wilhelm von 

Humboldt’s 2 words. Yet it remains to consider what it is to be called—man. 

In any case, language belongs to the closest neighborhood of man’s being. 

We encounter language everywhere. Hence it cannot surprise us that as 

soon as man looks thoughtfully about himself at what is, he quickly hits 

upon language too, so as to define it by a standard reference to its overt 

aspects. Reflection tries to obtain an idea of what language is universally. 

The universal that holds for each thing is called its essence or nature. To 

represent universally what holds universally is, according to prevalent views, 

the basic feature of thought. To deal with language thoughtfully would thus 

mean to give an idea of the nature of language and to distinguish this idea 

properly from other ideas. This lecture, 3 too, seems to attempt something of 

1. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. 

2. German philologist and diplomat (1767– 1835). 

3. “Language” is a revised version of Heidegger’s 

lecture notes.


that kind. However, the title of the lecture is not “On the Nature of Language.” 

It is only “Language.” “Only,” we say, and yet we are clearly placing 

a far more presumptuous title at the head of our project than if we were to 

rest content with just making a few remarks about language. Still, to talk 

about language is presumably even worse than to write about silence. We 

do not wish to assault language in order to force it into the grip of ideas 

already fixed beforehand. We do not wish to reduce the nature of language to 

a concept, so that this concept may provide a generally useful view of language 

that will lay to rest all further notions about it. 

To discuss language, to place it, means to bring to its place of being not 

so much language as ourselves: our own gathering into the appropriation. 4 

We would reflect on language itself, and on language only. Language itself 

is— language and nothing else besides. Language itself is language. The 

understanding that is schooled in logic, thinking of everything in terms of 

calculation and hence usually overbearing, calls this proposition an empty 

tautology. Merely to say the identical thing twice— language is language— 

how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. 

We would like only, for once, to get to just where we are already. 

This is why we ponder the question, “What about language itself?” This 

is why we ask, “In what way does language occur as language?” We answer: 

Language speaks. Is this, seriously, an answer? Presumably— that is, when it 

becomes clear what speaking is. 

To reflect on language thus demands that we enter into the speaking of 

language in order to take up our stay with language, i.e., within its speaking, 

not within our own. Only in that way do we arrive at the region within which 

it may happen— or also fail to happen— that language will call to us from 

there and grant us its nature. We leave the speaking to language. We do not 

wish to ground language in something else that is not language itself, nor do 

we wish to explain other things by means of language. 

On the tenth of August, 1784 Hamann wrote to Herder 5 (Hamanns 

Schriften, ed. Roth, VII, pp. 151 f.): 

If I were as eloquent as Demosthenes 6 I would yet have to do nothing 

more than repeat a single word three times: reason is language, logos. 7 

I gnaw at this marrow- bone and will gnaw myself to death over it. There 

still remains a darkness, always, over this depth for me; I am still waiting 

for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss. 

For Hamann, this abyss consists in the fact that reason is language. Hamann 

returns to language in his attempt to say what reason is. His glance, aimed 

at reason, falls into the depths of an abyss. Does this abyss consist only in 

the fact that reason resides in language, or is language itself the abyss? We 

4. A complicated and elusive term in Heidegger’s 

thought: the “appropriation” (Ereignis) refers to 

the original appearance and nature of being in 

language. The perceptible traits or qualities proper 

to the various things of the world are manifested, 

made present, and brought into their own being 

solely through the inaugural granting of language. 

Human beings dwell in this appropriation, perceiving 

only what language founds; thus, they do 

not speak language but are spoken by it. 

5. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744– 1803), German 

phi los o pher, theologian, and critic. Johann 

Georg Hamann (1730– 1788), German phi los o pher 

and theologian. [From Johann Georg Hamann, 

Schriften, edited by F. Roth and G. A. Wiener, 8 

Parts (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1821)— translator’s 

note.] 

6. Athenian orator and statesman (384– 322 

b.c.e.), generally held to be the greatest Greek 

orator. 

7. Word, speech; discourse, reason (Greek).


speak of an abyss where the ground falls away and a ground is lacking to us, 

where we seek the ground and set out to arrive at a ground, to get to the 

bottom of something. But we do not ask now what reason may be; here we 

reflect immediately on language and take as our main clue the curious statement, 

“Language is language.” This statement does not lead us to something 

else in which language is grounded. Nor does it say anything about whether 

language itself may be a ground for something else. The sentence, “Language 

is language,” leaves us to hover over an abyss as long as we endure what it 

says. 

Language is— language, speech. Language speaks. If we let ourselves fall 

into the abyss denoted by this sentence, we do not go tumbling into emptiness. 

We fall upward, to a height. Its loftiness opens up a depth. The two 

span a realm in which we would like to become at home, so as to find a 

residence, a dwelling place for the life of man. 

To reflect on language means— to reach the speaking of language in such 

a way that this speaking takes place as that which grants an abode for the 

being of mortals. 

What does it mean to speak? The current view declares that speech is the 

activation of the organs for sounding and hearing. Speech is the audible 

expression and communication of human feelings. These feelings are accompanied 

by thoughts. In such a characterization of language three points are 

taken for granted: 

First and foremost, speaking is expression. The idea of speech as an utterance 

is the most common. It already presupposes the idea of something internal 

that utters or externalizes itself. If we take language to be utterance, we 

give an external, surface notion of it at the very moment when we explain it 

by recourse to something internal. 

Secondly, speech is regarded as an activity of man. Accordingly we have to 

say that man speaks, and that he always speaks some language. Hence we 

cannot say, “Language speaks.” For this would be to say: “It is language that 

first brings man about, brings him into existence.” Understood in this way, 

man would be bespoken by language. 

Finally, human expression is always a pre sen ta tion and repre sen ta tion of 

the real and the unreal. 

It has long been known that the characteristics we have advanced do not 

suffice to circumscribe the nature of language. But when we understand the 

nature of language in terms of expression, we give it a more comprehensive 

definition by incorporating expression, as one among many activities, into 

the total economy of those achievements by which man makes himself. 

As against the identification of speech as a merely human per for mance, 

others stress that the word of language is of divine origin. According to the 

opening of the Prologue of the Gospel of St. John, in the beginning the 

Word was with God. 8 The attempt is made not only to free the question of 

origin from the fetters of a rational- logical explanation, but also to set aside 

the limits of a merely logical description of language. In opposition to the 

exclusive characterization of word- meanings as concepts, the figurative and 

symbolical character of language is pushed into the foreground. Biology 

and philosophical anthropology, sociology and psychopathology, theology 

8. John 1.1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”


and poetics are all then called upon to describe and explain linguistic phenomena 

more comprehensively. 

In the meantime, all statements are referred in advance to the traditionally 

standard way in which language appears. The already fixed view of the 

whole nature of language is thus consolidated. This is how the idea of language 

in grammar and logic, philosophy of language and linguistics, has 

remained the same for two and a half millennia, although knowledge about 

language has progressively increased and changed. This fact could even be 

adduced as evidence for the unshakable correctness of the leading ideas 

about language. No one would dare to declare incorrect, let alone reject as 

useless, the identification of language as audible utterance of inner emotions, 

as human activity, as a repre sen ta tion by image and by concept. The 

view of language thus put forth is correct, for it conforms to what an investigation 

of linguistic phenomena can make out in them at any time. And all 

questions associated with the description and explanation of linguistic phenomena 

also move within the precincts of this correctness. 

We still give too little consideration, however, to the singular role of these 

correct ideas about language. They hold sway, as if unshakable, over the 

whole field of the varied scientific perspectives on language. They have their 

roots in an ancient tradition. Yet they ignore completely the oldest natural 

cast of language. Thus, despite their antiquity and despite their comprehensibility, 

they never bring us to language as language. 

Language speaks. What about its speaking? Where do we encounter such 

speaking? Most likely, to be sure, in what is spoken. For here speech has 

come to completion in what is spoken. The speaking does not cease in what 

is spoken. Speaking is kept safe in what is spoken. In what is spoken, speaking 

gathers the ways in which it persists as well as that which persists by it— 

its per sis tence, its presencing. But most often, and too often, we encounter 

what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past. 

If we must, therefore, seek the speaking of language in what is spoken, we 

shall do well to find something that is spoken purely rather than to pick just 

any spoken material at random. What is spoken purely is that in which the 

completion of the speaking that is proper to what is spoken is, in its turn, an 

original. What is spoken purely is the poem. For the moment, we must let 

this statement stand as a bare assertion. We may do so, if we succeed in hearing 

in a poem something that is spoken purely. But what poem shall speak 

to us? Here we have only one choice, but one that is secured against mere 

caprice. By what? By what is already told us as the presencing element in 

language, if we follow in thought the speaking of language. Because of this 

bond between what we think and what we are told by language we choose, as 

something spoken purely, a poem which more readily than others can help us 

in our first steps to discover what is binding in that bond. We listen to what is 

spoken. The poem bears the title: 

A Winter Eve ning 

Window with falling snow is arrayed, 

Long tolls the vesper bell, 

The house is provided well, 

The table is for many laid.

Wandering ones, more than a few, 

Come to the door on darksome courses. 

Golden blooms the tree of graces 

Drawing up the earth’s cool dew. 

Wanderer quietly steps within; 

Pain has turned the threshold to stone. 

There lie, in limpid brightness shown, 

Upon the table bread and wine. 

The two last verses of the second stanza and the third stanza read in the 

first version (Letter to Karl Kraus, 9 December 13, 1913): 

Love’s tender power, full of graces, 

Binds up his wounds anew. 

O! man’s naked hurt condign. 

Wrestler with angels mutely held, 

Craves, by holy pain compelled, 

Silently God’s bread and wine. 

(Cf. the new Swiss edition of the poems of G. Trakl edited by Kurt Horwitz, 

1946.) 1 

The poem was written by Georg Trakl. Who the author is remains unimportant 

here, as with every other masterful poem. The mastery consists 

precisely in this, that the poem can deny the poet’s person and name. 

The poem is made up of three stanzas. Their meter and rhyme pattern can 

be defined accurately according to the schemes of metrics and poetics. The 

poem’s content is comprehensible. There is not a single word which, taken by 

itself, would be unfamiliar or unclear. To be sure, a few of the verses sound 

strange, like the third and fourth in the second stanza: 



Similarly, the second verse of the third stanza is startling: 



But the verses here singled out also manifest a par tic u lar beauty of imagery. 

This beauty heightens the charm of the poem and strengthens its aesthetic 

perfection as an artistic structure. 

The poem describes a winter eve ning. The first stanza describes what is 

happening outside: snowfall, and the ringing of the vesper bell. The things 

outside touch the things inside the human homestead. The snow falls on the 

window. The ringing of the bell enters into every house. Within, everything 

is well provided and the table set. 

9. Austrian poet, critic, and journalist (1874– 

1936). 

1. Georg Trakl, Die Dichtungen. Gesamtausgabe 

mit einem Anhang: Zeugnisse und Erinnerungen, 

ed. Kurt Horwitz (Zu rich: Arche Verlag, 1946). 

This poem, “Ein Winterabend,” may also be 

found in Die Dichtungen, 11th ed. (Salzburg: 

Otto Müller, 1938), p. 124. The letter to Karl 

Kraus may be found in Erinnerung an Georg Trakl: 

Zeugnisse und Briefe (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1959), 

pp. 172– 73 [translator’s note]. Trakl (1887– 1914), 

Austrian expressionist poet.


The second stanza raises a contrast. While many are at home within the 

house and at the table, not a few wander homeless on darksome paths. And 

yet such— possibly evil— roads sometimes lead to the door of the sheltering 

house. To be sure, this fact is not presented expressly. Instead, the poem 

names the tree of graces. 

The third stanza bids the wanderer enter from the dark outdoors into the 

brightness within. The houses of the many and the tables of their daily meals 

have become house of God and altar. 

The content of the poem might be dissected even more distinctly, its form 

outlined even more precisely, but in such operations we would still remain 

confined by the notion of language that has prevailed for thousands of years. 

According to this idea language is the expression, produced by men, of their 

feelings and the world view that guides them. Can the spell this idea has cast 

over language be broken? Why should it be broken? In its essence, language 

is neither expression nor an activity of man. Language speaks. We are now 

seeking the speaking of language in the poem. Accordingly, what we seek lies 

in the poetry of the spoken word. 

The poem’s title is “A Winter Eve ning.” We expect from it the description 

of a winter eve ning as it actually is. But the poem does not picture a winter 

eve ning occurring somewhere, sometime. It neither merely describes a winter 

eve ning that is already there, nor does it attempt to produce the semblance, 

leave the impression, of a winter eve ning’s presence where there is no 

such winter eve ning. Naturally not, it will be replied. Everyone knows that a 

poem is an invention. It is imaginative even where it seems to be descriptive. 

In his fictive act the poet pictures to himself something that could be present 

in its presence. The poem, as composed, images what is thus fashioned for 

our own act of imaging. In the poem’s speaking the poetic imagination gives 

itself utterance. What is spoken in the poem is what the poet enunciates out 

of himself. What is thus spoken out, speaks by enunciating its content. The 

language of the poem is a manifold enunciating. Language proves incontestably 

to be expression. But this conclusion is in conflict with the proposition 

“Language speaks,” assuming that speaking, in its essential nature, is not an 

expressing. 

Even when we understand what is spoken in the poem in terms of poetic 

composition, it seems to us, as if under some compulsion, always and only to 

be an expressed utterance. Language is expression. Why do we not reconcile 

ourselves to this fact? Because the correctness and currency of this view 

of language are insufficient to serve as a basis for an account of the nature of 

language. How shall we gauge this inadequacy? Must we not be bound by a 

different standard before we can gauge anything in that manner? Of course. 

That standard reveals itself in the proposition, “Language speaks.” Up to this 

point this guiding proposition has had merely the function of warding off the 

ingrained habit of disposing of speech by throwing it at once among the phenomena 

of expression instead of thinking it in its own terms. The poem cited 

has been chosen because, in a way not further explicable, it demonstrates 

a peculiar fitness to provide some fruitful hints for our attempt to discuss 

language. 

Language speaks. This means at the same time and before all else: language 

speaks. Language? And not man? What our guiding proposition 

demands of us now— is it not even worse than before? Are we, in addition to

everything else, also going to deny now that man is the being who speaks? 

Not at all. We deny this no more than we deny the possibility of classifying 

linguistic phenomena under the heading of “expression.” But we ask, “How 

does man speak?” We ask, “What is it to speak?” 

Window with falling snow is arrayed 

Long tolls the vesper bell. 

This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in 

the waning day, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything 

lasting lasts longer. Therefore the vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly 

fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the winter eve ning time. What is 

this naming? Does it merely deck out the imaginable familiar objects and 

events— snow, bell, window, falling, ringing— with words of a language? No. 

This naming does not hand out titles, it does not apply terms, but it calls 

into the word. The naming calls. Calling brings closer what it calls. However 

this bringing closer does not fetch what is called only in order to set it down 

in closest proximity to what is present, to find a place for it there. The call 

does indeed call. Thus it brings the presence of what was previously uncalled 

into a nearness. But the call, in calling it here, has already called out to what 

it calls. Where to? Into the distance in which what is called remains, still 

absent. 

The calling here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest 

what it calls away from the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling 

there. The calling calls into itself and therefore always here and there— 

here into presence, there into absence. Snowfall and tolling of vesper bell 

are spoken to us here and now in the poem. They are present in the call. Yet 

they in no way fall among the things present here and now in this lecture 

hall. Which presence is higher, that of these present things or the presence 

of what is called? 


The table is for many laid. 


The two verses speak like plain statements, as though they were noting 

something present. The emphatic “is” sounds that way. Nevertheless it speaks 

in the mode of calling. The verses bring the well- provided house and the 

ready table into that presence that is turned toward something absent. 

What does the first stanza call? It calls things, bids them come. Where? 

Not to be present among things present; it does not bid the table named in 

the poem to be present here among the rows of seats where you are sitting. 

The place of arrival which is also called in the calling is a presence sheltered 

in absence. The naming call bids things to come into such an arrival. Bidding 

is inviting. It invites things in, so that they may bear upon men as things. The 

snowfall brings men under the sky that is darkening into night. The tolling of 

the eve ning bell brings them, as mortals, before the divine. House and table 

join mortals to the earth. The things that were named, thus called, gather to 

themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. The four are united primally 

in being toward one another, a fourfold. The things let the fourfold of 

the four stay with them. This gathering, assembling, letting- stay is the thinging 

of things. The unitary fourfold of sky and earth, mortals and divinities, 

which is stayed in the thinging of things, we call— the world. In the naming,


the things named are called into their thinging. Thinging, they unfold world, 

in which things abide and so are the abiding ones. By thinging, things carry 

out world. Our old language calls such carry ing bern, bären— Old High 

German beran— to bear; hence the words gebaren, to carry, gestate, give 

birth, and Gebärde, bearing, gesture. Thinging, things are things. Thinging, 

they gesture— gestate—world. 

The first stanza calls things into their thinging, bids them come. The bidding 

that calls things calls them here, invites them, and at the same time 

calls out to the things, commending them to the world out of which they 

appear. Hence the first stanza names not only things. It simultaneously 

names world. It calls the “many” who belong as mortals to the world’s fourfold. 

Things be- thing—i.e., condition— mortals. This now means: things, 

each in its time, literally visit mortals with a world. The first stanza speaks 

by bidding the things to come. 

The second stanza speaks in a different way. To be sure, it too bids to 

come. But its calling begins as it calls and names mortals: 

Wandering ones, more than a few . . . 

Not all mortals are called, not the many of the first stanza, but only “more 

than a few”— those who wander on dark courses. These mortals are capable 

of dying as the wandering toward death. In death the supreme concealedness 

of Being crystallizes. Death has already overtaken every dying. Those 

“wayfarers” must first wander their way to house and table through the 

darkness of their courses; they must do so not only and not even primarily 

for themselves, but for the many, because the many think that if they only 

install themselves in houses and sit at tables, they are already bethinged, 

conditioned, by things and have arrived at dwelling. 

The second stanza begins by calling more than a few of the mortals. 

Although mortals belong to the world’s fourfold along with the divinities, 

with earth and sky, the first two verses of the second stanza do not expressly 

call the world. Rather, very much like the first stanza but in a different 

sequence, they at the same time name things— the door, the dark paths. It 

is the two remaining verses that expressly name the world. Suddenly they 

name something wholly different: 



The tree roots soundly in the earth. Thus it is sound and flourishes into a 

blooming that opens itself to heaven’s blessing. The tree’s towering has been 

called. It spans both the ecstasy of flowering and the soberness of the nourishing 

sap. The earth’s abated growth and the sky’s open bounty belong 

together. The poem names the tree of graces. Its sound blossoming harbors 

the fruit that falls to us unearned— holy, saving, loving toward mortals. In the 

golden- blossoming tree there prevail earth and sky, divinities and mortals. 

Their unitary fourfold is the world. The word “world” is now no longer used in 

the metaphysical sense. It designates neither the universe of nature and history 

in its secular repre sen ta tion nor the theologically conceived creation 

(mundus), nor does it mean simply the whole of entities present (kosmos). 2 

2. Both mundus (Latin) and kosmos (Greek) mean “world,” in the different senses that Heidegger gives.


The third and fourth lines of the second stanza call the tree of graces. 

They expressly bid the world to come. They call the world- fourfold here, 

and thus call world to the things. 

The two lines start with the word “golden.” So that we may hear more 

clearly this word and what it calls, let us recollect a poem of Pindar’s: 3 Isthmians 

V. At the beginning of this ode the poet calls gold periosion panton, 

that which above all shines through everything, panta, shines through each 

thing present all around. The splendor of gold keeps and holds everything 

present in the unconcealedness of its appearing. 

As the calling that names things calls here and there, so the saying that 

names the world calls into itself, calling here and there. It entrusts world 

to the things and simultaneously keeps the things in the splendor of world. 

The world grants to things their presence. Things bear world. World grants 

things. 

The speaking of the first two stanzas speaks by bidding things to come to 

world, and world to things. The two modes of bidding are different but not 

separated. But neither are they merely coupled together. For world and things 

do not subsist alongside one another. They penetrate each other. Thus the 

two traverse a middle. In it, they are at one. Thus at one they are intimate. 

The middle of the two is intimacy— in Latin, inter. The corresponding German 

word is unter, the En glish inter-. The intimacy of world and thing is not 

a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate— world and thing— 

divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the 

between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a difference. 

The intimacy of world and thing is present in the separation of the 

between; it is present in the difference. The word difference is now removed 

from its usual and customary usage. What it now names is not a generic 

concept for various kinds of differences. It exists only as this single difference. 

It is unique. Of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which 

world and things are at one with each other. The intimacy of the difference 

is the unifying element of the diaphora, the carry ing out that carries through. 

The difference carries out world in its worlding, carries out things in their 

thinging. Thus carry ing them out, it carries them toward one another. The 

difference does not mediate after the fact by connecting world and things 

through a middle added on to them. Being the middle, it first determines 

world and things in their presence, i.e., in their being toward one another, 

whose unity it carries out. 

The word consequently no longer means a distinction established between 

objects only by our repre sen ta tions. Nor is it merely a relation obtaining 

between world and thing, so that a repre sen ta tion coming upon it can 

establish it. The difference is not abstracted from world and thing as their 

relationship after the fact. The difference for world and thing disclosingly 

appropriates things into bearing a world; it disclosingly appropriates world 

into the granting of things. 

The difference is neither distinction nor relation. The difference is, at 

most, dimension for world and thing. But in this case “dimension” also no 

longer means a precinct already present in de pen dently in which this or that 

3. Greek lyric poet (ca. 518– 438 b.c.e.), known for his elaborate victory odes. In fact, the word panton 

is not used at the beginning of the poem cited.


comes to settle. The difference is the dimension, insofar as it mea sures out, 

apportions, world and thing, each to its own. Its allotment of them first 

opens up the separateness and towardness of world and thing. Such an 

opening up is the way in which the difference here spans the two. The difference, 

as the middle for world and things, metes out the mea sure of their 

presence. In the bidding that calls thing and world, what is really called is: 

the difference. 

The first stanza of the poem bids the things to come which, thinging, bear 

world. The second stanza bids that world to come which, worlding, grants 

things. The third stanza bids the middle for world and things to come: the 

carry ing out of the intimacy. On this account the third stanza begins with an 

emphatic calling: 

Wanderer quietly steps within. 

Where to? The verse does not say. Instead, it calls the entering wanderer into 

the stillness. This stillness ministers over the doorway. Suddenly and strangely 

the call sounds: 


This verse speaks all by itself in what is spoken in the whole poem. It 

names pain. What pain? The verse says merely “pain.” Whence and in what 

way is pain called? 


“Turned . . . to stone”— these are the only words in the poem that speak 

in the past tense. Even so, they do not name something gone by, something 

no longer present. They name something that persists and that has already 

persisted. It is only in turning to stone that the threshold presences at all. 

The threshold is the ground- beam that bears the doorway as a whole. It 

sustains the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside, penetrate 

each other. The threshold bears the between. What goes out and goes in, in 

the between, is joined in the between’s dependability. The dependability of 

the middle must never yield either way. The settling of the between needs 

something that can endure, and is in this sense hard. The threshold, as the 

settlement of the between, is hard because pain has petrified it. But the pain 

that became appropriated to stone did not harden into the threshold in order 

to congeal there. The pain presences unflagging in the threshold, as pain. 

But what is pain? Pain rends. It is the rift. But it does not tear apart into 

dispersive fragments. Pain indeed tears asunder, it separates, yet so that at 

the same time it draws everything to itself, gathers it to itself. Its rending, 

as a separating that gathers, is at the same time that drawing which, like 

the pen- drawing of a plan or sketch, draws and joins together what is held 

apart in separation. Pain is the joining agent in the rending that divides and 

gathers. Pain is the joining of the rift. The joining is the threshold. It settles 

the between, the middle of the two that are separated in it. Pain joins the 

rift of the difference. Pain is the difference itself. 


The verse calls the difference, but it neither thinks it specifically nor does 

it call its nature by this name. The verse calls the separation of the between,


the gathering middle, in whose intimacy the bearing of things and the granting 

of world pervade one another. 

Then would the intimacy of the difference for world and thing be pain? 

Certainly. But we should not imagine pain anthropologically as a sensation 

that makes us feel afflicted. We should not think of the intimacy psychologically 

as the sort in which sentimentality makes a nest for itself. 


Pain has already fitted the threshold into its bearing. The difference presences 

already as the collected presence, from which the carry ing out of world 

and thing appropriatingly takes place. How so? 



Where does the pure brightness shine? On the threshold, in the settling of 

the pain. The rift of the difference makes the limpid brightness shine. Its 

luminous joining decides the brightening of the world into its own. The rift of 

the difference expropriates the world into its worlding, which grants things. 

By the brightening of the world in their golden gleam, bread and wine at the 

same time attain to their own gleaming. The nobly named things are lustrous 

in the simplicity of their thinging. Bread and wine are the fruits of heaven 

and earth, gifts from the divinities to mortals. Bread and wine gather these 

four to themselves from the simple unity of their fourfoldness. The things 

that are called bread and wine are simple things because their bearing of 

world is fulfilled, without intermediary, by the favor of the world. Such things 

have their sufficiency in letting the world’s fourfold stay with them. The pure 

limpid brightness of world and the simple gleaming of things go through their 

between, the difference. 

The third stanza calls world and things into the middle of their intimacy. 

The seam that binds their being toward one another is pain. 

Only the third stanza gathers the bidding of things and the bidding of 

world. For the third stanza calls primally out of the simplicity of the intimate 

bidding which calls the difference by leaving it unspoken. The primal calling, 

which bids the intimacy of world and thing to come, is the authentic 

bidding. This bidding is the nature of speaking. Speaking occurs in what is 

spoken in the poem. It is the speaking of language. Language speaks. It 

speaks by bidding the bidden, thing- world and world- thing, to come to the 

between of the difference. What is so bidden is commanded to arrive from 

out of the difference into the difference. Here we are thinking of the old 

sense of command, which we recognize still in the phrase, “Commit thy way 

unto the Lord.” 4 The bidding of language commits the bidden thus to the 

bidding of the difference. The difference lets the thinging of the thing rest 

in the worlding of the world. The difference expropriates the thing into the 

repose of the fourfold. Such expropriation does not diminish the thing. Only 

so is the thing exalted into its own, so that it stays world. To keep in repose 

is to still. The difference stills the thing, as thing, into the world. 

Such stilling, however, takes place only in such a way that at the same 

time the world’s fourfold fulfills the bearing of the thing, in that the stilling 

4. Psalm 37.5.


grants to the thing the sufficiency of staying world. The difference stills in 

a twofold manner. It stills by letting things rest in the world’s favor. It stills 

by letting the world suffice itself in the thing. In the double stilling of the 

difference there takes place: stillness. 

What is stillness? It is in no way merely the soundless. In soundlessness 

there persists merely a lack of the motion of entoning, sounding. But the 

motionless is neither limited to sounding by being its suspension, nor is it 

itself already something genuinely tranquil. The motionless always remains, 

as it were, merely the other side of that which rests. The motionless itself still 

rests on rest. But rest has its being in the fact that it stills. As the stilling of 

stillness, rest, conceived strictly, is always more in motion than all motion 

and always more restlessly active than any agitation. 

The difference stills particularly in two ways: it stills the things in thinging 

and the world in worlding. Thus stilled, thing and world never escape 

from the difference. Rather, they rescue it in the stilling, where the difference 

is itself the stillness. 

In stilling things and world into their own, the difference calls world and 

thing into the middle of their intimacy. The difference is the bidder. The 

difference gathers the two out of itself as it calls them into the rift that is 

the difference itself. This gathering calling is the pealing. In it there occurs 

something different from a mere excitation and spreading of sound. 

When the difference gathers world and things into the simple onefold of 

the pain of intimacy, it bids the two to come into their very nature. The difference 

is the command out of which every bidding itself is first called, so 

that each may follow the command. The command of the difference has 

ever already gathered all bidding within itself. The calling, gathered together 

with itself, which gathers to itself in the calling, is the pealing as the peal. 

The calling of the difference is the double stilling. The gathered bidding, 

the command, in the form of which the difference calls world and things, 

is the peal of stillness. Language speaks in that the command of the difference 

calls world and things into the simple onefold of their intimacy. 

Language speaks as the peal of stillness. Stillness stills by the carry ing out, 

the bearing and enduring, of world and things in their presence. The carrying 

out of world and thing in the manner of stilling is the appropriative taking 

place of the difference. Language, the peal of stillness, is, inasmuch as the 

difference takes place. Language goes on as the taking place or occurring 

of the difference for world and things. 

The peal of stillness is not anything human. But on the contrary, the 

human is indeed in its nature given to speech— it is linguistic. The word “linguistic” 

as it is here used means: having taken place out of the speaking of 

language. What has thus taken place, human being, has been brought into its 

own by language, so that it remains given over or appropriated to the nature 

of language, the peal of stillness. Such an appropriating takes place in that 

the very nature, the presencing, of language needs and uses the speaking of 

mortals in order to sound as the peal of stillness for the hearing of mortals. 

Only as men belong within the peal of stillness are mortals able to speak in 

their own way in sounds. 

Mortal speech is a calling that names, a bidding which, out of the simple 

onefold of the difference, bids thing and world to come. What is purely bidden 

in mortal speech is what is spoken in the poem. Poetry proper is never


merely a higher mode (melos) 5 of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: 

everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used- up poem, from which 

there hardly resounds a call any longer. 

The opposite of what is purely spoken, the opposite of the poem, is not 

prose. Pure prose is never “prosaic.” It is as poetic and hence as rare as 

poetry. 

If attention is fastened exclusively on human speech, if human speech is 

taken simply to be the voicing of the inner man, if speech so conceived is 

regarded as language itself, then the nature of language can never appear 

as anything but an expression and an activity of man. But human speech, 

as the speech of mortals, is not self- subsistent. The speech of mortals rests 

in its relation to the speaking of language. 

At the proper time it becomes unavoidable to think of how mortal speech 

and its utterance take place in the speaking of language as the peal of the 

stillness of the difference. Any uttering, whether in speech or writing, 

breaks the stillness. On what does the peal of stillness break? How does 

the broken stillness come to sound in words? How does the broken stillness 

shape the mortal speech that sounds in verses and sentences? 

Assuming that thinking will succeed one day in answering these questions, 

it must be careful not to regard utterance, let alone expression, as the 

decisive element of human speech. 

The structure of human speech can only be the manner (melos) in which 

the speaking of language, the peal of the stillness of the difference, appropriates 

mortals by the command of the difference. 

The way in which mortals, called out of the difference into the difference, 

speak on their own part, is: by responding. Mortal speech must first 

of all have listened to the command, in the form of which the stillness of 

the difference calls world and things into the rift of its onefold simplicity. 

Every word of mortal speech speaks out of such a listening, and as such a 

listening. 

Mortals speak insofar as they listen. They heed the bidding call of the stillness 

of the difference even when they do not know that call. Their listening 

draws from the command of the difference what it brings out as sounding 

word. This speaking that listens and accepts is responding. 

Nevertheless by receiving what it says from the command of the difference, 

mortal speech has already, in its own way, followed the call. Response, 

as receptive listening, is at the same time a recognition that makes due 

ac know ledg ment. Mortals speak by responding to language in a twofold way, 

receiving and replying. The mortal word speaks by corresponding in a multiple 

sense. 

Every authentic hearing holds back with its own saying. For hearing keeps 

to itself in the listening by which it remains appropriated to the peal of stillness. 

All responding is attuned to this restraint that reserves itself. For this 

reason such reserve must be concerned to be ready, in the mode of listening, 

for the command of the difference. But the reserve must take care not just 

to hear the peal of stillness afterward, but to hear it even beforehand, and 

thus as it were to anticipate its command. 

5. A song, tune, or melody considered apart from rhythm (Greek).

998 / Antonio Gramsci 

This anticipating while holding back determines the manner in which 

mortals respond to the difference. In this way mortals live in the speaking 

of language. 

Language speaks. Its speaking bids the difference to come which expropriates 

world and things into the simple onefold of their intimacy. 

Language speaks. 

Man speaks in that he responds to language. This responding is a hearing. 

It hears because it listens to the command of stillness. 

It is not a matter here of stating a new view of language. What is important 

is learning to live in the speaking of language. To do so, we need to examine 

constantly whether and to what extent we are capable of what genuinely 

belongs to responding: anticipation in reserve. For: 

Man speaks only as he responds to language. 

Language speaks. 

Its speaking speaks for us in what has been spoken: 

A Winter Eve ning 

Window with falling snow is arrayed. 

Long tolls the vesper bell, 


The table is for many laid. 

Wandering ones, more than a few, 

Come to the door on darksome courses. 



Wanderer quietly steps within; 




1950 

ANTONIO GRAMSCI 

1891–1937 

A Marxist martyr, determined to balance “pessimism of the intellect” with “optimism 

of the will,” Antonio Gramsci is central to cultural studies and to all attempts 

to locate the roles that literature and culture play in the establishment, maintenance, 

and contestation of po liti cal power. Caught between the Rus sian Revolution, 

which he hoped to see reenacted in Italy, and the rise to power instead of the Fascist 

Party led by Benito Mussolini, Gramsci’s failed po liti cal efforts motivated his revisionist 

Marxism, which emphasized the way cultural activities interact with both the 

economy and the state to forge the “manufactured consent” he calls “hegemony.”

Antonio Gramsci / 999 

Gramsci was born on the impoverished and marginalized island of Sardinia into 

the family of a minor government official. His schooling was interrupted at age 

twelve, when he was forced to begin working sixty- hour weeks to help support his 

family after his father’s imprisonment for fraud (the conviction may have been po litically 

motivated). An early childhood bout with tuberculosis left Gramsci deformed 

(he described himself as a hunchback) and stunted (four feet, ten inches tall). Having 

won a modest scholarship, he left Sardinia in 1911 to attend the University of Turin. 

The site of Fiat’s factories, Turin was a major industrial city of Italy and home to a 

strong socialist movement among the factory workers. By 1914 Gramsci was a committed 

socialist, and in December 1916 he became an editor of the official Socialist 

Party newspaper. For the next six years, he worked as a po liti cal journalist and editor 

for various leftist publications. 

An enthusiastic champion of the Rus sian Revolution, Gramsci had reason to 

believe that Italy’s socialist revolution would not be far behind. In response to a company 

lockout, Fiat workers occupied the factories and produced cars on their own in 

September 1920, while the Socialist Party’s various trade unions had over two million 

members that same year. But membership quickly declined as Mussolini’s Fascist 

movement grew. Fascism’s nationalist trumpeting of the glories of empire and of Italy’s 

Roman past swept away concerns about its use of a militaristic state to keep workers 

and other potential dissidents under strict control. As pop u lar support for Fascism 

mounted, leftist groups fought among themselves over how to respond. In 1921 

Gramsci was one of the leading figures in the formation of the Communist Party of 

Italy. 

Like other Eu ro pe an Communist parties, the Italian one looked to Moscow for 

financial and intellectual sustenance. While Gramsci spent the bulk of 1922 and 

1923 in Rus sia, the newly installed Fascist government in Italy issued a warrant for 

his arrest. Elected to Parliament on the Communist ticket in 1924, Gramsci returned 

to take his seat, protected from prosecution by parliamentary immunity. Mussolini 

announced a one- party state the following year, and Gramsci was placed under police 

surveillance. The leaders of the Communist Party, including Gramsci, were arrested 

in November 1926 and were tried together in June 1928. Gramsci was sentenced to 

twenty years in prison. Released from prison because of ill health in April 1937, he 

died less than two weeks after gaining his freedom. 

For four years (1929– 33) in prison, before his health collapsed, Gramsci was 

allowed to write. The result was the four volumes of the Quaderni del carcere 

(The Prison Notebooks), on which most of Gramsci’s reputation as a social and 

cultural theorist is based and from which “The Formation of the Intellectuals” is 

taken. 

Gramsci is one of the major figures of Western Marxism, a term that covers the 

work of twentiethcentury German, French, British, and Italian leftist intellectuals. 

One abiding concern of these theorists is why the working- class revolution predicted 

by karl marx did not occur in Western Eu rope. An orthodox Soviet reading of Marx, 

promulgated and enforced by the Rus sian Bolsheviks, claimed that both po liti cal 

action and intellectual beliefs derive from economic interest. Since capitalism is 

against the economic interest of the workers, and since the workers are much more 

numerous than their employers, a proletariat revolution should be both inevitable and 

successful. But Western Marxists recognized that many workers were indifferent or 

even hostile to workers’ movements and socialism, and that many workers supported 

fascist parties, even when they seemed obvious enemies of workers’ interests. Significantly, 

Western Marxists proposed that economic interests are only part of the story 

when one considers the beliefs, values, commitments, and aspirations that motivate 

action; cultural factors are also crucial. It is this attention to how culture influences 

attitudes and actions that has made Western Marxism important for literary and cultural 

studies.


Gramsci’s immediate concern was the Left’s failure to win the hearts and minds 

of the Italian people, who supported the Fascists instead. Vladimir Lenin had already 

theorized that the workers’ revolution could not happen spontaneously; revolution 

could succeed only if a dedicated cadre of revolutionaries stirred the workers to 

action and or ga nized those actions once they occurred. This vanguard is the “party” 

for Lenin; its necessity justified the leadership role taken by the Bolsheviks in a supposedly 

egalitarian revolution. Subsequent writers have seen Lenin’s justification of 

“the dictatorship of the party” as the first step toward the betrayal of Marxism that 

led to the tyranny in Soviet Rus sia between 1919 and 1989. 

Gramsci’s meditations on intellectuals subtly contest Lenin’s writings on the role 

of the party. He wants to consider how the intellectual can be effective, especially 

in moving people to action. (Similar worries still bedev il literary intellectuals who 

espouse po liti cal causes.) Gramsci identifies two types of intellectuals. Traditional 

intellectuals are the administrators and apologists for existing social and cultural 

institutions, such as schools, various religious denominations, corporations, the military, 

the press, po liti cal bureaucracies, and the judicial system. Writers, artists, and 

phi los o phers are traditional intellectuals insofar as they work within formal institutions. 

In contrast, organic intellectuals rise out of membership in social groups (or 

classes) that have an antagonistic relationship to established institutions and official 

power. They “articulate” those groups’ needs and aspirations, which have frequently 

gone unexpressed. The organic intellectual does not simply parrot preexisting group 

beliefs or demands but brings to the level of public speech what has not been officially 

recognized. While a given group does have certain tendencies, the pro cess of 

articulation itself will shape it, giving it new identities and commitments— new ways 

of understanding itself and its desires. 

For Gramsci, the traditional Marxist notion of “class” is too inert if it leads us to 

believe that workers, by virtue of their social position, always belong to the same class 

and possess the same attitudes and interests. The phrase “historic bloc”— Gramsci’s 

own coinage— expresses his sense that social groups are dynamically created in specific 

historical moments, or so- called conjunctures. Any bloc’s ability to intervene 

effectively in social arrangements depends on the relative strength of other “blocs” in 

a social field marked by conflict and continual jockeying for advantage. Intellectuals 

play a key role in the ongoing formation and reformation of historical blocs. 

The emphasis on intellectuals, articulation, and the formation of a historic bloc 

culminates in the concept of “hegemony,” which substantially revises standard 

Marxist theories of “ideology.” There are two notions of ideology found in Marx’s 

German Ideology (written 1845– 46; see above): the first holds that a person’s beliefs 

and values are a reflection of that person’s economic interests (though often not 

recognized as such); the second maintains that the leading ideas of the ruling class 

will be the ruling ideas of the age. In both cases, ideology mirrors economic interest, 

though in complex ways. Hegemony, like the historic bloc, aims to make this 

static Marxist concept dynamic. Gramsci argues elsewhere that a stable state never 

rules by force alone but relies on a combination of coercion and consent. Dominance 

is secure only if a majority voluntarily complies with the law. Any group that 

aspires to rule must work to gain the people’s consent, and this work must be done 

before any directly revolutionary effort to seize and hold on to “material force.” The 

effort to win consent— an effort that is ongoing and never entirely successful (force 

will be needed against some recalcitrant citizens)— is the attempt to gain hegemony, 

the dominant position in a given society. Hegemony is “manufactured consent,” 

created through the articulation of intellectuals in a public sphere in which 

contending articulations are also voiced. 

Gramsci’s dynamic model has been especially crucial for later British Marxists 

and for the version of cultural studies that comes from Britain. Leading figures in 

cultural studies such as stuart hall and dick hebdige use the concept of hegemony

Antonio Gramsci / 1001 

to move away from the class- based politics of the Labour Party; they embrace instead 

a cultural politics that emphasizes the need of intellectuals to contest power in 

multiple ways and to engage issues of race, gender, and identity. The most frequent 

criticisms of Gramsci also resurface in evaluations of British cultural studies. Orthodox 

Marxists worry that concentrating on cultural influences on behavior will cause 

material and economic factors to slide from view. For those outside the Marxist tradition, 

the focus on intellectuals seems potentially antidemo cratic, while the stress on 

gaining power within a conflicted social field often moves issues of ethics and justice 

to the margins. Despite such criticisms, Gramsci’s focus on the cultural work that 

intellectuals do, joined with his revision of key Marxist concepts, ensures his continuing 

influence within cultural studies. 

bibliography 

A new four- volume translation of the complete Prison Notebooks, edited by Joseph 

Buttigieg and Antonio Callari and featuring an indispensable introduction and 

superb scholarly apparatus, is being published by Columbia University Press (3 

vols. to date, 1992–). But Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quentin 

Hoare and Geoffrey Newell Smith (1971), remains the most accessible text for the 

general reader. The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916– 1935, edited by David 

Forgacs (2000), is also a good place to start. Letters from Prison, edited by Frank 

Rosengarten (2 vols., 1994), is an informative supplement to the Prison Notebooks. 

Parts of Gramsci’s work before the prison years have been translated, including 

Selections from Po liti cal Writings, edited by Quintin Hoare (2 vols., 1977– 78); 

Selections from Cultural Writings, edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell 

Smith (1991); and Pre- Prison Writings, edited by Richard Bellamy (1994). There are 

two biographies: Arnold Davidson’s Antonio Gramsci: Toward an Intellectual Biography 

(1977) focuses on Gramsci’s intellectual development, while Giuseppe Fiori’s 

Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary (1990) uses new sources to offer the most 

comprehensive account of Gramsci’s life. 

The best short introduction is Steve Jones’s Antonio Gramsci (2006). Anne Showstack 

Sassoon’s Gramsci and Contemporary Politics: Beyond Pessimism of the Intellect 

(2000) offers a more detailed and sophisticated consideration of Gramsci’s work in 

relation to issues of our day. The four volumes of essays collected in Antonio Gramsci: 

Critical Assessments of Leading Po liti cal Phi los o phers, edited by James Martin 

(2002), contain many important and illuminating responses to and expansions on 

Gramsci’s ideas. Walter Adamson’s Hegemony and Revolution (1980) is an extended 

study of Gramsci’s po liti cal and cultural theory, while Robert Bocock’s Hegemony 

(1986) provides an introductory overview of the title concept. Perry Anderson’s Considerations 

on Western Marxism (1976), a key place to begin looking into Western 

Marxism, discusses Gramsci at some length. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s 

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) joins Gramsci with poststructuralist thought 

to provide a fundamental rethinking of Marxist theory. The selections by Stuart 

Hall and Dick Hebdige in this anthology record the influence of Gramsci on cultural 

studies; David Harris’s From Class Struggle to the Politics of Plea sure: The Effects of 

Gramscianism on Cultural Studies (1993) and Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural 

Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan- Hsing Chen (1996), explore this 

connection further. Joan Nordquist’s Antonio Gramsci: A Bibliography (1987) offers 

an excellent bibliography both of English- language commentary on Gramsci and of 

Gramsci’s own work in Italian and in En glish translation.


The Formation of the Intellectuals 1 

Are intellectuals an autonomous and in de pen dent social group, or does 

every social group have its own par tic u lar specialised category of intellectuals? 

The problem is a complex one, because of the variety of forms assumed 

to date by the real historical pro cess of formation of the different categories 

of intellectuals. 

The most important of these forms are two: 

1. Every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an 

essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with 

itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity 

and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also 

in the social and po liti cal fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside 

himself the industrial technician, the specialist in po liti cal economy, 

the organisers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc. It should be noted 

that the entrepreneur himself represents a higher level of social elaboration, 

already characterised by a certain directive [dirigente] and technical (i.e. 

intellectual) capacity: he must have a certain technical capacity, not only in 

the limited sphere of his activity and initiative but in other spheres as well, 

at least in those which are closest to economic production. He must be an 

organiser of masses of men; he must be an organiser of the “confidence” of 

investors in his business, of the customers for his product, etc. 

If not all entrepreneurs, at least an élite amongst them must have the 

capacity to be an organiser of society in general, including all its complex 

organism of ser vices, right up to the state organism, because of the need to 

create the conditions most favourable to the expansion of their own class; or 

at the least they must possess the capacity to choose the deputies (specialised 

employees) to whom to entrust this activity of organising the general 

system of relationships external to the business itself. It can be observed 

that the “organic” intellectuals which every new class creates alongside itself 

and elaborates in the course of its development, are for the most part “specialisations” 

of partial aspects of the primitive activity of the new social type 

which the new class has brought into prominence. 2 

Even feudal lords were possessors of a par tic u lar technical capacity, military 

capacity, and it is precisely from the moment at which the aristocracy 

loses its monopoly of technico- military capacity that the crisis of feudalism 

begins. But the formation of intellectuals in the feudal world and in the 

preceding classical world is a question to be examined separately: this formation 

and elaboration follows ways and means which must be studied 

concretely. Thus it is to be noted that the mass of the peasantry, although it 

performs an essential function in the world of production, does not elaborate 

its own “organic” intellectuals, nor does it “assimilate” any stratum of 

“traditional” intellectuals, although it is from the peasantry that other social 

1. Translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey 

Nowell Smith, who occasionally retain the original 

Italian in brackets. 

2. [Gaetano] Mosca’s Elementi di Scienza Politica 

[Elements of Po liti cal Science] (new expanded 

edition, 1923) is worth looking at in this connection. 

Mosca’s so- called “po liti cal class” is nothing 

other than the intellectual category of the dominant 

social group. Mosca’s concept of “po liti cal 

class” can be connected with Pareto’s concept of 

the élite, which is another attempt to interpret 

the historical phenomena of the intellectuals and 

their function in the life of the state and of society 

[Gramsci’s note]. Vilfredo Pareto (1848– 

1923), Italian economist and sociologist.

The Formation of the Intellectuals / 1003 

groups draw many of their intellectuals and a high proportion of traditional 

intellectuals are of peasant origin. 

2. However, every “essential” social group which emerges into history out 

of the preceding economic structure, and as an expression of a development 

of this structure, has found (at least in all of history up to the present) categories 

of intellectuals already in existence and which seemed indeed to 

represent an historical continuity uninterrupted even by the most complicated 

and radical changes in po liti cal and social forms. 

The most typical of these categories of intellectuals is that of the ecclesiastics, 

who for a long time (for a whole phase of history, which is partly 

characterised by this very monopoly) held a monopoly of a number of important 

ser vices: religious ideology, that is the philosophy and science of the 

age, together with schools, education, morality, justice, charity, good works, 

etc. The category of ecclesiastics can be considered the category of intellectuals 

organically bound to the landed aristocracy. It had equal status juridically 

with the aristocracy, with which it shared the exercise of feudal 

own ership of land, and the use of state privileges connected with property. 3 

But the monopoly held by the ecclesiastics in the superstructural field 4 was 

not exercised without a struggle or without limitations, and hence there took 

place the birth, in various forms (to be gone into and studied concretely), of 

other categories, favoured and enabled to expand by the growing strength of 

the central power of the monarch, right up to absolutism. Thus we find the 

formation of the noblesse de robe, 5 with its own privileges, a stratum of 

administrators, etc., scholars and scientists, theorists, non- ecclesiastical 

phi los o phers, etc. 

Since these various categories of traditional intellectuals experience 

through an “esprit de corps” their uninterrupted historical continuity and 

their special qualification, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous 

and in de pen dent of the dominant social group. This self- assessment is not 

without consequences in the ideological and po liti cal field, consequences of 

wide- ranging import. The whole of idealist philosophy 6 can easily be connected 

with this position assumed by the social complex of intellectuals and 

can be defined as the expression of that social utopia by which the intellectuals 

think of themselves as “in de pen dent”, autonomous, endowed with 

a character of their own, etc. 

One should note however that if the Pope and the leading hierarchy of 

the Church consider themselves more linked to Christ and to the apostles 

than they are to senators Agnelli and Benni, the same does not hold for 

3. For one category of these intellectuals, possibly 

the most important after the ecclesiastical for 

its prestige and the social function it performed 

in primitive societies, the category of medical 

men in the wide sense, that is all those who 

“struggle” or seem to struggle against death and 

disease, compare the Storia della medicina [1927, 

A History of Medicine] of Arturo Castiglioni. 

Note that there has been a connection between 

religion and medicine, and in certain areas there 

still is: hospitals in the hands of religious orders 

for certain organisational functions, apart from 

the fact that wherever the doctor appears, so does 

the priest (exorcism, various forms of assistance, 

etc.). Many great religious figures were and are 

conceived of as great “healers”: the idea of miracles, 

up to the resurrection of the dead. Even in 

the case of kings the belief long survived that 

they could heal with the laying on of hands, etc. 

[Gramsci’s note]. 

4. From this has come the general sense of “intellectual” 

or “specialist” of the word chierico (clerk, 

cleric) in many languages of romance origin or 

heavily influenced, through church Latin, by the 

romance languages, together with its correlative 

laico (lay, layman) in the sense of profane, nonspecialist 


5. Nobility of the robe or gown (French); Gramsci 

refers to judges and lawyers. 

6. A philosophy that posits the existence of ideas, 

motives, and actions separate from their material, 

economic origins and consequences.


Gentile and Croce, 7 for example: Croce in par tic u lar feels himself closely 

linked to Aristotle and Plato, but he does not conceal, on the other hand, 

his links with senators Agnelli and Benni, and it is precisely here that one 

can discern the most significant character of Croce’s philosophy. 

What are the “maximum” limits of ac cep tance of the term “intellectual”? 

Can one find a unitary criterion to characterise equally all the diverse and 

disparate activities of intellectuals and to distinguish these at the same 

time and in an essential way from the activities of other social groupings? 

The most widespread error of method seems to me that of having looked for 

this criterion of distinction in the intrinsic nature of intellectual activities, 

rather than in the ensemble of the system of relations in which these activities 

(and therefore the intellectual groups who personify them) have their 

place within the general complex of social relations. Indeed the worker or 

proletarian, for example, is not specifically characterised by his manual or 

instrumental work, but by performing this work in specific conditions and 

in specific social relations (apart from the consideration that purely physical 

labour does not exist and that even Taylor’s 8 phrase of “trained gorilla” 

is a meta phor to indicate a limit in a certain direction: in any physical work, 

even the most degraded and mechanical, there exists a minimum of technical 

qualification, that is, a minimum of creative intellectual activity). And we 

have already observed that the entrepreneur, by virtue of his very function, 

must have to some degree a certain number of qualifications of an intellectual 

nature although his part in society is determined not by these, but by 

the general social relations which specifically characterise the position of 

the entrepreneur within industry. 

All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in 

society the function of intellectuals. 9 

When one distinguishes between intellectuals and nonintellectuals, 

one is referring in reality only to the immediate social function of the professional 

category of the intellectuals, that is, one has in mind the direction 

in which their specific professional activity is weighted, whether towards 

intellectual elaboration or towards muscular- nervous effort. This means 

that, although one can speak of intellectuals, one cannot speak of nonintellectuals, 

because nonintellectuals do not exist. But even the relationship 

between efforts of intellectual- cerebral elaboration and muscular- nervous 

effort is not always the same, so that there are varying degrees of specific 

intellectual activity. There is no human activity from which every form of 

intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated 

from homo sapiens. 1 Each man, finally, outside his professional activity, carries 

on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a “phi los o pher”, an 

7. Benedetto Croce (1866– 1952) the major liberal, 

idealist phi los o pher of Italy; a staunch opponent 

of fascism, his international fame protected 

him. Giovanni Agnelli (1866– 1945), found er of 

Fiat and an Italian senator. Antonio Benni (1880– 

1945), industrialist turned politician, later a 

Fascist minister. Giovanni Gentile (1874– 1944), 

Sicilian phi los o pher, early ally of Croce, and later 

Fascist minister of education. Gramsci’s point is 

that Croce, despite his idealism and antifascism, 

understands the realities of po liti cal and economic 

power, taking care to maintain good relations with 

his friends in high places. 

8. Frederick Taylor (1856– 1915), American efficiency 

expert who greatly influenced the or ga niza 

tion of factory work. 

9. Thus, because it can happen that everyone at 

some time fries a couple of eggs or sews up a tear 

in a jacket, we do not necessarily say that everyone 

is a cook or a tailor [Gramsci’s note]. 

1. Literally, “man the thinker” (Latin). Homo 

faber: man the maker (Latin).


artist, a man of taste, he participates in a par tic u lar conception of the world, 

has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a 

conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new 

modes of thought. 

The problem of creating a new stratum of intellectuals consists therefore 

in the critical elaboration of the intellectual activity that exists in everyone 

at a certain degree of development, modifying its relationship with the 

muscular- nervous effort towards a new equilibrium, and ensuring that the 

muscular- nervous effort itself, in so far as it is an element of a general practical 

activity, which is perpetually innovating the physical and social world, 

becomes the foundation of a new and integral conception of the world. The 

traditional and vulgarised type of the intellectual is given by the man of letters, 

the phi los o pher, the artist. Therefore journalists, who claim to be men 

of letters, phi los o phers, artists, also regard themselves as the “true” intellectuals. 

In the modern world, technical education, closely bound to industrial 

labour even at the most primitive and unqualified level, must form the 

basis of the new type of intellectual. 

On this basis the weekly Ordine Nuovo 2 worked to develop certain forms 

of new intellectualism and to determine its new concepts, and this was not 

the least of the reasons for its success, since such a conception corresponded 

to latent aspirations and conformed to the development of the real forms of 

life. The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, 

which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, 

but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser, “permanent 

persuader” and not just a simple orator (but superior at the same 

time to the abstract mathematical spirit); from technique- as- work one proceeds 

to technique- as- science and to the humanistic conception of history, 

without which one remains “specialised” and does not become “directive” 

(specialised and po liti cal). 

Thus there are historically formed specialised categories for the exercise 

of the intellectual function. They are formed in connection with all social 

groups, but especially in connection with the more important, and they 

undergo more extensive and complex elaboration in connection with the 

dominant social group. One of the most important characteristics of any 

group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate 

and to conquer “ideologically” the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation 

and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the 

group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic 

intellectuals. 

The enormous development of activity and organisation of education in 

the broad sense in the societies that emerged from the medieval world is an 

index of the importance assumed in the modern world by intellectual functions 

and categories. Parallel with the attempt to deepen and to broaden the 

“intellectuality” of each individual, there has also been an attempt to multiply 

and narrow the various specialisations. This can be seen from educational 

institutions at all levels, up to and including the organisms that exist 

to promote so- called “high culture” in all fields of science and technology. 

2. New Order, a socialist magazine edited by Gramsci in 1919– 20.


School is the instrument through which intellectuals of various levels are 

elaborated. The complexity of the intellectual function in different states 

can be mea sured objectively by the number and gradation of specialised 

schools: the more extensive the “area” covered by education and the more 

numerous the “vertical” “levels” of schooling, the more complex is the cultural 

world, the civilisation, of a par tic u lar state. A point of comparison can 

be found in the sphere of industrial technology: the industrialisation of a 

country can be mea sured by how well equipped it is in the production of 

machines with which to produce machines, and in the manufacture of ever 

more accurate instruments for making both machines and further instruments 

for making machines, etc. The country which is best equipped in the 

construction of instruments for experimental scientific laboratories and in 

the construction of instruments with which to test the first instruments, 

can be regarded as the most complex in the technical- industrial field, with 

the highest level of civilisation, etc. The same applies to the preparation of 

intellectuals and to the schools dedicated to this preparation; schools and 

institutes of high culture can be assimilated to each other. In this field also, 

quantity cannot be separated from quality. To the most refined technicalcultural 

specialisation there cannot but correspond the maximum possible 

diffusion of primary education and the maximum care taken to expand the 

middle grades numerically as much as possible. Naturally this need to provide 

the widest base possible for the selection and elaboration of the top 

intellectual qualifications— i.e. to give a demo cratic structure to high culture 

and top- level technology— is not without its disadvantages: it creates 

the possibility of vast crises of unemployment for the middle intellectual 

strata, and in all modern societies this actually takes place. 

It is worth noting that the elaboration of intellectual strata in concrete 

reality does not take place on the terrain of abstract democracy but in 

accordance with very concrete traditional historical pro cesses. Strata have 

grown up which traditionally “produce” intellectuals and these strata coincide 

with those which have specialised in “saving”, i.e. the petty and middle 

landed bourgeoisie and certain strata of the petty and middle urban bourgeoisie. 

The varying distribution of different types of school (classical and 

professional) over the “economic” territory and the varying aspirations of 

different categories within these strata determine, or give form to, the production 

of various branches of intellectual specialisation. Thus in Italy the 

rural bourgeoisie produces in par tic u lar state functionaries and professional 

people, whereas the urban bourgeoisie produces technicians for industry. 

Consequently it is largely northern Italy which produces technicians and 

the South which produces functionaries and professional men. 

The relationship between the intellectuals and the world of production is 

not as direct as it is with the fundamental social groups but is, in varying 

degrees, “mediated” by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of 

superstructures, of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the “functionaries”. 

It should be possible both to mea sure the “organic quality” [organicità] 

of the various intellectual strata and their degree of connection with a fundamental 

social group, and to establish a gradation of their functions and 

of the superstructures from the bottom to the top (from the structural base 

upwards). What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural 

“levels”: the one that can be called “civil society”, that is the ensemble


of organisms commonly called “private”, and that of “po liti cal society” or 

“the State”. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of 

“hegemony” which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on 

the other hand to that of “direct domination” or command exercised through 

the State and “juridical” government. The functions in question are precisely 

organisational and connective. The intellectuals are the dominant 

group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony 

and po liti cal government. These comprise: 

1. The “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population 

to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental 

group; this consent is “historically” caused by the prestige (and consequent 

confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and 

function in the world of production. 

2. The apparatus of state coercive power which “legally” enforces discipline 

on those groups who do not “consent” either actively or passively. This 

apparatus is, however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of 

moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent 

has failed. 

This way of posing the problem has as a result a considerable extension of 

the concept of intellectual, but it is the only way which enables one to reach 

a concrete approximation of reality. It also clashes with preconceptions of 

caste. The function of organising social hegemony and state domination 

certainly gives rise to a par tic u lar division of labour and therefore to a whole 

hierarchy of qualifications in some of which there is no apparent attribution 

of directive or organisational functions. For example, in the apparatus of 

social and state direction there exist a whole series of jobs of a manual and 

instrumental character (non- executive work, agents rather than officials or 

functionaries). It is obvious that such a distinction has to be made just as it 

is obvious that other distinctions have to be made as well. Indeed, intellectual 

activity must also be distinguished in terms of its intrinsic characteristics, 

according to levels which in moments of extreme opposition represent a 

real qualitative difference— at the highest level would be the creators of the 

various sciences, philosophy, art, etc., at the lowest the most humble “administrators” 

and divulgators of preexisting, traditional, accumulated intellectual 

wealth. 3 

In the modern world the category of intellectuals, understood in this sense, 

has undergone an unpre ce dented expansion. The democratic- bureaucratic 

system has given rise to a great mass of functions which are not all justified 

by the social necessities of production, though they are justified by the 

po liti cal necessities of the dominant fundamental group. Hence Loria’s 4 

conception of the unproductive “worker” (but unproductive in relation to 

whom and to what mode of production?), a conception which could in part 

be justified if one takes account of the fact that these masses exploit their 

position to take for themselves a large cut out of the national income. Mass 

3. Here again military organisation offers a model 

of complex gradations between subaltern officers, 

se nior officers and general staff, not to mention 

the NCOs, whose importance is greater than is 

generally admitted. It is worth observing that all 

these parts feel a solidarity and indeed it is the 

lower strata that display the most blatant esprit de 

corps, from which they derive a certain “conceit” 

which is apt to lay them open to jokes and witticisms 


4. Achille Loria (1857– 1943), Italian economic 

theorist.

1008 / Zora Neale Hurston 

formation has standardised individuals both psychologically and in terms 

of individual qualification and has produced the same phenomena as with 

other standardised masses: competition which makes necessary organisations 

for the defence of professions, unemployment, over- production in the 

schools, emigration, etc. 

1929–33 1948–51 

ZORA NEALE HURSTON 

1891–1960 

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is said to be the most 

frequently taught text in U.S. colleges and universities, but few readers have paid 

attention to the rich body of her work— including other novels, stories, and cultural 

criticism. Hurston identified herself as a “literary anthropologist,” a phrase that 

reflects her training in anthropology at Columbia University, her deep and abiding 

interest in folklore, and her commitment to the creative power of the literary imagination. 

Born near Tuskegee, Alabama, Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the first 

incorporated, self- governing black township in the United States, where her father, 

a Baptist minister, served three terms as mayor. Her childhood experiences played 

a central role in the development of the characters and themes of her literary work. 

As Hurston’s novels and her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) attest, she 

felt an intimate bond to the customs, beliefs, and forms of speech of the African 

American community. Hurston studied between 1918 and 1924 at Howard University 

in Washington, D.C. Encouraged by Alain Locke, one of her teachers and a 

distinguished African American intellectual, she first submitted a story to the 

journal Opportunity, where it was published in December 1924. Hurston also contributed 

the story “Spunk” to Locke’s groundbreaking collection The New Negro 

(1925). 

In 1925 Hurston traveled to New York City, where she soon became one of the 

leading lights of the Harlem Re nais sance, known both for her plays and stories and 

for her oral per for mances of black folklore and folktales. Helped by white patrons, 

she was able to attend Barnard College, studying with the eminent anthropologist 

Franz Boas, a professor at Columbia; she graduated in 1928. Her research in the 

South and in the Ca rib be an formed the basis of her landmark collection of African 

American folklore, Mules and Men (1935), which was followed by a second compilation, 

Tell My Horse (1938). 

While undertaking ethnographic study in Haiti, Hurston completed Their Eyes 

Were Watching God. She had published one novel already—Jonah’s Gourd Vine 

(1934), which focuses on a Baptist minister— and other novels would follow, including 

Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), her retelling of the Exodus story. But Their 

Eyes Were Watching God is her masterpiece, an evocative, often painful, but ultimately 

celebratory account of its black heroine’s quest for emotional and sexual 

fulfillment and personal freedom. 

Hurston’s defense of the language she uses in Their Eyes Were Watching God 

had appeared three years earlier, “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934). In 

that essay, our first selection, she describes the rich, flexible resources of African

Zora Neale Hurston / 1009 

American dialect and folk expression. Her subject is language in the broadest 

sense— including gestures and forms of music and dance— but she dwells particularly 

on African American speech, which had so often been mocked and ridiculed, 

misinterpreted and devalued. “Negro dialect” was suppressed by schools and attacked 

by contemporary critics of language and culture such as H. L. Mencken. Hurston 

praises and celebrates the linguistic prowess and cultural greatness of her people, 

even as she also points to (and calls attention to the flaws in) efforts by white artists 

to adapt distinctively African American styles and expressions in language and, especially, 

in music and dance. 

Hurston’s career peaked in the 1930s. Her later novels were less successful, and 

other writings were left unfinished. She had come under attack by some black writers, 

such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, who blasted Their Eyes Were Watching 

God as a “minstrel novel” and her writing as “calculated burlesque”; moreover, 

the benefits she saw in a black- run community like Eatonville made her suspicious 

of demands for integration, a view that set her outside the African American intellectual 

mainstream in the 1950s. During the final de cade of her life, she worked as 

a cleaning woman and at other menial jobs. She died in poverty, forgotten, with 

none of her books in print. In the early 1970s, the African American novelist Alice 

Walker wrote movingly of locating the approximate site of Hurston’s unmarked 

grave; Walker’s essays, particularly her comments on Their Eyes Were Watching 

God, were instrumental in reviving Hurston’s reputation. 

In her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), Hurston focused on a white 

woman, a shift implying a view of artistic freedom that our second selection, “What 

White Publishers Won’t Print” (1950), makes explicit. Though her emphasis is on the 

need for publishers, theater producers, editors, and audiences to accept a more honest 

and nuanced treatment of black and other minority characters, she argues here 

against any restrictions on subject matter. For Hurston, it is crucial that writers and 

readers strive to break through racial and ethnic ste reo types, even when readers find 

the new kinds of characters and themes unfamiliar and disorienting. She stresses, 

on the one hand, that the consciousness of black people is different (and not captured 

by the reductive, distorted versions in pop u lar thought and in past and present literature). 

But on the other hand, she contends that all individuals have much in common: 

“Minorities,” she explains, are “just like everybody else.” 

Though set in a specific po liti cal context, when cold war tensions seemed to make 

imperative a national unity that appeared to be unattainable without better understanding 

of racial and ethnic minorities, “What White Publishers Won’t Print” is in 

large part a lively adaptation of an oft- repeated (and historically very important) 

argument. In the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass and other African American 

abolitionists argued that black men and women, slave and free alike, must be 

portrayed and understood as authentic individuals; many twentiethcentury black 

writers and critics, including Wright, Ellison, w. e. b. du bois, langston hughes, 

and James Baldwin, similarly attacked stereotyping and argued for artistic freedom. 

Hurston’s call for literary works about average and well- to- do African Americans is 

both a plea for realism and a criticism of the typical depiction of “Negro” characters 

as quaint or exceptional. 

But Hurston’s essay also bears witness to her ongoing literary, critical, and cultural 

disputes with her peers. In her judgment, because of their emphasis on politics 

they misleadingly represent black experience as primarily defined by white 

racism, from which there is no escape. Hurston stresses that the search for freedom 

is profoundly personal and cannot be captured by the category of race alone. As 

“What White Publishers Won’t Print” reveals, Hurston insists that the in de pendence 

to explore the inner lives of her characters, white as well as black, is essential 

both sociopo liti cally and artistically.


bibliography 

Hurston’s novels, stories, folklore, memoirs, and other writings are available from 

the Library of America in two volumes edited by Cheryl A. Wall, Novels and Stories 

and Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (1995). See also I Love Myself: A Zora 

Neale Hurston Reader, edited by Alice Walker (1979). 

Robert Hemenway’s Zora Neale Hurston (1977) is an indispensable biography 

that has done much to spark interest in Hurston’s work. Lillie P. Howard’s Zora 

Neale Hurston (1980) is a concise survey of Hurston’s life and writings. In addition, 

Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, edited by Carla Kaplan (2002), includes more 

than 600 letters that span nearly forty years of Hurston’s life. The best studies of 

Hurston are Karla F. C. Holloway, The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora 

Neale Hurston (1987); Lynda Marion Hill, Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora 

Neale Hurston (1996); Susan Edwards Meisenhelder, Hitting a Straight Lick with a 

Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston (1999); and Tiffany 

Ruby Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life (2005). 

Cheryl A. Wall’s Women of the Harlem Re nais sance (1995) places Hurston within 

a wider cultural and literary context. On the relation of Hurston’s work to contemporary 

literary theory and African American cultural and literary studies, see Barbara 

Johnson, A World of Difference (1987), and Henry Louis Gates Jr., The 

Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro- American Literary Criticism (1988). A helpful 

collection of essays is Zora Neale Hurston: Perspectives Past and Present, edited by 

Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah (1993). The documentary Zora Neale Hurston: 

Jump at the Sun (2008), produced and written by Kristy Andersen, is informative 

and moving. For bibliography, see Adele S. Newson, Zora Neale Hurston: A 

Reference Guide (1987), and Rose Parkman Davis, Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated 

Bibliography and Reference Guide (1997). 

Characteristics of Negro Expression 

Drama 

The Negro’s universal mimicry is not so much a thing in itself as an evidence 

of something that permeates his entire self. And that thing is drama. 

His very words are action words. His interpretation of the En glish language 

is in terms of pictures. One act described in terms of another. Hence 

the rich meta phor and simile. 

The meta phor is of course very primitive. It is easier to illustrate than it is 

to explain because action came before speech. Let us make a parallel. Language 

is like money. In primitive communities actual goods, however bulky, 

are bartered for what one wants. This finally evolves into coin, the coin being 

not real wealth but a symbol of wealth. Still later even coin is abandoned for 

legal tender, and still later for checks in certain usages. 

Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized. No matter how joyful or 

how sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama. Everything is acted out. 

Unconsciously for the most part of course. There is an impromptu ceremony 

always ready for every hour of life. No little moment passes unadorned. 

Now the people with highly developed languages have words for detached 

ideas. That is legal tender. “That- which- we- squat- on” has become “chair.” 

“Groan- causer” has evolved into “spear,” and so on. Some individuals even 

conceive of the equivalent of check words, like “ideation” and “pleonastic.”

Characteristics of Negro Expression / 1011 

Perhaps we might say that Paradise Lost and Sartor Resartus 1 are written in 

check words. 

The primitive man exchanges descriptive words. His terms are all closefitting. 

Frequently the Negro, even with detached words in his vocabulary— 

not evolved in him but transplanted on his tongue by contact— must add 

action to it to make it do. So we have “chop- axe,” “sitting- chair,” “cook- pot” 

and the like because the speaker has in his mind the picture of the object in 

use. Action. Everything illustrated. So we can say the white man thinks in 

a written language and the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics. 

A bit of Negro drama familiar to all is the frequent meeting of two opponents 

who threaten to do atrocious murder one upon the other. 

Who has not observed a robust young Negro chap posing upon a street 

corner, possessed of nothing but his clothing, his strength and his youth? 

Does he bear himself like a pauper? No, Louis XIV 2 could be no more insolent 

in his assurance. His eyes say plainly “Female, halt!” His posture exults 

“Ah, female, I am the eternal male, the giver of life. Behold in my hot flesh 

all the delights of this world. Salute me, I am strength.” All this with a languid 

posture, there is no mistaking his meaning. 

A Negro girl strolls past the corner lounger. Her whole body panging and 

posing. A slight shoulder movement that calls attention to her bust, that is all 

of a dare. A hippy undulation below the waist that is a sheaf of promises tied 

with conscious power. She is acting out “I’m a darned sweet woman and you 

know it.” 

These little plays by strolling players are acted out daily in a dozen streets 

in a thousand cities, and no one ever mistakes the meaning. 

Will to Adorn 

The will to adorn is the second most notable characteristic in Negro expression. 

Perhaps his idea of ornament does not attempt to meet conventional 

standards, but it satisfies the soul of its creator. 

In this respect the American Negro has done wonders to the En glish language. 

It has often been stated by etymologists that the Negro has introduced 

no African words to the language. This is true, but it is equally true 

that he has made over a great part of the tongue to his liking and has had his 

revision accepted by the ruling class. No one listening to a Southern white 

man talk could deny this. Not only has he softened and toned down strongly 

consonanted words like “aren’t” to “aint” and the like, he has made new 

force words out of old feeble elements. Examples of this are “ham- shanked,” 

“battle- hammed,” “double- teen,” “bodaciously,” “muffle- jawed.” 

But the Negro’s greatest contribution to the language is: (1) the use of 

meta phor and simile; (2) the use of the double descriptive; (3) the use of 

verbal nouns. 

1. Meta phor and Simile 

One at a time, like lawyers going to heaven. 

1. A dense philosophical satire (1833) by the 

Scottish- born historian and essayist Thomas 

Carlyle. Paradise Lost (1667), epic poem by John 

Milton. 

2. King of France (1638– 1715); his reign (1673– 

1715) was a flowering of French art, literature, 

and extravagant style.


You sho is propaganda. 

Sobbing hearted. 

I’ll beat you till: (a) rope like okra, (b) slack like lime, (c) smell like 

onions. 

Fatal for naked. 

Kyting 3 along. 

That’s a lynch. 

That’s a rope. 

Cloakers—deceivers. 

Regular as pig- tracks. 

Mule blood— black molasses. 

Syndicating—gossiping. 

Flambeaux—cheap café (lighted by flambeaux). 

To put yo’self on de ladder. 

2. The Double Descriptive 

High- tall. 

Little- tee- ninchy (tiny). 

Low- down. 

Top- superior. 

Sham- polish. 

Lady- people. 

Kill- dead. 

Hot- boiling. 

Chop- axe. 

Sitting- chairs. 

De watch wall. 

Speedy- hurry. 

More great and more better. 

3. Verbal Nouns 

She features somebody I know. 

Funeralize. 

Sense me into it. 

Puts the shamery on him. 

’Taint everybody you kin confidence. 

I wouldn’t friend with her. 

Jooking—playing piano or guitar as it is done in Jook- houses (houses 

of ill- fame). 

Uglying away. 

I wouldn’t scorn my name all up on you. 

Bookooing (beaucoup) around— showing off. 

Nouns from Verbs 

Won’t stand a broke. 

She won’t take a listen. 

He won’t stand straightening. 

That is such a complement. 

That’s a lynch. 

3. Hurrying.


The stark, trimmed phrases of the Occident seem too bare for the voluptuous 

child of the sun, hence the adornment. It arises out of the same impulse 

as the wearing of jewelry and the making of sculpture— the urge to adorn. 

On the walls of the homes of the average Negro one always finds a glut of 

gaudy calendars, wall pockets and advertising lithographs. The sophisticated 

white man or Negro would tolerate none of these, even if they bore a 

likeness to the Mona Lisa. 4 No commercial art for decoration. Nor the calendar 

nor the advertisement spoils the picture for this lowly man. He sees 

the beauty in spite of the declaration of the Portland Cement Works or the 

butcher’s announcement. I saw in Mobile a room in which there was an 

overstuffed mohair living- room suite, an imitation mahogany bed and chifforobe, 

a console victrola. 5 The walls were gaily papered with Sunday supplements 

of the Mobile Register. There were seven calendars and three wall 

pockets. One of them was decorated with a lace doily. The mantel- shelf was 

covered with a scarf of deep homemade lace, looped up with a huge bow of 

pink crepe paper. Over the door was a huge lithograph showing the Treaty 

of Versailles 6 being signed with a Waterman fountain pen. 

It was grotesque, yes. But it indicated the desire for beauty. And decorating 

a decoration, as in the case of the doily on the gaudy wall pocket, did 

not seem out of place to the hostess. The feeling back of such an act is that 

there can never be enough of beauty, let alone too much. Perhaps she is 

right. We each have our standards of art, and thus are we all interested parties 

and so unfit to pass judgment upon the art concepts of others. 

What ever the Negro does of his own volition he embellishes. His religious 

ser vice is for the greater part excellent prose poetry. Both prayers and 

sermons are tooled and polished until they are true works of art. The supplication 

is forgotten in the frenzy of creation. The prayer of the white man 

is considered humorous in its bleakness. The beauty of the Old Testament 

does not exceed that of a Negro prayer. 

Angularity 

After adornment the next most striking manifestation of the Negro is Angularity. 

Everything that he touches becomes angular. In all African sculpture 

and doctrine of any sort we find the same thing. 

Anyone watching Negro dancers will be struck by the same phenomenon. 

Every posture is another angle. Pleasing, yes. But an effect achieved by the 

very means which an Eu ro pe an strives to avoid. 

The pictures on the walls are hung at deep angles. Furniture is always set 

at an angle. I have instances of a piece of furniture in the middle of a wall 

being set with one end nearer the wall than the other to avoid the simple 

straight line. 

Asymmetry 

Asymmetry is a definite feature of Negro art. I have no samples of true 

Negro painting unless we count the African shields, but the sculpture and 

carvings are full of this beauty and lack of symmetry. 

4. Painting (ca. 1504) by Leonardo da Vinci. 

5. Brand of phonograph. 

6. Peace treaty of 1919 that formally ended World 

War I.


It is present in the literature, both prose and verse. I offer an example of 

this quality in verse from Langston Hughes: 7 

I ain’t gonna mistreat ma good gal any more, 

I’m just gonna kill her next time she makes me sore. 

I treats her kind but she don’t do me right, 

She fights and quarrels most ever’ night. 

I can’t have no woman’s got such low- down ways 

Cause de blue gum woman aint de style now’days. 

I brought her from the South and she’s goin on back, 

Else I’ll use her head for a carpet track. 

It is the lack of symmetry which makes Negro dancing so difficult for 

white dancers to learn. The abrupt and unexpected changes. The frequent 

change of key and time are evidences of this quality in music. (Note the St. 

Louis Blues.) 8 

The dancing of the justly famous Bo- Jangles and Snake Hips 9 are excellent 

examples. 

The presence of rhythm and lack of symmetry are paradoxical, but there 

they are. Both are present to a marked degree. There is always rhythm, but 

it is the rhythm of segments. Each unit has a rhythm of its own, but when 

the whole is assembled it is lacking in symmetry. But easily workable to a 

Negro who is accustomed to the break in going from one part to another, so 

that he adjusts himself to the new tempo. 

Dancing 

Negro dancing is dynamic suggestion. No matter how violent it may appear 

to the beholder, every posture gives the impression that the dancer will do 

much more. For example, the performer flexes one knee sharply, assumes a 

ferocious face mask, thrusts the upper part of the body forward with 

clenched fists, elbows taut as in hard running or grasping a thrusting blade. 

That is all. But the spectator himself adds the picture of ferocious assault, 

hears the drums and finds himself keeping time with the music and tensing 

himself for the struggle. It is compelling insinuation. That is the very reason 

the spectator is held so rapt. He is participating in the per for mance 

himself— carrying out the suggestions of the performer. 

The difference in the two arts is: the white dancer attempts to express 

fully; the Negro is restrained, but succeeds in gripping the beholder by forcing 

him to finish the action the performer suggests. Since no art ever can 

express all the variations conceivable, the Negro must be considered the 

greater artist, his dancing is realistic suggestion, and that is about all a great 

artist can do. 

7. African American poet (1902– 1967; see below); 

the poem is “Evil Woman” (1927). 

8. Song written in 1914 by W. C. Handy, performed 

most notably by the blues singer Bessie 

Smith, and often called the most pop u lar blues 

song ever written. 

9. Nicknames of, respectively, the African American 

dancers Bill Robinson (1878– 1949) and Earl 

Tucker (1905– 1937).


Negro Folklore 

Negro folklore is not a thing of the past. It is still in the making. Its great 

variety shows the adaptability of the black man: nothing is too old or too 

new, domestic or foreign, high or low, for his use. God and the Dev il are 

paired, and are treated no more reverently than Rocke fel ler and Ford. 1 Both 

of these men are prominent in folklore, Ford being particularly strong, and 

they talk and act like good- natured stevedores or mill- hands. Ole Massa is 

sometimes a smart man and often a fool. The automobile is ranged alongside 

of the oxcart. The angels and the apostles walk and talk like section 

hands. And through it all walks Jack, the greatest culture hero of the South; 

Jack beats them all— even the Dev il, who is often smarter than God. 

Culture Heroes 

The Dev il is next after Jack as a culture hero. He can outsmart everyone but 

Jack. God is absolutely no match for him. He is good- natured and full of 

humor. The sort of person one may count on to help out in any difficulty. 

Peter the Apostle is the third in importance. One need not look far for the 

explanation. The Negro is not a Christian really. The primitive gods are not 

deities of too subtle inner reflection; they are hardworking bodies who serve 

their devotees just as laboriously as the suppliant serves them. Gods of 

physical violence, stopping at nothing to serve their followers. Now of all the 

apostles Peter is the most active. When the other ten fell back trembling in 

the garden, Peter wielded the blade on the posse. 2 Peter first and foremost in 

all action. The gods of no peoples have been philosophic until the people 

themselves have approached that state. 

The rabbit, the bear, the lion, the buzzard, the fox are culture heroes from 

the animal world. The rabbit is far in the lead of all the others and is blood 

brother to Jack. In short, the trickster- hero of West Africa has been transplanted 

to America. 

John Henry 3 is a culture hero in song, but no more so than Stacker Lee, 

Smokey Joe or Bad Lazarus. There are many, many Negroes who have never 

heard of any of the song heroes, but none who do not know John (Jack) and 

the rabbit. 

EXAMPLES OF FOLKLORE AND THE MODERN CULTURE HERO 

Why de Porpoise’s Tail Is On Crosswise 

Now, I want to tell you ’bout de porpoise. God had done made de world 

and everything. He set de moon and de stars in de sky. He got de fishes 

of de sea, and de fowls of de air completed. 

He made de sun and hung it up. Then He made a nice gold track for 

it to run on. Then He said, “Now, Sun, I got everything made but Time. 

1. Henry Ford (1863– 1947), American automobile 

manufacturer and pioneer of the assembly 

line. John D. Rocke fel ler (1839– 1937), U.S. oil 

magnate and philanthropist of enormous wealth. 

2. See John 18.10– 11: Peter draws a sword and 

cuts off the ear of a servant who is among those 

coming to seize Jesus. 

3. Legendary and prodigiously strong black hero 

of American tall tales and ballads, and by far the 

best known of the “song heroes” named here 

(though in the 1930s the black bandleader Cab 

Calloway recorded songs featuring Stacker Lee 

and Smokey Joe).


That’s up to you. I want you to start out and go round de world on dis 

track just as fast as you kin make it. And de time it takes you to go and 

come, I’m going to call day and night.” De Sun went zoonin’ on cross de 

elements. Now, de porpoise was hanging round there and heard God 

what he tole de Sun, so he decided he’d take dat trip round de world hisself. 

He looked up and saw de Sun kytin’ along, so he lit out too, him and 

dat Sun! 

So de porpoise beat de Sun round de world by one hour and three 

minutes. So God said, “Aw naw, this aint gointer do! I didn’t mean for 

nothin’ to be faster than de Sun!” So God run dat porpoise for three 

days before he run him down and caught him, and took his tail off and 

put it on crossways to slow him up. Still he’s de fastest thing in de water. 

And dat’s why de porpoise got his tail on crossways. 

Rocke fel ler and Ford 

Once John D. Rocke fel ler and Henry Ford was woofing at each other. 

Rocke fel ler told Henry Ford he could build a solid gold road round the 

world. Henry Ford told him if he would he would look at it and see if 

he liked it, and if he did he would buy it and put one of his tin lizzies 4 

on it. 

Originality 

It has been said so often that the Negro is lacking in originality that it has 

almost become a gospel. Outward signs seem to bear this out. But if one 

looks closely its falsity is immediately evident. 

It is obvious that to get back to original sources is much too difficult for 

any group to claim very much as a certainty. What we really mean by originality 

is the modification of ideas. The most ardent admirer of the great 

Shakespeare cannot claim first source even for him. It is his treatment of 

the borrowed material. 

So if we look at it squarely, the Negro is a very original being. While he 

lives and moves in the midst of a white civilization, everything that he 

touches is reinterpreted for his own use. He has modified the language, 

mode of food preparation, practice of medicine, and most certainly the religion 

of his new country, just as he adapted to suit himself the Sheik haircut 

made famous by Rudolph Valentino. 5 

Everyone is familiar with the Negro’s modification of the whites’ musical 

instruments, so that his interpretation has been adopted by the white man 

himself and then reinterpreted. In so many words, Paul Whiteman 6 is giving 

an imitation of a Negro orchestra making use of white- invented musical 

instruments in a Negro way. Thus has arisen a new art in the civilized world, 

and thus has our so- called civilization come. The exchange and re- exchange 

of ideas between groups. 

4. Model T Fords (the first mass- produced car). 

5. Italian- born American actor (1895– 1926), a 

star of silent films, including The Sheik (1921). 

6. American conductor (1890– 1967).


Imitation 

The Negro, the world over, is famous as a mimic. But this in no way damages 

his standing as an original. Mimicry is an art in itself. If it is not, then all art 

must fall by the same blow that strikes it down. When sculpture, painting, 

acting, dancing, literature neither reflect nor suggest anything in nature or 

human experience we turn away with a dull wonder in our hearts at why the 

thing was done. Moreover, the contention that the Negro imitates from a 

feeling of inferiority is incorrect. He mimics for the love of it. The group of 

Negroes who slavishly imitate is small. The average Negro glories in his ways. 

The highly educated Negro the same. The self- despisement lies in a middle 

class who scorns to do or be anything Negro. “That’s just like a Nigger” is the 

most terrible rebuke one can lay upon this kind. He wears drab clothing, sits 

through a boresome church ser vice, pretends to have no interest in the community, 

holds beauty contests, and otherwise apes all the mediocrities of the 

white brother. The truly cultured Negro scorns him, and the Negro “farthest 

down” is too busy “spreading his junk” in his own way to see or care. He likes 

his own things best. Even the group who are not Negroes but belong to the 

“sixth race,” 7 buy such rec ords as “Shake dat thing” and “Tight lak dat.” They 

really enjoy hearing a good bible- beater preach, but wild horses could drag no 

such admission from them. Their readymade expression is: “We done got 

away from all that now.” Some refuse to countenance Negro music on the 

grounds that it is niggerism, and for that reason should be done away with. 

Roland Hayes 8 was thoroughly denounced for singing spirituals until he was 

accepted by white audiences. Langston Hughes is not considered a poet by 

this group because he writes of the man in the ditch, who is more numerous 

and real among us than any other. 

But, this group aside, let us say that the art of mimicry is better developed 

in the Negro than in other racial groups. He does it as the mockingbird does 

it, for the love of it, and not because he wishes to be like the one imitated. I 

saw a group of small Negro boys imitating a cat defecating and the subsequent 

toilet of the cat. It was very realistic, and they enjoyed it as much as if they 

had been imitating a coronation ceremony. The dances are full of imitations 

of various animals. The buzzard lope, walking the dog, the pig’s hind legs, 

holding the mule, elephant squat, pigeon’s wing, falling off the log, seabord 

(imitation of an engine starting), and the like. 

It is said that Negroes keep nothing secret, that they have no reserve. This 

ought not to seem strange when one considers that we are an outdoor people 

accustomed to communal life. Add this to all- permeating drama and you 

have the explanation. 

There is no privacy in an African village. Loves, fights, possessions are, to 

misquote Woodrow Wilson, “Open disagreements openly arrived at.” 9 The 

community is given the benefit of a good fight as well as a good wedding. An 

7. A new and higher race that will evolve in the 

Americas from a great amalgamation of all the current 

races of the earth, according to the teachings 

of theosophy, a system of mystic and occult speculation 

pop u lar in the late 19th and early 20th 

century. 

8. American tenor (1887– 1977). 

9. In an address to Congress on January 8, 1918, 

President Wilson (1856– 1924; 28th U.S. president, 

1913– 21) spoke of “Open covenants of peace, 

openly arrived at.”


audience is a necessary part of any drama. We merely go with nature rather 

than against it. 

Discord is more natural than accord. If we accept the doctrine of the 

survival of the fittest there are more fighting honors than there are honors 

for other achievements. Humanity places premiums on all things necessary 

to its wellbeing, and a valiant and good fighter is valuable in any community. 

So why hide the light under a bushel? Moreover, intimidation is a recognized 

part of warfare the world over, and threats certainly must be listed 

under that head. So that a great threatener must certainly be considered an 

aid to the fighting machine. So then if a man or woman is a facile hurler of 

threats why should he or she not show their wares to the community? Hence 

the holding of all quarrels and fights in the open. One relieves one’s pent- up 

anger and at the same time earns laurels in intimidation. Besides, one does 

the community a ser vice. There is nothing so exhilarating as watching wellmatched 

opponents go into action. The entire world likes action, for that 

matter. Hence prize- fighters become millionaires. 

Likewise lovemaking is a biological necessity the world over and an art 

among Negroes. So that a man or woman who is proficient sees no reason 

why the fact should not be moot. 1 He swaggers. She struts hippily about. 

Songs are built on the power to charm beneath the bedclothes. Here again 

we have individuals striving to excel in what the community considers an 

art. Then if all of his world is seeking a great lover, why should he not speak 

right out loud? 

It is all in a viewpoint. Lovemaking and fighting in all their branches are 

high arts, other things are arts among other groups where they brag about 

their proficiency just as brazenly as we do about these things that others 

consider matters for conversation behind closed doors. At any rate, the white 

man is despised by Negroes as a very poor fighter individually, and a very 

poor lover. One Negro, speaking of white men, said, “White folks is alright 

when dey gits in de bank and on de law bench, but dey sho’ kin lie about 

wimmen folks.” 

I pressed him to explain. “Well you see, white mens makes out they marries 

wimmen to look at they eyes, and they know they gits em for just what 

us gits em for. ’Nother thing, white mens say they goes clear round de world 

and wins all de wimmen folks way from they men folks. Dat’s a lie too. They 

don’t win nothin, they buys em. Now de way I figgers it, if a woman don’t 

want me enough to be wid me, ’thout 2 I got to pay her, she kin rock right on, 

but these here white men don’t know what to do wid a woman when they gits 

her— dat’s how come they gives they wimmen so much. They got to. Us 

wimmen works jus as hard as us does an come home an sleep wid us every 

night. They own wouldn’t do it and its de mens fault. Dese white men done 

fooled theyself bout dese wimmen. 

“Now me, I keeps me some wimmens all de time. Dat’s whut dey wuz put 

here for— us mens to use. Dat’s right now, Miss. Y’all wuz put here so us 

mens could have some plea sure. Course I don’t run round like heap uh men 

folks. But if my ole lady go way from me and stay more’n two weeks, I got to 

git me somebody, aint I?” 

1. Brought up. 2. Without, unless.


The Jook 

Jook is the word for a Negro plea sure house. It may mean a bawdy house. It 

may mean the house set apart on public works where the men and women 

dance, drink and gamble. Often it is a combination of all these. 

In past generations the music was furnished by “boxes,” another word for 

guitars. One guitar was enough for a dance; to have two was considered 

excellent. Where two were playing one man played the lead and the other 

seconded him. The first player was “picking” and the second was “framming,” 

that is, playing chords while the lead carried the melody by dexterous 

finger work. Sometimes a third player was added, and he played a 

tom- tom effect on the low strings. Believe it or not, this is excellent dance 

music. 

Pianos soon came to take the place of the boxes, and now player- pianos 

and victrolas are in all of the Jooks. 

Musically speaking, the Jook is the most important place in America. For 

in its smelly, shoddy confines has been born the secular music known as 

blues, and on blues has been founded jazz. The singing and playing in the 

true Negro style is called “jooking.” 

The songs grow by incremental repetition as they travel from mouth to 

mouth and from Jook to Jook for years before they reach outside ears. Hence 

the great variety of subjectmatter in each song. 

The Negro dances circulated over the world were also conceived inside 

the Jooks. They too make the round of Jooks and public works before going 

into the outside world. 

In this respect it is interesting to mention the Black Bottom. I have read 

several false accounts of its origin and name. One writer claimed that it got 

its name from the black sticky mud on the bottom of the Mississippi river. 

Other equally absurd statements gummed the press. Now the dance really 

originated in the Jook section of Nashville, Tennessee, around Fourth Avenue. 

This is a tough neighborhood known as Black Bottom— hence the name. 

The Charleston is perhaps forty years old, and was danced up and down 

the Atlantic seaboard from North Carolina to Key West, Florida. 

The Negro social dance is slow and sensuous. The idea in the Jook is to 

gain sensation, and not so much exercise. So that just enough foot movement 

is added to keep the dancers on the floor. A tremendous sex stimulation 

is gained from this. But who is trying to avoid it? The man, the woman, 

the time and the place have met. Rather, little intimate names are indulged 

in to heap fire on fire. 

These too have spread to all the world. 

The Negro theatre, as built up by the Negro, is based on Jook situations, 

with women, gambling, fighting, drinking. Shows like “Dixie to Broadway” 3 

are only Negro in cast, and could just as well have come from pre- Soviet 

Rus sia. 

Another interesting thing— Negro shows before being tampered with did 

not specialize in octoroon chorus girls. The girl who could hoist a Jook song 

from her belly and lam it against the front door of the theatre was the lead, 

3. A revue that opened on Broadway in 1924 featuring black performers, with music written by the black 

composer Will Vodery.


even if she were as black as the hinges of hell. The question was “Can she 

jook?” She must also have a good belly wobble, and her hips must, to quote 

a pop u lar work song, “Shake like jelly all over and be so broad, Lawd, Lawd, 

and be so broad.” So that the bleached chorus is the result of a white 

demand and not the Negro’s. 

The woman in the Jook may be nappy headed and black, but if she is a 

good lover she gets there just the same. A favorite Jook song of the past has 

this to say: 

Singer: It aint good looks dat takes you through dis world. 

Audience: What is it, good mama? 

Singer: Elgin movements 4 in your hips 

Twenty years guarantee. 

And it always brought down the house too. 

Oh de white gal rides in a Cadillac, 

De yaller 5 gal rides de same, 

Black gal rides in a rusty Ford 

But she gits dere just de same. 

The sort of woman her men idealize is the type that is put forth in the theatre. 

The art- creating Negro prefers a not too thin woman who can shake like 

jelly all over as she dances and sings, and that is the type he put forth on the 

stage. She has been banished by the white producer and the Negro who takes 

his cue from the white. 

Of course a black woman is never the wife of the upper class Negro in the 

North. This state of affairs does not obtain in the South, however. I have 

noted numerous cases where the wife was considerably darker than the husband. 

People of some substance, too. 

This scornful attitude towards black women receives mouth sanction by 

the mud- sills. 6 

Even on the works and in the Jooks the black man sings disparagingly of 

black women. They say that she is evil. That she sleeps with her fists doubled 

up and ready for action. All over they are making a little drama of waking 

up a yaller wife and a black one. 

A man is lying beside his yaller wife and wakes her up. She says to him, 

“Darling, do you know what I was dreaming when you woke me up?” He says, 

“No honey, what was you dreaming?” She says, “I dreamt I had done cooked 

you a big, fine dinner and we was setting down to eat out de same plate and 

I was setting on yo’ lap jus huggin you and kissin you and you was so sweet.” 

Wake up a black woman, and before you kin git any sense into her she be 

done up and lammed you over the head four or five times. When you git her 

quiet she’ll say, “Nigger, know whut I was dreamin when you woke me up?” 

You say, “No honey, what was you dreamin?” She says, “I dreamt you shook 

yo’ rusty fist under my nose and I split yo’ head open wid a axe.” 

But in spite of disparaging fictitious drama, in real life the black girl is 

drawing on his account at the commissary. Down in the Cypress Swamp 7 as 

he swings his axe he chants: 

4. That is, the movements of an Elgin watch. 

5. Yellow (that is, mulatto). 

6. Those at the bottom of the social scale. 

7. In southern Florida.


Dat ole black gal, she keep on grumblin, 

New pair shoes, new pair shoes, 

I’m goint to buy her shoes and stockings 

Slippers too, slippers too. 

Then adds aside: “Blacker de berry, sweeter de juice.” 

To be sure the black gal is still in power, men are still cutting and shooting 

their way to her pillow. To the queen of the Jook! 

Speaking of the influence of the Jook, I noted that Mae West 8 in “Sex” 

had much more flavor of the turpentine quarters 9 than she did of the white 

bawd. I know that the piece she played on the piano is a very old Jook composition. 

“Honey let yo’ drawers hang low” had been played and sung in every 

Jook in the South for at least thirty- five years. It has always puzzled me why 

she thought it likely to be played in a Canadian bawdy house. 

Speaking of the use of Negro material by white performers, it is astonishing 

that so many are trying it, and I have never seen one yet entirely realistic. 

They often have all the elements of the song, dance, or expression, but they 

are misplaced or distorted by the accent falling on the wrong element. Every 

one seems to think that the Negro is easily imitated when nothing is further 

from the truth. Without exception I wonder why the blackface comedians 

are blackface; it is a puzzle— good comedians, but darn poor niggers. Gershwin 

1 and the other “Negro” rhapsodists come under this same axe. Just 

about as Negro as caviar or Ann Pennington’s 2 athletic Black Bottom. When 

the Negroes who knew the Black Bottom in its cradle saw the Broadway version 

they asked each other, “Is you learnt dat new Black Bottom yet?” Proof 

that it was not their dance. 

And God only knows what the world has suffered from the white damsels 

who try to sing Blues. 

The Negroes themselves have sinned also in this respect. In spite of the 

goings up and down on the earth, from the original Fisk Jubilee Singers 3 

down to the present, there has been no genuine pre sen ta tion of Negro songs 

to white audiences. The spirituals that have been sung around the world are 

Negroid to be sure, but so full of musicians’ tricks that Negro congregations 

are highly entertained when they hear their old songs so changed. They 

never use the new style songs, and these are never heard unless perchance 

some daughter or son has been off to college and returns with one of the old 

songs with its face lifted, so to speak. 

I am of the opinion that this trick style of delivery was originated by the 

Fisk Singers; Tuskegee and Hampton 4 followed suit and have helped spread 

this misconception of Negro spirituals. This Glee Club style has gone on so 

long and become so fixed among concert singers that it is considered quite 

8. American actress (1892– 1980), who began in 

burlesque and continued to specialize in double 

entendre in films; she wrote as well as starred in 

the 1926 play Sex. 

9. The housing (usually shanties) for black workers 

who collected tree sap to be pro cessed into 

turpentine. 

1. George Gershwin (1898– 1937), American 

composer who wrote both Broadway musicals 

and concert works that incorporated jazz elements, 

including Rhapsody in Blue (1924). 

2. American dancer and actress (1893– 1971). 

3. An ensemble formed in 1871 at Fisk University, 

a historically black institution that opened 

in 1866 in Nashville, Tennessee; it toured the 

United States and Eu rope to raise money for the 

school (the ensemble still exists). 

4. Two schools begun as industrial training institutes, 

in Tuskegee, Alabama (founded 1881), and 

in Hampton, Virginia (founded 1868), respectively; 

both are now universities.


authentic. But I say again, that not one concert singer in the world is singing 

the songs as the Negro song- makers sing them. 

If anyone wishes to prove the truth of this let him step into some unfashionable 

Negro church and hear for himself. 

To those who want to institute the Negro theatre, let me say it is already 

established. It is lacking in wealth, so it is not seen in the high places. A creature 

with a white head and Negro feet struts the Metropolitan boards. The 

real Negro theatre is in the Jooks and the cabarets. Self- conscious individuals 

may turn away the eye and say, “Let us search elsewhere for our dramatic 

art.” Let ’em search. They certainly won’t find it. Butter Beans and Susie, 5 

Bo- Jangles and Snake Hips are the only performers of the real Negro school 

it has ever been my plea sure to behold in New York. 

Dialect 

If we are to believe the majority of writers of Negro dialect and the burntcork 

artists, 6 Negro speech is a weird thing, full of “ams” and “Ises.” Fortunately 

we don’t have to believe them. We may go directly to the Negro and 

let him speak for himself. 

I know that I run the risk of being damned as an infidel for declaring that 

nowhere can be found the Negro who asks “am it?” nor yet his brother who 

announces “Ise uh gwinter.” He exists only for a certain type of writers and 

performers. 

Very few Negroes, educated or not, use a clear clipped “I.” It verges more 

or less upon “Ah.” I think the lip form is responsible for this to a great extent. 

By experiment the reader will find that a sharp “I” is very much easier with 

a thin taut lip than with a full soft lip. Like tightening violin strings. 

If one listens closely one will note too that a word is slurred in one position 

in the sentence but clearly pronounced in another. This is particularly true of 

the pronouns. A pronoun as a subject is likely to be clearly enunciated, but 

slurred as an object. For example: “You better not let me ketch yuh.” 

There is a tendency in some localities to add the “h” to “it” and pronounce 

it “hit.” Probably a vestige of old En glish. In some localities “if” is “ef.” 

In storytelling “so” is universally the connective. It is used even as an introductory 

word, at the very beginning of a story. In religious expression “and” is 

used. The trend in stories is to state conclusions; in religion, to enumerate. 

I am mentioning only the most general rules in dialect because there are 

so many quirks that belong only to certain localities that nothing less than 

a volume would be adequate. 

Now He told me, He said: “You got the three witnesses. One is water, one 

is spirit, and one is blood. And these three correspond with the three in 

heben— Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” 

Now I ast Him about this lyin in sin and He give me a handful of seeds 

and He tole me to sow ’em in a bed and He tole me: “I want you to watch 

them seeds.” The seeds come up about in places and He said: “Those 

5. Married African American vaudev ille entertainers, 

Jodie “Butterbeans” Edwards (1895– 1967) 

and Susie Hawthorne (ca. 1896– 1963), who 

toured together for almost 50 years. 

6. That is, white performers who act in blackface, 

a form pop u lar ized in the 19th century that 

lasted into the 1950s.

What White Publishers Won’t Print / 1023 

seeds that come up, they died in the heart of the earth and quickened and 

come up and brought forth fruit. But those seeds that didn’t come up, 

they died in the heart of the earth and rottened. 

“And a soul that dies and quickens through my spirit they will live 

forever, but those that dont never pray, they are lost forever.” 

(Rev. Jessie Jefferson.) 7 

1934 

What White Publishers Won’t Print 

I have been amazed by the Anglo- Saxon’s lack of curiosity about the internal 

lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non- Anglo- 

Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor. 

This lack of interest is much more important than it seems at first glance. 

It is even more important at this time than it was in the past. The internal 

affairs of the nation have bearings on the international stress and strain, 1 

and this gap in the national literature now has tremendous weight in world 

affairs. National coherence and solidarity is implicit in a thorough understanding 

of the various groups within a nation, and this lack of knowledge 

about the internal emotions and behavior of the minorities cannot fail to bar 

our understanding. Man, like all the other animals fears, and is repelled by 

that which he does not understand, and mere difference is apt to connote 

something malign. 

The fact that there is no demand for incisive and full- dress stories around 

Negroes above the servant class is indicative of something of vast importance 

to this nation. This blank is NOT filled by the fiction built around upperclass 

Negroes exploiting the race problem. Rather, it tends to point it up. A collegebred 

Negro still is not a person like other folks, but an interesting problem, 

more or less. It calls to mind a story of slavery time. In this story, a master with 

more intellectual curiosity than usual, set out to see how much he could teach 

a particularly bright slave of his. When he had gotten him up to higher mathematics 

and to be a fluent reader of Latin, he called in a neighbor to show off 

his brilliant slave, and to argue that Negroes had brains just like the slaveowners 

had, and given the same opportunities, would turn out the same. 

The visiting master of slaves looked and listened, tried to trap the literate 

slave in Algebra and Latin, and failing to do so in both, turned to his neighbor 

and said: 

“Yes, he certainly knows his higher mathematics, and he can read Latin 

better than many white men I know, but I cannot bring myself to believe that 

he understands a thing that he is doing. It is all an aping of our culture. All 

on the outside. You are crazy if you think that it has changed him inside in 

the least. Turn him loose, and he will revert at once to the jungle. He is still a 

7. A local minister whom Hurston had observed. 

1. The cold war– the post– World War II rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.


savage, and no amount of translating Virgil and Ovid 2 is going to change him. 

In fact, all you have done is to turn a useful savage into a dangerous beast.” 

That was in slavery time, yes, and we have come a long, long way since 

then, but the troubling thing is that there are still too many who refuse to 

believe in the ingestion and digestion of western culture as yet. Hence the 

lack of literature about the higher emotions and love life of upperclass 

Negroes and the minorities in general. 

Publishers and producers are cool to the idea. Now, do not leap to the conclusion 

that editors and producers constitute a special class of unbelievers. 

That is far from true. Publishing houses and theatrical promoters are in business 

to make money. They will sponsor anything that they believe will sell. 

They shy away from romantic stories about Negroes and Jews because they 

feel that they know the public indifference to such works, unless the story or 

play involves racial tension. It can then be offered as a study in Sociology, with 

the romantic side subdued. They know the skepticism in general about the 

complicated emotions in the minorities. The average American just cannot 

conceive of it, and would be apt to reject the notion, and publishers and producers 

take the stand that they are not in business to educate, but to make 

money. Sympathetic as they might be, they cannot afford to be crusaders. 

In proof of this, you can note various publishers and producers edging forward 

a little, and ready to go even further when the trial balloons show that 

the public is ready for it. This public lack of interest is the nut of the matter. 

The question naturally arises as to the why of this indifference, not to say 

skepticism, to the internal life of educated minorities. 

The answer lies in what we may call THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF 

UNNATURAL HISTORY. 3 This is an intangible built on folk belief. It is 

assumed that all non- Anglo- Saxons are uncomplicated ste reo types. Everybody 

knows all about them. They are lay figures mounted in the museum 

where all may take them in at a glance. They are made of bent wires without 

insides at all. So how could anybody write a book about the non ex is tent? 

The American Indian is a contraption of copper wires in an eternal warbonnet, 

with no equipment for laughter, expressionless face and that says 

“How” when spoken to. His only activity is treachery leading to massacres. 

Who is so dumb as not to know all about Indians, even if they have never 

seen one, nor talked with anyone who ever knew one? 

The American Negro exhibit is a group of two. Both of these mechanical 

toys are built so that their feet eternally shuffle, and their eyes pop and roll. 

Shuffling feet and those popping, rolling eyes denote the Negro, and no characterization 

is genuine without this monotony. One is seated on a stump picking 

away on his banjo and singing and laughing. The other is a most amoral 

character before a sharecropper’s shack mumbling about injustice. Doing 

this makes him out to be a Negro “intellectual.” It is as simple as all that. 

The whole museum is dedicated to the con ve nient “typical.” In there is 

the “typical” Oriental, Jew, Yankee, Westerner, Southerner, Latin, and even 

out- of- favor Nordics like the German. The En glishman “I say old chappie,” 

and the gesticulating Frenchman. The least observant American can know 

them all at a glance. However, the public willingly accepts the untypical in 

2. Roman poets: the Aeneid of Virgil (70– 19 b.c.) 

and stories from the Metamorphoses of Ovid (43 

b.c.e.– 17 c.e.) were staples of the schoolroom for 

centuries. 

3. New York City’s American Museum of Natural 

History opened in 1877; among its exhibits were 

dioramas of “primitive” life similar to those 

mockingly suggested by Hurston.

What White Publishers Won’t Print / 1025 

Nordics, but feels cheated if the untypical is portrayed in others. The 

author of Scarlet Sister Mary 4 complained to me that her neighbors objected 

to her book on the grounds that she had the characters thinking, “and 

everybody know that Nigras don’t think.” 

But for the national welfare, it is urgent to realize that the minorities do 

think, and think about something other than the race problem. That they are 

very human and internally, according to natural endowment, are just like 

everybody else. So long as this is not conceived, there must remain that feeling 

of unsurmountable difference, and difference to the average man means 

something bad. If people were made right, they would be just like him. 

The trouble with the purely problem arguments is that they leave too much 

unknown. Argue all you will or may about injustice, but as long as the majority 

cannot conceive of a Negro or a Jew feeling and reacting inside just as they 

do, the majority will keep right on believing that people who do not look like 

them cannot possibly feel as they do, and conform to the established pattern. 

It is well known that there must be a body of waived matter, let us say, things 

accepted and taken for granted by all in a community before there can be 

that commonality of feeling. The usual phrase is having things in common. 

Until this is thoroughly established in respect to Negroes in America, as well 

as of other minorities, it will remain impossible for the majority to conceive of 

a Negro experiencing a deep and abiding love and not just the passion of sex. 

That a great mass of Negroes can be stirred by the pageants of Spring and 

Fall; the extravaganza of summer, and the majesty of winter. That they can 

and do experience discovery of the numerous subtle faces as a foundation for 

a great and selfless love, and the diverse nuances that go to destroy that love 

as with others. As it is now, this capacity, this evidence of high and complicated 

emotions, is ruled out. Hence the lack of interest in a romance uncomplicated 

by the race struggle has so little appeal. 

This insistence on defeat in a story where upperclass Negroes are portrayed 

perhaps says something from the subconscious of the majority. 

Involved in western culture, the hero or the heroine, or both, must appear 

frustrated and go down to defeat, somehow. Our literature reeks with it. Is 

it the same as saying, “You can translate Virgil, and fumble with the differential 

calculus, but can you really comprehend it? Can you cope with our 

subtleties?” 

That brings us to the folklore of “reversion to type.” This curious doctrine 

has such wide ac cep tance that it is tragic. One has only to examine the huge 

literature on it to be convinced. No matter how high we may seem to climb, 

put us under strain and we revert to type, that is, to the bush. Under a superficial 

layer of western culture, the jungle drums throb in our veins. 

This ridiculous notion makes it possible for that majority who accept it to 

conceive of even a man like the suave and scholarly Dr. Charles S. Johnson 5 

to hide a black cat’s bone on his person, and indulge in a midnight voodoo 

ceremony, complete with leopard skin and drums, if threatened with the 

loss of the presidency of Fisk University, or the love of his wife. “Under the 

skin . . . better to deal with them in business, etc., but otherwise keep them 

4. The Southern writer Julia Peterkin (1880– 

1961), whose fiction focused on the Gullahs of 

coastal South Carolina; this novel was published 

in 1928. 

5. African American sociologist and educator 

(1893– 1956), president of Fisk University from 

1946 to 1956.


at a safe distance and under control. I tell you, Carl Van Vechten, 6 think as 

you like, but they are just not like us.” 

The extent and extravagance of this notion reaches the ultimate in nonsense 

in the widespread belief that the Chinese have bizarre genitals, 

because of that eye- fold that makes their eyes seem to slant. In spite of the 

fact that no biology has ever mentioned any such difference in reproductive 

organs makes no matter. Millions of people believe it. “Did you know that a 

Chinese has. . . .” Consequently, their quiet contemplative manner is interpreted 

as a sign of slyness and a treacherous inclination. 

But the opening wedge for better understanding has been thrust into the 

crack. Though many Negroes denounced Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven 

because of the title, and without ever reading it, the book, written in the 

deepest sincerity, revealed Negroes of wealth and culture to the white public. 

It created curiosity even when it aroused skepticism. It made folks want 

to know. Worth Tuttle Hedden’s The Other Room 7 has definitely widened 

the opening. Neither of these well- written works take a romance of upperclass 

Negro life as the central theme, but the atmosphere and the background 

is there. These works should be followed up by some incisive and 

intimate stories from the inside. 

The realistic story around a Negro insurance official, dentist, general practitioner, 

undertaker and the like would be most revealing. Thinly disguised 

fiction around the well known Negro names is not the answer, either. The 

“exceptional” as well as the Ol’ Man Rivers 8 has been exploited all out of 

context already. Everybody is already resigned to the “exceptional” Negro, 

and willing to be entertained by the “quaint.” To grasp the penetration of 

western civilization in a minority, it is necessary to know how the average 

behaves and lives. Books that deal with people like in Sinclair Lewis’ Main 

Street 9 is the necessary metier. For various reasons, the average, struggling, 

nonmorbid Negro is the best- kept secret in America. His revelation to the 

public is the thing needed to do away with that feeling of difference which 

inspires fear, and which ever expresses itself in dislike. 

It is inevitable that this knowledge will destroy many illusions and romantic 

traditions which America probably likes to have around. But then, we 

have no record of anybody sinking into a lingering death on finding out that 

there was no Santa Claus. The old world will take it in its stride. The realization 

that Negroes are no better nor no worse, and at times just as boring 

as everybody else, will hardly kill off the population of the nation. 

Outside of racial attitudes, there is still another reason why this literature 

should exist. Literature and other arts are supposed to hold up the mirror to 

nature. 1 With only the fractional “exceptional” and the “quaint” portrayed, a 

true picture of Negro life in America cannot be. A great principle of national 

art has been violated. 

6. White American critic and novelist (1880– 

1964), whose works include Nigger Heaven (1926), 

a novel about Harlem life. 

7. Prize- winning novel published in 1947; Hedden 

(1896– 1985), a white woman, was a champion of 

rights for blacks and women. 

8. “Ol’ Man River” is the title of a song sung by a 

black dockworker in the American musical Show 

Boat (1927), written by Jerome Kern and Oscar 

Hammerstein II. 

9. Satiric 1920 novel about small- town America 

by Lewis (1885– 1961). 

1. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet (ca. 1600), Hamlet 

urges the players “to hold as ’t were the mirror up 

to nature” (3.2.20).

ERICH AUERBACH / 1027 

These are the things that publishers and producers, as the accredited 

representatives of the American people, have not as yet taken into consideration 

sufficiently. Let there be light! 2 1950 

2. Genesis 1.3. 

ERICH AUERBACH 

1892–1957 

A found er of modern academic comparative literature, Erich Auerbach is one of a 

number of brilliant Eu ro pe an philologists who, displaced by the rise of fascism and 

World War II, settled in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s and who, during 

the 1950s, helped make Romance philology— a Eu ro pe an discipline that studies 

cultures through historical analyses of their languages— a vital alternative to the 

New Criticism that was then dominating the study of literature in the United States. 

Auerbach’s monumental study, Mimesis: The Repre sen ta tion of Reality in Western 

Literature (1946), was perhaps his attempt to salvage Eu ro pe an humanism from fascism. 

“The challenge,” he wrote to a student in 1938, “is not to grasp and digest all 

the evil that’s happening— that’s not too difficult— but much more to find a point of 

departure [Ausgangspunkt] for those historical forces that can be set against it.” The 

work for which he is best remembered was written in Istanbul, where he had fled 

Nazi persecution, without access to libraries, books, journals, or even reliable critical 

editions of the literary texts discussed. In his epilogue, he speculates that his 

distance from the specialized libraries of Eu rope may have enabled him to write the 

book. 

Auerbach was born in Berlin to a middleclass Jewish family. He attended the prestigious 

Französisches Gymnasium and universities in Berlin, Freiburg, and Munich 

before receiving a degree in law from the University of Heidelberg in 1913. After 

serving in the German army during World War I, he abandoned law to pursue studies 

in Romance languages; he received his doctorate from the University of Greifswald 

in 1921. From 1923 to 1929 he was on the staff of the Prus sian State Library 

in Berlin, a position that enabled him to research and publish two books— a German 

translation of giambattista Vico’s New Science (1926) and a book on dante, Dante: 

Poet of the Secular World (1929). In 1929 he succeeded Leo Spitzer as chair of 

Romance philology at the University of Marburg, remaining there until 1935, when 

the Nazis stripped him of his post. In 1936 Auerbach emigrated to Turkey, where he 

took on the task of creating a modernized Eu ro pe an literature curriculum at the 

State University of Istanbul, staying until 1947. In 1947 he emigrated again, this 

time to the United States, where he taught at Pennsylvania State University and 

later became affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Studies at Prince ton University. 

In 1950 he moved to Yale University, where in 1956 he was appointed Sterling 

Professor of Romance Philology. He died the following year. Auerbach’s Mimesis 

stands among the highest achievements of literary philology, a discipline that counts 

Vico, friederich schleiermacher, and friedrich nietz sche as its most illustrious 

forerunners, and edward said and fredric jameson as its most esteemed contemporary 

heirs.

1028 / ERICH AUERBACH 

In the epilogue to Mimesis, Auerbach notes that the starting point for his 

study of literary repre sen ta tions of reality was plato’s discussion of mimesis— 

representation—in book 10 of the Republic. However, he approaches the perennial 

problem of literature’s vexed relationships with truth and reality not, as Plato does, 

from a philosophical perspective but from the perspective of historical linguistics 

and literary stylistics. For Auerbach, mimesis does not primarily concern the faithfulness 

of correspondence between a par tic u lar text and something we might call 

“reality”; it is instead a matter of style— and the history of style— that, he argues, 

offers insight into characteristically Western means of perceiving and forming reality. 

His book provides a crucial link between classical notions of mimesis, which 

persisted through the end of the Enlightenment, and modern theorists’ renewed 

interest in repre sen ta tion and its dynamics. 

Our selection, “Odysseus’s Scar,” the first chapter of Mimesis, provides a memorable 

example of Auerbach’s method of “partial investigation,” which relies on minute 

contextualized observations of par tic u lar texts. Unlike New Critical close 

reading, which focuses on individual literary style divorced from cultural contexts, 

Auerbach’s philological close reading scrutinizes and compares the dynamics 

of cultural styles. The essay begins with a reading of the scene near the end of 

Homer’s Odyssey in which the hero, Odysseus, having returned to Ithaca after 

twenty years’ absence, is recognized by the old house keeper Euryclea from a scar 

on his thigh. Comparing Homer’s narrative style in this scene with the Old Testament 

narrative of the sacrifice of Isaac, Auerbach describes two distinct styles of 

realism— two means of representing or inscribing “reality”— which we might call 

the Hellenistic and the Hebraic. Even though Odysseus’s scar represents a focal 

point in the story— a point at which both past and present come together— no such 

temporal perspective emerges in Homer’s narrative, Auerbach argues. Everything 

in Homer’s style is presented as foreground: that is, as a local and temporal present 

that is absolute. All phenomena, including psychological pro cesses, are fully externalized, 

fully visible, fixed in their temporal and spatial relationship. Homer’s realism 

presents a uniformly illuminated and uniformly objective present. As a result, 

his narrative can be analyzed but not interpreted. The biblical style in the story of 

Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac presents a very different sort of realism— one fraught 

with background, in which temporal and spatial markers are mostly missing or 

symbolic, in which psychological motivation is complex but absent. Such a narrative 

style demands investigation and interpretation. Along the way Auerbach provocatively 

contrasts Greek and Hebrew syntax, social class, patriarchy, and preferred 

genres. While Auerbach depicts Eu ro pe an literature as alternating between these 

two styles of realism, it is the latter, with its openness to ambiguity, contradiction, 

and plurality of meaning and reference, that most interests him. 

Even as Auerbach’s fascination with ambiguity in and interpretation of biblical 

narrative provides a bridge between nineteenthcentury historicism and more recent 

New Historicism, it also displays his difference from contemporary historians, 

whose treatments of history are more open and relativistic. For Auerbach, the potential 

for indeterminacy in biblical realism is held in check by the pro cess of figural 

interpretation— a pro cess he describes in his famous essay “Figura” as establishing “a 

connection between two events or persons in such a way that the first signifies not 

only itself but also the second, while the second involves or fulfils the first.” In a figural 

view of history, two events separated by historical time (for example, the sacrifice 

of Isaac and the crucifixion of Jesus) are connected by one figure; and the consciousness 

of their connection is, as Auerbach puts it, “a spiritual act.” Auerbach’s historicism, 

which he employs while analyzing modernist as well as ancient literature, is 

closer to that of medieval allegorical thinkers like dante than to that articulated by 

contemporary historicist theory. The indeterminacy of historical interpretation often 

highlighted by contemporary theorists of history is for him delimited by the unifying 

pro cess of figuration.

ERICH AUERBACH / 1029 

Auerbach’s critics have maintained that the theoretical underpinnings of his 

historicism are indebted to an outdated medieval worldview, that he minimizes 

politics and economics, that he advocates a mystical humanism at odds with his 

radically relativist framework, and that his reluctance to propose universal laws 

of history clashes with his desire to describe the figural truth of history. But the 

sheer force of his original readings of an impressive range of Eu ro pe an texts has 

inspired critics as different as northrop frye, Fredric Jameson, and Edward 

Said, all of whom have found much of interest in his methods and wide- ranging 

claims. 

bibliography 

Auerbach’s earliest scholarly work was a German translation of Vico’s New Science 

(1926). His first monograph, Dante: Poet of the Secular World (1929; trans. 1961), is 

still considered one of the best introductions to Dante’s work. Mimesis: The Represen 

ta tion of Reality in Western Literature (1946), the work for which Auerbach is 

best remembered, was translated into En glish in 1953; the fiftieth anniversary of 

the book’s translation saw the release of a new edition with a preface by Edward 

Said (2003). Other books include Introduction to Romance Languages and Literature 

(1953; trans. 1961) and Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity 

and in the Middle Ages (1953; trans. 1965). Auerbach’s last book, Scenes from the 

Drama of Eu ro pe an Literature (1959; trans. 1984), contains the essay “Figura,” considered 

his definitive statement on figural history. 

Geoffrey Green’s Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach 

and Leo Spitzer (1982) is a useful introduction to Auerbach that provides an intellectual 

biography. Geoffrey Hartman’s A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a 

Displaced Child of Eu rope (2007) ends with an extended meditation on his encounters 

with Auerbach at Yale during the late 1950s. Renewed interest in Auerbach’s 

response to Nazi oppressions, which he experienced firsthand, was sparked by Martin 

Elsky, Martin Vialon, and Robert Stein’s translation in PMLA 122 (2007) of a 

series of letters written by Auerbach during the war years to, among others, his 

student Martin Hellweg, to Karl Vossler, and to Walter Benjamin. 

Edward W. Said discusses Auerbach’s legacy in the introductory chapter to his 

The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), and the central chapters of Paul Bové’s 

Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (1986) are devoted to 

Auerbach. With the approach of a new century, reevaluations of Auerbach’s legacy 

focused on the place of philology in literary criticism, on his status as a German Jew 

in exile in Istanbul during the Holocaust, and on his brush there with Orientalism. 

Aamir R. Mufti explores the importance of Auerbach for Edward Said’s notion of 

“secular criticism” in “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and 

the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical Inquiry 25 (1998). The essays collected 

in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, 

edited by Seth Lerer (1996), examine Auerbach’s work in the context of nineteenthand 

twentiethcentury philology, the Eu ro pe an discipline that studies cultures 

through historical analyses of their languages. Poetics Today devoted a special issue 

(20.1) to Auerbach, Erich Auerbach and Literary Repre sen ta tion (1998). In “Literary 

History and the Sublime in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis,” New Literary History 38 

(2007), Robert Doran places Romance philology within the critical tradition, derived 

from Longinus, of the sublime. In “Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of Philology,” 

Critical Inquiry 35 (2008), James I. Porter reads in Auerbach’s contrast in “Odysseus’ 

Scar” between Jewish and Greek forms of repre sen ta tion a challenge to Germanic 

philology from the perspective of a secular Jewish intellectual writing during 

and in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. The 1993 edition of Ralph Manheim’s 

translation of Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in 

the Middle Ages includes a bibliography.


From Mimesis: The Repre sen ta tion of Reality 

in Western Literature 1 

Chapter 1. 

Odysseus’ Scar 

Readers of the Odyssey 2 will remember the well- prepared and touching 

scene in book 19, when Odysseus has at last come home, the scene in which 

the old house keeper Euryclea, who had been his nurse, recognizes him by a 

scar on his thigh. The stranger has won Penelope’s 3 good will; at his request 

she tells the house keeper to wash his feet, which, in all old stories, is the 

first duty of hospitality toward a tired traveler. Euryclea busies herself fetching 

water and mixing cold with hot, meanwhile speaking sadly of her absent 

master, who is probably of the same age as the guest, and who perhaps, like 

the guest, is even now wandering somewhere, a stranger; and she remarks 

how astonishingly like him the guest looks. Meanwhile Odysseus, remembering 

his scar, moves back out of the light; he knows that, despite his 

efforts to hide his identity, Euryclea will now recognize him, but he wants at 

least to keep Penelope in ignorance. No sooner has the old woman touched 

the scar than, in her joyous surprise, she lets Odysseus’ foot drop into the 

basin; the water spills over, she is about to cry out her joy; Odysseus restrains 

her with whispered threats and endearments; she recovers herself and conceals 

her emotion. Penelope, whose attention Athena’s 4 foresight had diverted 

from the incident, has observed nothing. 

All this is scrupulously externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion. The 

two women express their feelings in copious direct discourse. Feelings though 

they are, with only a slight admixture of the most general considerations 

upon human destiny, the syntactical connection between part and part is 

perfectly clear, no contour is blurred. There is also room and time for orderly, 

perfectly well- articulated, uniformly illuminated descriptions of implements, 

ministrations, and gestures; even in the dramatic moment of recognition, 

Homer does not omit to tell the reader that it is with his right hand that 

Odysseus takes the old woman by the throat to keep her from speaking, at 

the same time that he draws her closer to him with his left. Clearly outlined, 

brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm 

where everything is visible; and not less clear— wholly expressed, orderly 

even in their ardor— are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved. 

In my account of the incident I have so far passed over a whole series of 

verses which interrupt it in the middle. There are more than seventy of these 

verses— while to the incident itself some forty are devoted before the interruption 

and some forty after it, The interruption, which comes just at the 

point when the house keeper recognizes the scar— that is, at the moment of 

crisis— describes the origin of the scar, a hunting accident which occurred 

in Odysseus’ boyhood, at a boar hunt, during the time of his visit to his 

grandfather Autolycus. This first affords an opportunity to inform the 

1. Translated by Willard R. Trask. 

2. Greek epic attributed to Homer (ca. 8th c. 

b.c.e.); its hero is Odysseus. 

3. Odysseus’s faithful wife; during his long absence, 

many suitors urge her to marry again. 

4. Greek goddess of wisdom, who favors the wily 

Odysseus.

Mimesis / 1031 

reader about Autolycus, his house, the precise degree of the kinship, his 

character, and, no less exhaustively than touchingly, his behavior after the 

birth of his grandson; then follows the visit of Odysseus, now grown to be a 

youth; the exchange of greetings, the banquet with which he is welcomed, 

sleep and waking, the early start for the hunt, the tracking of the beast, the 

struggle, Odysseus’ being wounded by the boar’s tusk, his recovery, his 

return to Ithaca, his parents’ anxious questions— all is narrated, again with 

such a complete externalization of all the elements of the story and of their 

interconnections as to leave nothing in obscurity. Not until then does the 

narrator return to Penelope’s chamber, not until then, the digression having 

run its course, does Euryclea, who had recognized the scar before the 

digression began, let Odysseus’ foot fall back into the basin. 

The first thought of a modern reader— that this is a device to increase 

suspense— is, if not wholly wrong, at least not the essential explanation of this 

Homeric procedure. For the element of suspense is very slight in the Homeric 

poems; nothing in their entire style is calculated to keep the reader or hearer 

breathless. The digressions are not meant to keep the reader in suspense, but 

rather to relax the tension. And this frequently occurs, as in the passage 

before us. The broadly narrated, charming, and subtly fashioned story of the 

hunt, with all its elegance and self- sufficiency, its wealth of idyllic pictures, 

seeks to win the reader over wholly to itself as long as he is hearing it, to make 

him forget what had just taken place during the foot- washing. But an episode 

that will increase suspense by retarding the action must be so constructed 

that it will not fill the present entirely, will not put the crisis, whose resolution 

is being awaited, entirely out of the reader’s mind, and thereby destroy the 

mood of suspense; the crisis and the suspense must continue, must remain 

vibrant in the background. But Homer— and to this we shall have to return 

later— knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only 

present, and fills both the stage and the reader’s mind completely. So it is 

with the passage before us. When the young Euryclea (vv. 401ff.) sets the 

infant Odysseus on his grandfather Autolycus’ lap after the banquet, the aged 

Euryclea, who a few lines earlier had touched the wanderer’s foot, has entirely 

vanished from the stage and from the reader’s mind. 

Goethe and Schiller, 5 who, though not referring to this par tic u lar episode, 

exchanged letters in April 1797 on the subject of “the retarding element” in 

the Homeric poems in general, put it in direct opposition to the element of 

suspense— the latter word is not used, but is clearly implied when the “retarding” 

procedure is opposed, as something proper to epic, to tragic procedure 

(letters of April 19, 21, and 22). The “retarding element,” the “going back and 

forth” by means of episodes, seems to me, too, in the Homeric poems, to be 

opposed to any tensional and suspensive striving toward a goal, and doubtless 

Schiller is right in regard to Homer when he says that what he gives us 

is “simply the quiet existence and operation of things in accordance with 

their natures”; Homer’s goal is “already present in every point of his progress.” 

But both Schiller and Goethe raise Homer’s procedure to the level of a 

law for epic poetry in general, and Schiller’s words quoted above are meant 

to be universally binding upon the epic poet, in contradistinction from the 

5. friedrich von schiller (1759– 1803), German poet, phi los o pher, dramatist, and historian. Johann 

Wolfgang von Goethe (1749– 1832), German poet, playwright, and novelist.


tragic. Yet in both modern and ancient times, there are important epic works 

which are composed throughout with no “retarding element” in this sense 

but, on the contrary, with suspense throughout, and which perpetually “rob 

us of our emotional freedom”— which power Schiller will grant only to the 

tragic poet. And besides it seems to me undemonstrable and improbable that 

this procedure of Homeric poetry was directed by aesthetic considerations 

or even by an aesthetic feeling of the sort postulated by Goethe and Schiller. 

The effect, to be sure, is precisely that which they describe, and is, furthermore, 

the actual source of the conception of epic which they themselves 

hold, and with them all writers decisively influenced by classical antiquity. 

But the true cause of the impression of “retardation” appears to me to lie 

elsewhere— namely, in the need of the Homeric style to leave nothing which 

it mentions half in darkness and unexternalized. 

The excursus upon the origin of Odysseus’ scar is not basically different 

from the many passages in which a newly introduced character, or even a 

newly appearing object or implement, though it be in the thick of a battle, is 

described as to its nature and origin; or in which, upon the appearance of a 

god, we are told where he last was, what he was doing there, and by what road 

he reached the scene; indeed, even the Homeric epithets 6 seem to me in the 

final analysis to be traceable to the same need for an externalization of phenomena 

in terms perceptible to the senses. Here is the scar, which comes up 

in the course of the narrative; and Homer’s feeling simply will not permit 

him to see it appear out of the darkness of an unilluminated past; it must be 

set in full light, and with it a portion of the hero’s boyhood— just as, in the 

Iliad, when the first ship is already burning and the Myrmidons 7 finally arm 

that they may hasten to help, there is still time not only for the wonderful 

simile of the wolf, not only for the order of the Myrmidon host, but also for 

a detailed account of the ancestry of several subordinate leaders (16, vv. 

155ff.). To be sure, the aesthetic effect thus produced was soon noticed and 

thereafter consciously sought; but the more original cause must have lain in 

the basic impulse of the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in a fully 

externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely 

fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological pro cesses 

receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and 

unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion 

does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; 

what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the 

reader is informed of it. Much that is terrible takes place in the Homeric 

poems, but it seldom takes place wordlessly: Polyphemus talks to Odysseus; 

Odysseus talks to the suitors when he begins to kill them; Hector 8 and 

Achilles talk at length, before battle and after; and no speech is so filled with 

anger or scorn that the particles 9 which express logical and grammatical connections 

are lacking or out of place. This last observation is true, of course, 

6. Word (often compound adjectives) repeatedly 

used to describe people or things in Homer’s 

epics (e.g., “wine- dark sea”). 

7. The host of warriors under the command of 

Achilles, the greatest fighter among the Greeks, 

during the Trojan War. The events of the Ilaid, 

an epic also ascribed to Homer, precede those of 

the Odyssey, and the poem appears to have been 

composed first. 

8. Trojan hero, killed by the Greek Achilles in the 

Iliad. Polyphemus: the Cyclops Odysseus encounters 

and blinds during his return home from Troy 

in the Odyssey. 

9. Words expressing modes of thought or moods 

(used frequently in classical Greek).


not only of speeches but of the pre sen ta tion in general. The separate elements 

of a phenomenon are most clearly placed in relation to one another; a 

large number of conjunctions, adverbs, particles, and other syntactical tools, 

all clearly circumscribed and delicately differentiated in meaning, delimit 

persons, things, and portions of incidents in respect to one another, and at 

the same time bring them together in a continuous and ever flexible connection; 

like the separate phenomena themselves, their relationships— their 

temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparative, concessive, antithetical, 

and conditional limitations— are brought to light in perfect fullness; so 

that a continuous rhythmic pro cession of phenomena passes by, and never is 

there a form left fragmentary or half- illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, 

never a glimpse of unplumbed depths. 

And this pro cession of phenomena takes place in the foreground— that is, 

in a local and temporal present which is absolute. One might think that the 

many interpolations, the frequent moving back and forth, would create a sort 

of perspective in time and place; but the Homeric style never gives any such 

impression. The way in which any impression of perspective is avoided can be 

clearly observed in the procedure for introducing episodes, a syntactical construction 

with which every reader of Homer is familiar; it is used in the passage 

we are considering, but can also be found in cases when the episodes are 

much shorter. To the word scar (v. 393) there is first attached a relative clause 

(“which once long ago a boar . . .”), which enlarges into a voluminous syntactical 

parenthesis; into this an in de pen dent sentence unexpectedly intrudes (v. 

396: “A god himself gave him . . .”), which quietly disentangles itself from 

syntactical subordination, until, with verse 399, an equally free syntactical 

treatment of the new content begins a new present which continues unchallenged 

until, with verse 467 (“The old woman now touched it . . .”), the scene 

which had been broken off is resumed. To be sure, in the case of such long 

episodes as the one we are considering, a purely syntactical connection with 

the principal theme would hardly have been possible; but a connection with it 

through perspective would have been all the easier had the content been 

arranged with that end in view; if, that is, the entire story of the scar had been 

presented as a recollection which awakens in Odysseus’ mind at this par tic u- 

lar moment. It would have been perfectly easy to do; the story of the scar had 

only to be inserted two verses earlier, at the first mention of the word scar, 

where the motifs “Odysseus” and “recollection” were already at hand. But any 

such subjectivistic- perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, 

resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely 

foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only 

a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present. And so the excursus 

does not begin until two lines later, when Euryclea has discovered the scar— 

the possibility for a perspectivistic connection no longer exists, and the story 

of the wound becomes an in de pen dent and exclusive present. 

The genius of the Homeric style becomes even more apparent when it is 

compared with an equally ancient and equally epic style from a different 

world of forms. I shall attempt this comparison with the account of the sacrifice 

of Isaac, a homogeneous narrative produced by the so- called Elohist. 1 

1. Author of one of the common collections of oral 

traditions (ca. 9th c. b.c.e.) that served as a source 

for the Hebrew scriptures, distinguished by referring 

to God as Elohim instead of Yahweh in stories 

set before the time of Moses. Isaac: the son of 

Abraham, the found er of the Jewish people.


The King James version 2 translates the opening as follows (Genesis 22: 1): 

“And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and 

said to him, Abraham! and he said, Behold, here I am.” Even this opening 

startles us when we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We 

are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be 

found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to 

speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm 

from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does 

he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, 

from the Aethiopians, 3 where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. 

Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He 

has not, like Zeus, discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered 

in council; nor have the deliberations in his own heart been presented to us; 

unexpected and mysterious, he enters the scene from some unknown height 

or depth and calls: Abraham! It will at once be said that this is to be explained 

by the par tic u lar concept of God which the Jews held and which was wholly 

different from that of the Greeks. True enough— but this constitutes no 

objection. For how is the Jewish concept of God to be explained? Even their 

earlier God of the desert was not fixed in form and content, and was alone; 

his lack of form, his lack of local habitation, his singleness, was in the end 

not only maintained but developed even further in competition with the comparatively 

far more manifest gods of the surrounding Near Eastern world. 

The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their 

manner of comprehending and representing things. 

This becomes still clearer if we now turn to the other person in the dialogue, 

to Abraham. Where is he? We do not know. He says, indeed: Here I 

am— but the Hebrew word means only something like “behold me,” and in 

any case is not meant to indicate the actual place where Abraham is, but a 

moral position in respect to God, who has called to him— Here am I awaiting 

thy command. Where he is actually, whether in Beersheba 4 or elsewhere, 

whether indoors or in the open air, is not stated; it does not interest the narrator, 

the reader is not informed; and what Abraham was doing when God 

called to him is left in the same obscurity. To realize the difference, consider 

Hermes’ visit to Calypso, 5 for example, where command, journey, arrival and 

reception of the visitor, situation and occupation of the person visited, are 

set forth in many verses; and even on occasions when gods appear suddenly 

and briefly, whether to help one of their favorites or to deceive or destroy 

some mortal whom they hate, their bodily forms, and usually the manner of 

their coming and going, are given in detail. Here, however, God appears without 

bodily form (yet he “appears”), coming from some unspecified place— we 

only hear his voice, and that utters nothing but a name, a name without an 

adjective, without a descriptive epithet for the person spoken to, such as is 

the rule in every Homeric address; and of Abraham too nothing is made 

2. An En glish translation of the Bible (1611) 

commissioned during the reign of James I (1603– 

25) to be the official version used by the Church 

of En gland; its use became widespread in all 

Protestant churches and it had enormous influence 

on literature written in En glish. 

3. That is, Ethiopia. Zeus: chief god of the Greeks. 

Poseidon: Greek god of the sea (at the beginning 

of Odyssey 1, he is described as feasting among 

the Ethiopians). 

4. The southernmost city of Old Testament Israel. 

5. In the Odyssey, the nymph who detained Odysseus 

for 7 years until Zeus— his orders carried by 

Hermes, the messenger god— commanded her to 

release the hero.


perceptible except the words in which he answers God: Hinne- ni, Behold me 

here— with which, to be sure, a most touching gesture expressive of obedience 

and readiness is suggested, but it is left to the reader to visualize it. 

Moreover the two speakers are not on the same level: if we conceive of Abraham 

in the foreground, where it might be possible to picture him as prostrate 

or kneeling or bowing with outspread arms or gazing upward, God is 

not there too: Abraham’s words and gestures are directed toward the depths of 

the picture or upward, but in any case the undetermined, dark place from 

which the voice comes to him is not in the foreground. 

After this opening, God gives his command, 6 and the story itself begins: 

everyone knows it; it unrolls with no episodes in a few in de pen dent sentences 

whose syntactical connection is of the most rudimentary sort. In this atmosphere 

it is unthinkable that an implement, a landscape through which the 

travelers passed, the servingmen, or the ass, should be described, that their 

origin or descent or material or appearance or usefulness should be set forth 

in terms of praise; they do not even admit an adjective: they are servingmen, 

ass, wood, and knife, and nothing else, without an epithet; they are 

there to serve the end which God has commanded; what in other respects 

they were, are, or will be, remains in darkness. A journey is made, because 

God has designated the place where the sacrifice is to be performed; but we 

are told nothing about the journey except that it took three days, and even 

that we are told in a mysterious way: Abraham and his followers rose “early 

in the morning” and “went unto” the place of which God had told him; on 

the third day he lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. That gesture 

is the only gesture, is indeed the only occurrence during the whole journey, 

of which we are told; and though its motivation lies in the fact that the place 

is elevated, its uniqueness still heightens the impression that the journey 

took place through a vacuum; it is as if, while he traveled on, Abraham had 

looked neither to the right nor to the left, had suppressed any sign of life in 

his followers and himself save only their footfalls. 

Thus the journey is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and 

the contingent, a holding of the breath, a pro cess which has no present, which 

is inserted, like a blank duration, between what has passed and what lies 

ahead, and which yet is mea sured: three days! Three such days positively 

demand the symbolic interpretation which they later received. They began 

“early in the morning.” But at what time on the third day did Abraham lift up 

his eyes and see his goal? The text says nothing on the subject. Obviously not 

“late in the eve ning,” for it seems that there was still time enough to climb the 

mountain and make the sacrifice. So “early in the morning” is given, not as 

an indication of time, but for the sake of its ethical significance; it is intended 

to express the resolution, the promptness, the punctual obedience of the 

sorely tried Abraham. Bitter to him is the early morning in which he saddles 

his ass, calls his servingmen and his son Isaac, and sets out; but he obeys, he 

walks on until the third day, then lifts up his eyes and sees the place. Whence 

he comes, we do not know, but the goal is clearly stated: Jeruel 7 in the land of 

6. That is, to offer Isaac as a burnt offering (Genesis 

22.2). 

7. The place- name appears only in 2 Chronicles 

20.16 as the site of a battle. It is not mentioned in 

Genesis. It is possible Auerbach has in mind the 

name that Abraham subsequently gives to the 

mountain on which the sacrifice takes place, Jehovahjireh 

(in Hebrew, “the Lord will see”; Genesis 

22.14).


Moriah. What place this is meant to indicate is not clear—“Moriah” especially 

may be a later correction of some other word. But in any case the goal 

was given, and in any case it is a matter of some sacred spot which was to 

receive a par tic u lar consecration by being connected with Abraham’s sacrifice. 

Just as little as “early in the morning” serves as a temporal indication 

does “Jeruel in the land of Moriah” serve as a geo graph i cal indication; and in 

both cases alike, the complementary indication is not given, for we know as 

little of the hour at which Abraham lifted up his eyes as we do of the place 

from which he set forth— Jeruel is significant not so much as the goal of an 

earthly journey, in its geo graph i cal relation to other places, as through its 

special election, through its relation to God, who designated it as the scene of 

the act, and therefore it must be named. 

In the narrative itself, a third chief character appears: Isaac. While God 

and Abraham, the servingmen, the ass, and the implements are simply 

named, without mention of any qualities or any other sort of definition, Isaac 

once receives an appositive; God says, “Take Isaac, thine only son, whom 

thou lovest.” But this is not a characterization of Isaac as a person, apart from 

his relation to his father and apart from the story; he may be handsome or 

ugly, intelligent or stupid, tall or short, pleasant or unpleasant— we are not 

told. Only what we need to know about him as a personage in the action, 

here and now, is illuminated, so that it may become apparent how terrible 

Abraham’s temptation is, and that God is fully aware of it. By this example 

of the contrary, we see the significance of the descriptive adjectives and 

digressions of the Homeric poems; with their indications of the earlier and 

as it were absolute existence of the persons described, they prevent the 

reader from concentrating exclusively on a present crisis; even when the most 

terrible things are occurring, they prevent the establishment of an overwhelming 

suspense. But here, in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice, the overwhelming 

suspense is present; what Schiller makes the goal of the tragic 

poet— to rob us of our emotional freedom, to turn our intellectual and spiritual 

powers (Schiller says “our activity”) in one direction, to concentrate 

them there 8 — is effected in this Biblical narrative, which certainly deserves 

the epithet epic. 

We find the same contrast if we compare the two uses of direct discourse. 

The personages speak in the Bible story too; but their speech does not serve, 

as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts— on the contrary, 

it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed. God gives 

his command in direct discourse, but he leaves his motives and his purpose 

unexpressed; Abraham, receiving the command, says nothing and does what 

he has been told to do. The conversation between Abraham and Isaac on the 

way to the place of sacrifice is only an interruption of the heavy silence and 

makes it all the more burdensome. The two of them, Isaac carry ing the wood 

and Abraham with fire and a knife, “went together.” Hesitantly, Isaac ventures 

to ask about the ram, and Abraham gives the wellknown answer. 9 Then 

the text repeats: “So they went both of them together.” Everything remains 

unexpressed. 

8. See Schiller’s “On Tragic Art” (1792) and “On 

the Plea sure We Derive from Tragic Repre sen tation” 

(1792) for statements on tragedy. 

9. “My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a 

burnt offering” (Genesis 22.8).


It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those 

of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, externalized, 

uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite 

place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; 

thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely 

fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalization 

of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of 

the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative 

alone are emphasized, what lies between is non ex is tent; time and place are 

undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, 

are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the 

whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a 

single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and 

“fraught with background.” 

I will discuss this term in some detail, lest it be misunderstood. I said 

above that the Homeric style was “of the foreground” because, despite much 

going back and forth, it yet causes what is momentarily being narrated to give 

the impression that it is the only present, pure and without perspective. A 

consideration of the Elohistic text teaches us that our term is capable of a 

broader and deeper application. It shows that even the separate personages 

can be represented as possessing “background”; God is always so represented 

in the Bible, for he is not comprehensible in his presence, as is Zeus; it is 

always only “something” of him that appears, he always extends into depths. 

But even the human beings in the Biblical stories have greater depths of 

time, fate, and consciousness than do the human beings in Homer; although 

they are nearly always caught up in an event engaging all their faculties, they 

are not so entirely immersed in its present that they do not remain continually 

conscious of what has happened to them earlier and elsewhere; their thoughts 

and feelings have more layers, are more entangled. Abraham’s actions are 

explained not only by what is happening to him at the moment, nor yet only by 

his character (as Achilles’ actions by his courage and his pride, and Odysseus’ 

by his versatility and foresightedness), but by his previous history; he remembers, 

he is constantly conscious of, what God has promised him and what 

God has already accomplished for him— his soul is torn between desperate 

rebellion and hopeful expectation; his silent obedience is multilayered, has 

background. Such a problematic psychological situation as this is impossible 

for any of the Homeric heroes, whose destiny is clearly defined and who wake 

every morning as if it were the first day of their lives: their emotions, though 

strong, are simple and find expression instantly. 

How fraught with background, in comparison, are characters like Saul 

and David! 1 How entangled and stratified are such human relations as those 

between David and Absalom, between David and Joab! 2 Any such “background” 

quality of the psychological situation as that which the story of 

Absalom’s death and its sequel (II Samuel 18 and 19, by the so- called Jahvist 

3 ) rather suggests than expresses, is unthinkable in Homer. Here we are 

1. King of ancient Israel (d. ca. 970 b.c.e.); he succeeded 

Saul, the first king, who at one point out 

of jealousy sought to kill him (see 1 Samuel). 

2. King David’s nephew; disobeying the king’s 

orders, Joab killed David’s son Absalom, who was 

leading a revolt against him. As he was dying, 

David cursed Joab (2 Samuel 15– 18; 1 Kings 

2.5– 6). 

3. The conjectured author of the earliest oral tradition 

that was a source for the Hebrew scriptures; 

throughout it, God is called Yahweh.


confronted not merely with the psychological pro cesses of characters whose 

depth of background is veritably abysmal, but with a purely geo graph i cal 

background too. For David is absent from the battlefield; but the influence 

of his will and his feelings continues to operate, they affect even Joab in his 

rebellion and disregard for the consequences of his actions; in the magnificent 

scene with the two messengers, 4 both the physical and psychological 

background is fully manifest, though the latter is never expressed. With 

this, compare, for example, how Achilles, who sends Patroclus 5 first to 

scout and then into battle, loses almost all “presentness” so long as he is not 

physically present. But the most important thing is the “multilayeredness” 

of the individual character; this is hardly to be met with in Homer, or at 

most in the form of a conscious hesitation between two possible courses of 

action; otherwise, in Homer, the complexity of the psychological life is 

shown only in the succession and alternation of emotions; whereas the Jewish 

writers are able to express the simultaneous existence of various layers 

of consciousness and the conflict between them. 

The Homeric poems, then, though their intellectual, linguistic, and above 

all syntactical culture appears to be so much more highly developed, are yet 

comparatively simple in their picture of human beings; and no less so in their 

relation to the real life which they describe in general. Delight in physical 

existence is everything to them, and their highest aim is to make that delight 

perceptible to us. Between battles and passions, adventures and perils, they 

show us hunts, banquets, palaces and shepherds’ cots, 6 athletic contests and 

washing days— in order that we may see the heroes in their ordinary life, and 

seeing them so, may take plea sure in their manner of enjoying their savory 

present, a present which sends strong roots down into social usages, landscape, 

and daily life. And thus they bewitch us and ingratiate themselves to 

us until we live with them in the reality of their lives; so long as we are reading 

or hearing the poems, it does not matter whether we know that all this is 

only legend, “make- believe.” The oft- repeated reproach that Homer is a liar 

takes nothing from his effectiveness, he does not need to base his story 

on historical reality, his reality is powerful enough in itself; it ensnares us, 

weaving its web around us, and that suffices him. And this “real” world into 

which we are lured, exists for itself, contains nothing but itself; the Homeric 

poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning. 

Homer can be analyzed, as we have essayed to do here, but he cannot be 

interpreted. Later allegorizing trends have tried their arts of interpretation 

upon him, but to no avail. He resists any such treatment; the interpretations 

are forced and foreign, they do not crystallize into a unified doctrine. The 

general considerations which occasionally occur (in our episode, for example, 

v. 360: that in misfortune men age quickly) reveal a calm ac cep tance of 

the basic facts of human existence, but with no compulsion to brood over 

them, still less any passionate impulse either to rebel against them or to 

embrace them in an ecstasy of submission. 

It is all very different in the Biblical stories. Their aim is not to bewitch the 

senses, and if nevertheless they produce lively sensory effects, it is only 

4. From the first messenger, David learns that his 

forces have won; from the second, that Absalom 

is dead (2 Samuel 18.28– 33). 

5. In the Ilaid, Achilles’ closest friend; anger and 

grief at his death (at the hands of Hector) draw 

Achilles back into battle. 

6. Cottages.


because the moral, religious, and psychological phenomena which are their 

sole concern are made concrete in the sensible matter of life. But their religious 

intent involves an absolute claim to historical truth. The story of Abraham 

and Isaac is not better established than the story of Odysseus, Penelope, 

and Euryclea; both are legendary. But the Biblical narrator, the Elohist, 

had to believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice— 

the existence of the sacred ordinances of life rested upon the truth of this 

and similar stories. He had to believe in it passionately; or else (as many 

rationalistic interpreters believed and perhaps still believe) he had to be a 

conscious liar— no harmless liar like Homer, who lied to give plea sure, but 

a po liti cal liar with a definite end in view, lying in the interest of a claim to 

absolute authority. 

To me, the rationalistic interpretation seems psychologically absurd; but 

even if we take it into consideration, the relation of the Elohist to the truth 

of his story still remains a far more passionate and definite one than is 

Homer’s relation. The Biblical narrator was obliged to write exactly what 

his belief in the truth of the tradition (or, from the rationalistic standpoint, 

his interest in the truth of it) demanded of him— in either case, his freedom 

in creative or representative imagination was severely limited; his activity 

was perforce reduced to composing an effective version of the pious tradition. 

What he produced, then, was not primarily oriented toward “realism” 

(if he succeeded in being realistic, it was merely a means, not an end); it 

was oriented toward truth. Woe to the man who did not believe it! One can 

perfectly well entertain historical doubts on the subject of the Trojan War 

or of Odysseus’ wanderings, and still, when reading Homer, feel precisely 

the effects he sought to produce; but without believing in Abraham’s sacrifice, 

it is impossible to put the narrative of it to the use for which it was written. 

Indeed, we must go even further. The Bible’s claim to truth is not only 

far more urgent than Homer’s, it is tyrannical— it excludes all other claims. 

The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically 

true reality— it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for 

autocracy. All other scenes, issues, and ordinances have no right to appear 

in de pen dently of it, and it is promised that all of them, the history of all 

mankind, will be given their due place within its frame, will be subordinated 

to it. The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they 

do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us— they seek to subject 

us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels. 

Let no one object that this goes too far, that not the stories, but the religious 

doctrine, raises the claim to absolute authority; because the stories 

are not, like Homer’s, simply narrated “reality.” Doctrine and promise are 

incarnate in them and inseparable from them; for that very reason they are 

fraught with “background” and mysterious, containing a second, concealed 

meaning. In the story of Isaac, it is not only God’s intervention at the beginning 

and the end, but even the factual and psychological elements which 

come between, that are mysterious, merely touched upon, fraught with 

background; and therefore they require subtle investigation and interpretation, 

they demand them. Since so much in the story is dark and incomplete, 

and since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret 

it constantly finds something new to feed upon. Doctrine and the search for 

enlightenment are inextricably connected with the physical side of the


narrative— the latter being more than simple “reality”; indeed they are in 

constant danger of losing their own reality, as very soon happened when 

interpretation reached such proportions that the real vanished. 

If the text of the Biblical narrative, then, is so greatly in need of interpretation 

on the basis of its own content, its claim to absolute authority forces 

it still further in the same direction. Far from seeking, like Homer, merely 

to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our 

reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements 

in its structure of universal history. This becomes increasingly difficult the 

further our historical environment is removed from that of the Biblical 

books; and if these nevertheless maintain their claim to absolute authority, 

it is inevitable that they themselves be adapted through interpretative transformation. 

This was for a long time comparatively easy; as late as the Eu rope 

an Middle Ages it was possible to represent Biblical events as ordinary 

phenomena of contemporary life, the methods of interpretation themselves 

forming the basis for such a treatment. But when, through too great a change 

in environment and through the awakening of a critical consciousness, this 

becomes impossible, the Biblical claim to absolute authority is jeopardized; 

the method of interpretation is scorned and rejected, the Biblical stories 

become ancient legends, and the doctrine they had contained, now dissevered 

from them, becomes a disembodied image. 

As a result of this claim to absolute authority, the method of interpretation 

spread to traditions other than the Jewish. The Homeric poems present 

a definite complex of events whose boundaries in space and time are clearly 

delimited; before it, beside it, and after it, other complexes of events, which 

do not depend upon it, can be conceived without conflict and without difficulty. 

The Old Testament, on the other hand, presents universal history: it 

begins with the beginning of time, with the creation of the world, and will 

end with the Last Days, the fulfilling of the Covenant, with which the world 

will come to an end. Everything else that happens in the world can only be 

conceived as an element in this sequence; into it everything that is known 

about the world, or at least everything that touches upon the history of the 

Jews, must be fitted as an ingredient of the divine plan; and as this too became 

possible only by interpreting the new material as it poured in, the need for 

interpretation reaches out beyond the original Jewish- Israelitish realm of 

reality— for example to Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Roman history; 

interpretation in a determined direction becomes a general method of comprehending 

reality; the new and strange world which now comes into view 

and which, in the form in which it presents itself, proves to be wholly unutilizable 

within the Jewish religious frame, must be so interpreted that it can 

find a place there. But this pro cess nearly always also reacts upon the frame, 

which requires enlarging and modifying. The most striking piece of interpretation 

of this sort occurred in the first century of the Christian era, in 

consequence of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles: Paul and the Church Fathers 7 

reinterpreted the entire Jewish tradition as a succession of figures prognosticating 

the appearance of Christ, and assigned the Roman Empire its 

7. Early writers and teachers of the Christian 

Church (1st– 6th c.), including St. augustine 

(354– 430). St. Paul (d. ca. 67 c.e.); Roman Jew 

whose conversion to Christianity is recorded in 

Acts of the New Testament; he went on three 

missionary journeys in Asia Minor and Greece.


proper place in the divine plan of salvation. Thus while, on the one hand, 

the reality of the Old Testament presents itself as complete truth with a 

claim to sole authority, on the other hand that very claim forces it to a constant 

interpretative change in its own content; for millennia it undergoes an 

incessant and active development with the life of man in Eu rope. 

The claim of the Old Testament stories to represent universal history, their 

insistent relation— a relation constantly redefined by conflicts— to a single 

and hidden God, who yet shows himself and who guides universal history by 

promise and exaction, gives these stories an entirely different perspective 

from any the Homeric poems can possess. As a composition, the Old Testament 

is incomparably less unified than the Homeric poems, it is more obviously 

pieced together— but the various components all belong to one concept 

of universal history and its interpretation. If certain elements survived which 

did not immediately fit in, interpretation took care of them; and so the reader 

is at every moment aware of the universal religio- historical perspective which 

gives the individual stories their general meaning and purpose. The greater 

the separateness and horizontal disconnection of the stories and groups of 

stories in relation to one another, compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, 

the stronger is their general vertical connection, which holds them all together 

and which is entirely lacking in Homer. Each of the great figures of the Old 

Testament, from Adam to the prophets, embodies a moment of this vertical 

connection. God chose and formed these men to the end of embodying his 

essence and will— yet choice and formation do not coincide, for the latter 

proceeds gradually, historically, during the earthly life of him upon whom 

the choice has fallen. How the pro cess is accomplished, what terrible trials 

such a formation inflicts, can be seen from our story of Abraham’s sacrifice. 

Herein lies the reason why the great figures of the Old Testament are so 

much more fully developed, so much more fraught with their own biographical 

past, so much more distinct as individuals, than are the Homeric heroes. 

Achilles and Odysseus are splendidly described in many well- ordered words, 

epithets cling to them, their emotions are constantly displayed in their words 

and deeds— but they have no development, and their life- histories are clearly 

set forth once and for all. So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing 

or having developed, that most of them— Nestor, Agamemnon, 8 

Achilles— appear to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in 

whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer 

so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of 

it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca 

two de cades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob 9 who 

cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has 

been torn to pieces by a wild beast!— between David the harp player, persecuted 

by his lord’s jealousy, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues, 

whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not! 1 

The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an 

individual than the young man; for it is only during the course of an eventful 

8. King of Mycenae, and leader of the Greeks in 

the Trojan War. Nestor: king of Pylos, and the 

eldest of the Greek warriors in the Ilaid. 

9. Younger son of Isaac, who deceived his blind 

father to cheat his elder brother Esau out of the 

firstborn’s birthright (Genesis 27). Jacob’s own 

sons would trick him into believing that his 

favorite, their brother Joseph, had been killed by 

“an evil beast” (37.33). 

1. That is, he did not have sexual relations with 

the young virgin from Shunem brought to warm 

him (1 Kings 1.1– 3).


life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of 

a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone 

by those whom God has chosen to be examples. Fraught with their 

development, sometimes even aged to the verge of dissolution, they show a 

distinct stamp of individuality entirely foreign to the Homeric heroes. Time 

can touch the latter only outwardly, and even that change is brought to our 

observation as little as possible; whereas the stern hand of God is ever upon 

the Old Testament figures; he has not only made them once and for all and 

chosen them, but he continues to work upon them, bends them and kneads 

them, and, without destroying them in essence, produces from them forms 

which their youth gave no grounds for anticipating. The objection that the 

biographical element of the Old Testament often springs from the combination 

of several legendary personages does not apply; for this combination is a 

part of the development of the text. And how much wider is the pendulum 

swing of their lives than that of the Homeric heroes! For they are bearers of 

the divine will, and yet they are fallible, subject to misfortune and humiliation— 

and in the midst of misfortune and in their humiliation their acts and words 

reveal the transcendent majesty of God. There is hardly one of them who does 

not, like Adam, undergo the deepest humiliation— and hardly one who is not 

deemed worthy of God’s personal intervention and personal inspiration. 

Humiliation and elevation go far deeper and far higher than in Homer, and 

they belong basically together. The poor beggar Odysseus is only masquerading, 

but Adam is really cast down, Jacob really a refugee, Joseph 2 really in the 

pit and then a slave to be bought and sold. But their greatness, rising out of 

humiliation, is almost superhuman and an image of God’s greatness. The 

reader clearly feels how the extent of the pendulum’s swing is connected with 

the intensity of the personal history— precisely the most extreme circumstances, 

in which we are immeasurably forsaken and in despair, or immeasurably 

joyous and exalted, give us, if we survive them, a personal stamp 

which is recognized as the product of a rich existence, a rich development. 

And very often, indeed generally, this element of development gives the Old 

Testament stories a historical character, even when the subject is purely legendary 

and traditional. 

Homer remains within the legendary with all his material, whereas the 

material of the Old Testament comes closer and closer to history as the narrative 

proceeds; in the stories of David the historical report predominates. 

Here too, much that is legendary still remains, as for example the story of 

David and Goliath; 3 but much— and the most essential— consists in things 

which the narrators knew from their own experience or from firsthand testimony. 

Now the difference between legend and history is in most cases easily 

perceived by a reasonably experienced reader. It is a difficult matter, requiring 

careful historical and philological training, to distinguish the true from 

the synthetic or the biased in a historical pre sen ta tion; but it is easy to separate 

the historical from the legendary in general. Their structure is different. 

Even where the legendary does not immediately betray itself by elements of 

the miraculous, by the repetition of wellknown standard motives, typical 

2. Youn gest son of Jacob and Rachel, sold by his 

elder brothers into slavery in Egypt (Genesis 37). 

Adam is “cast down” by his expulsion from Eden 

and by his need to labor (Genesis 3.17– 24), and 

Jacob, after fleeing from the anger of his brother 

Esau, stays away for years. 

3. Philistine giant killed by David (1 Samuel 17).


patterns and themes, through neglect of clear details of time and place, and 

the like, it is generally quickly recognizable by its composition. It runs far too 

smoothly. All cross- currents, all friction, all that is casual, secondary to the 

main events and themes, everything unresolved, truncated, and uncertain, 

which confuses the clear progress of the action and the simple orientation of 

the actors, has disappeared. The historical event which we witness, or learn 

from the testimony of those who witnessed it, runs much more variously, 

contradictorily, and confusedly; not until it has produced results in a definite 

domain are we able, with their help, to classify it to a certain extent; and how 

often the order to which we think we have attained becomes doubtful again, 

how often we ask ourselves if the data before us have not led us to a far too 

simple classification of the original events! Legend arranges its material in a 

simple and straightforward way; it detaches it from its contemporary historical 

context, so that the latter will not confuse it; it knows only clearly outlined 

men who act from few and simple motives and the continuity of whose feelings 

and actions remains uninterrupted. If the legends of martyrs, for example, 

a stiff- necked and fanatical persecutor stands over against an equally 

stiff- necked and fanatical victim; and a situation so complicated— that is to 

say, so real and historical— as that in which the “persecutor” Pliny finds himself 

in his celebrated letter to Trajan on the subject of the Christians, 4 is unfit 

for legend. And that is still a comparatively simple case. Let the reader think 

of the history which we are ourselves witnessing; anyone who, for example, 

evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the 

rise of National Socialism 5 in Germany, or the behavior of individual peoples 

and states before and during the last war, 6 will feel how difficult it is to represent 

historical themes in general, and how unfit they are for legend; the 

historical comprises a great number of contradictory motives in each individual, 

a hesitation and ambiguous groping on the part of groups; only seldom 

(as in the last war) does a more or less plain situation, comparatively 

simple to describe, arise, and even such a situation is subject to division below 

the surface, is indeed almost constantly in danger of losing its simplicity; and 

the motives of all the interested parties are so complex that the slogans of 

propaganda can be composed only through the crudest simplification— with 

the result that friend and foe alike can often employ the same ones. To write 

history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to 

the technique of legend. 

It is clear that a large part of the life of David as given in the Bible contains 

history and not legend. In Absalom’s rebellion, for example, or in the scenes 

from David’s last days, the contradictions and crossing of motives both in individuals 

and in the general action have become so concrete that it is impossible 

to doubt the historicity of the information conveyed. Now the men who composed 

the historical parts are often the same who edited the older legends too; 

their peculiar religious concept of man in history, which we have attempted 

to describe above, in no way led them to a legendary simplification of events; 

and so it is only natural that, in the legendary passages of the Old Testament, 

4. As Roman governor of Bithynia (111– ca. 112 

c.e.), Pliny the Younger (ca. 61– ca. 112) sent a 

letter to the emperor Trajan (53– 117; emperor 

98– 117) to inquire about his policy of prosecuting 

Christians. 

5. That is, Nazism, the doctrines of the National 

Socialist German Workers’ Party (founded 1919), 

led from 1920 to 1945 by Adolph Hitler. 

6. That is, World War I.


historical structure is frequently discernible— of course, not in the sense that 

the traditions are examined as to their credibility according to the methods of 

scientific criticism; but simply to the extent that the tendency to a smoothing 

down and harmonizing of events, to a simplification of motives, to a static 

definition of characters which avoids conflict, vacillation, and development, 

such as are natural to legendary structure, does not predominate in the Old 

Testament world of legend. Abraham, Jacob, or even Moses 7 produces a more 

concrete, direct, and historical impression than the figures of the Homeric 

world— not because they are better described in terms of sense (the contrary 

is the case) but because the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events, 

the psychological and factual cross- purposes, which true history reveals, 

have not disappeared in the repre sen ta tion but still remain clearly perceptible. 

In the stories of David, the legendary, which only later scientific criticism 

makes recognizable as such, imperceptibly passes into the historical; and even 

in the legendary, the problem of the classification and interpretation of human 

history is already passionately apprehended— a problem which later shatters 

the framework of historical composition and completely overruns it with prophecy; 

thus the Old Testament, in so far as it is concerned with human events, 

ranges through all three domains: legend, historical reporting, and interpretative 

historical theology. 

Connected with the matters just discussed is the fact that the Greek text 

seems more limited and more static in respect to the circle of personages 

involved in the action and to their po liti cal activity. In the recognition scene 

with which we began, there appears, aside from Odysseus and Penelope, the 

house keeper Euryclea, a slave whom Odysseus’ father Laertes had bought 

long before. She, like the swineherd Eumaeus, has spent her life in the service 

of Laertes’ family; like Eumaeus, she is closely connected with their fate, 

she loves them and shares their interests and feelings. But she has no life of 

her own, no feelings of her own; she has only the life and feelings of her master. 

Eumaeus too, though he still remembers that he was born a freeman and 

indeed of a noble house (he was stolen as a boy), has, not only in fact but also 

in his own feeling, no longer a life of his own, he is entirely involved in the 

life of his masters. Yet these two characters are the only ones whom Homer 

brings to life who do not belong to the ruling class. Thus we become conscious 

of the fact that in the Homeric poems life is enacted only among the 

ruling class— others appear only in the role of servants to that class. The ruling 

class is still so strongly patriarchal, and still itself so involved in the daily 

activities of domestic life, that one is sometimes likely to forget their rank. 

But they are unmistakably a sort of feudal aristocracy, whose men divide 

their lives between war, hunting, marketplace councils, and feasting, while 

the women supervise the maids in the house. As a social picture, this world is 

completely stable; wars take place only between different groups of the ruling 

class; nothing ever pushes up from below. In the early stories of the Old Testament 

the patriarchal condition is dominant too, but since the people 

involved are individual nomadic or half- nomadic tribal leaders, the social picture 

gives a much less stable impression; class distinctions are not felt. As 

soon as the people completely emerges— that is, after the exodus from Egypt— 

its activity is always discernible, it is often in ferment, it frequently intervenes 

7. Biblical lawgiver and prophet who led the exodus from Egypt.


in events not only as a whole but also in separate groups and through the 

medium of separate individuals who come forward; the origins of prophecy 

seem to lie in the irrepressible politico- religious spontaneity of the people. 

We receive the impression that the movements emerging from the depths of 

the people of Israel- Judah must have been of a wholly different nature from 

those even of the later ancient democracies— of a different nature and far 

more elemental. 

With the more profound historicity and the more profound social activity 

of the Old Testament text, there is connected yet another important distinction 

from Homer: namely, that a different conception of the elevated style 

and of the sublime is to be found here. Homer, of course, is not afraid to let 

the realism of daily life enter into the sublime and tragic; our episode of the 

scar is an example, we see how the quietly depicted, domestic scene of the 

foot- washing is incorporated into the pathetic and sublime action of Odysseus’ 

homecoming. From the rule of the separation of styles which was later 

almost universally accepted and which specified that the realistic depiction 

of daily life was incompatible with the sublime and had a place only in comedy 

or, carefully stylized, in idyl 8 — from any such rule Homer is still far 

removed. And yet he is closer to it than is the Old Testament. For the great 

and sublime events in the Homeric poems take place far more exclusively 

and unmistakably among the members of a ruling class; and these are far 

more untouched in their heroic elevation than are the Old Testament figures, 

who can fall much lower in dignity (consider, for example, Adam, 

Noah, David, Job 9 ); and finally, domestic realism, the repre sen ta tion of daily 

life, remains in Homer in the peaceful realm of the idyllic, whereas, from 

the very first, in the Old Testament stories, the sublime, tragic, and problematic 

take shape precisely in the domestic and commonplace: scenes such as 

those between Cain and Abel, between Noah and his sons, 1 between Abraham, 

Sarah, and Hagar, between Rebekah, 2 Jacob, and Esau, and so on, are 

inconceivable in the Homeric style. The entirely different ways of developing 

conflicts are enough to account for this. In the Old Testament stories the 

peace of daily life in the house, in the fields, and among the flocks, is undermined 

by jealousy over election and the promise of a blessing, and complications 

arise which would be utterly incomprehensible to the Homeric heroes. 

The latter must have palpable and clearly expressible reasons for their conflicts 

and enmities, and these work themselves out in free battles; whereas, 

with the former, the perpetually smouldering jealousy and the connection 

between the domestic and the spiritual, between the paternal blessing and 

the divine blessing, lead to daily life being permeated with the stuff of conflict, 

often with poison. The sublime influence of God here reaches so 

deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday 

are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable. 

8. A poem (usually short) that presents simple 

scenes of pastoral or rustic life. 

9. A just and upright man who is brought low to 

test his faith in God, as described in the book of 

Job. Noah: the biblical builder of the ark who 

later became drunk on his own wine (see the following 

note). 

1. While Noah was drunk, his son Canaan saw his 

nakedness and told his brothers, who, without 

looking, covered their father; for this, Noah cursed 

Canaan (Genesis 9.20– 27). Cain and Abel: sons 

of Adam and Eve; because Cain was jealous that 

Abel’s offerings to God were preferred, he killed 

his younger brother (Genesis 4.1– 8). 

2. Wife of Isaac; she helped Jacob scheme against 

Esau. Sarah: Abraham’s wife, at her urging, her 

Egyptian servant Hagar bore Abraham a son— but 

after Sarah bore Isaac, Hagar and her son were 

sent into the wilderness (Genesis 16, 21.1– 21).

1046 / WALTER BENJAMIN 

We have compared these two texts, and, with them, the two kinds of style 

they embody, in order to reach a starting point for an investigation into the 

literary repre sen ta tion of reality in Eu ro pe an culture. The two styles, in their 

opposition, represent basic types: on the one hand fully externalized description, 

uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all 

events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of 

historical development and of psychological perspective; on the other hand, 

certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive 

influence of the unexpressed, “background” quality, multiplicity of meanings 

and the need for interpretation, universal- historical claims, development 

of the concept of the historically becoming, and preoccupation with the 

problematic. 

Homer’s realism is, of course, not to be equated with classical- antique 

realism in general; for the separation of styles, which did not develop until 

later, permitted no such leisurely and externalized description of everyday 

happenings; in tragedy 3 especially there was no room for it; furthermore, 

Greek culture very soon encountered the phenomena of historical becoming 

and of the “multilayeredness” of the human problem, and dealt with them in 

its fashion; in Roman realism, finally, new and native concepts are added. 

We shall go into these later changes in the antique repre sen ta tion of reality 

when the occasion arises; on the whole, despite them, the basic tendencies 

of the Homeric style, which we have attempted to work out, remained effective 

and determinant down into late antiquity. 

Since we are using the two styles, the Homeric and the Old Testament, as 

starting points, we have taken them as finished products, as they appear in the 

texts; we have disregarded everything that pertains to their origins, and thus 

have left untouched the question whether their peculiarities were theirs from 

the beginning or are to be referred wholly or in part to foreign influences. 

Within the limits of our purpose, a consideration of this question is not necessary; 

for it is in their full development, which they reached in early times, that 

the two styles exercised their determining influence upon the repre sen ta tion 

of reality in Eu ro pe an literature. 

3. A form that developed after the Iliad and Odyssey were composed. 

1946 

WALTER BENJAMIN 

1892–1940 

“It has always been one of the primary tasks of art to create a demand whose hour of 

full satisfaction has not yet come,” remarks Walter Benjamin in his celebrated essay 

“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936– 39). The 

same could be said of Benjamin’s criticism itself. During his lifetime, he was considered, 

by a small coterie of admirers such as the phi los o pher theodor adorno, one

WALTER BENJAMIN / 1047 

of the most original and promising writers on literature, language, and aesthetics of 

his generation; but at the time of his premature death fleeing the Nazis in 1940, his 

name had passed into obscurity both within and outside Germany. The publication in 

1955 of a collection of his works in a German edition sponsored by Adorno spurred 

renewed attention, and since the 1970s Benjamin has become one of the most 

highly esteemed critics of the twentieth century; he is seen as an innovator in 

diverse fields, including Marxist literary criticism, deconstruction, historiography, 

and media studies. A broad speculative account of the interaction of industrial production 

and modern aesthetics, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological 

Reproducibility” has had par tic u lar influence in contemporary film and visual studies 

and is considered a fundamental work of cultural studies. 

Born in Berlin into a wealthy Jewish family, Benjamin was first educated by private 

tutors, later attending boarding school and the University of Freiburg. He continued 

his studies in Berlin and Munich, but settled in Berne, Switzerland, in 1917 

to avoid being drafted into the German army in World War I. In 1919 he received his 

doctorate from the university there; his thesis, The Concept of Criticism in German 

Romanticism, was published the following year. Returning to Berlin in 1920, he 

wrote essays and newspaper articles as he worked on a translation of the important 

nineteenthcentury French poet charles baudelaire, building a significant reputation 

as a cultural critic. Under financial pressure from his father, who wanted him to 

take a position in a bank, Benjamin considered starting a used book business but 

finally decided to pursue an academic career. To complete an additional requirement 

for a teaching post in the German university system, he wrote a second dissertation 

in 1925, The Origins of German Tragic Drama (1928; trans. 1977); however, it 

was rejected because of its density and difficulty. One examiner commented that 

it was an “incomprehensible morass” (another examiner who criticized the submission 

was max horkheimer, later an associate of Benjamin’s). 

Thus thwarted, Benjamin became an in de pen dent scholar, writing articles for 

leading German periodicals, translating, and conducting research for an ambitious 

but never- completed historical work on nineteenthcentury Paris later known as the 

Arcades Project (trans. 1999). During the twenties and thirties, he traveled across 

Eu rope; in a visit to Moscow (1926– 27), he observed firsthand the achievements and 

limitations of the Bolshevik Revolution. Though his friend Gershom Scholem, the 

Jewish mystical thinker, urged him to emigrate to Palestine, Benjamin remained in 

Germany, participating in the German Communist Party (as his brother had done). 

Initially attracted to Marxism in the 1920s on reading györgy lukács’s History and 

Class Consciousness (1923) and influenced by his friendship during the 1930s with 

the German Marxist writer Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin adopted increasingly leftwing 

po liti cal positions and showed the influence of Marxism in his writings on 

culture. 

Exiled in Paris after the Nazi takeover in Germany in 1933, Benjamin lived a lonely 

and, as the threat of war approached, increasingly desperate existence. He struggled 

to support himself by writing while pursuing research for his Arcades Project, one 

small section of which, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), appeared in the 

journal of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. But Benjamin’s 

methods and po liti cal orientation were increasingly at loggerheads with 

those of the institute— members of the Frankfurt School were turning away from 

the traditional paths of Marxism— and he became distant from his friend Adorno, 

as correspondence from the 1930s reveals. After the German invasion of France in 

1940, Benjamin attempted to escape to Spain, intending to emigrate from there 

to the United States. Stopped at the border in the Pyrenees and fearful that he would 

be sent back to France to face internment in a concentration camp, Benjamin committed 

suicide. 

Though many of his larger projects remained unfinished at the time of his death, 

and his essays were often composed under financial and emotional duress, Benjamin’s


work encompasses a rich and heterogeneous range: autobiographical writings and 

familiar essays on topics including his travels to Moscow, his experiments with hashish, 

and his love of book collecting; dense theoretical considerations of allegory and 

language, such as Origins of German Tragic Drama and “The Task of the Translator” 

(1923), which speculates on how translation offers fragments of a “pure language”; 

translations into German of Baudelaire and the modern French novelist Marcel 

Proust; literary criticism introducing contemporary authors such as Franz Kafka to 

general audiences; aphoristic considerations of the philosophy of history; and avowedly 

Marxist examinations of the role of art in modern society, such as “The Author as 

Producer” (1934) and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” 

Academically trained but denied an academic career, Benjamin represents a 

crossover figure in literary theory, resembling the mid- twentieth- century American 

literary and social critic edmund wilson in the range of his writing and cultural concerns, 

as well as the more academic Adorno in his philosophical sophistication. 

Among the texts that Benjamin published under the auspices of the Frankfurt 

Institute, none has become more famous than “The Work of Art in the Age of Its 

Technological Reproducibility.” It introduces his seminal concept of “aura”— the 

unique quality traditionally attributed to an artwork, giving it a special status equivalent 

to that of a sacred object in religious ritual. Investigating the perennial theoretical 

problem of the relation of aesthetics to social history, Benjamin argues that 

the status of the artwork is not timeless: it changed with the advent of capitalist mass 

production, which dispelled its unique aura and revered standing by devaluing the 

concept of the “original.” Taking photography and film as his prime examples, he 

speculates that social transformations induced by technological changes in production 

alter aesthetic perception itself. He contrasts painting— a topic of comparison 

made familiar in aesthetics by gotthold ephraim lessing (1729– 1781)—with film, 

noting that the stream of images in film promotes a “deepening of apperception” and 

that the close- up, among other techniques, “furthers insight into the necessities 

governing our lives.” These are benefits of the reproducibility of art. 

Though many view Benjamin as a mystical thinker, he does not express nostalgia 

for a time when the artwork possessed an “aura”; indeed, he denounces theories that 

assert an auratic or ritualistic power of film, branding them po liti cally and aesthetically 

regressive. In contrast to painting or orchestral music, film has revolutionary 

potential because it abolishes authenticity and aura and enjoins the participation of 

the audience. Echoing Brecht on the “alienation effects” achieved by actors and staging 

in experimental theater, Benjamin maintains that the very pro cess through which 

a movie is constructed— shot by shot, as the editor sutures together sequences filmed 

at different times— prevents audience members from unconsciously empathizing or 

identifying with any actor, thereby provoking them to thought and perhaps to action. 

Nonetheless, Benjamin recognizes that any art form can be turned to reactionary 

purposes, and that the apparatus or technology of film does not guarantee a singular 

po liti cal outcome. He thus dispels the utopian belief that technology necessarily 

generates beneficial changes (a belief sometimes expressed today in rhapsodic pronouncements 

on the Internet). Mindful of the uses that fascists had made of film— 

notably Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1934), an infamous celebration of 

Nazi ideology— Benjamin sternly rebukes the aestheticization of politics, by which 

sheer technical brilliance and beauty mask the repre sen ta tion of a pernicious po liti cal 

program. Instead of offering a fascination with aesthetic qualities, communism 

positively “politicizes art” by foregrounding po liti cal action in the work and compelling 

the audience to reflect on the problems it raises. As is often the case with Benjamin, 

“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” is less an 

authoritative statement of general aesthetic principles than a sequence of striking 

observations and an injunction for future work. 

Some critics have stressed Benjamin’s trajectory from the philosophical idealism 

of his early writings on language, aesthetics, and philosophy to his more explicitly

WALTER BENJAMIN / 1049 

Marxist later writings, but the very range of his work— on language, allegory, translation 

theory, historiography, aesthetics, film, and the philosophy of technology— has 

sometimes led commentators to shape Benjamin’s work according to their own tastes. 

Beginning with his lifelong friend, Gershom Scholem, one prominent strand of readings 

foregrounds Benjamin’s more philosophical works, seeing them as an expression 

of Jewish mysticism. Such readings downplay his mature works of the 1930s, viewing 

them as a misguided infatuation with the Marxist Brecht. Deconstructive critics, 

notably paul de man and Geoffrey Hartman, draw on Benjamin’s writings on allegory 

and language, claiming him as a precursor of deconstruction in his focus on the problematics 

of language. Marxists like terry ea gleton have stressed his exemplary role 

as a revolutionary critic, though one with messianic leanings. Despite the legendary 

obscurity of his prose style and his use of idioms derived from mysticism and German 

idealist philosophy (especially in his earlier writings), Benjamin per sis tent ly calls 

attention in his later work to the influence of the means of production on culture; he 

commands the revolutionary intellectual to assume an attitude that would transform 

him “from a supplier of the productive apparatus into an engineer who sees it as his 

task to adapt this apparatus to the purposes of proletarian revolution” (“The Author 

as Producer”). 

bibliography 

Not until de cades after his death did Benjamin’s diverse work become readily available 

in German and later in En glish. In addition to his two dissertations, The Concept 

of Criticism in German Romanticism (1920) and The Origin of German Tragic Drama 

(1928; trans. 1977), he published many essays and articles and left several unfinished 

book manuscripts. The first collected edition in German, the twovolume Schriften 

(Writings), edited by Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem (1955), brought renewed 

attention to Benjamin’s work. The standard scholarly edition of the complete writings 

in German is Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser 

(7 vols., 1972– 89). The first selection of essays in En glish, Illuminations, 

was edited by Hannah Arendt (1968); it includes an early, pop u lar translation of our 

selection, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” A string 

of En glish collections followed, sometimes overlapping in material: Charles Baudelaire: 

A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1973); Understanding Brecht (1973); 

Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz 

(1978); One- Way Street and Other Writings (1979); and Moscow Diary, edited by Gary 

Smith (1986). In the 1990s, Harvard University Press began publishing a wide array 

of Benjamin’s writings in En glish, notably four volumes of Selected Writings, under 

the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings: volume 1, 1913– 1926 (1996); volume 

2, 1927– 1934 (1999); volume 3, 1935– 1938 (2002); and volume 4, 1938– 1940 (2003). 

The press also published Benjamin’s massive but incomplete Arcades Project (1999) 

and a series of short, spin- off collections, among them Berlin Childhood around 1900 

(1950; trans. 2006), On Hashish (2006), The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles 

Baudelaire (2006), and The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 

and Other Writings on Media (2008). 

Our selection, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 

comes from the last volume of the Selected Writings. There are several versions and 

translations of the essay, and scholars continue to debate which is the closest to Benjamin’s 

intentions and is the best rendering. Benjamin began the essay in the mid- 

1930s, completing a first version in 1935. He then prepared a second version that 

appeared in French translation in 1936; the latter text was the only version published 

in his lifetime. However, Benjamin continued to revise the essay, as he did with most 

of his work, up to the spring of 1939. This later, unfinished version, called the third 

version, is what Adorno included in the 1955 edition of Benjamin’s writings, the basis 

of both the wellknown 1968 translation in Illuminations and our translation. We


chose this version because, though unfinished, it presumably most closely represents 

Benjamin’s final intentions. It includes a larger selection of quotations, reliance on 

which being one of Benjamin’s signature habits for instance, the opening and very 

relevant epigraph from the modern French poet Paul Valéry. The Benjamin scholar 

Esther Leslie notes of the third version “that the Brechtian elements are amplified.” 

The most prominent advocate of the second version is the film scholar Miriam Hansen, 

who argues that it better conveys Benjamin’s intention because it was completed 

and is more consistent. See Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience 

(1998), for an extended comparison of the two versions. Caygill believes that 

Benjamin “refined and improved” his views in the 1939 version, while perhaps playing 

down the stronger po liti cal claims about magic in the earlier version. We use the 

2003 translation because it more closely follows Benjamin’s German (beginning 

with the title, which renders technischen Reproduzierbarkeit literally as “technological 

reproducibility” rather than using the more idiomatic En glish phrase 

“mechanical reproduction”). 

Among several collections of letters, the most comprehensive is The Correspondence 

of Walter Benjamin, 1910– 1940, edited by Scholem and Adorno (1966; trans. 

1994). For Adorno’s as well as Benjamin’s letters, see Adorno and Benjamin, The 

Complete Correspondence, 1928– 1940 (1999). Walter Benjamin’s Archive, edited 

by Ursula Marx et al. (2007), reprints manuscript pages, notes, pictures, and other 

curiosities from Benjamin memorabilia. 

The standard biography is Momme Brodersen’s Walter Benjamin: A Biography 

(1990; trans. 1996), which replaces Bernd Witte’s earlier Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual 

Biography (1985; trans. 1991). Gershom Scholem’s Walter Benjamin: The 

Story of a Friendship (1975; trans. 1981) offers a firsthand personal account. 

The secondary literature on Benjamin in En glish is extensive. Fredric Jameson 

provided an influential introduction of Benjamin in Marxism and Form: Twentieth- 

Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971). Susan Buck- Morss’s The Origin of 

Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School 

(1977) roots Benjamin’s work in the context of the Frankfurt School. A spirited 

attempt to recapture Benjamin for the Left was undertaken by Terry Ea gleton in 

Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981). Much of the criticism 

on Benjamin, such as Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption 

(1982; 2d ed., 1994), follows the mystical interpretation inaugurated by Scholem. 

Michael Jennings’s Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Literary Criticism 

(1987) is a useful examination of Benjamin’s critical methodology. On Walter 

Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, edited by Gary Smith (1988), contains 

important texts by Benjamin’s contemporaries Adorno, Scholem, and Ernst Bloch 

and an assessment by the phi los o pher Jürgen Habermas. See also the companion 

volume edited by Smith, Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics (1989). Rainer 

Rochlitz’s Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin (1992; trans. 

1996) considers Benjamin’s reflections on language, art, modernity, and history. 

More recently Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (2000), 

provides a good overview; see also Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations 

(2002). The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David 

S. Ferris (2004), covers the range of Benjamin’s work. The compendium Walter Benjamin: 

Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, edited by Peter Osborne (3 vols., 

2005), reprints key essays on many facets of Benjamin’s work. Esther Leslie’s subsequent 

Walter Benjamin (2007) is a somewhat anecdotal account of his life as well as 

work. See also David Ferris, The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin (2008). 

Testifying to the influence Benjamin has on contemporary culture, there are also a 

few fictionalized accounts— notably Jay Parini’s novel, Benjamin’s Crossing (1997). 

For works focusing on aesthetics, see Caygill’s Walter Benjamin, cited above; Lutz 

Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (1999); Benjamin’s Ghosts: 

Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, edited by Gerhard

Work of Art . . . Technological Reproducibility / 1051 

Richter (2002), and Walter Benjamin and Art, edited by Beatrice Hanssen and 

Andrew Benjamin (2005). Specifically on our selection, see Miriam Hansen, 

“Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience,” New German Critique 40 (1987); Susan Buck- 

Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” 

October, no. 62 (fall 1992); and Hansen, “Room- for- Play: Benjamin’s Gamble 

with Cinema,” October, no. 109 (summer 2004). The first two are collected in 

Osborne, Walter Benjamin; the latter contains Hansen’s argument for the second 

version of the “Work of Art” essay. 

The standard bibliography in German is Walter Benjamin: Eine kommentierte 

Bibliographie, compiled by Momme Brodersen et al. (1996), which includes a section 

on Benjamin’s work in En glish. Gary Smith’s Benjamin (cited above) includes a 

bibliography of Benjamin’s work and selected secondary material up to 1988. The 

Cambridge Companion, Gilloch’s Walter Benjamin, and Leslie’s Walter Benjamin 

(2007) include selected bibliographies of Benjamin’s writing and criticism on it. 

The Work of Art in the Age of Its 

Technological Reproducibility 1 

Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, 

in times very different from the present, by men whose 

power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with 

ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability 

and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are 

creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending 

in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts, there is a 

physical component which can no longer be considered or treated 

as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern 

knowledge and power. For the last twenty years, neither matter nor 

space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We 

must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique 

of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps 

even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. 

—Paul Valéry, 2 Pièces sur l’art 

(“La Conquête de l’ubiquité”) 

Introduction 

When Marx undertook his analysis of the capitalist mode of production, 

this mode was in its infancy. 3 Marx adopted an approach which gave his 

investigations prognostic value. Going back to the basic conditions of capitalist 

production, he presented them in a way which showed what could be 

expected of capitalism in the future. What could be expected, it emerged, 

was not only an increasingly harsh exploitation of the proletariat but, ultimately, 

the creation of conditions which would make it possible for capitalism 

to abolish itself. 

1. Translated by Harry Zohn and Edmund 

Jephcott. 

2. A leading French poet and essyist (1871– 1945); 

the quote is taken from “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” 

an essay published in Pieces on Art (3d ed., 

1936). 

3. The German phi los o pher karl marx (1818– 

1883) divided human history into seven modes of 

production, the most recent being feudalism and 

capitalism; he undertook his analyses only a 

short time after the capitalist industrial revolution 

had taken hold in En gland. Marx argued 

that capitalism’s economic base (the mode of production, 

or “substructure”) determines all noneconomic 

aspects of life (“superstructure”).


Since the transformation of the superstructure proceeds far more slowly 

than that of the base, it has taken more than half a century for the change 

in the conditions of production to be manifested in all areas of culture. 

How this pro cess has affected culture can only now be assessed, and these 

assessments must meet certain prognostic requirements. They do not, however, 

call for theses on the art of the proletariat after its seizure of power, 

and still less for any on the art of the classless society. They call for theses 

defining the tendencies of the development of art under the present conditions 

of production. The dialectic of these conditions of production is evident 

in the superstructure, no less than in the economy. Theses defining 

the developmental tendencies of art can therefore contribute to the po liti cal 

struggle in ways that it would be a mistake to underestimate. They neutralize 

a number of traditional concepts— such as creativity and genius, eternal 

value and mystery— which, used in an uncontrolled way (and controlling 

them is difficult today), allow factual material to be manipulated in the interests 

of fascism. In what follows, the concepts which are introduced into the 

theory of art differ from those now current in that they are completely useless 

for the purposes of fascism. On the other hand, they are useful for the formulation 

of revolutionary demands in the politics of art. 

I 

In principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. Objects made by 

humans could always be copied by humans. Replicas were made by pupils 

in practicing for their craft, by masters in disseminating their works, and, 

finally, by third parties in pursuit of profit. But the technological reproduction 

of artworks is something new. Having appeared intermittently in history, at 

widely spaced intervals, it is now being adopted with ever- increasing intensity. 

The Greeks had only two ways of technologically reproducing works of 

art: casting and stamping. Bronzes, terracottas, and coins were the only artworks 

they could produce in large numbers. All others were unique and could 

not be technologically reproduced. Graphic art was first made technologically 

reproducible by the woodcut, long before written language became reproducible 

by movable type. The enormous changes brought about in literature by 

movable type, the technological reproducibility of writing, are well known. 

But they are only a special case, though an important one, of the phenomenon 

considered here from the perspective of world history. In the course of 

the Middle Ages the woodcut was supplemented by engraving and etching, 

and at the beginning of the nineteenth century by lithography. 

Lithography marked a fundamentally new stage in the technology of reproduction. 

This much more direct process— distinguished by the fact that the 

drawing is traced on a stone, rather than incised on a block of wood or etched 

on a copper plate— first made it possible for graphic art to market its products 

not only in large numbers, as previously, but in daily changing variations. 

Lithography enabled graphic art to provide an illustrated accompaniment to 

everyday life. It began to keep pace with movable- type printing. But only a 

few de cades after the invention of lithography, graphic art was surpassed by 

photography. For the first time, photography freed the hand from the most 

important artistic tasks in the pro cess of pictorial reproduction— tasks that 

now devolved solely upon the eye looking into a lens. And since the eye


perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the pro cess of pictorial 

reproduction was enormously accelerated, so that it could now keep pace 

with speech. A cinematographer shooting a scene in the studio captures the 

images at the speed of an actor’s speech. Just as the illustrated newspaper 

virtually lay hidden within lithography, so the sound film was latent in photography. 

The technological reproduction of sound was tackled at the end 

of the last century. These convergent endeavors made it possible to conceive 

of the situation that Paul Valéry describes in this sentence: “Just as water, 

gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our 

needs with minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory 

images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, 

hardly more than a sign.” 4 Around 1900, technological reproduction not 

only had reached a standard that permitted it to reproduce all known works 

of art, profoundly modifying their effect, but it also had captured a place of 

its own among the artistic pro cesses. In gauging this standard, we would do 

well to study the impact which its two different manifestations— the reproduction 

of artworks and the art of film— are having on art in its traditional 

form. 

II 

In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now 

of the work of art— its unique existence in a par tic u lar place. It is this unique 

existence— and nothing else— that bears the mark of the history to which the 

work has been subject. This history includes changes to the physical structure 

of the work over time, together with any changes in own ership. 5 Traces 

of the former can be detected only by chemical or physical analyses (which 

cannot be performed on a reproduction), while changes of own ership are part 

of a tradition which can be traced only from the standpoint of the original 

in its present location. 

The here and now of the original underlies the concept of its authenticity. 

Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish its authenticity, 

just as the proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages came 

from an archive of the fifteenth century helps to establish its authenticity. 

The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological— and, of course, not 

only technological— reproducibility. 6 But whereas the authentic work retains 

its full authority in the face of a reproduction made by hand, which it generally 

brands a forgery, this is not the case with technological reproduction. 

The reason is twofold. First, technological reproduction is more in de pendent 

of the original than is manual reproduction. For example, in photogra- 

4. Valéry, Pièces sur l’art (Paris), p. 105 [Benjamin’s 

note]. Some of the author’s notes have been 

edited, and some omitted. 

5. Of course, the history of a work of art encompasses 

more than this. The history of the “Mona 

Lisa,” for instance, encompasses the kind and 

number of its copies made in the 17th, 18th, and 

19th centuries [Benjamin’s noted]. Mona Lisa 

(ca. 1504), painting by Leonardo da Vinci. 

6. Precisely because authenticity is not reproducible, 

the intensive penetration of certain (technological) 

pro cesses of reproduction was instrumental 

in differentiating and gradating authenticity. To 

develop such differentiations was an important 

function of the trade in works of art. Such trade 

had a manifest interest in distinguishing among 

various prints of a woodblock engraving (those 

before and those after inscription), of a copperplate 

engraving, and so on. The invention of the woodcut 

may be said to have struck at the root of the quality 

of authenticity even before its late flowering. 

To be sure, a medieval picture of the Madonna at 

the time it was created could not yet be said to 

be “authentic.” It became “authentic” only during 

the succeeding centuries, and perhaps most strikingly 

so during the 19th [Benjamin’s note].


phy it can bring out aspects of the original that are accessible only to the 

lens (which is adjustable and can easily change viewpoint) but not to the 

human eye; or it can use certain pro cesses, such as enlargement or slow 

motion, to record images which escape natural optics altogether. This is the 

first reason. Second, technological reproduction can place the copy of the 

original in situations which the original itself cannot attain. Above all, it 

enables the original to meet the recipient halfway, whether in the form of a 

photograph or in that of a gramophone record. The cathedral leaves its site 

to be received in the studio of an art lover; the choral work performed in an 

auditorium or in the open air is enjoyed in a private room. 

The situations into which the product of technological reproduction can 

be brought may leave the artwork’s other properties untouched, but they 

certainly devalue the here and now of the artwork. And although this can 

apply not only to art but (say) to a landscape moving past the spectator in a 

film, in the work of art this pro cess touches on a highly sensitive core, 

more vulnerable than that of any natural object. That core is its authenticity. 

The authenticity of a thing is the quintessence of all that is transmissible 

in it from its origin on, ranging from its physical duration to the 

historical testimony relating to it. Since the historical testimony is founded 

on the physical duration, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction, 

in which the physical duration plays no part. And what is really jeopardized 

when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the 

object. 7 

One might encompass the eliminated element within the concept of the 

aura, and go on to say: what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility 

of the work of art is the latter’s aura. The pro cess is symptomatic; 

its significance extends far beyond the realm of art. It might be stated as a 

general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced 

object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, 

it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the 

reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes 

that which is reproduced. These two pro cesses lead to a massive upheaval in 

the domain of objects handed down from the past— a shattering of tradition 

which is the reverse side of the present crisis and renewal of humanity. 

Both pro cesses are intimately related to the mass movements of our day. 

Their most powerful agent is film. The social significance of film, even— 

and especially— in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its 

destructive, cathartic 8 side: the liquidation of the value of tradition in the 

cultural heritage. This phenomenon is most apparent in the great historical 

films. It is assimilating ever more advanced positions in its spread. When 

Abel Gance fervently proclaimed in 1927, “Shakespeare, Rembrandt, 

Beethoven will make films. . . . All legends, all mythologies, and all myths, 

all the found ers of religions, indeed, all religions, . . . await their celluloid 

7. The poorest provincial staging of Goethe’s 

Faust is superior to a film of Faust in that, ideally, 

it competes with the first per for mance at Weimar 

[Benjamin’s note]. Faust (1808, 1832), a drama by 

the German Romantic writer Johann Wolfgang 

von Goethe (1749– 1832), who lived for most of 

his life in Weimar. 

8. Purgative. Benjamin here invokes a sense very 

different from the traditional literary meaning of 

catharsis, a a term applied by aristotle (384– 322 

b.c.e.) in the Poetics (see above) to the emotional 

release experienced by an audience watching a 

tragedy.


resurrection, and the heroes are pressing at the gates,” he was inviting the 

reader, no doubt unawares, to witness a comprehensive liquidation. 9 

III 

Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long 

historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which 

human perception is organized— the medium in which it occurs— is conditioned 

not only by nature but by history. The era of the migration of peoples, 

an era which saw the rise of the late- Roman art industry and the Vienna 

Genesis, developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a 

different perception. The scholars of the Viennese school Riegl and Wickhoff, 1 

resisting the weight of the classical tradition beneath which this art had 

been buried, were the first to think of using such art to draw conclusions 

about the or ga ni za tion of perception at the time the art was produced. However 

far- reaching their insight, it was limited by the fact that these scholars 

were content to highlight the formal signature which characterized perception 

in late- Roman times. They did not attempt to show the social upheavals 

manifested in these changes of perception— and perhaps could not have 

hoped to do so at that time. Today, the conditions for an analogous insight 

are more favorable. And if changes in the medium of present- day perception 

can be understood as a decay of the aura, it is possible to demonstrate the 

social determinants of that decay. 

The concept of the aura which was proposed above with reference to historical 

objects can be usefully illustrated with reference to an aura of natural 

objects. We definite the aura of the latter as the unique apparition of a 

distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye— while resting on a 

summer afternoon— a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts 

its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that 

branch. In the light of this description, we can readily grasp the social basis 

of the aura’s present decay. It rests on two circumstances, both linked to 

the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely: the 

desire of the present- day masses to “get closer” to things spatially and humanly, 

and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness 

by assimilating it as a reproduction. 2 Every day the urge grows stronger to get 

hold of an object at close range in an image, or better, in a facsimile, a reproduction. 

And the reproduction as offered by illustrated magazines and newsreels, 

differs unmistakably from the image. Uniqueness and permanence are 

as closely entwined in the latter as are transitoriness and repeatability in the 

former. The stripping of the veil from the object, the destruction of the aura, 

9. Abel Gance, “Le Temps de l’image est venu!” 

[It Is Time for the Image!” (French)], in L’Art 

cinématographique, vol. 2 (Paris, 1927), pp. 

94– 95 [Benjamin’s note]. Gance (1889– 1981), 

French silent film director. Rembrandt van Rijn 

(1606– 1669), Dutch paint er and etcher. Ludwig 

van Beethoven (1770– 1827), German composer. 

1. Alois Riegl (1858– 1905) and Franz Wickhoff 

(1853– 1909), Austrian art historians who studied 

the inception (hence “genesis”) of Eu ro pe an 

art in Vienna in the Middle Ages, an inception 

influenced by earlier Roman art. 

2. Getting closer (in terms of human interest) to 

the masses may involve having one’s social function 

removed from the field of vision. Nothing 

guarantees that a portraitist of today, when painting 

a famous surgeon at the breakfast table with 

his family, depicts his social function more precisely 

than a paint er of the seventeenth century 

who showed the viewer doctors representing their 

profession, as Rembrandt did in his “Anatomy 

Lesson” [Benjamin’s note]. Anatomy Lesson of 

Dr. Tulp, a group portrait, was painted in 1632.


is the signature of a perception whose “sense for sameness in the world” 3 

has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even 

from what is unique. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in 

the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing significance of statistics. 

The alignment of reality with the masses and of the masses with reality 

is a pro cess of immea sur able importance for both thinking and perception. 

IV 

The uniqueness of the work of art is identical to its embeddedness in the 

context of tradition. Of course, this tradition itself is thoroughly alive and 

extremely changeable. An ancient statute of Venus, 4 for instance, existed in 

a traditional context for the Greeks (who made it an object of worship) that 

was different from the context in which it existed for medieval clerics (who 

viewed it as a sinister idol). But what was equally evident to both was its 

uniqueness— that is, its aura. Originally, the embeddedness of an artwork 

in the context of tradition found expression in a cult. As we know, the earliest 

artworks originated in the ser vice of rituals— first magical, then religious. 

And it is highly significant that the artwork’s auratic mode of existence is 

never entirely severed from its ritual function. 5 In other words: the unique 

value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the source of its original 

use value. This ritualistic basis, however meditated it may be, is still recognizable 

as secularized ritual in even the most profane forms of the cult of 

beauty. 6 The secular worship of beauty, which developed during the Re naissance 

and prevailed for three centuries, clearly displayed that ritualistic basis 

in its subsequent decline and in the first severe crisis which befell it. For 

when, with the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction 

(namely, photography, which emerged at the same time as socialism), art felt 

the approach of that crisis which a century later has become unmistakable, it 

reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art 7 — that is, with a theology of art. 

This in turn gave rise to a negative theology, in the form of an idea of “pure” 

art, which rejects not only any social function but any definition in terms of 

a repre sen ta tional content. (In poetry, Mallarmé 8 was the first to adopt this 

standpoint.) 

No investigation of the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility 

can overlook these connections. They lead to crucial insight: for the 

first time in world history, technological reproducibility emancipates the work 

3. Quoted from Exotische Novellen (1919, Exotic 

Novella), by the Danish writer Johannes V. 

Jensen. 

4. Roman goddess of love identified with the 

Greek Aphrodite. 

5. The definition of the aura as the “unique apparition 

of a distance, however near it may be,” represents 

nothing more than a formulation of the 

cult value of the work of art in categories of spatiotemporal 

perception. Distance is the opposite 

of nearness. The essentially distant is the unapproachable. 

Unapproachability is, indeed, a primary 

quality of the cult image; true to its nature, 

the cult image remains “distant, however near it 

may be.” The nearness which one may gain from 

its substance does not impair the distance it 

retains in its apparition [Benjamin’s note]. 

6. To the extent that the cult value of a painting is 

secularized, the impressions of its fundamental 

uniqueness become less distinct. In the viewer’s 

imagination, the uniqueness of the phenomena 

holding sway in the cult image is more and more 

displaced by the empirical uniqueness of the artist 

or of his creative achievement. To be sure, 

never completely so— the concept of authenticity 

always transcends that of proper attribution. (This 

is particularly apparent in the collector, who 

always displays some traits of the fetishist and 

who, through his possession of the artwork, shares 

in its cultic power.) Nevertheless, the concept of 

authenticity still functions as a determining factor 

in the evaluation of art; as art becomes secularized, 

authenticity displaces the cult value of the 

work [Benjamin’s note]. 

7. “Art for art’s sake” (French), a 19th- century 

aesthetic doctrine; see walter pater, above. 

8. stéphane mallarmé (1842– 1989), French 

poet.


of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. To an ever- increasing degree, 

the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility. 

9 From a photographic plate, for example, one can make any number 

of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But as soon as 

the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the 

whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, 

it is based on a different practice: politics. 

V 

The reception of works of art varies in character, but in general two polar 

types stand out: one accentuates the artwork’s cult value; the other, its exhibition 

value. Artistic production begins with figures in the ser vice of a cult. 

One may assume that it was more important for these figures to be present 

than to be seen. The elk depicted by Stone Age man on the walls of his cave 

is an instrument of magic. He exhibits it to his fellow men, to be sure, but in 

the main it is meant for the spirits. Cult value as such tends today, it would 

seem, to keep the artwork out of sight: certain statues of gods are accessible 

only to the priest in the cella 1 ; certain images of the Madonna remain covered 

nearly all year round; certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are not 

visible to the viewer at ground level. With the emancipation of specific artistic 

practices from the ser vice of ritual, the opportunities for exhibiting their products 

increase. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here 

and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has a fixed place in the 

interior of a temple. A panel painting can be exhibited more easily than 

the mosaic or fresco which preceded it. And although a Mass may have been 

no less suited to public pre sen ta tion than a symphony, the symphony came 

into being at a time when the possibility of such pre sen ta tion promised to be 

greater. 

The scope for exhibiting the work of art has increased so enormously with 

the various methods of technologically reproducing it that, as happened in 

prehistoric times, a quantitative shift between the two poles of the artwork 

has led to a qualitative transformation in its nature. Just as the work of art in 

prehistoric times, through the absolute emphasis placed on its cult value, 

became first and foremost an instrument of magic which only later came to 

be recognized as a work of art, so today, through the absolute emphasis 

placed on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a construct with quite 

9. In film, the technological reproducibility of the 

product is not an externally imposed condition of 

its mass dissemination, as it is, say, in literature or 

painting. The technological reproducibility of films 

is based directly on the technology of their production. 

This not only makes possible the mass dissemination 

of films in the most direct way, but 

actually enforces it. It does so because the pro cess 

of producing a film is so costly that an individual 

who could afford to buy a painting, for example, 

could not afford to buy a [master print of a] film. 

It was calculated in 1927 that, in order to make a 

profit, a major film needed to reach an audience of 

9 million. Of course, the advent of sound film initially 

caused a movement in the opposite direction: 

its audience was restricted by language 

boundaries. And that coincided with the emphasis 

placed on national interests by fascism. But it is 

less important to note this setback (which in any 

case was mitigated by dubbing) than to observe its 

connection with fascism. The simultaneity of the 

two phenomena results from the economic crisis. 

The same disorders which led, in the world at 

large, to an attempt to maintain existing property 

relations by brute force induced film capital, 

under the threat of crisis, to speed up the development 

of sound film. Its introduction brought temporary 

relief, not only because sound film attracted 

the masses back into the cinema but because it 

consolidated new capital from the electrical 

industry with that of film. Thus, considered from 

the outside, sound film promoted national interests; 

but seen from the inside, it helped internationalize 

film production even more than before 

[Benjamin’s note]. 

1. Small room (Latin); specifically, a priest’s cell.


new functions. Among these, the one we are conscious of— the artistic 

function— may subsequently be seen as incidental. 2 This much is certain: 

today, photography and film are the most ser viceable vehicles of this new 

understanding. 

VI 

In photography, exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts. 

But cult value does not give way without re sis tance. It falls back to a last 

entrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait is 

central to early photography. In the cult of remembrance of dead or absent 

loved ones, the cult value of the image finds its last refuge. In the fleeting 

expression of a human face, the aura beckons from early photographs for the 

last time. This is what gives them their melancholy and incomparable beauty. 

But as the human being withdraws from the photographic image, exhibition 

value for the first time shows its superiority to cult value. To have given this 

development its local habitation constitutes the unique significance of Atget, 3 

who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has justly 

been said that he photographed them like scenes of crimes. A crime scene, 

too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. 

With Atget, photographic rec ords begin to be evidence in the historical trial. 

This constitutes their hidden po liti cal significance. They demand a specific 

kind of reception. Free- floating contemplation is no longer appropriate to 

them. They unsettle the viewer; he feels challenged to find a par tic u lar way 

to approach them. At the same time, illustrated magazines begin to put up 

signposts for him— whether these are right or wrong is irrelevant. For the 

first time, captions become obligatory. And it is clear that they have a character 

altogether different from the titles of paintings. The directives given 

by captions to those looking at images in illustrated magazines soon become 

even more precise and commanding in films, where the way each single 

image is understood appears prescribed by the sequence of all the preceding 

images. 

VII 

The nineteenthcentury dispute over the relative artistic merits of painting 

and photography seems misguided and confused today. But this does not 

diminish its importance, and may even underscore it. The dispute was in 

fact an expression of a world- historical upheaval whose true nature was concealed 

from both parties. Insofar as the age of technological reproducibility 

separated art from its basis in cult, all semblance of art’s autonomy disappeared 

forever. But the resulting change in the function of art lay beyond 

2. Bertolt Brecht, on a different level, engaged in 

analogous reflections: “If the concept of ‘work of 

art’ can no longer be applied to the thing that 

emerges once the work is transformed into a commodity, 

we have to eliminate this concept with 

due caution but without fear, lest we liquidate the 

function of the very thing as well. For it has to go 

through this phase unswervingly; there is no viable 

detour from the straight path. Rather, what happens 

here with the work of art will change it fundamentally, 

will erase its past to such an extent 

that— should the old concept be taken up again 

(and it will be; why not?)— it will no longer evoke 

any memory of the thing it once designated.” 

Brecht, Versuche (Experiments), 8– 10 (Berlin, 

1931), pp. 301– 2 [Benjamin’s note]. Brecht (1898– 

1956), German playwright and influential Marxist 

friend of Benjamin. 

3. Eugène Atget (1857– 1927), French photographer.


the horizon of the nineteenth century. And even the twentieth, which saw 

the development of film, was slow to perceive it. 

Though commentators had earlier expended much fruitless ingenuity on 

the question of whether photography was an art— without asking the more fundamental 

question of whether the invention of photography had not transformed 

the entire character of art— film theorists quickly adopted the same 

ill- considered standpoint. But the difficulties which photography caused for 

traditional aesthetics were child’s play compared to those presented by film. 

Hence the obtuse and hyperbolic character of early film theory. Abel Gance, 

for instance, compares film to hieroglyphs: “By a remarkable regression, we 

are transported back to the expressive level of the Egyptians. . . . Pictorial 

language has not matured, because our eyes are not yet adapted to it. There 

is not yet enough respect not enough cult, for what it expresses.” 4 Or, in the 

words of Séverin- Mars: “What other art has been granted a dream . . . at 

once more poetic and more real? Seen in this light, film might represent an 

incomparable means of expression, and only the noblest minds should move 

within its atmosphere, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their 

lives.” 5 Alexander Arnoux, for his part, concludes a fantasy about the silent 

film with the question: “Do not all the bold descriptions we have given 

amount to a definition of prayer?” 6 It is instructive to see how the desire to 

annex film to “art” impels these theoreticians to attribute elements of cult to 

film— with a striking lack of discretion. Yet when these speculations were 

published, works like A Woman of Paris and The Gold Rush 7 had already 

appeared. This did not deter Abel Gance from making the comparison with 

hieroglyphs, while Séverin- Mars speaks of film as one might speak of paintings 

by Fra Angelico. 8 It is revealing that even today especially reactionary 

authors look in the same direction for the significance of film— finding, if not 

actually a sacred significance, then at least a supernatural one. In connection 

with Max Reinhardt’s film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Werfel 9 

comments that it was undoubtedly the sterile copying of the external world— 

with its streets, interiors, railroad stations, restaurants, automobiles, and 

beaches— that had prevented film up to now from ascending to the realm of 

art. “Film has not yet realized its true purpose, its real possibilities. . . . These 

consist in its unique ability to use natural means to give incomparably convincing 

expression to the fairylike, the marvelous, the supernatural.” 1 

VIII 

The artistic per for mance of a stage actor is directly presented to the public by 

the actor in person; that of a screen actor, however, is presented through a 

camera, with two consequences. The recording apparatus that brings the 

4. Gance, p. 101 [Benjamin’s note]. 

5. Quoted in Gance, p. 100 [Benjamin’s note]. 

Séverin- Mars (Armand Jean de Malasayade, 

1873– 1921), French writer and actor who 

appeared in three of Gance’s films. 

6. Alexandre Arnoux, Cinéma (Paris, 1929), p. 

28 [Benjamin’s note]. Arnoux (1884– 1973), 

French playwright. 

7. Two American silent films (1923, 1925) written 

and directed by the En glish actor and director 

Charlie Chaplin (1889– 1977). 

8. Florentine paint er (Giovanni da Fiesole, ca. 

1400– 1455), a monk whose works often have religious 

subjects. 

9. Franz Werfel (1890– 1945), Austrian poet, 

playwright, and novelist. Reinhardt (1873– 1943). 

Austrian- born actor and producer of theater and 

film; his version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer 

Night’s Dream (ca. 1595) was released in 1935. 

1. Franz Werfel, “Ein Sommernachtstraum: Ein 

Film von Shakespeare und Reinhardt” [“A Midsummer 

Night’s Dream: A Film by Shakespeare 

and Reinhardt”], Neues Wiener Journal, cited in 

Lu, Nov. 15, 1935 [Benjamin’s note].


film actor’s per for mance to the public need not respect the per for mance as 

an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes 

its position with respect to the per for mance. The sequence of positional 

views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes 

the completed film. It comprises a certain number of movements, of various 

kinds and duration, which must be apprehended as such through the camera, 

not to mention special camera angles, close- ups, and so on. Hence, the perfor 

mance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests. This is the first 

consequence of the fact that the actor’s per for mance is presented by means 

of a camera. The second consequence is that the film actor lacks the opportunity 

of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his per for mance, 

since he does not present his per for mance to the audience in person. This 

permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing 

any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s empathy with the actor 

is really an empathy with the camera. Consequently, the audience takes the 

position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. 2 This is not an approach 

compatible with cult value. 

IX 

In the case of film, the fact that the actor represents someone else before 

the audience matters much less than the fact that he represents himself 

before the apparatus. One of the first to sense this transformation of the 

actor by the test per for mance was Pirandello. 3 That his remarks on the subject 

in his novel Si gira are confined to the negative aspects of this change, 

and to silent film only, does little to diminish their relevance. For in this 

respect, the sound film changed nothing essential. What matters is that the 

actor is performing for a piece of equipment— or, in the case of sound film, 

for two pieces of equipment. “The film actor,” Pirandello writes, “feels as if 

exiled. Exiled not only from the stage but from his own person. With a 

vague unease, he senses an inexplicable void, stemming from the fact that 

his body has lost its substance, that he has been volatilized, stripped of his 

reality, his life, his voice, the noises he makes when moving about, and has 

been turned into a mute image that flickers for a moment on the screen, 

then vanishes into silence. . . . The little apparatus will play with his shadow 

before the audience, and he himself must be content to play before the 

apparatus.” The situation can also be characterized as follows: for the first 

time— and this is the effect of film— the human being is placed in a position 

where he must operate with his whole living person, while forgoing its 

aura. For the aura is bound to his presence in the here and now. There is no 

facsimile of the aura. The aura surrounding Macbeth 4 on the stage cannot 

be divorced from the aura which, for the living spectators, surrounds the 

2. The expansion of the field of the testable which 

the film apparatus brings about for the actor corresponds 

to the extraordinary expansion of the 

field of the testable brought about for the individual 

through economic conditions. Thus, vocational 

aptitude tests become constantly more 

important. What matters in these tests are segmental 

per for mances of the individual. The final 

cut of a film and the vocational aptitude test are 

both taken before a panel of experts. The director 

in the studio occupies a position identical to that 

of the examiner during aptitude tests [Benjamin’s 

note]. 

3. Luigi Pirandello (1867– 1936), Italian dramatist 

and novelist; his novel Si Gira (1915) was 

translated as Shoot! in 1926. 

4. Title character of Shakespeare’s play (1606).


actor who plays him. What distinguishes the shot in the film studio, however, 

is that the camera is substituted for the audience. As a result, the aura 

surrounding the actor is dispelled— and, with it, the aura of the figure he 

portrays. 

It is not surprising that it should be a dramatist such as Pirandello who, in 

reflecting on the special character of film acting, inadvertently touches on 

the crisis now affecting the theater. Indeed, nothing contrasts more starkly 

with a work of art completely subject to (or, like film, founded in) technological 

reproduction than a stage play. Any thorough consideration will confirm 

this. Expert observers have long recognized that, in film, “the best effects are 

almost always achieved by ‘acting’ as little as possible. . . . The development,” 

according to Rudolf Arnheim, writing in 1932, has been toward “using the 

actor as one of the ‘props,’ chosen for his typicalness and . . . introduced in 

the proper context.” 5 Closely bound up with this development is something 

else. The stage actor identifies himself with a role. The film actor very often is 

denied this opportunity. His per for mance is by no means a unified whole, but 

is assembled from many individual per for mances. Apart from incidental 

concerns about studio rental, availability of other actors, scenery, and so on, 

there are elementary necessities of the machinery that split the actor’s per formance 

into a series of episodes capable of being assembled. In par tic u lar, 

lighting and its installation require the repre sen ta tion of an action— which 

on the screen appears as a swift, unified sequence— to be filmed in a series 

of separate takes, which may be spread over hours in the studio. Not to mention 

the more obvious effects of montage. A leap from a window, for example, 

can be shot in the studio as a leap from a scaffold, while the ensuing fall may 

be filmed weeks later at an outdoor location. And far more paradoxical cases 

can easily be imagined. Let us assume that an actor is supposed to be startled 

by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can 

resort to an expedient: he could have a shot fired without warning behind the 

actor’s back on some other occasion when he happens to be in the studio. 

The actor’s frightened reaction at that moment could be recorded and then 

edited into the film. Nothing shows more graphically that art has escaped the 

realm of “beautiful semblance,” which for so long was regarded as the only 

sphere in which it could thrive. 

X 

The film actor’s feeling of estrangement in the face of the apparatus, as 

Pirandello describes this experience, is basically of the same kind as the 

estrangement felt before one’s appearance in a mirror. But now the mirror 

image has become detachable from the person mirrored, and is transportable. 

And where is it transported? To a site in front of the public. 6 The 

5. Rudolf Arnheim, Film als Kunst [Film as Art] 

(Berlin, 1932), pp. 176– 77. If the actor thus 

becomes a prop, the prop, in its turn, not infrequently 

functions as an actor. At any rate, it is not 

unusual for films to allocate a role to a prop. [For 

example,] a clock that is running will always be a 

disturbance on the stage, where it cannot be permitted 

its role of mea sur ing time. Even in a naturalistic 

play, real- life time would conflict with 

theatrical time. In view of this, it is very revealing 

that film— where appropriate— can readily make 

use of time as mea sured by a clock. This feature, 

more than many others, makes it clear that— 

circumstances permitting— each and every prop 

in a film may assume decisive functions [Benjamin’s 

note]. Arnheim (1904– 2007), German- born 

writer on art and visual thinking. 

6. The change noted here in the mode of 

exhibition— a change brought about by reproduction 

technology— is also noticeable in politics.


screen actor never for a moment ceases to be aware of this. While he stands 

before the apparatus, the screen actor knows that in the end he is confronting 

the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he 

offers not only his labor but his entire self, his heart and soul, is beyond his 

reach. During the shooting, he has as little contact with it as would any 

article being made in a factory. This may contribute to that oppression, that 

new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips the actor before the camera. 

Film responds to the shriveling of the aura by artificially building up 

the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by 

the money of the film industry, preserves that magic of the personality 

which has long been no more than the putrid magic of its own commodity 

character. So long as moviemakers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule the 

only revolutionary merit that can be ascribed to today’s cinema is the promotion 

of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. We do not 

deny that in some cases today’s films can also foster revolutionary criticism 

of social conditions, even of property relations. But the present study is no 

more specifically concerned with this than is western Eu ro pe an film production. 

It is inherent in the technology of film, as of sports, that everyone who 

witnesses these per for mances does so as a quasi- expert. This is obvious to 

anyone who has listened to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their 

bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race. It is no accident that 

newspaper publishers arrange races for their delivery boys. These arouse 

great interest among the participants, for the winner has a chance to rise 

from delivery boy to professional racer. Similarly, the newsreel offers everyone 

the chance to rise from passerby to movie extra. In this way, a person 

might even see himself becoming part of a work of art: think of Vertov’s 

Three Songs of Lenin or Ivens’ Borinage. 7 Any person today can lay claim to 

being filmed. This claim can best be clarified by considering the historical 

situation of literature today. 

For centuries it was in the nature of literature that a small number of writers 

confronted many thousands of readers. This began a change toward the 

end of the past century. With the growth and extension of the press, which 

constantly made new po liti cal, religious, scientific, professional, and local 

journals available to readers, an increasing number of readers— in isolated 

cases, at first— turned into writers. It began with the space set aside for “letters 

to the editor” in the daily press, and has now reached a point where 

there is hardly a Eu ro pe an engaged in the work pro cess who could not, in 

principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other an account of 

The present crisis of the bourgeois democracies 

involves a crisis in the conditions governing the 

public pre sen ta tion of leaders. Democracies 

exhibit the leader directly, in person, before 

elected representatives. The parliament is his public. 

But innovations in recording equipment now 

enable the speaker to be heard by an unlimited 

number of people while he is peaking, and to be 

seen by an unlimited number shortly afterward. 

This means that priority is given to presenting the 

politician before the recording equipment. Parliaments 

are becoming depopulated at the same time 

as theaters. Radio and film are changing not only 

the function of the professional actor but, equally, 

the function of those who, like the leaders, present 

themselves before these media. The direction 

of this change is the same for the film actor and for 

the leader, regardless of their different tasks. It 

tends toward the exhibition of controllable, transferable 

skills under certain social conditions. 

This results in a new form of selection— selection 

before an apparatus— from which the star and the 

dictator emerge as victors [Benjamin’s note]. 

7. A 1933 film directed by Dutch director Joris 

Ivens (1898– 1989). Dziga Vertov (1896– 1954), 

early Rus sian film director; Three Songs about 

Lenin appeared in 1934.


a work experience, a complaint, a report, or something of the kind. Thus, 

the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic 

character. The difference becomes functional; it may vary from case to 

case. At any moment, the reader is ready to become a writer. As an expert— 

which he has had to become in any case in a highly specialized work pro cess, 

even if only in some minor capacity— the reader gains access to authorship. 

In the Soviet Union, work itself is given a voice. And the ability to describe a 

job in words now forms part of the expertise needed to carry it out. Literary 

competence is no longer founded on specialized higher education but on 

polytechnic training, and thus is common property. 8 

All this can readily be applied to film, where shifts that in literature took 

place over centuries have occurred in a de cade. In cinematic practice— 

above all, in Russia— this shift has already been partly realized. Some of the 

actors taking part in Rus sian films are not actors in our sense but people 

who portray themselves— and primarily in their own work pro cess. In western 

Eu rope today, the capitalist exploitation of film obstructs the human 

being’s legitimate claim to being reproduced. Under these circumstances, 

the film industry has an overriding interest in stimulating the involvement of 

the masses through illusionary displays and ambiguous speculations. 

XI 

The shooting of a film, especially a sound film, offers a hitherto unimaginable 

spectacle. It presents a pro cess in which it is impossible to assign to 

the spectator a single viewpoint which would exclude from his or her field of 

vision the equipment not directly involved in the action being filmed— the 

camera, the lighting units, the technical crew, and so forth (unless the alignment 

of the spectator’s pupil coincided with that of the camera). This circumstance, 

more than any other, makes any resemblance between a scene 

in a film studio and one onstage superficial and irrelevant. In principle, the 

8. The privileged character of the respective techniques 

is lost. Aldous Huxley writes: “Advances in 

technology have led . . . to vulgarity. . . . Pro cess 

reproduction and the rotary press have made 

possible the indefinite multiplication of writing 

and pictures. Universal education and relatively 

high wages have created an enormous public who 

know how to read and can afford to buy reading 

and pictorial matter. A great industry has been 

called into existence in order to supply these commodities. 

Now, artistic talent is a very rare phenomenon; 

whence it follows . . . that, at every 

epoch and in all countries, most art has been bad. 

But the proportion of trash in the total artistic 

output is greater now than at any other period. 

That it must be so is a matter of simple arithmetic. 

The population of Western Eu rope has a little 

more than doubled during the last century. But 

the amount of reading— and seeing— matter has 

increased, I should imagine, at least twenty and 

possibly fifty or even a hundred times. If there 

were n men of talent in a population of x millions, 

there will presumably be 2n men of talent among 

2x millions. The situation may be summed up 

thus. For every page of print and prictures published 

a century ago, twenty or perhaps even a 

hundred pages are published today. But for every 

man of talent then living, there are now only 

two men of talent. It may be of course that, thanks 

to universal education, many potential talents 

which in the past would have been stillborn are 

now enabled to realize themselves. Let us assume, 

then, that there are now three or even four men of 

talent to every one of earlier times. It still remains 

true to say that the consumption of reading— and 

seeing— matter has far outstripped the natural 

production of gifted writers and draftsmen. It is 

the same with hearingmatter. Prosperity, the 

gramophone and the radio have created an audience 

of hearers who consume an amount of 

hearingmatter that has increased out of all proportion 

to the increase of population and the consequent 

natural increase of talented musicians. It 

follows from all this that in all the arts the output 

of trash is both absolutely and relatively 

greater than it was in the past; and that it must 

remain greater for just so long as the world continues 

to consume the present inordinate quantities 

of reading- matter, seeing- matter, and hearingmatter.” 

(Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay: 

A Traveller’s Journal, 1934 [reprint, London, 1949, 

pp. 274ff.].) This mode of observation is obviously 

not progressive [Benjamin’s note]. Huxley (1894– 

1963), En glish novelist and essayist.


theater includes a position from which the action on the stage cannot easily 

be detected as an illusion. There is no such position where a film is being 

shot. The illusory nature of film is of the second degree; it is the result of 

editing. That is to say: In the film studio the apparatus has penetrated so deeply 

into reality that a pure view of that reality, free of the foreign body of equipment, 

is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially 

adjusted photographic device and the assembly of that shot with others of the 

same kind. The equipment- free aspect of reality has here become the height 

of artifice, and the vision of immediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of 

technology. 9 

This state of affairs, which contrasts so sharply with that which obtains in 

the theater, can be compared even more instructively to the situation in 

painting. Here we have to pose the question: How does the camera operator 

compare with the paint er? In answer to this, it will be helpful to consider the 

concept of the operator as it is familiar to us from surgery. The surgeon represents 

the polar opposite of the magician. The attitude of the magician, 

who heals a sick person by a laying- on of hands, differs from that of the surgeon, 

who makes an intervention in the patient. The magician maintains the 

natural distance between himself and the person treated; more precisely, 

he reduces it slightly by laying on his hands, but increases it greatly by his 

authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the 

distance from the patient by penetrating the patient’s body, and increases it 

only slightly by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In 

short: unlike the magician (traces of whom are still found in the medical 

practitioner), the surgeon abstains at the decisive moment from confronting 

his patient person to person; instead, he penetrates the patient by operating.— 

Magician is to surgeon as paint er is to cinematographer. The paint er maintains 

in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer 

penetrates deeply into its tissue. The images obtained by each differ enormously. 

The paint er’s is a total image, whereas that of the cinematographer 

is piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law. 

Hence, the pre sen ta tion of reality in film is incomparably the more significant 

for people of today, since it provides the equipment- free aspect of reality they 

are entitled to demand from a work of art, and does so precisely on the basis 

of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment. 

XII 

The technological reproducibility of the artwork changes the relation of the 

masses to art. The extremely backward attitude toward a Picasso 1 painting 

changes into a highly progressive reaction to a Chaplin film. The progressive 

reaction is characterized by an immediate, intimate fusion of pleasure— 

pleasure in seeing and experiencing— with an attitude of expert appraisal. 

Such a fusion is an important social index. As is clearly seen in the case of 

painting, the more reduced the social impact of an art form, the more 

9. An allusion to Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), 

an unfinished novel by the German Romantic 

writer Novalis (Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, 

1772– 1801), in which a medieval poet 

searches for a blue flower that bears the face of his 

beloved. 

1. Pablo Picasso (1881– 1973), Spanish- born paint er 

who was a pioneer of modern art.


widely criticism and enjoyment of it diverge in the public. The conventional 

is uncritically enjoyed, while the truly new is criticized with aversion. With 

regard to the cinema, the critical and uncritical attitudes of the public coincide. 

The decisive reason for this is that nowhere more than in the cinema 

are the reactions of individuals, which together make up the massive reaction 

of the audience, determined by the imminent concentration of reactions 

into a mass. No sooner are these reactions manifest than they regulate 

one another. Again, the comparison with painting is fruitful. A painting has 

always exerted a claim to be viewed primarily by a single person or by a few. 

The simultaneous viewing of paintings by a large audience, as happened in 

the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis in painting, a crisis 

triggered not only by photography but, in a relatively in de pen dent way, 

by the artwork’s claim to the attention of the masses. 

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective 

reception, as architecture has always been able to do, as the epic poem 

could do at one time, and as film is able to do today. And although direct 

conclusions about the social role of painting cannot be drawn from this 

fact alone, it does have a strongly adverse effect whenever painting is led 

by special circumstances, as if against its nature, to confront the masses 

directly. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages, and at the 

princely courts up to about the end of the eigh teenth century, the collective 

reception of paintings took place not simultaneously but in a manifoldly 

graduated and hierarchically mediated way. If that has changed, the change 

testifies to the special conflict in which painting has become enmeshed by 

the technological reproducibility of the image. And while efforts have 

been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this 

mode of reception gives the masses no means of or ga niz ing and regulating 

their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick 

comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism. 2 

XIII 

Film can be characterized not only in terms of man’s pre sen ta tion of himself 

to the camera but also in terms of his repre sen ta tion of his environment by 

means of this apparatus. A glance at occupational psychology illustrates the 

testing capacity of the equipment. Psychoanalysis illustrates it in a different 

perspective. In fact, film has enriched our field of perception with methods 

that can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory. Fifty years ago, a slip 

of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed. Only exceptionally may such 

a slip have opened a perspective on depths in a conversation which had 

seemed to be proceeding on a superficial plane. Since the publication of On 

the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 3 things have changed. This book isolated 

and made analyzable things which had previously floated unnoticed on 

the broad stream of perception. A similar deepening of appreciation throughout 

the entire spectrum of optical— and now also auditory— impressions has 

2. An experimental literary and po liti cal movement 

founded in France in 1924; its members 

sought to express subconscious thought and feeling. 

3. An early work (1904) of sigmund freud (1856– 

1939), the Austrian found er of psychoanalysis, 

that discusses how what has come to be called a 

“Freudian slip” reveals unconscious feelings.


been accomplished by film. One is merely stating the obverse of this fact 

when one says that actions shown in a movie can be analyzed much more 

precisely and from more points of view than those presented in a painting or 

on the stage. In contrast to what obtains in painting, filmed action lends 

itself more readily to analysis because it delineates situations far more precisely. 

In contrast to what obtains on the stage, filmed action lends itself 

more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance 

derives its prime importance from the fact that it tends to foster the 

interpenetration of art and science. Actually, if we think of a filmed action 

as neatly delineated within a par tic u lar situation— like a flexed muscle in a 

body— it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its 

value for science. Demonstrating that the artistic uses of photography are identical 

to its scientific uses— these two dimensions having usually been separated 

until now— will be one of the revolutionary functions of film. 4 

On the one hand, film furthers insight into the necessities governing our 

lives by its use of close- ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar 

objects, and by its exploration of commonplace millieux through the ingenious 

guidance of the camera; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of 

a vast and unsuspected field of action. Our bars and city streets, our offices 

and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories seemed to close 

relentlessly around us. Then came film and exploded this prison- world with 

the dynamite of the split second, 5 so that now we can set off calmly on journeys 

of adventure among its far- flung debris. With the close- up, space 

expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. And just as enlargement 

not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly “in any case,” but brings to light 

entirely new structures of matter, slow motion not only reveals familiar 

aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them— 

aspects “which do not appear as the retarding of natural movements but 

have a curious gliding, floating character of their own.” 6 Clearly, it is another 

nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. “Other” above 

all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to 

a space informed by the unconscious. Whereas it is a commonplace that, 

for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only 

in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the split second 

when a person actually takes a step. We are familiar with the movement 

of picking up a cigarette lighter or a spoon, but know almost nothing 

of what really goes on between hand and metal, and still less how this varies 

with different moods. This is where the camera comes into play, with all 

its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or 

compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the 

camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover 

the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. 

4. Re nais sance painting offers a revealing analogy 

to this situation. The incomparable development 

of this art and its significance depended not 

least on the integration of various new sciences, 

or at least various new scientific data. Re nais sance 

painting made use of anatomy and perspective, 

of mathematics, meteorology, and chromatology 

[Benjamin’s note]. 

5. The viewing time of the individual frames of a 

film. 

6. Arnheim, p. 138 [Benjamin’s note].


XIV 

It has always been one of the primary tasks of art to create a demand whose 

hour of full satisfaction has not yet come. 7 The history of every art form has 

critical periods in which the par tic u lar form strains after effects which can 

be easily achieved only with a changed technical standard— that is to say, in 

a new art form. The excesses and crudities of art which thus result, particularly 

in periods of so- called de cadence, actually emerge from the core of its 

richest historical energies. In recent years, Dadaism has abounded in such 

barbarisms. Only now is its impulse recognizable: Dadaism attempted to produce 

with the means of painting (or literature) the effects which the public 

today seeks in film. 

Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demand will overshoot 

its target. Dadaism did so to the extent that it sacrificed the market values 

so characteristic of film in favor of more significant aspirations— of which, to 

be sure, it was unaware in the form described here. The Dadaists attached 

much less importance to the commercial usefulness of their artworks than to 

the uselessness of those works as objects of contemplative immersion. They 

sought to achieve this uselessness not least by thorough degradation of their 

material. Their poems are “word- salad” 8 containing obscene expressions 

and every imaginable kind of linguistic refuse. It is not otherwise with their 

paintings, on which they mounted buttons or train tickets. What they 

achieved by such means was a ruthless annihilation of the aura in every 

object they produced, which they branded as a reproduction through the very 

means of production. Before a painting by Arp or a poem by August Stramm, 

it is impossible to take time for concentration and evaluation, as one can 

before a painting by Derain or a poem by Rilke. 9 Contemplative immersion— 

which, as the bourgeoisie degenerated, became a breeding ground for asocial 

7. “The artwork,” writes André Breton, “has value 

only insofar as it is alive to reverberations of the 

future.” And indeed every highly developed art 

form stands at the intersection of three lines of 

development. First, technology is working toward 

a par tic u lar form of art. Before film appeared, 

there were little books of photos that could be 

made to flit past the viewer under the pressure of 

the thumb, presenting a boxing match or a tennis 

match; then there were coin- operated peepboxes 

in bazaars, with image sequences kept 

in motion by the turning of a handle. Second, 

traditional art forms, at certain stages in their 

development, strain laboriously for effects which 

later are effortlessly achieved by new art forms. 

Before film became established, Dadaists’ per formances 

sought to stir in their audience reactions 

which Chaplin then elicited more naturally. 

Third, apparently insignificant social changes 

often foster a change in reception which benefits 

only the new art form. Before film had started to 

create its public, images (which were no longer 

motionless) were received by an assembled audience 

in the Kaiserpanorama. Here the audience 

faced a screen into which stereoscopes were fitted, 

one for each spectator. In front of these stereoscopes 

single images automatically appeared, 

remained briefly in view, and then gave way to others. 

Edison still had to work with similar means 

when he presented the first film strip— before the 

movie screen and projection were known; a 

small audience gazed into an apparatus in which 

a sequence of images was shown. Incidentally, 

the institution of the Kaiserpanorama very clearly 

manifests a dialectic of development. Shortly 

before film turned the viewing of images into a 

collective activity, image viewing by the individual, 

through the stereoscopes of these soon outmoded 

establishments, was briefly intensified, as 

it had been once before in the isolated contemplation 

of the divine image by the priest in the cella 

[Benjamin’s note]. Dadaists: members of a literary 

and artistic movement, founded in 1916, that 

stressed irrationality and anarchy and mocked 

normal aesthetic conventions. Breton (1896– 

1966), French artist and writer who broke with 

dadaism in 1921 and founded surrealism in 1924. 

Thomas Alva Edison (1847– 1931), American 

inventor, holder of patents for the microphone 

(1877), the phonograph (1878), the incandescent 

lamp (1879), and the Kinetoscope (1889), the 

single- view machine described by Benjamin; he 

also experimented with synchronizing motion 

pictures and sound. 

8. Incoherent speech or writing made up of real 

and invented words. 

9. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875– 1926), Austrian poet. 

Jean Arp (1887– 1966), French sculptor, one of the 

found ers of dadism. Stramm (1874– 1915), German 

poet. André Derain (1880– 1954), French 

paint er.


behavior— is here opposed by distraction as a variant of social behavior. 

Dadaist manifestations actually guaranteed a quite vehement distraction by 

making artworks the center of scandal. One requirement was paramount: to 

outrage the public. 

From an alluring visual composition or an enchanting fabric of sound, the 

Dadaists turned the artwork into a missile. It jolted the viewer, taking on a 

tactile quality. It thereby fostered the demand for film, since the distracting 

element in film is also primarily tactile, being based on successive changes of 

scene and focus which have a percussive effect on the spectator. Let us compare 

the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The 

painting invites the viewer to contemplation; before it, he can give himself up 

to his train of associations. Before a film image, he cannot do so. No sooner 

has he seen it than it has already changed. It cannot be fixed on. Duhamel, 

who detests the cinema and knows nothing of its significance, though he 

does know something about its structure, describes the situation as follows: 

“I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced 

by moving images.” 1 Indeed, the train of associations in the person contemplating 

these images is immediately interrupted by new images. This constitutes 

the shock effect of film, which, like all shock effects, seeks to induce 

heightened attention. 2 By means of its technological structure, film has freed 

the physical shock effect— which Dadaism had kept wrapped, as it were, inside 

the moral shock effect— from this wrapping. 3 

XV 

The masses are a matrix from which all customary behavior toward works of 

art is today emerging newborn. Quantity has been transformed into quality: 

the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a different kind of participation. 

The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a 

disreputable form should not mislead the observer. Yet some people have 

launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial aspect of the matter. 

Among these critics, Duhamel has expressed himself most radically. 

What he objects to most is the kind of participation which the movie elicits 

from the masses. Duhamel calls the movie “a pastime for helots, a diversion 

for uneducated, wretched, worn- out creatures who are consumed by their 

worries . . . , a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes 

no intelligence . . . , which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope 

other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.” 4 

1. Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future 

[Scenes from Future Life], 2d ed. (Paris, 1930), p. 

52 [Benjamin’s note]. Duhamel (1884– 1966), 

French novelist and poet. 

2. Film is the art form corresponding to the 

increased threat to life that faces people today. 

Humanity’s need to expose itself to shock effects 

represents an adaptation to the dangers threatening 

it. Film corresponds to profound changes in 

the apparatus of apperception— changes that are 

experienced on the scale of private existence by 

each passerby in big- city traffic, and on a historical 

scale by every present- day citizen [Benjamin’s 

note]. 

3. Film proves useful in illuminating Cubism and 

Futurism, as well as Dadaism. Both appear as 

deficient attempts on the part of art to take into 

account the pervasive interpenetration of reality 

by the apparatus. Unlike film, these schools did 

not try to use the apparatus as such for the artistic 

repre sen ta tion of reality, but aimed at a sort of 

alloy of represented reality and represented apparatus. 

In Cubism, a premonition of the structure 

of this apparatus, which is based on optics, plays a 

dominant part; in Futurism, it is the premonition 

of the effects of the apparatus— effects which are 

brought out by the rapid coursing of the band of 

film [Benjamin’s note]. A movement beginning in 

the early 1900s, cubism reacted against sentimental 

and realistic painting, using primarily abstract 

form; a radical movement in art and literature, 

futurism glorified speed, war, and machinery, as 

well as advocating rebellion. 

4. Duhamel, p. 58 [Benjamin’s note].


Clearly, this is in essence the ancient lament that the masses seek distraction, 

whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace. 

The question remains whether it provides a basis for the analysis of 

film. This calls for closer examination. Distraction and concentration form 

an antithesis, which may be formulated as follows. A person who concentrates 

before a work of art is absorbed by it; he enters into the work, just as, 

according to legend, a Chinese paint er entered his completed painting while 

beholding it. By contrast, the distracted masses absorb the work of art into 

themselves. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has 

always offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction 

and through the collective. The laws of architecture’s reception are 

highly instructive. 

Buildings have accompanied human existence since primeval times. Many 

art forms have come into being and passed away. Tragedy begins with the 

Greeks, is extinguished along with them, and is revived centuries later, 

though only according to its “rules.” 5 The epic, which originates in the early 

days of peoples, dies out in Eu rope at the end of the Re nais sance. Panel 

painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and nothing guarantees its uninterrupted 

existence. But the human need for shelter is permanent. Architecture 

has never had fallow periods. Its history is longer than that of any other 

art, and its effect ought to be recognized in any attempt to account for the 

relationship of the masses to the work of art. Buildings are received in a 

twofold manner: by use and by perception. Or, better: tactilely and optically. 

Such reception cannot be understood in terms of the concentrated attention 

of a traveler before a famous building. On the tactile side, there is no counterpart 

to what contemplation is on the optical side. Tactile reception comes 

about not so much by way of attention as by way of habit. The latter largely 

determines even the optical reception of architecture, which spontaneously 

takes the form of casual noticing, rather than attentive observation. Under 

certain circumstances, this form of reception shaped by architecture acquires 

canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception 

at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means— that 

is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually— taking their cue 

from tactile reception— through habit. 

Even the distracted person can form habits. What is more, the ability to 

master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their per for mance 

has become habitual. The sort of distraction that is provided by art represents 

a covert mea sure of the extent to which it has become possible to perform 

new tasks of apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to 

evade such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important tasks 

wherever it is able to mobilize the masses. It does so currently in film. Reception 

in distraction— the sort of reception which is increasingly noticeable in all 

areas of art and is a symptom of profound changes in apperception— finds in 

film its true training ground. Film, by virtue of its shock effects, is predisposed 

to this form of reception. It makes cult value recede into the background, 

not only because it encourages an evaluating attitude in the audience 

but also because, at the movies, the evaluating attitude requires no attention. 

The audience is an examiner, but a distracted one. 

5. Tragedy developed from Greek religious festivals 

of Dionysus; Aristotle described the genre in 

his Poetics, but its “rules” were laid down by neoclassical 

critics and playwrights of the 17th and 

18th century (e.g., see pierre corneille, above).


Epilogue 

The increasing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation 

of masses are two sides of the same pro cess. Fascism attempts to or ganize 

the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property 

relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression 

to the masses— but on no account granting them rights. 6 The masses 

have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression 

in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is 

an aestheticizing of po liti cal life. The violation of the masses, whom fascism, 

with its Führer 7 cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation 

of an apparatus which is pressed into serving the production of ritual 

values. 

All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is 

war. War, and only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements 

on the grandest scale while preserving traditional property relations. That 

is how the situation presents itself in po liti cal terms. In technological terms 

it can be formulated as follows: only war makes it possible to mobilize all 

of today’s technological resources while maintaining property relations. It 

goes without saying that the fascist glorification of war does not make use 

of these arguments. Nevertheless, a glance at such glorification is instructive. 

In Marinetti’s manifesto for the colonial war in Ethiopia, we read: 

For twenty- seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the idea that 

war is anti- aesthetic. . . . We therefore state: . . . War is beautiful 

because— thanks to its gas masks, its terrifying megaphones, its flame 

throwers, and light tanks— it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated 

machine. War is beautiful because it inaugurates the dreamed- of 

metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a 

flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine- guns. War is beautiful 

because it combines gunfire, barrages, cease- fires, scents, and the 

fragrance of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because 

it creates new architectures, like those of armored tanks, geometric 

squadrons of aircraft, spirals of smoke from burning villages, and much 

more. . . . Poets and artists of Futurism, . . . remember these principles 

of an aesthetic of war, that they may illuminate . . . your struggles for a 

new poetry and a new sculpture! 8 

6. A technological factor is important here, especially 

with regard to the newsreel, whose significance 

for propaganda purposes can hardly be 

overstated. Mass reproduction is especially favored 

by the reproduction of the masses. In great ceremonial 

pro cessions, giant rallies, and mass sporting 

events, and in war, all of which are now fed into 

the camera, the masses come face to face with 

themselves. This pro cess, whose significance need 

not be emphasized, is closely bound up with the 

development of reproduction and recording technologies. 

In general, mass movements are more 

clearly apprehended by the camera than by the 

eye. A bird’s-eye view best captures assemblies of 

hundreds of thousands. And even when this perspective 

is no less accessible to the human eye 

than to the camera, the image formed by the eye 

cannot be enlarged in the same way as a photograph. 

This is to say that mass movements, including 

war, are a form of human behavior especially 

suited to the camera [Benjamin’s note]. 

7. Leader (German), the title assumed by Adolf 

Hitler. 

8. Likely cited from a French newspaper, one of 

several manifestos issued by Filippo Tommaso 

Marinetti (1876– 1944), Italian poet and novelist 

who in 1909 founded futurism; for a time, the 

movement was endorsed by Italian Fascists. “The 

Colonial War in Ethiopia”: an ambiguously worded 

1889 treaty led Italy to claim Ethiopia as its protectorate; 

the war of 1895– 96 forced Italy to recognize 

Ethiopia’s in de pen dence, but in 1935 Italy 

invaded the country.


This manifesto has the merit of clarity. The question it poses deserves to 

be taken up by the dialectician. To him, the aesthetic of modern warfare 

appears as follows: if the natural use of productive forces is impeded by 

the property system, then the increase in technological means, in speed, 

in sources of energy will press toward an unnatural use. This is found in 

war, and the destruction caused by war furnishes proof that society was not 

mature enough to make technology its organ, that technology was not sufficiently 

developed to master the elemental forces of society. The most horrifying 

features of imperialist war are determined by the discrepancy between 

the enormous means of production and their inadequate use in the pro cess 

of production (in other words, by unemployment and the lack of markets). 

Imperialist war is an uprising on the part of technology, which demands 

repayment in “human material” for the natural material society has denied it. 

Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of 

trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs 

over cities; and in gas warfare it has found a new means of abolishing the 

aura. 

“Fiat ars— pereat mundus,” 9 says fascism, expecting from war, as Marinetti 

admits, the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology. 

This is evidently the consummation of l’art pour l’art. Humankind, 

which once, in Homer, 1 was an object of contemplation for the Olympian 

gods, has now become one for itself. Its self- alienation has reached the point 

where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. 

Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism 

replies by politicizing art. 

1936–39 1936, 1955 

9. Let art be made, let the world perish (Latin). 

1. Greek poet credited with authoring, the Iliad and the Odyssey (ca. 8th c. b.c.e.).

1072 

MIKHAIL M. BAKHTIN 

1895–1975 

Proclaimed by tzvetan todorov as perhaps the greatest twentiethcentury theorist 

of literature, M. M. Bakhtin, since his discovery in the 1970s, has been acclaimed 

by literary critics across a wide theoretical and po liti cal spectrum. He has been 

called a formalist, a Marxist, a Christian humanist, a conservative, and a radical; 

because his work intersects in eccentric ways with so many of the critical orthodoxies 

of contemporary literary criticism, it resists easy classification. 

Almost everything about Bakhtin’s life and writing is colored by the fact that his 

greatest period of productivity coincided with the Rus sian Revolution, the ensuing 

civil war (1918– 21), and the repressive Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin. Lacking 

Communist Party credentials, he labored most of his adult life in obscurity, a circumstance 

that probably saved his life at a time when his close— and better connected— 

friends were disappearing into death camps. The circumstances of Bakhtin’s life 

make it sometimes difficult to verify the authorship and chronology of his writings. 

Certain works written during his youth in the 1920s were not published until late 

in his life or after his death, and controversies continue over three disputed books 

from the 1920s that appeared under the names of his colleagues Valentin Vološinov 

and Pavel Medvedev, held by some to be the works of Bakhtin himself. Yet these 

difficulties in separating Bakhtin’s voice from those of others are of a piece with his 

own philosophical beliefs about the dialogic nature of language. As he wrote in a 

note that was later published in his Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, “Quests 

for my own words are quests for a word that is not my own.” 

Born in the Rus sian town of Orel, Bakhtin grew up in Vilnius and later Odessa. He 

earned a degree in classics and philology from the University of Petrograd in 1918. 

Working as a schoolteacher in Nevel in western Rus sia during the civil war between 

the Red Army and the anti- Bolshevist White armies, he first met the group of intellectuals 

who would become part of his circle and within whose wide- ranging discussions 

Bakhtin would formulate the critical concepts that were to dominate his 

thinking for the rest of his life. In 1920 Bakhtin settled in Vitebsk, where his circle, 

which by now included Vološinov and Medvedev, continued to meet. In 1924 Bakhtin 

moved back to Petrograd (or St. Petersburg), now renamed Leningrad; there in January 

1929 he was arrested and imprisoned for alleged antigovernment activity and 

the Socratic crime of “corrupting the young.” In prison he suffered from health problems 

caused by chronic osteomyelitis, a painful inflammation of the bone marrow. 

He was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp, but on the intervention of friends, the 

sentence was commuted to six years’ internal exile in Kazakhstan. In 1936, his exile 

over, he taught at Mordovia Pedagogical Institute in Saransk until new purges forced 

him to resign. He moved to a small town outside of Moscow where his worsening 

osteomyelitis led to the amputation of his right leg. After that surgery, Bakhtin had 

difficulty finding permanent employment, though he occasionally delivered lectures 

at the Gorky Institute of World Literature. 

In the 1930s and 1940s Bakhtin began to write a dissertation on the French writer 

François Rabelais (1490– 1553), as well as a book on novels that chronicle the main 

character’s maturation and education (the bildungsroman). World War II interrupted 

his work on the dissertation and the planned book on the bildungsroman; only fragments 

of this book survive. Following the war, Bakhtin was allowed to return to 

his university position in Saransk, and to his unfinished dissertation on Rabelais. 

Although he was finally granted the doctoral degree, he could not publish his dissertation; 

it remained unread until it was discovered in the Gorky Institute’s archives 

by graduate students in the early 1960s. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Bakhtin’s scholarly 

fortunes began to rise even as his health began to decline. In addition to osteo-

MIKHAIL M. BAKHTIN / 1073 

myelitis, he also suffered from emphysema caused by his heavy smoking. By the time 

of his death from complications of emphysema, he had become something of a cult 

figure in Rus sia. In the 1970s his reputation spread to Paris through the work of 

Eastern Eu ro pe an émigrés such as julia kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov; from there 

in the 1980s it reached North America and En gland, where his work had significant 

impact. 

Bakhtin’s earliest writings, in such essays as “Towards a Philosophy of the Act” 

(1919, published 1986) and “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (1919, published 

1975), are densely philosophical and heavily indebted to immanuel kant (1724– 

1804). Although these lengthy essays exhibit a keen interest in phenomenology and 

the intersubjective nature of language, the publications of the Bakhtin Circle from 

the late 1920s defined the problems of language that would occupy Bakhtin for the 

rest of his life. In 1926 Vološinov published Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, and 

Medvedev followed in 1928 with The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. In 1929 

Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language appeared and also Bakhtin’s 

Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, the only book to be published under his own name 

before Stalin’s death. Critics wary of Marxism have attempted to distance Bakhtin 

from the work of his circle, arguing that he did not share the Communist sympathies 

of Vološinov and Medvedev (both members of the Communist Party; both disappeared 

during the po liti cal purges of the 1930s). But regardless of whether Bakhtin 

actually wrote the books ascribed to his two colleagues, as some have claimed, the 

influences among the members of the circle were undoubtedly strong and indelible. 

Bakhtin’s words became inextricably and dialogically intertwined with those of 

his collaborators, whose thought influenced the key concepts he later developed 

in his celebrated writings on the novel, just as he undoubtedly influenced theirs. 

Bakhtin’s theory of the novel relies on three key concepts. The carnivalesque— an 

idea first introduced in Rabelais and His World (written in the 1930s and 1940s, 

published 1965)— is Bakhtin’s term for those forms of unofficial culture (the early 

novel among them) that resist official culture, po liti cal oppression, and totalitarian 

order through laughter, parody, and “grotesque realism.” In “Forms of Time and 

Chronotope in the Novel” (1937– 38), he develops the influential term chronotope to 

describe the intrinsic connectedness of time and space and their central role in constituting 

literary genres. Finally and most significantly, the dialogism of language, the 

“intense interanimation and struggle between one’s own and another’s word,” would 

come to dominate Bakhtin’s thinking about language after 1926. This concept of the 

multivoiced nature of discourse received its fullest treatment in “Discourse in the 

Novel” (1934– 35), a key text for narrative, linguistic, and literary theory, from which we 

have taken our selection. 

Bakhtin here addresses the limitations for literary studies of the abstract and formal 

analyses of literary technique widespread among critics during the interwar 

period. Traditional linguistics, stylistics, and literary theory— including the theory 

of the Rus sian formalists, represented by critics like boris eichenbaum— as well as 

contemporary Marxist philosophy of language (see leon trotsky) and the new structural 

linguistics indebted to ferdinand de saussure, all fail to articulate an adequate 

account of the novel because they have not pursued a properly “so cio log i cal stylistics.” 

The philosophy of language on which these inadequate critical methods are 

based posits, on the one hand, a unitary system of language— a system of more or 

less absolute norms that govern speech— and, on the other hand, an individual who 

is seen as the controlling “author” of discourse. Bakhtin calls such a view of language 

“monologic,” and he argues that it is alien to the dynamics of the novel because it 

describes not real, living language but an abstraction created through selfconscious 

deliberation about language and cut off from the daily ideological activities of 

social life. Living language exhibits heteroglossia, the term Bakhtin famously uses 

to describe the “internal stratification” of language: the interplay among its social 

dialects, class dialects, professional jargons, languages of generations and age groups

1074 / MIKHAIL M. BAKHTIN 

and of passing fads, “languages that serve the specific sociopo liti cal purposes of the 

day, even of the hour.” Heteroglossia, which Bakhtin hails as the characteristic 

stylistic feature of the novel, celebrates not, as structuralism does, the systematic 

nature of language but the multiplicity of all those “centrifugal” forces at work in 

language, the variety of social speech types, and the diversity of voices interacting 

with one another. 

Central to Bakhtin’s theory of the novel is his belief that language is fundamentally 

dialogic. “Discourse in the Novel” offers his most elaborate analysis of “dialogism” and 

its relationship to style in the novel. Between any word and its object, between any 

word and its speaking subject, between any word and its active respondent(s), Bakhtin 

argues, there exists “an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same 

object”; and this “dialogically agitated and tensionfilled environment of alien words, 

value judgments and accents” that weaves in and out of discourse in complex patterns 

finds its most artistic expression in the novel. Bakhtin celebrates the dialogics of the 

novel while criticizing the monologism of poetry, which characteristically aims for a 

unified and pure discourse. Although conflict, contradiction, and doubt may be present 

in the subject matter of poetry, they do not, according to Bakhtin, enter into the language 

of the poem itself, as they consistently do in the novel. 

Bakhtin’s theories can sometimes appear confusing and vague because his critical 

terminology often seems at once evaluative and descriptive; he regularly establishes 

his critical vocabulary by defining certain terms positively against related terms given 

negative valences. Thus the novel is opposed to poetry, the carnivalesque to official 

discourse, the dialogic to the monologic. These judgments have posed problems for 

critics who value those genres that Bakhtin most frequently derogates as monologic, 

especially poetry, the epic, and drama. Other critics object that it is not clear to what 

degree Bakhtin espouses a mimetic theory of literature, insofar as language for him 

seems less to represent or reflect reality than to refract and rework it. 

Nevertheless, Bakhtin’s work has been much admired and extended by scholars 

in many fields. Those in cultural studies have found two major contributions particularly 

useful. First, Bakhtin focuses on “language” as the utterances of speaking 

subjects: that is, as spoken “discourse” and not the impersonal, prevocal signifiers 

or rhetorical tropes posited by the influential structuralist and poststructuralist 

traditions. Second, he insists that discourse unfolds in a heteroglot, dialogic force 

field of conflicting interests and ideologies— with literary language being only one 

of many discursive strata and itself divided by generic, stylistic, professional, and 

other special features. These Bakhtinian views, widely advocated by cultural studies 

scholars, promote a complex sociopoetics suited to a contemporary globalized 

world of diverse peoples, languages, and cultural forms. 

bibliography 

The standard Russian- language edition of Bakhtin’s works is Sobranie sochinenii, 

edited by S.G. Bocharov and L.A. Gogotishvill (7 vols.; 1996– 2003). The earliest 

works survive only in fragments, collected and translated into En glish by Vadim 

Liapunov as Art and Answerability (1990) and Toward a Philosophy of the Act (1993). 

Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, first published in 1929, was revised and reissued 

in Rus sian in 1963; Caryl Emerson translated it into En glish in 1984. Bakhtin’s 

dissertation of the 1930s and 1940s, finally published in 1965, was translated by 

Hélène Iswolsky as Rabelais and His World (1968). The important group of lengthy 

essays Bakhtin wrote between 1934 and 1941— including “Discourse in the Novel”— 

was not published in Rus sia until 1973; they were translated by Caryl Emerson and 

Michael Holquist as The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (1981). Fragments of 

Bakhtin’s late— and largely unfinished— works were collected in a Rus sian volume 

and translated into En glish as Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986). Works 

attributed to Bakhtin by some scholars though their title pages list other authors

MIKHAIL M. BAKHTIN / 1075 

include V.N. Vološinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1926; trans. 1976); P.N. 

Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (1928; trans. 1978); and 

Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929; trans. 1973). 

The standard biography is Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin 

(1984). Gary Saul Morson edited one of the first En glish collections of essays, Bakhtin: 

Essays and Dialogues on His Work (1981), still valuable for its critical readings. Tzvetan 

Todorov, who, with Julia Kristeva, was instrumental in bringing Bakhtin’s work to 

the attention of the West, provides a useful brief introduction to Bakhtinian dialogics 

in Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogic Principle (1981; trans. 1984). Two collections of 

essays—Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, edited by Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd 

(1989; 2d ed., 2001), and Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, edited by 

Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (1989)— offer readings of Bakhtin across a 

range of theoretical and po liti cal positions. For the feminist reception of Bakhtin, 

see Dale Bauer and Susan McKinstry, Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic (1991). 

Michael Holquist’s Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (1991) provides a comprehensive 

overview of Bakhtin’s work. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson’s Mikhail 

Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (1990) is the single most thorough and authoritative 

book- length study of Bakhtin’s writing and should be the starting point for more 

advanced study of his work. With the end of the Cold War in 1989, the work of Russian 

scholars on Bakhtin has become available for the first time, notably in Face to 

Face: Bakhtin in Rus sia and the West, edited by Carol Adlam (1997), which collects 

essays from a 1995 Bakhtin conference in Moscow. Sue Vice’s Introducing Bakhtin 

(1997) may be a more accessible introduction than Todorov’s for students new to 

Bakhtin’s thought. For a retrospective on Bakhtin’s works that places him in the context 

of twentiethcentury Rus sian thought, see Caryl Emerson, The First One Hundred 

Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (1997), as well as Critical Essays on Bakhtin, edited 

by Emerson (1999). Ken Hirschkop’s Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy 

(1999), drawing on the new Rus sian scholarship, challenges many of the myths about 

Bakhtin’s life and work to explore in a more nuanced fashion his contributions to an 

ethical and demo cratic cultural theory. The Bakhtin Circle: In the Master’s Absence, 

edited by Craig Brandist, David Shepherd, and Galin Tihanov (2004), offers new 

translations and studies of texts produced by the Bakhtin Circle, as well as new archival 

material related to their activity, highlighting the distinctiveness of works by such 

theorists as Vološinov and Medvedev, who have been closely identified with Bakhtin. 

The Annotated Bakhtin Bibliography, edited by Carol Adlam and David Shepherd 

(2000), is the most up- to- date bibliography, drawing on the extensive resources of the 

online Bakhtin Archive, which is maintained by the Bakhtin Center at the University 

of Sheffield.


From Discourse in the Novel 1 

The principal idea of this essay is that the study of verbal art can and must 

overcome the divorce between an abstract “formal” approach and an equally 

abstract “ideological” approach. Form and content in discourse are one, once 

we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon— social throughout 

its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image 

to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning. 

It is this idea that has motivated our emphasis on “the stylistics of genre.” 

The separation of style and language from the question of genre has been 

largely responsible for a situation in which only individual and period- bound 

overtones of a style are the privileged subjects of study, while its basic social 

tone is ignored. The great historical destinies of genres are overshadowed by 

the petty vicissitudes of stylistic modifications, which in their turn are linked 

with individual artists and artistic movements. For this reason, stylistics has 

been deprived of an authentic philosophical and so cio log i cal approach to its 

problems; it has become bogged down in stylistic trivia; it is not able to sense 

behind the individual and period- bound shifts the great and anonymous 

destinies of artistic discourse itself. More often than not, stylistics defines 

itself as a stylistics of “private craftsmanship” and ignores the social life of 

discourse outside the artist’s study, discourse in the open spaces of public 

squares, streets, cities and villages, of social groups, generations and epochs. 

Stylistics is concerned not with living discourse but with a histological specimen 

made from it, with abstract linguistic discourse in the ser vice of an 

artist’s individual creative powers. But these individual and tendentious overtones 

of style, cut off from the fundamentally social modes in which discourse 

lives, inevitably come across as flat and abstract in such a formulation 

and cannot therefore be studied in organic unity with a work’s semantic 

components. 

Modern Stylistics & the Novel 

Before the twentieth century, problems associated with a stylistics of the 

novel had not been precisely formulated— such a formulation could only 

have resulted from a recognition of the stylistic uniqueness of novelistic 

(artistic- prose) discourse. 

For a long time treatment of the novel was limited to little more than 

abstract ideological examination and publicistic commentary. Concrete questions 

of stylistics were either not treated at all or treated in passing and in an 

arbitrary way: the discourse of artistic prose was either understood as being 

poetic in the narrow sense, and had the categories of traditional stylistics 

(based on the study of tropes) uncritically applied to it, or else such questions 

were limited to empty, evaluative terms for the characterization of language, 

such as “expressiveness,” “imagery,” “force,” “clarity” and so on— without 

providing these concepts with any stylistic significance, however vague and 

tentative. 

1. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, who occasionally retain the original Rus sian 

words or add information in brackets.

Discourse in the Novel / 1077 

Toward the end of the last century, as a counterweight to this abstract 

ideological way of viewing things, interest began to grow in the concrete 

problems of artistic craftsmanship in prose, in the problems of novel and 

short- story technique. However, in questions of stylistics the situation did 

not change in the slightest; attention was concentrated almost exclusively on 

problems of composition (in the broad sense of the word). But, as before, the 

peculiarities of the stylistic life of discourse in the novel (and in the short 

story as well) lacked an approach that was both principled and at the same 

time concrete (one is impossible without the other); the same arbitrary judgmental 

observations about language— in the spirit of traditional stylistics— 

continued to reign supreme, and they totally overlooked the authentic nature 

of artistic prose. 

There is a highly characteristic and widespread point of view that sees novelistic 

discourse as an extraartistic medium, a discourse that is not worked 

into any special or unique style. After failure to find in novelistic discourse a 

purely poetic formulation (“poetic” in the narrow sense) as was expected, 

prose discourse is denied any artistic value at all; it is the same as practical 

speech for everyday life, or speech for scientific purposes, an artistically neutral 

means of communication. 2 

Such a point of view frees one from the necessity of undertaking stylistic 

analyses of the novel; it in fact gets rid of the very problem of a stylistics of 

the novel, permitting one to limit oneself to purely thematic analyses of it. 

It was, however, precisely in the 1920s that this situation changed: the 

novelistic prose word began to win a place for itself in stylistics. On the one 

hand there appeared a series of concrete stylistic analyses of novelistic prose; 

on the other hand, systematic attempts were made to recognize and define 

the stylistic uniqueness of artistic prose as distinct from poetry. 

But it was precisely these concrete analyses and these attempts at a principled 

approach that made patently obvious the fact that all the categories of 

traditional stylistics— in fact the very concept of a poetic artistic discourse, 

which lies at the heart of such categories— were not applicable to novelistic 

discourse. Novelistic discourse proved to be the acid test for this whole way 

of conceiving style, exposing the narrowness of this type of thinking and its 

inadequacy in all areas of discourse’s artistic life. 

All attempts at concrete stylistic analysis of novelistic prose either strayed 

into linguistic descriptions of the language of a given novelist or else limited 

themselves to those separate, isolated stylistic elements of the novel that were 

includable (or gave the appearance of being includable) in the traditional 

categories of stylistics. In both instances the stylistic whole of the novel and 

of novelistic discourse eluded the investigator. 

2. As recently as the 1920s, V. M. Žirmunskij 

[important fellow traveler of the Formalists (translators’ 

note)] was writing: “When lyrical poetry 

appears to be authentically a work of verbal art, 

due to its choice and combination of words (on 

semantic as well as sound levels) all of which are 

completely subordinated to the aesthetic project, 

Tolstoy’s novel, by contrast, which is free in its 

verbal composition, does not use words as an artistically 

significant element of interaction but as a 

neutral medium or as a system of significations 

subordinated (as happens in practical speech) to 

the communicative function, directing our attention 

to thematic aspects quite abstracted from 

purely verbal considerations. We cannot call such 

a literary work a work of verbal art or, in any case, 

not in the sense that the term is used for lyrical 

poetry” [“On the Problem of the Formal Method,” 

in an anthology of his articles, Problems of a 

Theory of Literature (Leningrad, 1928, p.173); Russian 

edition: “K voprosu o ‘formal’ nom metode’,” 

in Voprosy teorii literatury (L., 1928) (trans.)] 

[Bakhtin’s note]. Leo Tolstoy (1828– 1910), Russian 

novelist and moral phi los o pher.


The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in 

speech and voice. In it the investigator is confronted with several heterogeneous 

stylistic unities, often located on different linguistic levels and subject 

to different stylistic controls. 

We list below the basic types of compositional- stylistic unities into which 

the novelistic whole usually breaks down: 

(1) Direct authorial literary- artistic narration (in all its diverse variants); 

(2) Stylization of the various forms of oral everyday narration (skaz); 3 

(3) Stylization of the various forms of semiliterary (written) everyday narration 

(the letter, the diary, etc.); 

(4) Various forms of literary but extraartistic authorial speech (moral, philosophical 

or scientific statements, oratory, ethnographic descriptions, 

memoranda and so forth); 

(5) The stylistically individualized speech of characters. 

These heterogeneous stylistic unities, upon entering the novel, combine 

to form a structured artistic system, and are subordinated to the higher stylistic 

unity of the work as a whole, a unity that cannot be identified with any 

single one of the unities subordinated to it. 

The stylistic uniqueness of the novel as a genre consists precisely in the 

combination of these subordinated, yet still relatively autonomous, unities 

(even at times comprised of different languages) into the higher unity of the 

work as a whole: the style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its 

styles; the language of a novel is the system of its “languages.” Each separate 

element of a novel’s language is determined first of all by one such subordinated 

stylistic unity into which it enters directly— be it the stylistically 

individualized speech of a character, the down- to- earth voice of a narrator 

in skaz, a letter or what ever. The linguistic and stylistic profile of a given element 

(lexical, semantic, syntactic) is shaped by that subordinated unity to 

which it is most immediately proximate. At the same time this element, 

together with its most immediate unity, figures into the style of the whole, 

itself supports the accent of the whole and participates in the pro cess whereby 

the unified meaning of the whole is structured and revealed. 

The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes 

even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically 

or ga nized. The internal stratification of any single national language into 

social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic 

languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, 

languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages 

that serve the specific sociopo liti cal purposes of the day, even of the 

hour (each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases)— 

this internal stratification present in every language at any given moment 

of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as 

a genre. The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of 

objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diver- 

3. This term has no precise equivalent in En glish; 

skaz is a technique or mode of narration that imitates 

the oral speech or “yarn” of an individualized 

narrator, as in Mark Twain’s “Celebrated Jumping 

Frog of Calaveras County” (1865). Skaz was the 

subject of much Rus sian formalist criticism.


sity of speech types [raznorečie] and by the differing individual voices that 

flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, 

inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental 

compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia [raznorečie] can enter 

the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide 

variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized). 

These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, 

this movement of the theme through different languages and speech 

types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its 

dialogization— this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the 

novel. 

Such a combining of languages and styles into a higher unity is unknown 

to traditional stylistics; it has no method for approaching the distinctive 

social dialogue among languages that is present in the novel. Thus stylistic 

analysis is not oriented toward the novel as a whole, but only toward one or 

another of its subordinated stylistic unities. The traditional scholar bypasses 

the basic distinctive feature of the novel as a genre; he substitutes for it 

another object of study, and instead of novelistic style he actually analyzes 

something completely different. He transposes a symphonic (orchestrated) 

theme on to the piano keyboard. 

We notice two such types of substitutions: in the first type, an analysis of 

novelistic style is replaced by a description of the language of a given novelist 

(or at best of the “languages” of a given novel); in the second type, one of 

the subordinated styles is isolated and analyzed as if it were the style of the 

whole. 

In the first type, style is cut off from considerations of genre, and from the 

work as such, and regarded as a phenomenon of language itself: the unity of 

style in a given work is transformed either into the unity of an individual 

language (“individual dialect”), or into the unity of an individual speech 

(parole). It is precisely the individuality of the speaking subject that is recognized 

to be that style- generating factor transforming a phenomenon of language 

and linguistics into a stylistic unity. 

We have no need to follow where such an analysis of novelistic style leads, 

whether to a disclosing of the novelist’s individual dialect (that is, his vocabulary, 

his syntax) or to a disclosing of the distinctive features of the work 

taken as a “complete speech act,” an “utterance.” Equally in both cases, style 

is understood in the spirit of Saussure: 4 as an individualization of the general 

language (in the sense of a system of general language norms). Stylistics 

is transformed either into a curious kind of linguistics treating individual 

languages, or into a linguistics of the utterance. 

In accordance with the point of view selected, the unity of a style thus 

presupposes on the one hand a unity of language (in the sense of a system 

of general normative forms) and on the other hand the unity of an individual 

person realizing himself in this language. 

Both these conditions are in fact obligatory in the majority of verse- based 

poetic genres, but even in these genres they far from exhaust or define the 

style of the work. The most precise and complete description of the indi- 

4. Specifically, the emphasis by the French linguist ferdinand de saussure (1857– 1913) on langue (a 

language system) and parole (individual speech).


vidual language and speech of a poet— even if this description does choose 

to treat the expressiveness of language and speech elements— does not add 

up to a stylistic analysis of the work, inasmuch as these elements relate to a 

system of language or to a system of speech, that is, to various linguistic unities 

and not to the system of the artistic work, which is governed by a completely 

different system of rules than those that govern the linguistic systems 

of language and of speech. 

But—we repeat— in the majority of poetic genres, the unity of the language 

system and the unity (and uniqueness) of the poet’s individuality as 

reflected in his language and speech, which is directly realized in this unity, 

are indispensable prerequisites of poetic style. The novel, however, not only 

does not require these conditions but (as we have said) even makes of the 

internal stratification of language, of its social heteroglossia and the variety 

of individual voices in it, the prerequisite for authentic novelistic prose. 

Thus the substitution of the individualized language of the novelist (to the 

extent that one can recover this language from the “speech” and “language” 

systems of the novel) for the style of the novel itself is doubly imprecise: it 

distorts the very essence of a stylistics of the novel. Such substitution inevitably 

leads to the selection from the novel of only those elements that can be 

fitted within the frame of a single language system and that express, directly 

and without mediation, an authorial individuality in language. The whole of 

the novel and the specific tasks involved in constructing this whole out of 

heteroglot, multivoiced, multi- styled and often multi- languaged elements 

remain outside the boundaries of such a study. 

Such is the first type of substitution for the proper object of study in the 

stylistic analysis of the novel. We will not delve further into the diverse 

variations of this type, which are determined by the different ways in which 

such concepts as “the speech whole,” “the system of language,” “the individuality 

of the author’s language and speech” are understood, and by a 

difference in the very way in which the relationship between style and language 

is conceived (and also the relationship between stylistics and linguistics). 

In all possible variants on this type of analysis, which acknowledge 

only one single language and a single authorial individuality expressing itself 

directly in that language, the stylistic nature of the novel slips hopelessly 

away from the investigator. 

The second type of substitution is characterized not by an orientation 

toward the language of the author, but rather toward the style of the novel 

itself— although style thus understood is narrowed down to mean the style 

of merely one out of the several subordinated unities (which are relatively 

autonomous) within the novel. 

In the majority of cases the style of the novel is subsumed under the concept 

of “epic style,” and the appropriate categories of traditional stylistics are 

applied to it. In such circumstances only those elements of epic repre sen tation 

(those occurring predominantly in direct authorial speech) are isolated 

from the novel for consideration. The profound difference between novelistic 

and purely epic modes of expression is ignored. Differences between the 

novel and the epic are usually perceived on the level of composition and 

thematics alone. 

In other instances, different aspects of novelistic style are selected out as 

most characteristic of one or another concrete literary work. Thus the nar-


rational aspect can be considered from the point of view not of its objective 

descriptive mode, but of its subjective expression mode (expressiveness). 

One might select elements of vernacular extraliterary narration (skaz) or 

those aspects that provide the information necessary to further the plot (as 

one might do, for example, in analyzing an adventure novel). 5 And it is possible, 

finally, to select those purely dramatic elements of the novel that 

lower the narrational aspect to the level of a commentary on the dialogues 

of the novel’s characters. But the system of languages in drama is or ga nized 

on completely different principles, and therefore its languages sound utterly 

different than do the languages of the novel. In drama there is no allencompassing 

language that addresses itself dialogically to separate languages, 

there is no second allencompassing plotless (nondramatic) dialogue 

outside that of the (nondramatic) plot. 

All these types of analysis are inadequate to the style not only of the novelistic 

whole but even of that element isolated as fundamental for a given 

novel— inasmuch as that element, removed from its interaction with others, 

changes its stylistic meaning and ceases to be that which it in fact had been 

in the novel. 

The current state of questions posed by a stylistics of the novel reveals, 

fully and clearly, that all the categories and methods of traditional stylistics 

remain incapable of dealing effectively with the artistic uniqueness of discourse 

in the novel, or with the specific life that discourse leads in the novel. 

“Poetic language,” “individuality of language,” “image,” “symbol,” “epic style” 

and other general categories worked out and applied by stylistics, as well as 

the entire set of concrete stylistic devices subsumed by these categories (no 

matter how differently understood by individual critics), are all equally oriented 

toward the single- languaged and single- styled genres, toward the poetic 

genres in the narrow sense of the word. Their connection with this exclusive 

orientation explains a number of the par tic u lar features and limitations of 

traditional stylistic categories. All these categories, and the very philosophical 

conception of poetic discourse in which they are grounded, are too narrow 

and cramped, and cannot accommodate the artistic prose of novelistic 

discourse. 

Thus stylistics and the philosophy of discourse indeed confront a dilemma: 

either to acknowledge the novel (and consequently all artistic prose tending 

in that direction) an unartistic or quasi- artistic genre, or to radically reconsider 

that conception of poetic discourse in which traditional stylistics is 

grounded and which determines all its categories. 

This dilemma, however, is by no means universally recognized. Most scholars 

are not inclined to undertake a radical revision of the fundamental philosophical 

conception of poetic discourse. Many do not even see or recognize 

the philosophical roots of the stylistics (and linguistics) in which they work, 

and shy away from any fundamental philosophical issues. They utterly fail to 

see behind their isolated and fragmented stylistic observations and linguistic 

descriptions any theoretical problems posed by novelistic discourse. Others— 

more principled— make a case for consistent individualism in their under- 

5. Artistic prose style has been studied in Russia 

by the Formalists largely on these two last 

levels, that is, either skaz (Eichenbaum) or plotinformational 

aspects (Shklovsky) were studied 

as most characteristic of literary prose [Bakhtin’s 

note]. boris eichenbaum (1886– 1959), Rus sian 

formalist critic. Viktor Shklovsky (1893– 1984), 

Rus sian formalist writer and critic.


standing of language and style. First and foremost they seek in the stylistic 

phenomenon a direct and unmediated expression of authorial individuality, 

and such an understanding of the problem is least likely of all to encourage a 

reconsideration of basic stylistic categories in the proper direction. 

However, there is another solution of our dilemma that does take basic 

concepts into account: one need only consider oft- neglected rhetoric, which 

for centuries has included artistic prose in its purview. Once we have restored 

rhetoric to all its ancient rights, we may adhere to the old concept of poetic 

discourse, relegating to “rhetorical forms” everything in novelistic prose that 

does not fit the Procrustean bed of traditional stylistic categories. 6 

Gustav Shpet, 7 in his time, proposed such a solution to the dilemma, with 

all due rigorousness and consistency. He utterly excluded artistic prose and 

its ultimate realization— the novel— from the realm of poetry, and assigned 

it to the category of purely rhetorical forms. 8 

Here is what Shpet says about the novel: “The recognition that contemporary 

forms of moral propaganda— i.e., the novel— do not spring from poetic 

creativity but are purely rhetorical compositions, is an admission, and a conception, 

that apparently cannot arise without immediately confronting a 

formidable obstacle in the form of the universal recognition, despite everything, 

that the novel does have a certain aesthetic value.” 9 

Shpet utterly denies the novel any aesthetic significance. The novel is an 

extraartistic rhetorical genre, “the contemporary form of moral propaganda”; 

artistic discourse is exclusively poetic discourse (in the sense we have indicated 

above). 

Viktor Vinogradov 1 adopted an analogous point of view in his book On 

Artistic Prose, assigning the problem of artistic prose to rhetoric. While 

agreeing with Shpet’s basic philosophical definitions of the “poetic” and 

the “rhetorical,” Vinogradov was, however, not so paradoxically consistent: 

he considered the novel a syncretic, mixed form (“a hybrid formation”) and 

admitted that it contained, along with rhetorical elements, some purely 

poetic ones. 2 

The point of view that completely excludes novelistic prose, as a rhetorical 

formation, from the realm of poetry— a point of view that is basically false— 

does nevertheless have a certain indisputable merit. There resides in it an 

ac know ledg ment in principle and in substance of the inadequacy of all contemporary 

stylistics, along with its philosophical and linguistic base, when 

it comes to defining the specific distinctive features of novelistic prose. And 

6. Such a solution to the problem was especially 

tempting to adherents of the formal method in 

poetics: in fact, the re- establishment of rhetoric, 

with all its rights, greatly strengthens the Formalist 

position. Formalist rhetoric is a necessary 

addition to Formalist poetics. Our Formalists 

were being completely consistent when they 

spoke of the necessity of reviving rhetoric alongside 

poetics (on this, see B.M. Eichenbaum, Literature 

[Literatura; Leningrad, 1927], pp.147– 48) 

[Bakhtin’s note]. 

7. Gustav Shpet (1879– 1937), outstanding representative 

of the neo- Kantian and (especially) 

Husserlian traditions in Rus sia; as professor 

at the University of Moscow for many years he 

influenced many (among others, the young 

Roman Jakobson) [translators’ note.] immanuel 

kant (1724– 1804), German idealist phi los o pher. 

Edmund Husserl (1859– 1938), German phenomenologist. 

jakobson (1896– 1982), Russian- born 

literary theorist and linguist. 

8. Originally in his Aesthetic Fragments 

[Estetičeskie fragmenty]; in a more complete aspect 

in the book The Inner Form of the Word [Vnutrennjaja 

forma slova] (M., 1927) [Bakhtin’s note]. 

9. Vnutrennjaja forma slova, p.215 [Bakhtin’s 

note]. 

1. Viktor Vinogradov (1895– 1969), outstanding 

linguist and student of style in literature, a 

friendly critic of the Formalists, and an important 

theorist in his own right (especially his work 

on skaz technique) [translators’ note]. 

2. V. V. Vinogradov, On Artistic Prose [O xudožestvennom 

proze], Moscow- Leningrad, 1930, 

pp.75– 106 [Bakhtin’s note].


what is more, the very reliance on rhetorical forms has a great heuristic significance. 

Once rhetorical discourse is brought into the study with all its 

living diversity, it cannot fail to have a deeply revolutionizing influence on 

linguistics and on the philosophy of language. It is precisely those aspects of 

any discourse (the internally dialogic quality of discourse, and the phenomena 

related to it), not yet sufficiently taken into account and fathomed in all 

the enormous weight they carry in the life of language, that are revealed 

with great external precision in rhetorical forms, provided a correct and 

unprejudiced approach to those forms is used. Such is the general methodological 

and heuristic significance of rhetorical forms for linguistics and for 

the philosophy of language. 

The special significance of rhetorical forms for understanding the novel is 

equally great. The novel, and artistic prose in general, has the closest ge netic, 

family relationship to rhetorical forms. And throughout the entire development 

of the novel, its intimate interaction (both peaceful and hostile) with 

living rhetorical genres ( journalistic, moral, philosophical and others) has 

never ceased; this interaction was perhaps no less intense than was the novel’s 

interaction with the artistic genres (epic, dramatic, lyric). But in this uninterrupted 

interrelationship, novelistic discourse preserved its own qualitative 

uniqueness and was never reducible to rhetorical discourse. 

The novel is an artistic genre. Novelistic discourse is poetic discourse, but 

one that does not fit within the frame provided by the concept of poetic discourse 

as it now exists. This concept has certain underlying presuppositions 

that limit it. The very concept— in the course of its historical formulation 

from Aristotle 3 to the present day— has been oriented toward the specific 

“official” genres and connected with specific historical tendencies in verbal 

ideological life. Thus a whole series of phenomena remained beyond its conceptual 

horizon. 

Philosophy of language, linguistics and stylistics [i.e., such as they have 

come down to us] have all postulated a simple and unmediated relation of 

speaker to his unitary and singular “own” language, and have postulated as 

well a simple realization of this language in the monologic utterance of the 

individual. Such disciplines actually know only two poles in the life of language, 

between which are located all the linguistic and stylistic phenomena 

they know: on the one hand, the system of a unitary language, and on the 

other the individual speaking in this language. 

Various schools of thought in the philosophy of language, in linguistics 

and in stylistics have, in different periods (and always in close connection 

with the diverse concrete poetic and ideological styles of a given epoch), 

introduced into such concepts as “system of language,” “monologic utterance,” 

“the speaking individuum,” various differing nuances of meaning, but 

their basic content remains unchanged. This basic content is conditioned by 

the specific sociohistorical destinies of Eu ro pe an languages and by the destinies 

of ideological discourse, and by those par tic u lar historical tasks that 

ideological discourse has fulfilled in specific social spheres and at specific 

stages in its own historical development. 

These tasks and destinies of discourse conditioned specific verbalideological 

movements, as well as various specific genres of ideological discourse, and 

3. The Greek phi los o pher (384– 322 b.c.e.) discusses poetic discourse in his Poetics (see above).


ultimately the specific philosophical concept of discourse itself— in partic 

u lar, the concept of poetic discourse, which had been at the heart of all 

concepts of style. 

The strength and at the same time the limitations of such basic stylistic 

categories become apparent when such categories are seen as conditioned 

by specific historical destinies and by the task that an ideological discourse 

assumes. These categories arose from and were shaped by the historically 

aktuell 4 forces at work in the verbalideological evolution of specific social 

groups; they comprised the theoretical expression of actualizing forces that 

were in the pro cess of creating a life for language. 

These forces are the forces that serve to unify and centralize the verbalideological 

world. 

Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the historical 

pro cesses of linguistic unification and centralization, an expression of the 

centripetal forces of language. A unitary language is not something given 

[dan] but is always in essence posited [zadan]— and at every moment of its 

linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. But at the same 

time it makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia, 

imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual 

understanding and crystalizing into a real, although still relative, unity— 

the unity of the reigning conversational (everyday) and literary language, 

“correct language.” 

A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these 

norms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative 

forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of 

language, forces that unite and centralize verbalideological thought, creating 

within a heteroglot national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus 

of an officially recognized literary language, or else defending an already 

formed language from the pressure of growing heteroglossia. 

What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a 

common language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic 

symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. 

We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical 

categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language 

as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual 

understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives 

expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification 

and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the pro cesses 

of sociopo liti cal and cultural centralization. 

Aristotelian poetics, the poetics of Augustine, the poetics of the medieval 

church, of “the one language of truth,” the Cartesian poetics of neoclassicism, 

the abstract grammatical universalism of Leibniz (the idea of a “universal 

grammar”), Humboldt’s 5 insistence on the concrete— all these, what ever 

their differences in nuance, give expression to the same centripetal forces in 

4. Topical, of pressing current importance (German). 

5. Wilhelm Freiherr von Humboldt (1767– 1835), 

German humanist writer and philologist. augustine 

(354– 430), early Christian phi los o pher and 

theologian; on his poetics, see above. “The poetics 

of the medieval church”: see Hugh of St. Victor 

(ca. 1097– 1141). “The Cartesian poetics of 

neoclassicism”: on these dualistic (from the 

French phi los o pher René Descartes, 1596– 1650) 

poetics, see pierre corneille (1606– 1684). Gottfried 

Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646– 1716), German 

phi los o pher and mathematician.


sociolinguistic and ideological life; they serve one and the same project of 

centralizing and unifying the Eu ro pe an languages. The victory of one reigning 

language (dialect) over the others, the supplanting of languages, their 

enslavement, the pro cess of illuminating them with the True Word, the 

incorporation of barbarians and lower social strata into a unitary language of 

culture and truth, the canonization of ideological systems, philology with its 

methods of studying and teaching dead languages, languages that were by 

that very fact “unities,” Indo- European linguistics with its focus of attention, 

directed away from language plurality to a single proto- language—all this 

determined the content and power of the category of “unitary language” in 

linguistic and stylistic thought, and determined its creative, style- shaping 

role in the majority of the poetic genres that coalesced in the channel formed 

by those same centripetal forces of verbalideological life. 

But the centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a “unitary 

language,” operate in the midst of heteroglossia. At any given moment of its 

evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict 

sense of the word (according to formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic), 

but also— and for us this is the essential point— into languages that 

are socioideological: languages of social groups, “professional” and “ge netic” 

languages, languages of generations and so forth. From this point of 

view, literary language itself is only one of these heteroglot languages— and 

in its turn is also stratified into languages (generic, period- bound and 

others). And this stratification and heteroglossia, once realized, is not only 

a static invariant of linguistic life, but also what insures its dynamics: stratification 

and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as language is alive 

and developing. Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of 

language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbalideological 

centralization and unification, the uninterrupted pro cesses of decentralization 

and disunification go forward. 

Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal 

as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The pro cesses of 

centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification, intersect 

in the utterance; the utterance not only answers the requirements of its 

own language as an individualized embodiment of a speech act, but it answers 

the requirements of heteroglossia as well; it is in fact an active participant in 

such speech diversity. And this active participation of every utterance in living 

heteroglossia determines the linguistic profile and style of the utterance 

to no less a degree than its inclusion in any normative- centralizing system of 

a unitary language. 

Every utterance participates in the “unitary language” (in its centripetal 

forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical 

heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces). 

Such is the fleeting language of a day, of an epoch, a social group, a genre, 

a school and so forth. It is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis 

of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction- ridden, tensionfilled 

unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language. 

The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it 

lives and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglossia, anonymous and social 

as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and 

accented as an individual utterance.


At the time when major divisions of the poetic genres were developing 

under the influence of the unifying, centralizing, centripetal forces of verbalideological 

life, the novel— and those artistic- prose genres that gravitate 

toward it— was being historically shaped by the current of decentralizing, 

centrifugal forces. At the time when poetry was accomplishing the task 

of cultural, national and po liti cal centralization of the verbalideological 

world in the higher official socioideological levels, on the lower levels, on the 

stages of local fairs and at buffoon spectacles, the heteroglossia of the clown 

sounded forth, ridiculing all “languages” and dialects; there developed the 

literature of the fabliaux and Schwänke 6 of street songs, folksayings, anecdotes, 

where there was no language- center at all, where there was to be found 

a lively play with the “languages” of poets, scholars, monks, knights and others, 

where all “languages” were masks and where no language could claim to 

be an authentic, incontestable face. 

Heteroglossia, as or ga nized in these low genres, was not merely heteroglossia 

vis-à- vis the accepted literary language (in all its various generic 

expressions), that is, vis-à- vis the linguistic center of the verbalideological 

life of the nation and the epoch, but was a heteroglossia consciously opposed 

to this literary language. It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically 

against the official languages of its given time. It was heteroglossia that had 

been dialogized. 

Linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language that were born and 

shaped by the current of centralizing tendencies in the life of language have 

ignored this dialogized heteroglossia, in which is embodied the centrifugal 

forces in the life of language. For this very reason they could make no provision 

for the dialogic nature of language, which was a struggle among sociolinguistic 

points of view, not an intra- language struggle between individual 

wills or logical contradictions. Moreover, even intra- language dialogue (dramatic, 

rhetorical, cognitive or merely casual) has hardly been studied linguistically 

or stylistically up to the present day. One might even say outright 

that the dialogic aspect of discourse and all the phenomena connected with 

it have remained to the present moment beyond the ken of linguistics. 

Stylistics has been likewise completely deaf to dialogue. A literary work has 

been conceived by stylistics as if it were a hermetic and self- sufficient whole, 

one whose elements constitute a closed system presuming nothing beyond 

themselves, no other utterances. The system comprising an artistic work was 

thought to be analogous with the system of a language, a system that could 

not stand in a dialogic interrelationship with other languages. From the point 

of view of stylistics, the artistic work as a whole— whatever that whole might 

be— is a self- sufficient and closed authorial monologue, one that presumes 

only passive listeners beyond its own boundaries. Should we imagine the 

work as a rejoinder in a given dialogue, whose style is determined by its 

interrelationship with other rejoinders in the same dialogue (in the totality 

of the conversation)— then traditional stylistics does not offer an adequate 

means for approaching such a dialogized style. The sharpest and externally 

most marked manifestations of this stylistic category— the polemical style, 

the parodic, the ironic— are usually classified as rhetorical and not as poetic 

phenomena. Stylistics locks every stylistic phenomenon into the monologic 

6. Medieval comic folktales (German). Fabliaux: medieval short tales in verse (French).


context of a given self- sufficient and hermetic utterance, imprisoning it, as 

it were, in the dungeon of a single context; it is not able to exchange messages 

with other utterances; it is not able to realize its own stylistic implications in 

a relationship with them; it is obliged to exhaust itself in its own single hermetic 

context. 

Linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language— as forces in the 

ser vice of the great centralizing tendencies of Eu ro pe an verbalideological 

life— have sought first and foremost for unity in diversity. This exclusive 

“orientation toward unity” in the present and past life of languages has 

concentrated the attention of philosophical and linguistic thought on the 

firmest, most stable, least changeable and most mono- semic aspects of 

discourse— on the phonetic aspects first of all— that are furthest removed 

from the changing socio- semantic spheres of discourse. Real ideologically 

saturated “language consciousness,” one that participates in actual heteroglossia 

and multi- languagedness, has remained outside its field of vision. It 

is precisely this orientation toward unity that has compelled scholars to 

ignore all the verbal genres (quotidian, rhetorical, artistic- prose) that were 

the carriers of the decentralizing tendencies in the life of language, or that 

were in any case too fundamentally implicated in heteroglossia. The expression 

of this hetero- as well as polyglot consciousness in the specific forms 

and phenomena of verbal life remained utterly without determinative influence 

on linguistics and stylistic thought. 

Therefore proper theoretical recognition and illumination could not be 

found for the specific feel for language and discourse that one gets in stylizations, 

in skaz, in parodies and in various forms of verbal masquerade, 

“not talking straight,” and in the more complex artistic forms for the or gani 

za tion of contradiction, forms that orchestrate their themes by means of 

languages— in all characteristic and profound models of novelistic prose, 

in Grimmelshausen, Cervantes, Rabelais, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne 7 and 

others. 

The problem of stylistics for the novel inevitably leads to the necessity 

of engaging a series of fundamental questions concerning the philosophy of 

discourse, questions connected with those aspects in the life of discourse 

that have had no light cast on them by linguistic and stylistic thought— that 

is, we must deal with the life and behavior of discourse in a contradictory 

and multi- languaged world. 

Discourse in Poetry and Discourse in the Novel 

For the philosophy of language, for linguistics and for stylistics structured 

on their base, a whole series of phenomena have therefore remained almost 

entirely beyond the realm of consideration: these include the specific phenomena 

that are present in discourse and that are determined by its dialogic 

orientation, first, amid others’ utterances inside a single language (the 

primordial dialogism of discourse), amid other “social languages” within a 

7. All important early novelists— German: Hans 

Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (ca. 1621– 

1676); Spanish: Miguel de Cervantes (1547– 1616); 

French: François Rabelais (ca. 1490– ca. 1533); 

and En glish: Henry Fielding (1707– 1754), 

(Scottish- born) Tobias Smollett (1721– 1771), and 

Laurence Sterne (1713– 1768).


single national language and finally amid different national languages within 

the same culture, that is, the same socioideological conceptual horizon. 8 

In recent de cades, it is true, these phenomena have begun to attract the 

attention of scholars in language and stylistics, but their fundamental and 

wide- ranging significance in all spheres of the life of discourse is still far 

from acknowledged. 

The dialogic orientation of a word among other words (of all kinds and 

degrees of otherness) creates new and significant artistic potential in discourse, 

creates the potential for a distinctive art of prose, which has found its 

fullest and deepest expression in the novel. 

We will focus our attention here on various forms and degrees of dialogic 

orientation in discourse, and on the special potential for a distinctive proseart. 

As treated by traditional stylistic thought, the word acknowledges only 

itself (that is, only its own context), its own object, its own direct expression 

and its own unitary and singular language. It acknowledges another word, 

one lying outside its own context, only as the neutral word of language, as 

the word of no one in par tic u lar, as simply the potential for speech. The 

direct word, as traditional stylistics understands it, encounters in its orientation 

toward the object only the re sis tance of the object itself (the impossibility 

of its being exhausted by a word, the impossibility of saying it all), but it 

does not encounter in its path toward the object the fundamental and richly 

varied opposition of another’s word. No one hinders this word, no one argues 

with it. 

But no living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word 

and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an 

elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same 

theme, and this is an environment that it is often difficult to penetrate. It is 

precisely in the pro cess of living interaction with this specific environment 

that the word may be individualized and given stylistic shape. 

Indeed, any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it 

was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, 

charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist— or, on the 

contrary, by the “light” of alien words that have already been spoken about 

it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien 

value judgments and accents. The word, directed toward its object, enters 

a dialogically agitated and tensionfilled environment of alien words, value 

judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, 

merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: 

and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic 

layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic 

profile. 

The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a par tic u lar historical 

moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up 

against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socioideological consciousness 

around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become 

8. Linguistics acknowledges only a mechanical 

reciprocal influencing and intermixing of languages 

(that is, one that is unconscious and determined 

by social conditions) which is reflected in 

abstract linguistic elements (phonetic and morphological) 

[Bakhtin’s note].


an active participant in social dialogue. After all, the utterance arises out 

of this dialogue as a continuation of it and as a rejoinder to it— it does not 

approach the object from the sidelines. 

The way in which the word conceptualizes its object is a complex act— all 

objects, open to dispute and overlain as they are with qualifications, are from 

one side highlighted while from the other side dimmed by heteroglot social 

opinion, by an alien word about them. 9 And into this complex play of light 

and shadow the word enters— it becomes saturated with this play, and must 

determine within it the boundaries of its own semantic and stylistic contours. 

The way in which the word conceives its object is complicated by a dialogic 

interaction within the object between various aspects of its socio- verbal 

intelligibility. And an artistic repre sen ta tion, an “image” of the object, may be 

penetrated by this dialogic play of verbal intentions that meet and are interwoven 

in it; such an image need not stifle these forces, but on the contrary 

may activate and or ga nize them. If we imagine the intention of such a word, 

that is, its directionality toward the object, in the form of a ray of light, then 

the living and unrepealable play of colors and light on the facets of the 

image that it constructs can be explained as the spectral dispersion of the 

ray- word, not within the object itself (as would be the case in the play of an 

image- as- trope, in poetic speech taken in the narrow sense, in an “autotelic 

word”), but rather as its spectral dispersion in an atmosphere filled with 

the alien words, value judgments and accents through which the ray passes 

on its way toward the object; the social atmosphere of the word, the atmosphere 

that surrounds the object, makes the facets of the image sparkle. 

The word, breaking through to its own meaning and its own expression 

across an environment full of alien words and variously evaluating accents, 

harmonizing with some of the elements in this environment and striking a 

dissonance with others, is able, in this dialogized pro cess, to shape its own 

stylistic profile and tone. 

Such is the image in artistic prose and the image of novelistic prose in partic 

u lar. In the atmosphere of the novel, the direct and unmediated intention 

of a word presents itself as something impermissably naive, something in 

fact impossible, for naiveté itself, under authentic novelistic conditions, 

takes on the nature of an internal polemic and is consequently dialogized 

(in, for example, the work of the Sentimentalists, in Chateaubriand 1 and in 

Tostoy). Such a dialogized image can occur in all the poetic genres as well, 

even in the lyric (to be sure, without setting the tone). 2 But such an image 

can fully unfold, achieve full complexity and depth and at the same time 

artistic closure, only under the conditions present in the genre of the novel. 

In the poetic image narrowly conceived (in the image- as- trope), all 

activity— the dynamics of the image- as- word—is completely exhausted by 

the play between the word (with all its aspects) and the object (in all its 

9. Highly significant in this respect is the struggle 

that must be undertaken in such movements 

as Rousseauism, Naturalism, Impressionism, 

Acmeism, Dadaism, Surrealism and analogous 

schools with the “qualified” nature of the object 

(a struggle occasioned by the idea of a return to 

primordial consciousness, to original consciousness, 

to the object itself in itself, to pure perception 

and so forth) [Bakhtin’s note]. 

1. François- Auguste- René, vicomte de Chateaubriand 

(1768– 1848), French novelist. 

2. The Horatian lyric, Villon, Heine, Laforgue, 

Annenskij and others— despite the fact that these 

are extremely varied instances [Bakhtin’s note]. 

All lyric poets: horace (65– 8 b.c.e.), Roman; 

François Villon (1431– ca.1463), French; Heinrich 

Heine (1797– 1856), German; Jules Laforgue 

(1860– 1887), French; and Innokenty Annenskij 

(1855– 1909), Rus sian.


aspects). The word plunges into the inexhaustible wealth and contradictory 

multiplicity of the object itself, with its “virginal,” still “unuttered” nature; 

therefore it presumes nothing beyond the borders of its own context (except, 

of course, what can be found in the treasure- house of language itself). The 

word forgets that its object has its own history of contradictory acts of verbal 

recognition, as well as that heteroglossia that is always present in such acts 

of recognition. 

For the writer of artistic prose, on the contrary, the object reveals first of 

all precisely the socially heteroglot multiplicity of its names, definitions 

and value judgments. Instead of the virginal fullness and inexhaustibility of 

the object itself, the prose writer confronts a multitude of routes, roads and 

paths that have been laid down in the object by social consciousness. Along 

with the internal contradictions inside the object itself, the prose writer witnesses 

as well the unfolding of social heteroglossia surrounding the object, 

the Tower- of- Babel mixing of languages 3 that goes on around any object; the 

dialectics of the object are interwoven with the social dialogue surrounding 

it. For the prose writer, the object is a focal point for heteroglot voices among 

which his own voice must also sound; these voices create the background 

necessary for his own voice, outside of which his artistic prose nuances cannot 

be perceived, and without which they “do not sound.” 

The prose artist elevates the social heteroglossia surrounding objects into 

an image that has finished contours, an image completely shot through with 

dialogized overtones; he creates artistically calculated nuances on all the 

fundamental voices and tones of this heteroglossia. But as we have already 

said, every extraartistic prose discourse— in any of its forms, quotidian, 

rhetorical, scholarly— cannot fail to be oriented toward the “already uttered,” 

the “already known,” the “common opinion” and so forth. The dialogic orientation 

of discourse is a phenomenon that is, of course, a property of any discourse. 

It is the natural orientation of any living discourse. On all its various 

routes toward the object, in all its directions, the word encounters an alien 

word and cannot help encountering it in a living, tensionfilled interaction. 

Only the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal and as yet verbally 

unqualified world with the first word, could really have escaped from start to 

finish this dialogic inter- orientation with the alien word that occurs in the 

object. Concrete historical human discourse does not have this privilege: it 

can deviate from such inter- orientation only on a conditional basis and only 

to a certain degree. 

It is all the more remarkable that linguistics and the philosophy of discourse 

have been primarily oriented precisely toward this artificial, preconditioned 

status of the word, a word excised from dialogue and taken for the 

norm (although the primacy of dialogue over monologue is frequently proclaimed). 

Dialogue is studied merely as a compositional form in the structuring 

of speech, but the internal dialogism of the word (which occurs in a 

monologic utterance as well as in a rejoinder), the dialogism that penetrates 

its entire structure, all its semantic and expressive layers, is almost entirely 

ignored. But it is precisely this internal dialogism of the word, which does 

not assume any external compositional forms of dialogue, that cannot be 

isolated as an in de pen dent act, separate from the word’s ability to form a 

3. See Genesis 11.1– 9.


concept [koncipirovanie] of its object— it is precisely this internal dialogism 

that has such enormous power to shape style. The internal dialogism of the 

word finds expression in a series of peculiar features in semantics, syntax 

and stylistics that have remained up to the present time completely unstudied 

by linguistics and stylistics (nor, what is more, have the peculiar semantic 

features of ordinary dialogue been studied). 

The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is 

shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object. 

A word forms a concept of its own object in a dialogic way. 

But this does not exhaust the internal dialogism of the word. It encounters 

an alien word not only in the object itself: every word is directed toward 

an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word 

that it anticipates. 

The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a 

future answer- word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself 

in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, 

the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been 

said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such 

is the situation in any living dialogue. 

All rhetorical forms, monologic in their compositional structure, are oriented 

toward the listener and his answer. This orientation toward the listener 

is usually considered the basic constitutive feature of rhetorical discourse. 4 It 

is highly significant for rhetoric that this relationship toward the concrete 

listener, taking him into account, is a relationship that enters into the very 

internal construction of rhetorical discourse. This orientation toward an 

answer is open, blatant and concrete. 

This open orientation toward the listener and his answer in everyday dialogue 

and in rhetorical forms has attracted the attention of linguists. But 

even where this has been the case, linguists have by and large gotten no further 

than the compositional forms by which the listener is taken into account; 

they have not sought influence springing from more profound meaning and 

style. They have taken into consideration only those aspects of style determined 

by demands for comprehensibility and clarity— that is, precisely those 

aspects that are deprived of any internal dialogism, that take the listener for 

a person who passively understands but not for one who actively answers and 

reacts. 

The listener and his response are regularly taken into account when it 

comes to everyday dialogue and rhetoric, but every other sort of discourse 

as well is oriented toward an understanding that is “responsive”— although 

this orientation is not particularized in an in de pen dent act and is not compositionally 

marked. Responsive understanding is a fundamental force, one 

that participates in the formulation of discourse, and it is moreover an active 

understanding, one that discourse senses as re sis tance or support enriching 

the discourse. 

Linguistics and the philosophy of language acknowledge only a passive 

understanding of discourse, and moreover this takes place by and large on 

4. Cf. V. Vinogradov’s book On Artistic Prose, the chapter “Rhetoric and Poetics,” pp.75ff., where definitions 

taken from the older rhetorics are introduced [Bahktin’s note].


the level of common language, that is, it is an understanding of an utterance’s 

neutral signification and not its actual meaning. 

The linguistic significance of a given utterance is understood against the 

background of language, while its actual meaning is understood against the 

background of other concrete utterances on the same theme, a background 

made up of contradictory opinions, points of view and value judgments— 

that is, precisely that background that, as we see, complicates the path of any 

word toward its object. Only now this contradictory environment of alien 

words is present to the speaker not in the object, but rather in the consciousness 

of the listener, as his apperceptive background, pregnant with responses 

and objections. And every utterance is oriented toward this apperceptive 

background of understanding, which is not a linguistic background but rather 

one composed of specific objects and emotional expressions. There occurs a 

new encounter between the utterance and an alien word, which makes itself 

felt as a new and unique influence on its style. 

A passive understanding of linguistic meaning is no understanding at all, 

it is only the abstract aspect of meaning. But even a more concrete passive 

understanding of the meaning of the utterance, an understanding of the 

speaker’s intention insofar as that understanding remains purely passive, 

purely receptive, contributes nothing new to the word under consideration, 

only mirroring it, seeking, at its most ambitious, merely the full reproduction 

of that which is already given in the word— even such an understanding 

never goes beyond the boundaries of the word’s context and in no way 

enriches the word. Therefore, insofar as the speaker operates with such a 

passive understanding, nothing new can be introduced into his discourse; 

there can be no new aspects in his discourse relating to concrete objects and 

emotional expressions. Indeed the purely negative demands, such as could 

only emerge from a passive understanding (for instance, a need for greater 

clarity, more persuasiveness, more vividness and so forth), leave the speaker 

in his own personal context, within his own boundaries; such negative 

demands are completely immanent in the speaker’s own discourse and do not 

go beyond his semantic or expressive self- sufficiency. 

In the actual life of speech, every concrete act of understanding is active: 

it assimilates the word to be understood into its own conceptual system 

filled with specific objects and emotional expressions, and is indissolubly 

merged with the response, with a motivated agreement or disagreement. To 

some extent, primacy belongs to the response, as the activating principle: it 

creates the ground for understanding, it prepares the ground for an active 

and engaged understanding. Understanding comes to fruition only in the 

response. Understanding and response are dialectically merged and mutually 

condition each other; one is impossible without the other. 

Thus an active understanding, one that assimilates the word under consideration 

into a new conceptual system, that of the one striving to understand, 

establishes a series of complex interrelationships, consonances and 

dissonances with the word and enriches it with new elements. It is precisely 

such an understanding that the speaker counts on. Therefore his orientation 

toward the listener is an orientation toward a specific conceptual horizon, 

toward the specific world of the listener; it introduces totally new elements 

into his discourse; it is in this way, after all, that various different points of 

view, conceptual horizons, systems for providing expressive accents, various


social “languages” come to interact with one another. The speaker strives to 

get a reading on his own word, and on his own conceptual system that determines 

this word, within the alien conceptual system of the understanding 

receiver; he enters into dialogical relationships with certain aspects of this 

system. The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual horizon of the listener, 

constructs his own utterance on alien territory, against his, the listener’s, 

apperceptive background. 

This new form of internal dialogism of the word is different from that form 

determined by an encounter with an alien word within the object itself: here 

it is not the object that serves as the arena for the encounter, but rather the 

subjective belief system of the listener. Thus this dialogism bears a more subjective, 

psychological and (frequently) random character, sometimes crassly 

accommodating, sometimes provocatively polemical. Very often, especially in 

the rhetorical forms, this orientation toward the listener and the related 

internal dialogism of the word may simply overshadow the object: the strong 

point of any concrete listener becomes a self- sufficient focus of attention, and 

one that interferes with the word’s creative work on its referent. 

Although they differ in their essentials and give rise to varying stylistic 

effects in discourse, the dialogic relationship toward an alien word within the 

object and the relationship toward an alien word in the anticipated answer of 

the listener can, nevertheless, be very tightly interwoven with each other, 

becoming almost indistinguishable during stylistic analysis. 

Thus, discourse in Tolstoy is characterized by a sharp internal dialogism, 

and this discourse is moreover dialogized in the belief system of the reader— 

whose peculiar semantic and expressive characteristics Tolstoy acutely 

senses— as well as in the object. These two lines of dialogization (having in 

most cases polemical overtones) are tightly interwoven in his style: even in 

the most “lyrical” expressions and the most “epic” descriptions, Tolstoy’s discourse 

harmonizes and disharmonizes (more often disharmonizes) with various 

aspects of the heteroglot socio- verbal consciousness ensnaring the object, 

while at the same time polemically invading the reader’s belief and evaluative 

system, striving to stun and destroy the apperceptive background of the 

reader’s active understanding. In this respect Tolstoy is an heir of the eighteenth 

century, especially of Rousseau. 5 This propagandizing impulse sometimes 

leads to a narrowing- down of heteroglot social consciousness (against 

which Tolstoy polemicizes) to the consciousness of his immediate contemporary, 

a contemporary of the day and not of the epoch; what follows from this 

is a radical concretization of dialogization (almost always undertaken in the 

ser vice of a polemic). For this reason Tolstoy’s dialogization, no matter how 

acutely we sense it in the expressive profile of his style, sometimes requires 

special historical or literary commentary: we are not sure with what precisely 

a given tone is in harmony or disharmony, for this dissonance or consonance 

has entered into the positive project of creating a style. 6 It is true that such 

extreme concreteness (which approaches at time the feuilleton 7 ) is present 


French phi los o pher and author. 

6. Cf. B.M. Eichenbaum’s book Lev Tolstoj, book 

I (Leningrad, 1928), which contains much relevant 

material; for example, an explication of the 

topical context of “Family Happiness” [Bakhtin’s 

note]. Tolstoy famously observed in Anna Karenina 

(1875– 77) that “Happy families are all 

alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own 

way.” 

7. Light, pop u lar piece of newspaper writing.


only in those secondary aspects, the overtones of internal dialogization in 

Tolstoy’s discourse. 

In those examples of the internal dialogization of discourse that we have 

chosen (the internal, as contrasted with the external, compositionally marked, 

dialogue) the relationship to the alien word, to an alien utterance enters into 

the positing of the style. Style organically contains within itself indices that 

reach outside itself, a correspondence of its own elements and the elements 

of an alien context. The internal politics of style (how the elements are put 

together) is determined by its external politics (its relationship to alien discourse). 

Discourse lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own context 

and another, alien, context. 

In any actual dialogue the rejoinder also leads such a double life: it is structured 

and conceptualized in the context of the dialogue as a whole, which 

consists of its own utterances (“own” from the point of view of the speaker) 

and of alien utterances (those of the partner). One cannot excise the rejoinder 

from this combined context made up of one’s own words and the words of 

another without losing its sense and tone. It is an organic part of a heteroglot 

unity. 

The phenomenon of internal dialogization, as we have said, is present to 

a greater or lesser extent in all realms of the life of the word. But if in extraartistic 

prose (everyday, rhetorical, scholarly) dialogization usually stands 

apart, crystallizes into a special kind of act of its own and runs its course 

in ordinary dialogue or in other, compositionally clearly marked forms for 

mixing and polemicizing with the discourse of another— then in artistic 

prose, and especially in the novel, this dialogization penetrates from within 

the very way in which the word conceives its object and its means for 

expressing itself, reformulating the semantics and syntactical structure of 

discourse. Here dialogic inter- orientation becomes, as it were, an event of 

discourse itself, animating from within and dramatizing discourse in all 

aspects. 

In the majority of poetic genres (poetic in the narrow sense), as we have 

said, the internal dialogization of discourse is not put to artistic use, it does 

not enter into the work’s “aesthetic object,” and is artificially extinguished in 

poetic discourse. In the novel, however, this internal dialogization becomes 

one of the most fundamental aspects of prose style and undergoes a specific 

artistic elaboration. 

But internal dialogization can become such a crucial force for creating 

form only where individual differences and contradictions are enriched 

by social heteroglossia, where dialogic reverberations do not sound in the 

semantic heights of discourse (as happens in the rhetorical genres) but penetrate 

the deep strata of discourse, dialogize language itself and the world 

view a par tic u lar language has (the internal form of discourse)— where the 

dialogue of voices arises directly out of a social dialogue of “languages,” 

where an alien utterance begins to sound like a socially alien language, 

where the orientation of the word among alien utterances changes into an 

orientation of a word among socially alien languages within the boundaries 

of one and the same national language.


In genres that are poetic in the narrow sense, the natural dialogization of 

the word is not put to artistic use, the word is sufficient unto itself and does 

not presume alien utterances beyond its own boundaries. Poetic style is by 

convention suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse, 

any allusion to alien discourse. 

Any way what ever of alluding to alien languages, to the possibility of 

another vocabulary, another semantics, other syntactic forms and so forth, to 

the possibility of other linguistic points of view, is equally foreign to poetic 

style. It follows that any sense of the boundedness, the historicity, the social 

determination and specificity of one’s own language is alien to poetic style, 

and therefore a critical qualified relationship to one’s own language (as merely 

one of many languages in a heteroglot world) is foreign to poetic style— as is a 

related phenomenon, the incomplete commitment of oneself, of one’s full 

meaning, to a given language. 

Of course this relationship and the relationship to his own language (in 

greater or lesser degree) could never be foreign to a historically existent poet, 

as a human being surrounded by living hetero- and polyglossia; but this relationship 

could not find a place in the poetic style of his work without destroying 

that style, without transposing it into a prosaic key and in the pro cess 

turning the poet into a writer of prose. 

In poetic genres, artistic consciousness— understood as a unity of all the 

author’s semantic and expressive intentions— fully realizes itself within its 

own language; in them alone is such consciousness fully immanent, expressing 

itself in it directly and without mediation, without conditions and without 

distance. The language of the poet is his language, he is utterly immersed 

in it, inseparable from it, he makes use of each form, each word, each expression 

according to its unmediated power to assign meaning (as it were, “without 

quotation marks”), that is, as a pure and direct expression of his own 

intention. No matter what “agonies of the word” the poet endured in the 

pro cess of creation, in the finished work language is an obedient organ, fully 

adequate to the author’s intention. 

The language in a poetic work realizes itself as something about which 

there can be no doubt, something that cannot be disputed, something allencompassing. 

Everything that the poet sees, understands and thinks, he 

does through the eyes of a given language, in its inner forms, and there is 

nothing that might require, for its expression, the help of any other or alien 

language. The language of the poetic genre is a unitary and singular Ptolemaic 

world 8 outside of which nothing else exists and nothing else is needed. 

The concept of many worlds of language, all equal in their ability to conceptualize 

and to be expressive, is organically denied to poetic style. 

The world of poetry, no matter how many contradictions and insoluble 

conflicts the poet develops within it, is always illumined by one unitary and 

indisputable discourse. Contradictions, conflicts and doubts remain in the 

object, in thoughts, in living experiences— in short, in the subject matter— 

but they do not enter into the language itself. In poetry, even discourse 

about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted. 

8. That is, the stationary center of the universe. 

In the system of the universe postulated by 

Ptolemy (active 127– 148 c.e.), the Alexandrian 

astronomer, mathematician, and geographer, the 

sun, planets, and stars revolve around the earth.


To take responsibility for the language of the work as a whole at all of its 

points as its language, to assume a full solidarity with each of the work’s 

aspects, tones, nuances— such is the fundamental prerequisite for poetic 

style; style so conceived is fully adequate to a single language and a single 

linguistic consciousness. The poet is not able to oppose his own poetic consciousness, 

his own intentions to the language that he uses, for he is completely 

within it and therefore cannot turn it into an object to be perceived, 

reflected upon or related to. Language is present to him only from inside, in 

the work it does to effect its intention, and not from outside, in its objective 

specificity and boundedness. Within the limits of poetic style, direct unconditional 

intentionality, language at its full weight and the objective display of 

language (as a socially and historically limited linguistic reality) are all simultaneous, 

but incompatible. The unity and singularity of language are the 

indispensable prerequisites for a realization of the direct (but not objectively 

typifying) intentional individuality of poetic style and of its monologic steadfastness. 

This does not mean, of course, that heteroglossia or even a foreign language 

is completely shut out of a poetic work. To be sure, such possibilities 

are limited: a certain latitude for heteroglossia exists only in the “low” poetic 

genres— in the satiric and comic genres and others. Nevertheless, heteroglossia 

(other socioideological languages) can be introduced into purely poetic 

genres, primarily in the speeches of characters. But in such a context it is 

objective. It appears, in essence, as a thing, it does not lie on the same plane 

with the real language of the work: it is the depicted gesture of one of the 

characters and does not appear as an aspect of the word doing the depicting. 

Elements of heteroglossia enter here not in the capacity of another language 

carry ing its own par tic u lar points of view, about which one can say things not 

expressible in one’s own language, but rather in the capacity of a depicted 

thing. Even when speaking of alien things, the poet speaks in his own language. 

To shed light on an alien world, he never resorts to an alien language, 

even though it might in fact be more adequate to that world. Whereas the 

writer of prose, by contrast— as we shall see— attempts to talk about even his 

own world in an alien language (for example, in the nonliterary language of 

the teller of tales, or the representative of a specific socioideological group); 

he often mea sures his own world by alien linguistic standards. 

As a consequence of the prerequisites mentioned above, the language of 

poetic genres, when they approach their stylistic limit, 9 often becomes 

authoritarian, dogmatic and conservative, sealing itself off from the influence 

of extraliterary social dialects. Therefore such ideas as a special “poetic 

language,” a “language of the gods,” a “priestly language of poetry” and so 

forth could flourish on poetic soil. It is noteworthy that the poet, should he 

not accept the given literary language, will sooner resort to the artificial 

creation of a new language specifically for poetry than he will to the exploitation 

of actual available social dialects. Social languages are filled with specific 

objects, typical, socially localized and limited, while the artificially 

9. It goes without saying that we continually 

advance as typical the extreme to which poetic 

genres aspire; in concrete examples of poetic 

works it is possible to find features fundamental 

to prose, and numerous hybrids of various generic 

types exist. These are especially widespread in 

periods of shift in literary poetic languages [Bahktin’s 

note].


created language of poetry must be a directly intentional language, unitary 

and singular. Thus, when Rus sian prose writers at the beginning of the 

twentieth century began to show a profound interest in dialects and skaz, 

the Symbolists (Bal’mont, V. Ivanov) and later the Futurists dreamed of creating 

a special “language of poetry,” and even made experiments directed 

toward creating such a language (those of V. Khlebnikov). 1 

The idea of a special unitary and singular language of poetry is a typical 

utopian philosopheme 2 of poetic discourse: it is grounded in the actual conditions 

and demands of poetic style, which is always a style adequately ser viced 

by one directly intentional language from whose point of view other languages 

(conversational, business and prose languages, among others) are 

perceived as objects that are in no way its equal. 3 The idea of a “poetic language” 

is yet another expression of that same Ptolemaic conception of the 

linguistic and stylistic world. 

Language—like the living concrete environment in which the consciousness 

of the verbal artist lives— is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract 

grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, 

ideological conceptualizations that fill it, and in isolation from the uninterrupted 

pro cess of historical becoming that is a characteristic of all living 

language. Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly 

unitary national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of 

bounded verbalideological and social belief systems; within these various 

systems (identical in the abstract) are elements of language filled with various 

semantic and axiological content and each with its own different sound. 

Literary language— both spoken and written— although it is unitary not 

only in its shared, abstract, linguistic markers but also in its forms for conceptualizing 

these abstract markers, is itself stratified and heteroglot in its 

aspect as an expressive system, that is, in the forms that carry its meanings. 

This stratification is accomplished first of all by the specific organisms 

called genres. Certain features of language (lexicological, semantic, syntactic) 

will knit together with the intentional aim, and with the overall accentual 

system inherent in one or another genre: oratorical, publicistic, newspaper 

and journalistic genres, the genres of low literature (penny dreadfuls, for 

instance) or, finally, the various genres of high literature. Certain features of 

language take on the specific flavor of a given genre: they knit together with 

specific points of view, specific approaches, forms of thinking, nuances and 

accents characteristic of the given genre. 

In addition, there is interwoven with this generic stratification of language 

a professional stratification of language, in the broad sense of the term 

“professional”: the language of the lawyer, the doctor, the businessman, the 

politician, the public education teacher and so forth, and these sometimes 

1. Velimir Khlebnikov (1885– 1922), Rus sian 

experimental poet and playwright. Konstantin 

Bal’mont (1867– 1943), Rus sian symbolist poet. 

Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866– 1949), Rus sian poet and 

philologist. Symbolism, a poetic movement that 

began in France in the last third of the 19th century, 

emphasized the evocation of subjective emotion, 

via symbol and meta phor, rather than 

objective description. Futurism, a revolutionary 

movement in art and literature begun in Italy in 

1909, stressed speed, modernity, and rebellion; it 

quickly found adherents in Rus sia. 

2. Basic unit or element of philosophy. 

3. Such was the point of view taken by Latin 

toward national languages in the Middle Ages 

[Bakhtin’s note].


coincide with, and sometimes depart from, the stratification into genres. It 

goes without saying that these languages differ from each other not only in 

their vocabularies; they involve specific forms for manifesting intentions, 

forms for making conceptualization and evaluation concrete. And even the 

very language of the writer (the poet or novelist) can be taken as a professional 

jargon on a par with professional jargons. 

What is important to us here is the intentional dimensions, that is, the 

denotative and expressive dimension of the “shared” language’s stratification. 

It is in fact not the neutral linguistic components of language being 

stratified and differentiated, but rather a situation in which the intentional 

possibilities of language are being expropriated: these possibilities are realized 

in specific directions, filled with specific content, they are made concrete, 

par tic u lar, and are permeated with concrete value judgments; they 

knit together with specific objects and with the belief systems of certain 

genres of expression and points of view peculiar to par tic u lar professions. 

Within these points of view, that is, for the speakers of the language themselves, 

these generic languages and professional jargons are directly 

intentional— they denote and express directly and fully, and are capable of 

expressing themselves without mediation; but outside, that is, for those not 

participating in the given purview, these languages may be treated as objects, 

as typifactions, as local color. For such outsiders, the intentions permeating 

these languages become things, limited in their meaning and expression; they 

attract to, or excise from, such language a par tic u lar word— making it difficult 

for the word to be utilized in a directly intentional way, without any 

qualifications. 

But the situation is far from exhausted by the generic and professional 

stratification of the common literary language. Although at its very core literary 

language is frequently socially homogeneous, as the oral and written 

language of a dominant social group, there is nevertheless always present, 

even here, a certain degree of social differentiation, a social stratification, 

that in other eras can become extremely acute. Social stratification may here 

and there coincide with generic and professional stratification, but in essence 

it is, of course, a thing completely autonomous and peculiar to itself. 

Social stratification is also and primarily determined by differences between 

the forms used to convey meaning and between the expressive planes of various 

belief systems— that is, stratification expresses itself in typical differences 

in ways used to conceptualize and accentuate elements of language, and 

stratification may not violate the abstractly linguistic dialectological unity of 

the shared literary language. 

What is more, all socially significant world views have the capacity to 

exploit the intentional possibilities of language through the medium of their 

specific concrete instancing. Various tendencies (artistic and otherwise), circles, 

journals, par tic u lar newspapers, even par tic u lar significant artistic 

works and individual persons are all capable of stratifying language, in proportion 

to their social significance; they are capable of attracting its words 

and forms into their orbit by means of their own characteristic intentions and 

accents, and in so doing to a certain extent alienating these words and forms 

from other tendencies, parties, artistic works and persons. 

Every socially significant verbal per for mance has the ability— sometimes 

for a long period of time, and for a wide circle of persons— to infect with its


own intention certain aspects of language that had been affected by its 

semantic and expressive impulse, imposing on them specific semantic nuances 

and specific axiological overtones; thus, it can create slogan- words, cursewords, 

praise- words and so forth. 

In any given historical moment of verbalideological life, each generation at 

each social level has its own language; moreover, every age group has as a 

matter of fact its own language, its own vocabulary, its own par tic u lar accentual 

system that, in their turn, vary depending on social level, academic institution 

(the language of the cadet, the high school student, the trade school 

student are all different languages) and other stratifying factors. All this is 

brought about by socially typifying languages, no matter how narrow the 

social circle in which they are spoken. It is even possible to have a family jargon 

define the societal limits of a language, as, for instance, the jargon of the 

Irtenevs 4 in Tolstoy, with its special vocabulary and unique accentual system. 

And finally, at any given moment, languages of various epochs and periods 

of socioideological life cohabit with one another. Even languages of the 

day exist: one could say that today’s and yesterday’s socioideological and 

po liti cal “day” do not, in a certain sense, share the same language; every 

day represents another socioideological semantic “state of affairs,” another 

vocabulary, another accentual system, with its own slogans, its own ways of 

assigning blame and praise. Poetry depersonalizes “days” in language, while 

prose, as we shall see, often deliberately intensifies difference between them, 

gives them embodied repre sen ta tion and dialogically opposes them to one 

another in unresolvable dialogues. 

Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot 

from top to bottom: it represents the co- existence of socioideological contradictions 

between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the 

past, between different socioideological groups in the present, between tendencies, 

schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These “languages” 

of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming 

new socially typifying “languages.” 

Each of these “languages” of heteroglossia requires a methodology very 

different from the others; each is grounded in a completely different principle 

for marking differences and for establishing units (for some this principle 

is functional, in others it is the principle of theme and content, in yet 

others it is, properly speaking, a socio- dialectological principle). Therefore 

languages do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in 

many different ways (the Ukrainian language, the language of the epic 

poem, of early Symbolism, of the student, of a par tic u lar generation of children, 

of the run- of- the- mill intellectual, of the Nietz schean 5 and so on). It 

might even seem that the very word “language” loses all meaning in this 

process— for apparently there is no single plane on which all these “languages” 

might be juxtaposed to one another. 

In actual fact, however, there does exist a common plane that methodologically 

justifies our juxtaposing them: all languages of heteroglossia, 

what ever the principle underlying them and making each unique, are specific 

points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in 

4. Family in Tolstoy’s short story “The Dev il” (1911). 

5. Follower of friedrich nietz sche (1844– 1900), German philologist and phi los o pher.


words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings 

and values. As such they all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually 

supplement one another, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically. 

As such they encounter one another and coexist in the consciousness 

of real people— first and foremost, in the creative consciousness of people 

who write novels. As such, these languages live a real life, they struggle and 

evolve in an environment of social heteroglossia. Therefore they are all able 

to enter into the unitary plane of the novel, which can unite in itself parodic 

stylizations of generic languages, various forms of stylizations and illustrations 

of professional and period- bound languages, the languages of par tic u- 

lar generations, of social dialects and others (as occurs, for example, in the 

En glish comic novel). They may all be drawn in by the novelist for the orchestration 

of his themes and for the refracted (indirect) expression of his intentions 

and values. 

This is why we constantly put forward the referential and expressive— that 

is, intentional— factors as the force that stratifies and differentiates the common 

literary language, and not the linguistic markers (lexical coloration, 

semantic overtones, etc.) of generic languages, professional jargons and so 

forth— markers that are, so to speak, the sclerotic deposits of an intentional 

pro cess, signs left behind on the path of the real living project of an intention, 

of the par tic u lar way it imparts meaning to general linguistic norms. 

These external markers, linguistically observable and fixable, cannot in themselves 

be understood or studied without understanding the specific conceptualization 

they have been given by an intention. 

Discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse [napravlennost’] 

toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse 

all we have left is the naked corpse of the word, from which we can learn 

nothing at all about the social situation or the fate of a given word in life. To 

study the word as such, ignoring the impulse that reaches out beyond it, is just 

as senseless as to study psychological experience outside the context of that 

real life toward which it was directed and by which it is determined. 

By stressing the intentional dimension of stratification in literary language, 

we are able, as has been said, to locate in a single series such methodologically 

heterogeneous phenomena as professional and social dialects, 

world views and individual artistic works, for in their intentional dimension 

one finds that common plane on which they can all be juxtaposed, and juxtaposed 

dialogically. The whole matter consists in the fact that there may be, 

between “languages,” highly specific dialogic relations; no matter how these 

languages are conceived, they may all be taken as par tic u lar points of view 

on the world. However varied the social forces doing the work of stratification— 

a profession, a genre, a par tic u lar tendency, an individual personality— 

the work itself everywhere comes down to the (relatively) protracted and 

socially meaningful (collective) saturation of language with specific (and consequently 

limiting) intentions and accents. The longer this stratifying saturation 

goes on, the broader the social circle encompassed by it and consequently 

the more substantial the social force bringing about such a stratification of 

language, then the more sharply focused and stable will be those traces, the 

linguistic changes in the language markers (linguistic symbols), that are left 

behind in language as a result of this social force’s activity— from stable (and


consequently social) semantic nuances to authentic dialectological markers 

(phonetic, morphological and others), which permit us to speak of par tic u lar 

social dialects. 

As a result of the work done by all these stratifying forces in language, 

there are no “neutral” words and forms— words and forms that can belong to 

“no one”; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions 

and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is 

not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot 

conception of the world. All words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, 

a tendency, a party, a par tic u lar work, a par tic u lar person, a generation, an 

age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in 

which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated 

by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are 

inevitable in the word. 

As a living, socioideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, 

for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself 

and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes 

“one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his 

own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic 

and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word 

does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of 

a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other 

people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: 

it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. And not 

all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this 

seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly 

resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated 

them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into 

his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks 

against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes 

freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is 

populated— overpopulated—with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, 

forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and 

complicated pro cess. 

We have so far proceeded on the assumption of the abstract- linguistic 

(dialectological) unity of literary language. But even a literary language is 

anything but a closed dialect. Within the scope of literary language itself 

there is already a more or less sharply defined boundary between everydayconversational 

language and written language. Distinctions between genres 

frequently coincide with dialectological distinctions (for example, the high— 

Church Slavonic 6 — and the low— conversational—genres of the eigh teenth 

century); finally, certain dialects may be legitimized in literature and thus to 

a certain extent be appropriated by literary language. 

As they enter literature and are appropriated to literary language, dialects 

in this new context lose, of course, the quality of closed sociolinguistic systems; 

they are deformed and in fact cease to be that which they had been 

6. The South Slavic language used in the standard 

9th-century translation of the Bible done by 

the brothers Sts. Cyril (827– 869) and Methodius 

(826– 885) and still used as a liturgical language 

by all Slavic Orthodox Christian Churches.


simply as dialects. On the other hand, these dialects, on entering the literary 

language and preserving within it their own dialectological elasticity, their 

other- languagedness, have the effect of deforming the literary language; it, 

too, ceases to be that which it had been, a closed sociolinguistic system. 

Literary language is a highly distinctive phenomenon, as is the linguistic 

consciousness of the educated person who is its agent; within it, intentional 

diversity of speech [raznorečivost’] (which is present in every living dialect as 

a closed system) is transformed into diversity of language [raznojazyčie]; what 

results is not a single language but a dialogue of languages. 

The national literary language of a people with a highly developed art of 

prose, especially if it is novelistic prose with a rich and tensionfilled verbalideological 

history, is in fact an or ga nized microcosm that reflects the macrocosm 

not only of national heteroglossia, but of Eu ro pe an heteroglossia as 

well. The unity of a literary language is not a unity of a single, closed language 

system, but is rather a highly specific unity of several “languages” that 

have established contact and mutual recognition with each other (merely one 

of which is poetic language in the narrow sense). Precisely this constitutes 

the peculiar nature of the methodological problem in literary language. 

Concrete socioideological language consciousness, as it becomes 

creative— that is, as it becomes active as literature— discovers itself already 

surrounded by heteroglossia and not at all a single, unitary language, inviolable 

and indisputable. The actively literary linguistic consciousness at all 

times and everywhere (that is, in all epochs of literature historically available 

to us) comes upon “languages,” and not language. Consciousness finds 

itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language. With 

each literary- verbal per for mance, consciousness must actively orient itself 

amidst heteroglossia, it must move in and occupy a position for itself within 

it, it chooses, in other words, a “language.” Only by remaining in a closed 

environment, one without writing or thought, completely off the maps of 

socioideological becoming, could a man fail to sense this activity of selecting 

a language and rest assured in the inviolability of his own language, the 

conviction that his language is predetermined. 

Even such a man, however, deals not in fact with a single language, but 

with languages— except that the place occupied by each of these languages 

is fixed and indisputable, the movement from one to the other is predetermined 

and not a thought pro cess; it is as if these languages were in different 

chambers. They do not collide with each other in his consciousness, 

there is no attempt to coordinate them, to look at one of these languages 

through the eyes of another language. 

Thus an illiterate peasant, miles away from any urban center, naively 

immersed in an unmoving and for him unshakable everyday world, nevertheless 

lived in several language systems: he prayed to God in one language 

(Church Slavonic), sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third and, 

when he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, 

he tried speaking yet a fourth language (the official- literate language, “paper” 

language). All these are different languages, even from the point of view of 

abstract socio- dialectological markers. But these languages were not dialogically 

coordinated in the linguistic consciousness of the peasant; he passed


from one to the other without thinking, automatically: each was indisputably 

in its own place, and the place of each was indisputable. He was not yet able 

to regard one language (and the verbal world corresponding to it) through the 

eyes of another language (that is, the language of everyday life and the everyday 

world with the language of prayer or song, or vice versa). 7 

As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur in the 

consciousness of our peasant, as soon as it became clear that these were 

not only various different languages but even internally variegated languages, 

that the ideological systems and approaches to the world that were 

indissolubly connected with these languages contradicted each other and 

in no way could live in peace and quiet with one another— then the inviolability 

and predetermined quality of these languages came to an end, and 

the necessity of actively choosing one’s orientation among them began. 

The language and world of prayer, the language and world of song, the 

language and world of labor and everyday life, the specific language and 

world of local authorities, the new language and world of the workers freshly 

immigrated to the city— all these languages and worlds sooner or later 

emerged from a state of peaceful and moribund equilibrium and revealed 

the speech diversity in each. 

Of course the actively literary linguistic consciousness comes upon an 

even more varied and profound heteroglossia within literary language itself, 

as well as outside it. Any fundamental study of the stylistic life of the word 

must begin with this basic fact. The nature of the heteroglossia encountered 

and the means by which one orients oneself in it determine the concrete 

stylistic life that the word will lead. 

The poet is a poet insofar as he accepts the idea of a unitary and singular 

language and a unitary, monologically sealed- off utterance. These ideas 

are immanent in the poetic genres with which he works. In a condition of 

actual contradiction, these are what determine the means of orientation 

open to the poet. The poet must assume a complete single- personed hegemony 

over his own language, he must assume equal responsibility for each 

one of its aspects and subordinate them to his own, and only his own, 

intentions. Each word must express the poet’s meaning directly and without 

mediation; there must be no distance between the poet and his word. The 

meaning must emerge from language as a single intentional whole: none of 

its stratification, its speech diversity, to say nothing of its language diversity, 

may be reflected in any fundamental way in his poetic work. 

To achieve this, the poet strips the word of others’ intentions, he uses only 

such words and forms (and only in such a way) that they lose their link with 

concrete intentional levels of language and their connection with specific 

contexts. Behind the words of a poetic work one should not sense any typical 

or reified images of genres (except for the given poetic genre), nor professions, 

tendencies, directions (except the direction chosen by the poet himself), 

nor world views (except for the unitary and singular world view of the 

poet himself), nor typical and individual images of speaking persons, their 

speech mannerisms or typical intonations. Everything that enters the work 

7. We are of course deliberately simplifying: the real- life peasant could and did do this to a certain extent 

[Bakhtin’s note].


must immerse itself in Lethe, 8 and forget its previous life in any other contexts: 

language may remember only its life in poetic contexts (in such contexts, however, 

even concrete reminiscences are possible). 

Of course there always exists a limited sphere of more or less concrete 

contexts, and a connection with them must be deliberately evidenced in 

poetic discourse. But these contexts are purely semantic and, so to speak, 

accented in the abstract; in their linguistic dimension they are impersonal or 

at least no particularly concrete linguistic specificity is sensed behind them, 

no par tic u lar manner of speech and so forth, no socially typical linguistic 

face (the possible personality of the narrator) need peek out from behind 

them. Everywhere there is only one face— the linguistic face of the author, 

answering for every word as if it were his own. No matter how multiple and 

varied these semantic and accentual threads, associations, pointers, hints, 

correlations that emerge from every poetic word, one language, one conceptual 

horizon, is sufficient to them all; there is no need of heteroglot social 

contexts. What is more, the very movement of the poetic symbol (for example, 

the unfolding of a meta phor) presumes precisely this unity of language, 

an unmediated correspondence with its object. Social diversity of speech, 

were it to arise in the work and stratify its language, would make impossible 

both the normal development and the activity of symbols within it. 

The very rhythm of poetic genres does not promote any appreciable degree 

of stratification. Rhythm, by creating an unmediated involvement between 

every aspect of the accentual system of the whole (via the most immediate 

rhythmic unities), destroys in embryo those social worlds of speech and of 

persons that are potentially embedded in the word: in any case, rhythm puts 

definite limits on them, does not let them unfold or materialize. Rhythm 

serves to strengthen and concentrate even further the unity and hermetic 

quality of the surface of poetic style, and of the unitary language that this 

style posits. 

As a result of this work— stripping all aspects of language of the intentions 

and accents of other people, destroying all traces of social heteroglossia 

and diversity of language— a tensionfilled unity of language is achieved 

in the poetic work. This unity may be naive, and present only in those 

extremely rare epochs of poetry, when poetry had not yet exceeded the limits 

of a closed, unitary, undifferentiated social circle whose language and 

ideology were not yet stratified. More often than not, we experience a profound 

and conscious tension through which the unitary poetic language of 

a work rises from the heteroglot and language- diverse chaos of the literary 

language contemporary to it. 

This is how the poet proceeds. The novelist working in prose (and almost 

any prose writer) takes a completely different path. He welcomes the heteroglossia 

and language diversity of the literary and extraliterary language 

into his own work not only not weakening them but even intensifying them 

(for he interacts with their par tic u lar selfconsciousness). It is in fact out of 

this stratification of language, its speech diversity and even language diversity, 

that he constructs his style, while at the same time he maintains the 

unity of his own creative personality and the unity (although it is, to be 

sure, unity of another order) of his own style. 

8. A mythological river through Hades (literally, “Forgetfulness”; Greek). All who drink from it lose their 

memory.


The prose writer does not purge words of intentions and tones that are 

alien to him, he does not destroy the seeds of social heteroglossia embedded 

in words, he does not eliminate those language characterizations and 

speech mannerisms (potential narrator- personalities) glimmering behind 

the words and forms, each at a different distance from the ultimate semantic 

nucleus of his work, that is, the center of his own personal intentions. 

The language of the prose writer deploys itself according to degrees of 

greater or lesser proximity to the author and to his ultimate semantic instantiation: 

certain aspects of language directly and unmediatedly express (as in 

poetry) the semantic and expressive intentions of the author, others refract 

these intentions; the writer of prose does not meld completely with any of 

these words, but rather accents each of them in a par tic u lar way— humorously, 

ironically, parodically and so forth; 9 yet another group may stand even further 

from the author’s ultimate semantic instantiation, still more thoroughly 

refracting his intentions; and there are, finally, those words that are 

completely denied any authorial intentions: the author does not express himself 

in them (as the author of the word)— rather, he exhibits them as a unique 

speech- thing, they function for him as something completely reified. Therefore 

the stratification of language— generic, professional, social in the narrow 

sense, that of par tic u lar world views, par tic u lar tendencies, par tic u lar 

individuals, the social speech diversity and language- diversity (dialects) of 

language— upon entering the novel establishs its own special order within 

it, and becomes a unique artistic system, which orchestrates the intentional 

theme of the author. 

Thus a prose writer can distance himself from the language of his own 

work, while at the same time distancing himself, in varying degrees, from the 

different layers and aspects of the work. He can make use of language without 

wholly giving himself up to it, he may treat it as semi- alien or completely 

alien to himself, while compelling language ultimately to serve all his own 

intentions. The author does not speak in a given language (from which he 

distances himself to a greater or lesser degree), but he speaks, as it were, 

through language, a language that has somehow more or less materialized, 

become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquates. 

The prose writer as a novelist does not strip away the intentions of others 

from the heteroglot language of his works, he does not violate those socioideological 

cultural horizons (big and little worlds) that open up behind 

heteroglot languages— rather, he welcomes them into his work. The prose 

writer makes use of words that are already populated with the social intentions 

of others and compels them to serve his own new intentions, to serve 

a second master. Therefore the intentions of the prose writer are refracted, 

and refracted at different angles, depending on the degree to which the 

refracted, heteroglot languages he deals with are socio- ideologically alien, 

already embodied and already objectivized. 

The orientation of the word amid the utterances and languages of others, 

and all the specific phenomena connected with this orientation, takes 

on artistic significance in novel style. Diversity of voices and heteroglossia 

9. That is to say, the words are not his if we 

understand them as direct words, but they are his 

as things that are being transmitted ironically, 

exhibited and so forth, that is, as words that are 

understood from the distances appropriate to 

humor, irony, parody, etc. [Bakhtin’s note].


enter the novel and or ga nize themselves within it into a structured artistic 

system. This constitutes the distinguishing feature of the novel as a 

genre. 

Any stylistics capable of dealing with the distinctiveness of the novel as a 

genre must be a so cio log i cal stylistics. The internal social dialogism of novelistic 

discourse requires the concrete social context of discourse to be exposed, 

to be revealed as the force that determines its entire stylistic structure, its 

“form” and its “content,” determining it not from without, but from within; 

for indeed, social dialogue reverberates in all aspects of discourse, in those 

relating to “content” as well as the “formal” aspects themselves. 

The development of the novel is a function of the deepening of dialogic 

essence, its increased scope and greater precision. Fewer and fewer neutral, 

hard elements (“rock bottom truths”) remain that are not drawn into dialogue. 

Dialogue moves into the deepest molecular and, ultimately, subatomic 

levels. 

Of course, even the poetic word is social, but poetic forms reflect lengthier 

social pro cesses, i.e., those tendencies in social life requiring centuries 

to unfold. The novelistic word, however, registers with extreme subtlety the 

tiniest shifts and oscillations of the social atmosphere; it does so, moreover, 

while registering it as a whole, in all of its aspects. 

When heteroglossia enters the novel it becomes subject to an artistic 

reworking. The social and historical voices populating language, all its 

words and all its forms, which provide language with its par tic u lar concrete 

conceptualizations, are or ga nized in the novel into a structured stylistic 

system that expresses the differentiated socioideological position of the 

author amid the heteroglossia of his epoch. 

* * * 

1934–35

gotthold ephraim lessing 1729–1781 - St. Francis Xavier University

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?