The Classical Technique

MR. GEOFFREY TILLOTSON, in his book on Pope, after quoting the description of Timon's Villa that ends swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn, remarks: Pope's sense of beauty was practical than that of Wordsworth. Not that Wordsworth's was impractical-a sunrise could certainly minister a mind diseased or a mind unclean. But there are few whom life allows the opportunities for such a catharsis: There is chance of the day's salvation if the cleansing comes from a stone urn in a garden .... .2 To this passage in one of the copies of the book in our University Library a marginalist has added the following pencilled comment: Screaming absurdity-who in h[sic] can't look at a sunrise? and much painlessly than at a stone urn-ye Gods! I beg differ. Through no real wish of my own, I have spent a great deal of my life looking at sunrises, and also at what Pope would indubitably have called urns and I, in moments of exasperation, called more dpots, and I have found the former occupation very much painful than the latter. I have seen the sun rise in the Sahara and in Northern Ontario, in the Alps over what Coleridge so surprisingly calls thy bald awful head, O sovran Blanc, and Where burning Sappho loved and sung, and I can recall only two that made me forget my bed, my beard, and my breakfast:-once on entering New York harbour, and once on approaching Constantinople from Prinkipo. Sunsets are far superior, especially when seen after a long day's work from the vantage point of an easy chair and through the refracting medium of a glass. Our Toronto scholiast must belong either that very rare body of supermen that actually enjoys early rising, or probably that far extensive group of readers and critics, that holds that there must be a complete separation between true poetry and ordinary common sense, between Sense and Sensibility. Ultimately, this is the romantic position in the conflict between the classic and the romantic, a conflict far older than Madame de Stael. We might, indeed, argue that such a conflict is a mere quibble, that much of Homer is as romantic as Keats and much of Wordsworth as classic as Pope, but there is a fundamental difference in aim. The romantic poet seeks to extend the bounds of his reader's experience,3 communicate him some rare adventure, emotion, or sensation of his own. The average person, desirous of escaping from his own humdrum existence, enjoys this vicarious catharsis, which he would

Art · Literature · Classics · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism