Jan 13, 2009
Macaulay On Poetry, Pleasure, and Soundness of Mind
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind, if anything which gives so much pleasure ought to be called unsoundness.
Unsoundness, indeed. Pleasure—but for whom? I assume Macaulay means “gives so much pleasure”—that is, too much pleasure—for the reader, for it is the reader with whom the Victorian critics are most deeply concerned, the way of the lyric subject proving too decadent, too easily led into foible and folly for that startled and tenuous latter age. No good poet has ever truly seemed to enjoy being such (perhaps Byron is an exception, celebrity playboy that he was), preferring rather to wallow in all manner of angst on the one hand or dissolution on the other. But go cautiously, suffering and poetic ability are merely correlatively, not causally, linked. Strong feelings are not of themselves art, nor do they always produce it. Unsound, however, art always is: Macaulay gets that one right.