Critics and Poets

‘Who killed John Keats?’
‘I,’ said the Quarterly
So savage and tartarly –
‘I killed John Keats.’

page 297

Posterity is often harsher in its judgment on critics than on poets. A bad poet remains unread; a bad critic is dragged from his tomb, to answer the charge of malicious pontificating ignorance, or even (as in Byron’s quatrain above) the charge of homicide. Such judgments are far too sweeping and partisan. How many of us, in their shoes, would have assessed the merits of the writing of the time more accurately than did the Quarterly, Blackwood’s, or Edinburgh reviewers? How many of us can now assess accurately contemporary work? Gifford, of the Quarterly (quoted by Mr Crawford), wrote in 1810 of Crabbe:

The peculiarity of this author is that he wishes to discard everything like illusion from poetry . . . To talk of binding down poetry to dry representations of the world as it is, seems idle; because it is in order to escape from the world as it is, that we fly to poetry.

These sentiments have a most familiar ring.

Mr Crawford has laboured to show that criticism of the Edinburgh Review, unlike that of the Quarterly, was a genuine and sympathetic attempt to bring views of art and life into alignment – sometimes incomplete, rarely ignorant or petulant. He points out that Jeffrey’s judgment of Keats agrees substantially with Keats’s own self-criticism; that Jeffrey criticised the Lake poets for a ‘defect of realism’ which Coleridge also recognised; that under Jeffrey’s scholarship the reviewers had progressed from ‘the 1797 attitude of mind’ to ‘something resembling alliance with the second generation of Romantics’. These points are a mere skimming of his exposition, which is concise, energetic and (since fashions change but not the hearts and minds of man) cogent for our generation.

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