Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. 13: ‘The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing 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…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’.
77 (#ulink_6947a27c-d865-5ddb-a8d2-bf90357e87d1) The medieval term for ‘poetry’.
78 (#ulink_6947a27c-d865-5ddb-a8d2-bf90357e87d1) Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 1, Article 9, ‘Whether Holy Scripture Should Use Metaphors’: Objection 1. ‘It seems that Holy Scripture should not use metaphors. For that which is proper to the lowest science seems not to befit this science, which holds the highest place of all. But to proceed by the aid of various similitudes and figures is proper to poetry, the least of all the sciences. Therefore it is nut fitting that this science should make use of such similitudes.’ Reply: ‘Poetry makes use of metaphors to produce a representation, for it is natural to man to be pleased with representations. But sacred doctrine makes use of metaphors as both necessary and useful.’ ibid., Part I, Question 115, Article 5: ‘We know by experience that many things are done by demons, for which the power of heavenly bodies would in no way suffice: for instance, that a man in a state of delirium should speak an unknown tongue, recite poetry and authors of whom he has no previous knowledge.’
79 (#ulink_6947a27c-d865-5ddb-a8d2-bf90357e87d1) ‘poetry is the art of speaking in verses. Question 1: Whether rhythm is a type of verse.’
80 (#ulink_45661db7-6329-5539-bc99-8311c687f6f5) ‘by its activity, through contact, as from its appearance’. These are the criteria St Thomas Aquinas uses in the Summa Theologica, Part I. Question 75, Article 1 to discuss whether the soul has a body.
81 (#ulink_45661db7-6329-5539-bc99-8311c687f6f5) ‘through the path of the will’. This was a standard concern of the Church Fathers.
82 (#ulink_af5f9244-5ce5-53ab-93ff-389fc6447100) Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part II, Question 27, Article 5.
83 (#ulink_f328659a-6ffd-547e-8e3d-948d5f541e44) John 1:12.
1937 (#ulink_645d359a-3391-5402-9374-adebc0d1a14b)
TO JOAN BENNETT (L):
(#ulink_6501ac14-90b3-58cd-bd4f-ca2d03bdaf07)
[Magdalen College]
13 January 1937
A foul copy of an essay (which now that I re-read it doesn’t seem as good as I had hoped) is a poor return for the delightful, the champagne holiday you gave me. But you asked for it and here it is.
(#ulink_32110967-4695-50f8-ac6b-7a488d1ca27e)
What splendid talk goes on in your house!—and what a wonderful thing…your English Faculty is. If only we and you could combine into a single teaching body (leaving out your freaks and nonentities) we could make ‘English’ into an education that would not have to fear any rivalries. In the meantime we have lots to exchange. I am sure you practise more ‘judgement’; I suspect we have more ‘blood’. What we want is to be well commingled.
The Lucas book proves disappointing as you go on.
(#ulink_131153ff-cdc6-588e-9b8a-4240e3d3dc00) His attack on Richards
(#ulink_5c77d8f4-2981-5de0-84c8-7951ee4a9db7) for splitting up poetic effects which we receive as a unity, is silly; that is what analysis means and R. never suggested that the products of analysis were the same as the living unity. Again, he doesn’t seem to see that Richards is on his side in bringing poetry to an ethical test in the long run; and his own ethical standard is so half-hearted—he’s so afraid of being thought a moralist that he tries to blunt it by gas about ‘health’ and ‘survival’. As if survival can have any value apart from the prior value of what survives. To me especially it is an annoying book; he attacks my enemies in the wrong way…and a good deal of mere ‘superiority’ too…
TO JOAN BENNETT (L):
[Magdalen College
February 1937]
I also have been having ’flu or you should have heard from me sooner. I enclose the article: pray make whatever use you please of it
(#ulink_33d11c72-6e90-5f3a-9f95-e30930be3e70)…It is a question (for your sake and that of the Festschrift, not mine) whether a general pro-Donne paper called Donne and his critics—a glance at Dryden and Johnson and then some contemporaries including me—wouldn’t be better than a direct answer. C.S.L. as professional controversialist and itinerant prize-fighter is, I suspect, becoming already rather a bore to our small public, and might in that way infect you.
(#ulink_e1804a11-f70b-526d-9af2-12a4bb821645) Also, if you really refute me, you raise for the editor the awkward question, ‘Then why print the other article?’ However, do just as you like…and good luck with it whatever you do.
I’ve had a grand week in bed—Northanger Abbey, The Moonstone,
(#ulink_e5916d32-b63d-53db-8fb8-cee73a92847e) The Vision of judgement,
(#ulink_61cbb22a-a15d-5e21-b744-8a7735b62b34) Modern Painters (Vol. 3),
(#ulink_4d357885-9d9d-5100-a6d8-08f7c232470f)Our Mutual Friend,
(#ulink_6000d9e6-572a-5b31-8bfa-6ef1f46f7437) and The Egoist.
(#ulink_3e2fe3c4-a1c2-5016-a974-6fe85d5d1e28) Of the latter I decided this time that it’s a rare instance of the conception being so good that even the fantastic faults can’t kill it. There’s a good deal of the ass about Meredith—that dreadful first chapter—Carlyle in icing sugar. And isn’t the supposedly witty conversation much poorer than much we have heard in real life? Mrs Mounstuart is a greater bore than Miss Bates
(#ulink_ec3c5ac8-eaea-5725-920c-255600f09457)—only he didn’t mean her to be. The Byron was not so good as I remembered: the Ruskin, despite much nonsense, glorious.
TO MARY NEYLAN (T):
(#ulink_0cb00c20-8025-5907-9fc4-7721667e22aa)
Magdalen College
Oxford
March 8th 1937
Dear Mrs. Neylan
What a nice letter! To be read is nice enough: but to have led anyone back to the poets themselves is more what critics dream of than what usually happens.
I ought to be able to reward you with a good list of books, as desired, but you know bibliographies are my Waterloo: in my own reading I always sacrifice critics to the poets, which is unkind to my own trade. However, let’s try.
I haven’t yet got Grierson’s new book Milton and Wordsworth,
(#ulink_c62a94c2-a3fa-5dfa-bb2e-ce6639329f29) but I’m going to: it ought to kill two of your birds with one stone. Have you read F. L. Lucas’ Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal? Hideously over-written in parts, but well worth reading: he has grasped what seems to be a hard idea to modern minds, that a certain degree of a thing might be good and a further degree of the same thing bad. Elementary, you will say—yet a realisation of it would have forbidden the writing of many books. These are new.
A few years old—but you may not have read it—is E. K. Chambers’ Sir Thomas Wyatt and other studies.
(#ulink_c94e82cd-eff6-5b45-935f-bf3fb4170362) Some of the essays are medieval, but most of it is 16th century. I can’t think of anything much on ‘general tendencies of the 17th century’ since one you almost certainly read when you were up, Grierson’s Cross Currents of XVIIth c. Lit,
(#ulink_37160c8a-ee48-53a3-b362-b3ac6bf3bf23) very good indeed. By the bye a festschrift to Grierson shortly appearing (Tillyard, Nichol Smith, Joan Bennett and myself are among the contributors) might contain something of what you want. The book on the 17th c. by Willy
(#ulink_39318056-940e-5a0f-a892-24b0d27b3afc) (I have forgotten the title) is more on the thought background than the poets, rather doing for that century what my Prolegomena tried to do for the middle ages. I don’t know of anything general on the 18th century. Sherburn’s Early Life of Pope
(#ulink_5c6c296d-cf6c-5931-a9a7-60a0ec086381) tho’ good is hardly what you want.
You don’t say how you or your husband are: I hope all is well.
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
