The Concrete Universal: Observations on the Understanding of Poetry

I have been reading the new book by Professor W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., entitled The Verbal Icon (University of Kentucky Press, $4.00). It is a collection of essays about critical procedures, their hazards and “fallacies,” and how to make them secure. Mr. Wimsatt is of reasonable temper, and he has read everything. Being at Yale, he must have associated with both members of the famous partnership of Brooks and Warren, and with one member of the other famous partnership of Wellek and Warren (the two Warrens being not identical of course); and on the whole I believe he is regarded as a kind of “new” critic, a late and technically accomplished one. But we come to the essay where he advises that the understanding of a poem can be fitted pretty well into a kind of Hegelian disposition: for him a poem is a structure which may be viewed as a Concrete Universal. And suddenly we are in the deep waters of one of the great philosophical systems.

The Concrete Universal. Is this the language for a critic? He has his own reduction of the poem to make, but is there not a line to be drawn somewhere? For his usual language, perhaps. We might say that ordinarily the critic’s language, though less immediate than the poet’s, should be less reductive than the philosopher’s; in order that he may remember, and permit his gentle readers to remember, that the language of poetry is the language of feeling, not the language of epistemology. This can be said without prejudice to the rights of epistemology, and of philosophy at large. Perhaps the wisdom which chaste Philosophia loves is always epistemology, i.e. the universal grammar or logic of knowledge, describing serially its various and inter- lacing forms, itself devoid of any feeling except a rare and strange passion for widest perspective; the epistemological passion. Philosophy would then be different even from the pursuit of knowledge by the scientists, which is devoid of feeling for its materials, and supported only by a feeling for its urgent specific objectives; philosophy would suspend even these feelings in order to bring all the knowledges indifferently under the epistemological perspective. The satisfaction destined for the philosopher will be a philosophical satisfaction; the cake which he would bake will be the cake which he will cut. If at that stage he finds it painful to reflect that the love of wisdom has caused him to abandon certain more elementary emotions, he is like some Existentialist who wonders if there is any stage of the poor human panorama to which he might decently go back in order to reclaim his humanity. But at any rate we will locate (perhaps I mean that I should locate) the experience of the poet, and for the most part of his expositor, in the earlier stages.