English Pastoral Poetry (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from English Pastoral Poetry

Many eople, without being communists, have irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem, and this seems partly because they feel there is a cheat in the implied politics; the bourge01s themselves do not like literature to have too much bourgeois ideology' And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; 1t is only 111 deg rce that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and IS the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity. A statement of this is certainly non political because it is true in any society, and yet nearly all the great poetic statements of it are in a way bour geois, like this one; they suggest to many readers, though they do not say, that for the poor man things cannot be improved even in degree. This at least shows that the distinction the communists try to draw is a puzzling one; two people may get very different experiences from the same work of art without either being definitely wrong. One is told that the Russmns now disapprove of tragedy, and that there was a per formance of Hamlet in the turk-sib region which the audience decided spontaneously was a farce. They may well hold out against the melancholy of old Russia, and for them there may be dangerous implications in any tragedy, which other people do not see. I am sure at any rate that one could not estimate the amount of bourgeois ideology really in the verse from Gray.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.