The Columbia History of British Poetry by Carl Woodring, James Shapiro Read Free Book Online Page B

different kinds of truth rather than a simple opposition between truth and lies was of enormous help to poetry lovers. They could deploy a wide range of options (all recorded by Vincent), from arguing that poetry contained scientific truths, e.g., that the fable of the lame god Vulcan taught the crooked nature of fire, to euhemerism, e.g., insisting that Hercules was only called a god because he was a great hero in prehistorical times. A development of this line of thought was the insistence that any story that taught something true was valuable: Aesop's fables instilled good moral qualities. And "truth," of course, meant something considered valid by the learned establishment: not truth to life or nature, but to invisible and eschatological reality.
Such defenses of poetry insist on its didactic value and encourage allegory: if a story could be read for its message, then a message could be embodied in a story, and the truth or value of the message would redeem the story from the charge of untruth. Petrarch and Boccaccio are most enthusiastic about this "hidden truth" theory of poetry and hand on a vocabulary of veils, mists, and kernels that was exceedingly popular in fifteenth-century England. Poetry was supposed to be written this way to hide holy truths from the eyes of the unlearned vulgar, and to give intellectual pleasure to the eyes of the discerning few. Such an unpleasant view of poetry can only be excused by the fact that it is itself an excuse: unless poetry could lay claim to some sort of truth, it could have no intellectual place at all in a world where heaven and hell

 

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were all-important realities (the world of Chaucer's Parson). Despite these attempts at sanitizing fiction, however, the whole matter of the poets left an uncomfortable mental residue. Poetry was still the "lowest amongst the arts" for Aquinas, and a glance at the dictionary shows that many of the collocations in English of such words as poet, poesy , and poetry are with fables, lies , and feigning . The fabulous images of poetry could only, the philosophers said, come from the suspect power of imagination or phantasia in the brain. We share imagination with the animals, and we should use it only in the service of cognition. Hence "falsehed and fantesye / And cursyd ymagynacyon" are often pejorative; they appear as villains in Skelton's Magnyfycence and in the morality play Hyckescorner .
The unsavory atmosphere surrounding poetry in the learned world is reflected in the attitudes of English writers, especially those who function within the orbit of learned, i.e., latinate, culture. The popularity of the dream vision, where the poet pretends to no more than telling us what he saw in an unverifiable dream, must owe something to this unease (dreams, although themselves the products of phantasia unsupervised by reason, were morally blameless). Chaucer, who of all medieval writers has something of the modern confidence in the "value" of literature (but see his Retractation), is therefore rather less typical than his contemporaries. Chaucer's followers lean heavily on his example to justify themselves as serious writers, but there is still a predominantly apologetic note in their work. They often claim to have nothing but their readers' good at heart, or, at the very least, they write to pass the time of day harmlessly lest the devil find something worse for them to do. It is impossible to escape the idea that in the medieval learned world poetry must be at heart didactic. Any entertainment value was at best dubious, and at worst, sinister.
Outside the learned world, it is safe to assume, songs and stories were taken less ponderously. Indeed, the anxiety of the educated about the value of poetry points to an unregenerate enjoyment of such things; moralists take it for granted that poems, whether seen as metrical devices or as beautiful fictions, are of themselves delightful, and hence morally suspect. But there was a class of people,