For I A Richards, Eliot's 'The Waste Land' was exemplary in effecting a "complete severance" between poetry and belief. In his appendix to The Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards sees the obscurity, ambiguity and fragmentation of the Waste Land as a useful barrier to a traditional 'overintellectual' approach to poetry - one which tries "to catch [the poem] in an intellectual net or to squeeze out a doctrine". The Waste Land thus becomes a model for a poetry of the future in which poetry will not compete with science on the territory of belief, but will do the more important work of ordering our impulses and generating emotional attitudes in the service of life.
Eliot was sufficiently intrigued by Richards' view that he responded to it on several occasions, including a brief 'note on poetry and belief' in The Enemy (1927), a long footnote in his 1929 essay on Dante, and in Ch. 7 of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933). The thrust of his response is that the interpretation of poetry can never be fully 'detached from the beliefs of the poet'. In the specific case of the Waste Land, Eliot suggests that if the poem expresses a sense of desolation, doubt, uncertainty, futility, this is 'not a separation from belief'; rather 'doubt and uncertainty are merely a variety of belief'. Perhaps more precisely, the expression of a sense of desolation and doubt in a poem cannot be separated from the poet's wider beliefs, e.g. concerning the decline of Western civilization, and the erosion of religious belief.
This aspect of Eliot's response does not quite get to the heart of the issue, however, for it is open to Richards to question whether the poet's 'beliefs' about Western civilization and religion are really beliefs at all, and not rather emotional attitudes.
Richards follows the logical positivists in drawing a strict distinction between beliefs and emotional attitudes, between fact-stating and emotive discourse, with science on one side and poetry on the other (while inverting the logical positivists' conclusion that emotive, poetic discourse ought to be jettisoned). Richards might thus seem to be vulnerable to the classic criticism of the logical positivists, namely that they were unable to say whether their own assertions about discourse were fact-stating or emotive. Eliot almost makes this point in The Use of poetry... when he quotes a passage in which Richards discusses emotive 'pseudo-statements' , and writes tersely: 'I submit that this is itself a pseudo-statement, if there is such a thing'. But this is more of a challenge than a refutation - it leaves room for Richards to respond by either staking out a middle ground between fact-stating and emotive discourse in which to locate his brand of literary criticism, or to follow German romanticism, strands of French 'theory', or the 'Yale school' in accepting that literary criticism is itself a kind of literature, and so not scientific or fact-stating.
I suggest that to make progress with the question of poetry and belief we focus instead on an issue raised briefly in Eliot's footnote in the essay on Dante. Eliot writes: 'The theory of Mr. Richards is... incomplete until he defines the species of religious, philosophical, sientific, and other beliefs, as well as that of 'everyday' belief'. Eliot is exactly right, I suggest, to point to the variety of types of belief, though he may be wrong to suggest that there are radically different species here. It may be that all we need is a distinction between the degrees of belief with which an educated person may reasonably hold different types of belief. Everyday beliefs ('the post has arrived') and some types of scientific belief ('this aeroplane will fly safely') are reasonably held with a high degree of belief, while many religious and philosophical beliefs (and even some scientific beliefs - e.g. quantum theory is reconcilable with relativity) are most reasonably held with a very low degree of belief, given the divergence of expert opinion.
It seems to me that this distinction between 'high' and 'low' degree beliefs allows us to see the partial truth in the positions of both Eliot and Richards. We can affirm, with Eliot, that even on issues concerning the value and fate of Western civilization, it is not unreasonable to speak of belief, as long as we bear in mind the differences between different types and degrees of belief. At the same time, we can maintain something like Richards' distinction between emotional attitudes, and scientific belief. Richard's category of scientific belief translates into the category of beliefs that are reasonably held with a high degree of certainty. His emotional attitudes, on the other hand, can be understood as complex and compound psychological states involving (among many other things) philosophical, religious and other beliefs that are distinct from scientific and everyday beliefs in that it is unreasonable to hold them with any great degree of certainty. This enables us also to preserve the idea that it is a key function of poetry (perhaps, we might add, along with philosophy, theology and literary criticism) to generate and impact on emotional attitudes of this sort; and more specifically, that it is a key virtue of 'the Waste Land' that it does so.
Wednesday 30 March 2011
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