Poetry is an unflinching, enduring process that contends with the world within and without. It has seen many revolutions of form, critique and intent. This review traces how Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Eliot have answered two questions regarding the poetic process: first, does poetry lay claim to truth?; and second, what is the role of the poet and their identity in accessing this truth? Although each poets’ personal philosophy has informed their conception of truth and the roadmap they follow to reach this abstraction is irregular, there is relative consensus that poetry does make an imprecise but concerted claim to truth. As expected, the position that the poet occupies in relation to their poetry is rife with individualised schematics of their craft; Coleridge, Keats and Eliot posit varying blueprints of the impersonal poet, while Wordsworth makes his seminal argument in favour of an individual’s poetic genius determining how truth is sought. 

These lauded essays and letters are the primary colours in which we read, write, and think about poetry. Most artists at some point are existentially consumed by the question of what their poetry attempts to accomplish, and it is worth acknowledging that all four of these chosen poets are white men of a particular literary tradition, and despite their intellectual altercations or accords, they are the product of similar cultural and material circumstances that contain largely homogenised beliefs about art and knowledge. I will first chronologically introduce each poet’s creative formula and then weigh the thematic implications of their arguments.

In the interminably influential ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,’ Wordsworth describes a particular “promise” that poets must make, defined by their era, to satisfy reader’s expectations of selectivity of subject matter and imagery and quality (1800). These “terms of engagement” are central to broaching truth – for him, an idealised coalescence of pleasure, beauty and knowledge (p. 2).   His poetry explores “the primary laws of our nature” with rustic life as his choice modality to essentialise human nature because of how freely he believes life and language is in these settings. Wordsworth deliberately crafts a diction “of language really used by men” as an instrument to plumb some poetic truth.

This modality is deployed by a poet, qualified as someone who has a “lively sensibility” to both envisage fictional testimonies and also mine their personal life to produce amplified yet deeply moving poetry. The poet is curious and sensitive, the poet has the dexterity to capture most beautifully and effectively even those experiences which they have not had. The vital feeling that a poem conveys is privileged over the action that birthed it, and since the poet’s intention is to give “pleasure” to the reader per the terms of engagement, poets apply the “principle of selection” to filter out the distasteful dimensions of the action or event in question. The more the poet indulges in this exercise of sieving, the further removed a poem gets from “emanations of reality,” instead capturing an emotional encounter whose fabric is imaginative and at times romanticised or hyperbolic. Yet this space of imagined reality that a poem inhabits is not a departure into the falsified, but an utterance of an “immortal” poetic knowledge, that is “truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative…carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony” (p. 9).

In summation, Wordsworth makes a convincing case for how poetry provides truth by way of universalised commentary on the human condition, irrespective of personal experience, but he then somewhat narcissistically veers into positioning the poet as the person who uses their creative capability to “bind” together truth with their unique “passion and knowledge” (p. 11).

Like Wordsworth, Coleridge, too, believes that truth should be the ultimate objective of poetry. In Biographia Literaria’s Chapter 14, he explains that poets must seek to provide the scaffolding towards truth, and serving this end is possible only when a subject is broken down, infiltrated by the mind, and then “restore[d]” to its original whole (1817). This oppositional symbiosis of deconstruction and re-construction of an object and the space in which it exists is well-characterised by Patrick Keane’s essay in that “ultimate unity emerges from, and depends on, the dialectical tension between opposites” (2014).

In response to the second question about the poet’s role in accessing this truth, Coleridge upholds that a poet’s discernment in identifying truth (moral or intellectual) as the aim of poetry, rather than the seductive immediacy of pleasure, is an indication of their calibre. Coleridge does not value the poet for their firmament of experiences and skills in general (as Wordsworth did), but only for their poetic output. Although this distinction is feeble – as Coleridge concedes, “the images, thoughts and emotions of the poet’s own mind” produce the poem in the first place – it is important as the first of many evolutions of Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime” (Coleridge 1817; Keats, 1818).

In the year of and after Biographia Literaria’s publishing, in a series of letters, Keats expounds his theory that “what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth” (1818). He believes that “Imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human Life,” thereby connecting what might seem fantastical or fabricated with reality and truth. Further, he asserts that one produces this truth only when one can “delight in sensation” rather than scrambling to find truth in itself. Keats coins the term “negative capability” to describe this crucial capacity to, while consuming or creating art, be in a state of intellectual confusion, irrationality and doubt without thirsting after some unattainable and inconsequential ‘perfect’ logic. He posited that there is something transcendent, or at least, all-consuming about art that resists faculties of reason. Any exalted feeling, any simple, appealing idea that is conceived “on the Wings of the Imagination” ingrains itself in us through repetition and continuation, by which the melody or image is elevated to an endeared truth. 

Negative capability can be understood as a solution to a puzzle in Keats’ poetry. On one hand Keats describes the world he wants to fly away from with the nightingale in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ as a world of “drowsy numbness” and anguished keening, and on the other hand he describes the world he arrives at on the “viewless wings of Poesy” with romantic escapism and glorious ecstasy. In which experience does truth lie? In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ he offers the idea that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” but this is a truth in tension, with Keats uncertain whether the imaginative world he flies to is real, or whether his waking heartrending is true life; “[D]o I wake or sleep[?]” he muses in ‘Nightingale.’ Negative Capability resolves this tension by allowing him to “awake forever in a sweet unrest” (Last Sonnet), safe in the pleasure of poetry whose superb beauty is respite from logic’s drudgery and life’s mutability. In Keats’ words, “beauty…obliterates all consideration” (1817).

In his pursuit of the pure highs of escape and enchantment, Keats tries to lose himself in the song of the Nightingale. He fails to do so until ‘To Autumn,’ which is an iconoclastic work of romantic poetry; there is no personal ‘I’ in his tribute, just a description of plenitude in intricate, vivid imagery. It exhibits his view on poets’ hand in reaching truth by successfully subsuming himself in the beauty around him. Keats departs from Wordsworth’s egotistical sublime which has a clear identity and personhood to propose the chameleon poetical character – “it is not itself – it has no self – it is everything and nothing.” Keats believes that, unlike the vanity of Wordsworth’s sublime, “the poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence,” implying that poets are identity-less, unsuitable, prosaic subjects. Therefore, the poet has no identity, and their claim on truth, as poetic beauty, is predicated upon forgoing the logical ‘I.’

Jolting forward a century, New Yorker critic Kevin Dettmar pointedly remarked of Eliot’s writings, “Eliot essentially declares Romanticism dead to rights” (Dettmar et al, 2019). In ‘Poetry and Propaganda,’ Eliot loudly proclaims that poetry “proving anything” is “nonsense” and that people are “confusing the persuasive power of poetry with the evidence of truth” (1930). Yet it is inconceivable to me that the Romantics were truly suggesting that their poetry was “proving” scientific truths or that it was a suitable replacement of systematic inquiry. I would respectfully disagree with Mr Dettmar’s remark when analysing Eliot’s programme for truth and identity because Eliot’s proclamations – while outlandish and an intended critique of romanticism – do not reject all Romantic theory. In fact, in the two essays under review here, namely, ‘Poetry and Propaganda’ and ‘Tradition and Individual Talent,’ Eliot is extending the impersonal poet of the Romantics to its most extreme conclusion, and operating under a different, modern definition of truth which the Romantics were never laying claim to – scientific truth was neither the primary connotation of truth nor the most relevant one.

Eliot elaborates on his view of poetry being ill-equipped for proof by stating that poetry is “the making of truth more fully real to us” through the “creation of sensuous embodiment” which is similar to Keats’ beauty or Wordsworth’s sublime. For the Romantics, poetry is a state of being, whereas for Eliot, it is the expression of the myriad possible states of being; “a variety of wholes” that proves certain intellectual, moral or aesthetic experiences as possible, not necessarily knowable truths. 

As for Eliot on the poet’s identity and their voice in a poem, he famously sculpted a ground-breaking poetic landscape by calling for the “continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinguishment of personality” of the poet, who, in this view, is a “medium” or a “catalyst” rather than the performer themselves. While I have emphasised that this is not entirely novel but  an adroit chimera of decades of poetic theory, most markedly Keats’ chameleon poetical character, (it is safe to assume that he studied and borrowed from it) this claim fiercely endures and pervades literary criticism even a century after its publication.

In this essay, Eliot explicitly dismisses Wordsworth’s formula of a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…recollected in tranquility” as “inexact” because to him, the poet is not a clairvoyant visionary, but “only a medium and not a personality” – a poet’s identity is independent of their faculty or their poetry. He goes on to make a distinction between emotions, which are experienced in one’s personal life, and feelings, which can be responses to larger ideas, impersonal stimuli and do not require experiences as much as they do keen observation and ruthless assessment. Eliot uses these concepts to create a new constitution for poetry in opposition with Wordsworth’s insistence on emotionalism as the bedrock for poetry, instead proposing that it is often some configuration of emotions and feelings that produces poetry, but that emotions are not a necessary condition for the same.  Poetry, for him, was not the “turning loose of emotion,” but an “escape from emotion.”

These arguments of poetic impersonality are well-articulated and have centuries of credibility. Returning to the two questions I had set out to answer, poetry cannot be reduced to stunning craft or deft metaphors. It is fundamentally, audaciously, occupied with truth, with perennially representing human nature and boldly documenting moral strife. However, these poets, with the exception of Wordsworth, all submit to an extinguished, or at least hidden poet. As a postmodern reader, I find myself wondering – what universal truth can poetry possibly represent, or more importantly, whose truth is it? I suspect that Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes or Adrienne Rich would be furious at Keats’ prescription of a chameleon identity. Eliot’s demand for the extinguishment of identity, given his genocidal bent and public support for a homogenised population, could create a dangerous poetic economy where depersonalised uniformity has currency, and divergent identities can be appropriated and sanitised, or worse, systemically erased by poetic purists (Kaveney, 2014).

As the poetic pantheon is being transformed and revised, it is important to read Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge and Eliot not as final authorities on poetry, but architects of antecedent poetic ecosystems whose ghosts still fuel meaningful discourse about authorship. In 1817, Keats wrote “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.” While we must be careful not to let their arguments become hegemonic, it is this urge, this bursting need to capture in poetry life, not just in its lived reality, but also in its unlimited, imaginative and compassionate potential that makes these essays worth reading.

Works Cited

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “From Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV by Samuel…” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 1817, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69385/from-biographia-literaria-chapter-xiv.

Dettmar, Kevin, et al. “A Hundred Years of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’” The New Yorker, 2019, http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-hundred-years-of-t-s-eliots-tradition-and-the-individual-talent.

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent by T. S. Eliot.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 1919, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent.

Eliot, T. S. “Poetry and Propaganda.” The Bookman for February, 1930.

Faure, Tom. “Keats and Identity: The Chameleon in the Crucible — Patrick J. Keane.” Numéro Cinq, 18 Jan. 2014, numerocinqmagazine.com/2014/01/14jn`/keats-and-identity-the-chameleon-in-the-crucible-patrick-j-keane/.

Kaveney, Roz. “TS Eliot and the Politics of Culture | Roz Kaveney.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 28 Apr. 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/28/ts-eliot-politics-of-culture-chill.

Keats, John. “Selections from Keats’s Letters by John Keats.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 1817, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69384/selections-from-keatss-letters.

Wordsworth, William. “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.” Preface to Lyrical Ballads. William Wordsworth (1800). 1909-14. Famous Prefaces. The Harvard Classics, 1801, http://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html.