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outside the conscious mind. Plato, moreover, sees no social justification for poetry. “The emotions aroused”, retorts Aristotle, “serve a social end, that of catharsis.”

      Such a definition of poetry is insufficient in literature to-day, not because the Greeks were wrong but because literature, like society, has changed. If he were systematising literature to-day, Aristotle would see that the criterion of mimesis was insufficient to distinguish the existing species of literature, not because of any weakness in the original definition, but simply because in the course of social evolution new forms of literature had arisen. Mimesis is characteristic also of the modern novel and prose play. What we nowadays agree to call poetry is something apart from both play and novel, for which fresh specific differences must be sought. Our next task is to find them.

      But Aristotle’s definition reminds us that we cannot, in studying the sources of poetry, ignore the study of other forms of literature, because there is a time when all literature is poetry. A materialistic approach to culture avoids any such error. We have already seen that there is a time when all religion as well as all literature is poetry. Yet as moderns, as men living in the age of capitalism, our concern must be principally with bourgeois’ poetry. Our next section therefore will be devoted to a general historical study of the development of modern poetry.

      ¹ Marx, On Hege’s Philosophy of Law.

      ¹ Ion, translated by Shelley.

      III THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN POETRY

      1

      WHEN we use the world “modern” in a general sense, we use it to describe a whole complex of culture which developed in Europe and spread beyond it from the fifteenth century to the present day. There is something “modern” in Shakespeare, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Pope, Goethe and Voltaire which we can distinguish from Homer, Thales, Chaucer and Beowulf, and compare with Valery, Cezanne, James Joyce, Bergson and Einstein. This complex rests on an economic foundation. The complex itself is changeful—no epoch of human history has been so variegated and dynamic as that from the Elizabethan age to ours. But then, the economic foundations too have changed, from feudal to “industrial”. This culture complex is the superstructure of the bourgeois revolution in production—a revolution whose nature was first analysed completely by Marx in Das Kapital Modern poetry is capitalist poetry.

      It is impossible to understand modern poetry unless we understand it historically—in motion. We can only bring back dead formulae from a study of poetry as static “works of art”, as something frozen and ossified. This is particularly true where poetry is the organic product of a whole society violently in motion.

      Yet to study the poetry of bourgeois culture as a whole during that time is a formidable task. Many nations and many languages have been caught up into the bourgeois movement, and yet it is the characteristic of poetry that it demands for its appreciation a, more intimate knowledge of the language in which it was written than any other form of literature.

      But as it happens, England pioneered the bourgeois revolution in economy. Italy preceded it—but its development was stifled early. America outstripped it—but only at a late date. In England alone the greater part of the bourgeois revolution unfolded itself, and from there spread to the rest of the globe.

      In France during the period 1789-1871 the bourgeois revolution moved through many stages with greater speed, greater precision and more relentless logic than here, but its very speed made the ideological superstructure more confused. For a study of bourgeois literary art in general, France during that short period is more valuable; but for the study of poetry in particular; England—where the revolution unfolded itself so much snore evenly and in so much more detail—is a better field.

      Owing to its earlier and fuller development, the decay of English bourgeois economy arrived later than in other countries. Therefore during the period of Imperialism the poetic symptoms come to light at first in other countries than England—in France, Germany and Russia With the exception, therefore, of this concluding period, our historical survey of modern poetry will be confined to one country—England.

      It is no accident that this same country, England, has also been notable for the volume and variety of its contribution to modern poetry. The fact that England for three centuries led the world in the development of capitalism and that, during the same period, it led the world in the development of poetry, are not unrelated coincidences but part of the same movement of history.

      The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

      The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”.

      The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the means of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguished the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.¹

      Capitalist poetry reflects these conditions. It is the outcome of these conditions. The birth of poetry took place from the Undifferentiated matrix of the tribe, which gave it a mythological character. It separated itself from religion as the-art of a ruling class in class society, but, except in moments of revolutionary transition like that of fourth century B.C. Greece, this art led a quiet existence, mirroring the slow rise and slow collapse of a class “whose first condition of existence is conservation of its mode of production in unaltered form”. Then a class developed beneath the quiet, stiff art of feudalism, whose vigour is first announced by the Gothic cathedrals. This class in turn became a ruling class, but one whose conditions of existence is a constant revolution of the means of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.

      Its art is therefore in its essence an insurgent, non-formal. naturalistic art. Only the art of revolutionary Greece in any way forecasts the naturalism of bourgeois art. It is an art which constantly revolutionises its own conventions, just as bourgeois economy constantly revolutionises its own means of production. This constant revolution, this constant sweeping-away of “ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions”, this “everlasting uncertainty and agitation”, distinguishes bourgeois art from all previous art. Any bourgeois artist who even for a generation rests upon the conventions of his time becomes “academic” and his art lifeless. This same movement is characteristic of English poetry.

      The characteristic of capitalist economy is that it apparently sweeps away all directly coercive relations between men—and seems to substitute for them the coercive relations of men to a thing—the State-upheld right to property. Men are no longer coercively tied together, as in a feudal society serf is tied to lord and, lord to overlord, but they produce independently for the free market, and buy independently, from this same free market. They take note merely their products but their abilities to the market and are entitled to sell their labour-power there without let or hindrance to the highest bidder. This unreserved access to an unrestricted market constitutes the “freedom” of capitalist society.

      Thus there appear to be no coercive relations between men, but only force-upheld relations between men and a thing (property) which result in relations between an individual and the market. The market seems to be a part of Nature, a piece of the environment, subject to natural “laws” of supply and demand. Its coercion does not seem the coercion of men, but of blind natural forces, like a gale or volcanic eruption.

      In fact the

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