sidney keyes in historical perspective Beauty can be evaluated according to an objectivecriterion.An object is beautiful when it
appears free and independent of natural causes.^86
...nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so,
and not otherwise.^87
As a matter of fact all that has happened is that he [the writer] has made the poem out
of the poem itself: its final form is identical with its preliminary form in the poet’s mind,
uncorrupted by hints to the reader,familiar asides to make it less terrifying.^88
Some will call this opinion; I venture to call it an acute perception of the nature
of all major poetry: the eloquence growing out of, and returning to, itself, a
claim that can be demonstrated, by practical criticism, in the case of Shakespeare’s
dozen or so great sonnets,Paradise Regain’d,The Dunciad, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’,
‘Sunday Morning’, the ‘Byzantium’ poems, and numerous others. Keyes’s ‘William
Wordsworth’ has something of this kind of power, as do a number of Douglas’s
finest poems, and Drummond Allison’s ‘The Brass Horse’:
Never presume that in this marble stable
Furnished with imitation stalactites,
Withheld from any manger and unable
To stamp impatient hooves or show the whites
Of eyes whose lids are fixed, on sulky nights
He asks himself no questions, has no doubt
What he a brazen engine is about.
·······
We cannot guess what thoughts of combination
With the decaying cayman on the wall
Or the snow leopard blinded by elation
Trouble him in his Brahmin-carven stall,
For what Arabian mares and ribboned manes
He writhes his motionless metallic reins.^89Allison, Douglas, and Keyes are all without ‘hints to the reader’ as Riding and Graves
intend the phrase, whereas Elizabeth Jennings, say, cannot do without them. This
is not the same thing as suggesting that public attitudes towards accessibility do not
feature in the work of these three young war poets. They feature, but as a kind of
contingent factor or force by which to gauge the integrity and independence of the
individual voice.
(^86) Schiller,Friedrich Schiller: An Anthology for Our Time, 67.
(^87) Samuel Taylor Coleridge,Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, in
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vii (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton
University Press, 1983), ii. 12.
(^88) Laura Riding and Robert Graves, ASurvey of Modernist Poetry(London: William Heinemann,
1929), 142. 89
Allison, ‘The Brass Horse’, inYellow Night, 22.