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Volume Five, December 2004

home » articles » Constantin Cheveresan



ON BRITISH NATURIST POETRY

One of the questions rarely asked by critics today relates to the changes undergone by naturist literature lately. In The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, Joseph Warren Beach remarks that the very name and concept of nature are absent from twentieth-century poetry, if we look at this poetry from the angle of the philosophical and protoreligious concept of nature in the eighteenth century.
That concept, that religion of nature was, broadly, based on Newton’s idea of the domination of one single law in everything around us—the law of gravitation. In that concept, which stressed order in nature, people, whose Christianity was wearing away, could find new ‘evidence’ of God’s existence and thus some remnant of religious emotion.
This relative comfort was going to be shattered by two new developments. One was the rise of the nineteenth-century geology with its evidence of catastrophes which had led to the disappearance of whole species, and the other one was Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the mindless force governing the evolution of species. The effect of these developments in literature was a decline of nature poetry and nature literature, for that matter.
The Anglo-American writers’ attitudes to post-Darwinian nature ranged between one of optimism (Swinburne) and one of pessimism (Hardy), both anthropomorphic still, before they found a prolific focus in a new concept, that of the mindlessness of nature, of nature’s non-human otherness.
Looked at from another angle, this conceptual evolution is fairly accountable for in the sphere of the novel, in particular. But not exclusively. The nineteenth-century novel had set itself to only report things as they were. By the end of the century, writers such as Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, the Brontës, J. Austen, Dickens, G. Eliot had exhausted the basic critique of industrial and bourgeois life, without any bright perspectives for the individual or for bourgeois society being brought into however distant sight. Theories of social change (Marxism, socialism, anarchism) were still far from having practical relevance, while social utopias, such as W. Morris’s or J. Ruskin’s were rather artificial and beyond what ordinary people could clearly comprehend. A new type of utopia was needed, one founded upon something already present ontologically in nature, upon the resuscitated authority of human and physical nature. Charles Darwin, with his work The Voyage of the Beagle, was the support on which naturism was built.
John Alcorn offers a working definition of the word. He considers the naturist world as “a world of physical organism where biology replaces theology as the source of psychic health and moral authority.”1 In that world, the naturist, following Darwin, shows “man as part of an animal continuum.”2 Man’s instincts are praised as able to ensure man’s happiness, while the life of the mind stirs little interest; so do abstractions. The conventional morality, dogma, or ethic of the commercial society are rejected. Sexual liberation becomes a constant topic. Formally, the naturist novelists built loose plot structures around elaborate landscape descriptions achieved by means of the moving camera effect of cinematographic art.
The term “naturist” is an appropriate one for an aesthetic attitude which reflects a single basic insight about human experience displayed by writers sometimes labelled “late Romantics,” “primitivists” (especially W. H. Hudson, H. M. Tomlinson, D. H. Lawrence), “naturalists,” “social realists,” “evolutionary utopians,” “liberal humanists” (S. Butler, E. M. Forster).
The predominant preoccupation of the twentieth-century philosophers with such concepts as “duration” (Bergson), “event” (Whitehead), “mind” (Dewey), “absurd” (Camus), “existence” (Heidegger) relates in each instance to one dimension of experience which clearly definite ideas fail to grasp.
This quality of concreteness is abundantly present in the writings of Thomas Hardy, particularly in his novels. The topography of Wessex, revealed to the reader by means of a detailed map of the area, first offered at the front of Far From the Madding Crowd, and later through the sensuous immediacy of his landscape, its vegetation, teeming with insect and animal life, the physical attitudes of its human inhabitants, are the prevailing ingredients for Hardy’s fiction.
The renewed attention Hardy pays to nature confers upon it an aesthetic value judged on its own terms relying on intensity, proportion, harmony, purity of look and spirit, own subconscious consciousness, sublimity, modernity, not necessarily “natural beauty.” Here are two extracts:

1. … the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath...
The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternisation towards which each advanced half-way...
Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without serenity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity.
... Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.
... Intensity was more usually reached by way of the solemn than by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was often arrived at during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then Egdon was aroused to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the wind its... friend.3

2. The grassy margin of the bank, and the nearest hedgerow boughs, were powdered by the dust that had been stirred over them by hasty vehicles, the same dust as it lay on the road deadening their footfalls like a carpet; and this, with the aforesaid total absence of conversation, allowed every extraneous sound to be heard.
For a long time there was none, beyond the voice of a weak bird singing a trite old evening song that might doubtless have been heard on the hill at the same hour, and with the self-same trills, quavers, and breves, at any sunset of that season for centuries untold. But as they approached the village, sundry distant shouts and rattles reached their ears from some elevated spot in that direction, as yet screened from view by foliage.4

His writings are important for the generations of writers after him, including those of the twentieth century, less for his ideas, opinions and attitudes, than for the impression they give.
Thomas Hardy displays an exuberant awareness of the earth, of the landscape, of the world of nature, which the naturists were to inherit. Here is Joseph Conrad with Stein’s butterfly in Lord Jim:

“Marvellous” he repeated, looking up at me. “Look! The beauty - but that is nothing - look at the accuracy, the harmony. And so fragile! And so strong! And so exact! This is nature - the balance of colossal forces. Every star is so - and every blade of grass stands so - and the mighty kosmos in perfect equilibrium produces - this. This wonder; this masterpiece of Nature - the great artist”. ‘ “Never heard an entomologist go on like this”, I observed, cheerfully. “Masterpiece! And what of man?”
“Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece”, he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the glass case. “Perhaps the artist was a little mad. Eh? What do you think? Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a great noise about himself, talking about the stars, disturbing about the blades of grass?...”5

Stein, we remember, is the one who can give an answer to the question “How live?”: “The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertion of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me—how to be?”6
And here is Norman Douglas with his introduction of the self-contained, mightier-than-man nature of Nepenthe in South Wind:

The scenery of Nepenthe. It got on his nerves; it unstrung him. Does that surprise you too? Do you feel its effect upon yourself? The bland winds, the sea shining in velvety depth as though filled with some electric fluid, the riot of vegetation, these extravagant cliffs, that change of colour with every hour of the day? Look at that peak yonder—is it not almost transparent, like some crystal of amethyst? This coast-line alone—the sheer effrontery of its mineral charm—might affect some natures to such an extent as to dislocate their stability. Northern winds might seem to become fluid here, impressionable, unstable, unbalanced—what you please. There is something in the brightness of this spot which decomposes the old particles and arranges them into fresh and unexpected patterns. That is what people mean when they say that they “discover themselves” here. You discover a mechanism, you know, when you take it to pieces. You catch my meaning?7

Or D. H. Lawrence with purely physical sensing and knowing in Women in Love:

... the goodness, the holiness, the desire for creation and productive happiness must have lapsed, leaving the single impulse for knowledge in one sort, mindless, progressive knowledge through the senses. Knowledge arrested and ending in the senses, mystic knowledge in disintegration and dissolution, knowledge such as the beetles have, which live purely within the world of corruption and cold dissolution. This was why her face looked like a beetle’s: this was why the Egyptians worshipped the ball-rolling scarab: because of the principle of knowledge in dissolution and corruption.8

or:

Birkin thought of Gerald. He was one of those strange white wonderful demons from the North, fulfilled in the destructive frost mystery. And was he fated to pass away in this knowledge, this one process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? Was he a messenger, an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow? 9

But the renewed attention to nature had come from the Romantic poets, particularly from Wordsworth’s nature worship. Wordsworth’s response to nature remains within the epistemological world as long as it derives ideas and feelings from his observation of a natural setting and builds a false appearance to it. For Wordsworth nature is ruled by a transcendental order which throws the elements of nature and the mind of man together.
In “Lines Written in Early Spring,” for example, Wordsworth laments over the decay of man by comparison with nature, although so much linked to it. The pleasant sights of nature urge the speaker to pity man, whose actions have ruined his own condition of late, going against “Nature’s holy plan”:

I heard a thousand blended notes
While in a grave I sate reclined
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran.
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.10

For Wordsworth, in spite of all the beauty and joy of nature - whose items the poet capitalises - man cannot avoid acquiring a “philosophic mind” on sensing his mortality, as in “Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”:

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they:
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet.
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That has kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race has been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears.
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.11

Like Wordsworth, Hardy too, uses a natural setting as a source of thoughts about man and of deep emotion. An example of this kind is “The Prospect” (1912), where the cold end of the year and of vegetal nature foretells man’s own mortality without any comment from the speaker:

The twigs of a birch imprint the December sky
Like branching veins upon a thin old hand;
I think of summer-time, yes, of lost July,
When she was beneath them, greeting a gathered band
Of the urban and bland.
Iced airs wheeze through the skeletoned hedge from the north.
With steady snores, and a mumbling that threatens snow,
And skaters pass; and merry boys go forth
To look for slides. But well, well I do know
Whither I would go!12

There are, not too frequent indeed, occasions when Hardy shows man as not emotionally affected by nature, when he is not committed to the “pathetic fallacy,” as Ruskin called it. Speaking about the fallacy of false appearance in poetry, John Ruskin finds it to be of two kinds: “the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real expectation that it will be believed” and “a fallacy caused by the excited state of feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational.”13 Analysing the latter, Ruskin says that all violent feelings have the same effect of creating a state of mind which attributes to a thing the characteristics of a living creature: “they produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterise as the ‘pathetic fallacy.’”14 He adds that only the second order of poets delight in this fallacy, while “the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness”15 and that “the pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as it is pathetic”, that is as long as the distortion operated has psychological validity, as long as it is appropriate to the observer’s true emotion, and “feeble so far as it is fallacious.”16 For him “the dominion of Truth is entire, over this, as over every other natural and just state of the human mind.”17 The best poetry then will try to oppose, or at least appear to do so, the pathetic fallacy, to go beyond the nineteenth-century poets’ view of a life in nature different from but compatible with man’s, and reach the view of “an alien, even an unfeeling existence”18 in nature.
In one of the “most purely beautiful of all his poems,”19 entitled “Afterwards,” Hardy avoids the pathetic fallacy. Although the speaker realises the harshness of life and the wearing off of the best part of it, the poet reveals a patience and a silent strength only an animal can display. He is the countryman for whom the countryside is not beautiful but just there for him to immerse in and, unknowingly enough, to enjoy its sights and sounds:

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad grass leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
‘To him this must have been a familiar sight’.
If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, ‘He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone’.

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens, that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’!20

What the speaker expects to happen when he is gone is the mere recognition of his having noticed the things, of his having existed there as part of the scene. His sense of life as going on and on, unperturbed, subject only to the all-encompassing will of Nature, while including and transcending man’s frail endeavours and initiatives, gives him the strength to live, indifferent to whether he is in harmony with Nature or not.
It is clear enough, from this poem at least, that Hardy’s poetic vision stands in between Wordsworth’s, which is based on a distance between object (the landscape) and subject (the poet) and the naturist’s, which tries to avoid this separation by placing the personal subject within the impersonal world of Nature, to “obliterate the observing, thinking, feeling first-person, the Wordsworthian ‘I’.”21
Darwin’s view of the world was basically melioristic. The evolution of man involving his continual rise through the cumulative effect of small variations towards his present condition, not a perpetuation of a condition given him at the beginning, represented a hope for a better world. In Darwin’s view, man’s advance was to be based on the hidden geological truth of various places, of the environment which provided the wisdom to survive. Hardy too, imagines expressions of hope to come from no human or superhuman agency, including the speaker himself, but from the “ecstatic sound” of bird-song he hears in “The Darkling Thrush”:

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy, illimited.

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small.
In blust-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around.
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.22

The world of the bird, his knowledge or, rather, wisdom, is not ‘at one’ with any man’s; it is incomprehensible but hopefully superior.
D. H. Lawrence wrote what could be called animal poems, in which he set the pattern and style for the new naturist poem. In “Fish,” we are looking at an alien life (the fish) in an alien element (water) with which he is in perfect oneness, devoid of knowledge, self, in pure unconsciousness:

As the waters roll
Roll you.
The waters wash.
You wash in oneness
And never emerge,
Never know
Never grasp
Your life a shine of sensation along your sides,
You lie only with the waters
One touch.23

An explicit moral of many animal poems written at about that time is offered, not too poetically, at the end:

And my heart accused itself
Thinking: I am not the measure of creation.
This is beyond me, this fish
His God stands outside my God.24

The apparent separation of the two worlds: man’s, on the one side, and the water element’s with the fish belonging in it, on the other side, is not an isolation, not an alienation, but a recognition and a granting of self-identity to the alien element, resulting from the disantropomorphising attitude of the poet in his rating of forms of existence, in defiance of any chain-of-being status.
The same artistic tendency to disantropomorphisation is obvious in the best-known animal poem, D. H. Lawrence’s “Snake” (1932). The speaker and the snake meet at the trough, where they have come for water, and the speaker, the second comer, must observe the snake’s right of priority of arrival over the right of property:

A snake came to my water trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with the pitcher
And must wait, must wait and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.25

The speaker grants the snake, this “someone”, equal status to his own:

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.26

The snake is the son of the earth. He contains within himself the heat of a tropical area (Sicily) on a hot July day and also the energy of a volcano (Etna) in full activity:

He... flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stopped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.27

The snake is described in all his physical immediacy. His slow movements, his self-containment and his mystery lend him an aura of majesty, of Godlikeness:

He drank enough
And lifted its head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air.
And slowly turned his head.
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.28

The speaker wavers between two opposing attitudes. One comes from the ‘voices’ of his social consciousness, resulting from his education, which urges him to kill the animal, as gold snakes are considered venomous in Sicily. The other one comes from a somewhat guilty unconscious liking for the snake, a liking which has to be ‘confessed’:

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water trough,

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth? 29

He weighs his attitude, his unknowing inclination to awe before the snake:


Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.30

The speaker’s gesture of throwing a log at the water-trough is prompted by the ‘horror’ and ‘protest’ against the snake’s withdrawal into the “horrid black hole” at which he “stared with fascination”, though. Yet it is a gesture reminiscent of ordinary man’s, prompted by his education, one which he regretted immediately as being “mean”:

And immediately I regretted it
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.31

If Lawrence’s fish had a different God from man’s, belonging to another order of existence, his snake is superior to the speaker. The latter sees him as “a king in exile,” deserving to regain his crown, as “one of the lords of life.” He admits his “pettiness” in front of this god of our submerged unconscious and libidinal life32:

And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.33

The snake is given symbolic significance by Lawrence by both the quality of the language used in describing his appearance and movements and by the conflict he induces in the speaker. The language used helps the reader to recognise at the end that the snake is “one of the lords of life,” not life in general, not even the best aspect of life, possibly, since we cannot avoid considering the traditional symbolic associations of the snake with evil or the devil. The conflict produced in the speaker has to be taken as a whole to contribute to the symbolic significance and to qualify the snake as both positive and threatening.
Analysing the language, we notice a shift from the presence of two separate realms—the man and the snake—towards a communion of the two orders: the snake “reached down,” “sipped at the water,” “departed thankless,” “seemed to lick his lips.” The anthropomorphic image is rounded off when the speaker says that “Someone was before me at my water-trough,” to consecrate an equation of snake and man. But later the snake becomes superior to the speaker, being described “like a god” and “like a king in exile,” “a lord of life,” to be worshipped and appreciated as “my snake.”
The conflict in the speaker is between what the “voice” of his “education” and other voices in him tell him: to “kill” the snake, to “break him,” to “finish him off,” and the truth that he likes the snake. The voices speak of his being society-conditioned to repress all that springs from “the burning bowels of the earth.” We can assume therefore the inner conflict of the speaker to be between his “human education” and what society has taught him (to fear the snake and drive him back into “the secret earth”) and his affection for the earthly or elemental desires and emotions, hidden beneath the surface, where society would like them to stay, out of convenience. Instead of facing the problem, the speaker rids himself of it by hastening the snake’s withdrawal.
Lawrence’s description of the snake’s movements into the “earth-lipped fissure of the wall-front,” at which he “stared in fascination” is done in clear sexual overtones. His revulsion at the snake’s movement may be the result of repression. The psychological threat lying in acceptance of passions he has been taught to repress is greater than the psychical threat the snake might pose for the speaker. The latter remains with a “pettiness” “to atone for,” in Lawrence’s view.
Another remark is in order here. Noticing that Lawrence ended his poem Fish by saying

In the beginning
Jesus was called The Fish
And in the end (,)

and remembering that the snake is a “god,” we grasp Lawrence’s dialectic which “takes us over from water to animals to gods.”34
The neo-pantheistic vision of Dylan Thomas accommodated modern ideas taken from Darwin, Freud and Frazer, combined with a preoccupation with theology and paradox. In A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, death is seen as the reality of a “return to the beginning of things,”35 a return to the elements, such as earth and water, to the all-powerful darkness, to the “bird, beast and flower” (echoing Lawrence’s volume Birds, Beasts and Flowers—1932, the poems of which reflect the consciousness of nonhuman life) which contributed to the making of mankind. An eternal becoming in nature, a ceaseless life sustained by a biological and a theological vision is what D. Thomas would like the reader to consider:
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sack cloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child’s death.36

Pursuing one of his favourite themes, the “universal analogy” and its incommunicability,37 D. Thomas, a primitivistic but far from primitive poet, sees himself as silently, subconsciously communing with the natural elements, with all forms of physical being (plant, water, wind) by means of the same “governing” life force in “The Force That Through the Green Fuse” (1934):

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax...

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; 38

We see the life force exploding all living things into birth, maturity, death, each stage implying all the others. The impersonal physical force that “drives the water through the rocks” is identical to the one that drives the speaker’s blood. But it also constitutes a death trap represented by whirlpools, quicksand, windstorms.
All mortality reaches out powerful for life force to impregnate it in an image of universe-wide scale sexual analogy:

The lips of time leech to the fountain head:
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores, 39

‘The dumbness’ of the speaker makes it impossible to tell “the universal secret of destruction” or his dream that “time has ticked a heaven round the stars” and in this way, with Thomas’s modern turn, of lost certainties in the universe.
Thus, naturist poetry pressed forward into the modern period with suspicions regarding communication among people, with doubts about the meaningfulness and relevance of rational discourse, with resistance of conceptualisation, with ideas about human ‘relatedness’ being grounded in unconscious physical organism.
J. Alcorn brings back to memory the story of the wise monk about to deliver a discourse in front of his disciples. A bird alighted on the window-sill and began to sing: “The great hall was filled with bird-song; the monk and his students listened in silence; the bird finished its singing and flew away. Thereupon the monk abruptly dismissed his disciples saying ‘The sermon is over’.”40 The story gracefully illustrates the blessed spirit of the naturists.


Notes:
1. J. Alcorn, The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence (London and Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd. 1977). X.
2. Ibid., X.
3. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (Harmondsworth, Middlessex: Penguin Books Ltd. 1983), 53-55.
4. Thomas Hardy, The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan London Limited. 1972), 9.
5. Joseph Conrad, 1976, Lord Jim (Harmondsworth, Middlessex: Penguin Books Ltd. 1976), 158-9.
6. Ibid., 163.
7. N. Douglas, South Wind (New York: The Modern Library Inc. 1925), 223.
8. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Harmondsworth, Middlessex: Penguin Books Ltd. 1971), 285-8.
9. Ibid., 287.
10. D. Wright, The Penguin Book of English Romantic Verse (Harmondsworth, Middlessex: Penguin Books Ltd. 1970), 108-9.
11. Ibid., 138-9.
12. J. Wain (ed.), Selected Shorter Poems of Thomas Hardy (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan London Ltd. 1972), 101.
13. John Ruskin, “Modern Painters” (ch. XII. Of the Pathetic Fallacy), in A.Cartianu, St. Stoenescu (eds.), Proza eseistica victoriana. Antologie (Bucuresti: Tipografia Universitatii. 1969), 747-7.
14. Ibid., 747.
15. Ibid., 747.
16. Ibid., 747.
17. Ibid., 760.
18. R. Langbaum, The Modern Spirit. Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press. 1970), 104.
19. J. Wain, op.cit. (1966), XIV.
20. Ibid., 87.
21. J. Alcorn, op.cit. 4.
22. J. Wain, op.cit. (1972), 20-1.
23. R. Langbaum, op.cit. 114.
24. Ibid., 114.
25. A. W. Allison et al. (eds), The Norton Anthology (New York: W.W. Norton. 1975), 486.
26. Ibid., 486.
27. Ibid., 486.
28. Ibid., 487.
29. Ibid., 487.
30. Ibid., 487.
31. Ibid., 487.
32. R. Langbaum, op.cit. 115.
33. A. W. Allison et al., op.cit. 488.
34. R. Langbaum, op.cit. 118.
35. C. Brooks, R. P. Warren, Understanding Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. 1961), 196.
36. Ibid., 195.
37. M. L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets. A Critical Introduction (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. 1969), 204.
38. C. Brooks, R. P. Warren, op.cit. 385.
39. Ibid., 386.
40. J. Alcorn, op.cit. 123.


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