1. 'From Virgil To Milton' by C.M.Bowra.
The so-called 'literary epic' has played a large part in the spiritual history of Europe, and this book discusses it in some of its most splended manifestations. After a preliminary chapter in which the author asks what such epic really is and in what circumstances it arises, he discusses Virgil's Aeneid, which is not only the poem of Imperial Rome but the ancestor of many other epics, especially in the Renaissance. Then he moves to the three great poems of Camoes, Tasso and Milton, and shows how the Renaissance, the Counter-Reformation and Puritanism each found its own epic poet who used the Virgilian model to write a heroic story and to give his far-reaching speculations about man and his place in the universe. The 'literary' epic not only includes some of the noblest poetry every written, but raises fundamental questions abou the real nature of heroism and shows how at different times men have tried to adapt heroic ideals to their own age and in the process have evolved new and striking conceptions of manhood. This kind of poetry, with its wide sweep and its consummate craftsmanship, is among the greatest works of man, and still makes a great appeal by the range of its imaginative vision and the noble integrity of its ethical ideals.
2. On Poetry and Poets by T.S.Eliot
p3. The Social Function of Poetry
When we speak of the 'function' of anything we are likely to be thinking of what that thing ought to do rather than what it does do or has done. That is an important distinction, because I do not intend to talk about what I think poetry ought to do. People who tell us what poetry ought to do, especially if they are poets themselves, usually have in mind the particular kind of poetry that they would like to write. It is always possible, of course, that poetry may have a different task in the future from what it has had in the past; but even if that is so, it is worth while to decide first what function it has had in the past, both at one time or another in one language or another, and universally. I could easily write about what I do with poetry myself, or what I would like to do, and then try to persuade you that it is exactly what all good poets have tried to do, or ought to have done, in the past - only they have not succeeded completely, but perhaps that is not their fault. But it seems to me probable that if poetry - and I mean all great poetry - has had no social function in the past, it is not likely to have any in the future.
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We may say that the duty of the poet, as poet, is only indirectly to his people: his direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve. In expressing what other people feel he is also changing the feeling by making it more conscious; he is making people more aware of what they feel already, and therefore teaching them something about themselves. But he is not merely a more conscious person than the others; he is also individually different from other people, and from other poets too, and can make his readers share consciously in new feelings which they had not experienced before. That is the difference between the writer who is merely eccentric or mad and the genuine poet. The former may have feelings which are unique but which cannot be shared, and are therefore useless; the latter discovers new variations of sensibility which can be appropriated by others.
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If, finally, I am right in believing that poetry has a 'social function' for the whole of the people of the poet's language, whether they are aware of his existence or not, it follows that it matters to each people of Europe that the others should continue to have poetry. I cannot read Norwegian poetry, but if I were told that no more poetry was being written in the Norwegian language I should feel an alarm which would be much more than generous sympathy. I should regard it as a spot of malady which was likely to spread over the whole Continent; the beginning of a decline which would mean that people everywhere would cease to be able to express, and consequently be able to feel, the emotions of civilized beings. This of course might happen. Much has been said everywhere about the decline of religious sensibility. The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe in certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can still understand; but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it become meaningless. It is true that religious feeling varies naturally from country to country, and from age to age, just as poetic feeling does; the feeling varies, even when the belief, the doctrine remains the same. But this is a condition of human life, and what I am apprehensive of is death. It is equally possible that the feeling for poetry, and the feelings which are the material of poetry, may disappear everywhere: which might perhaps help to facilitate that unification of the world which some people consider desirable for its own sake.
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