Its aim, however, is not to establish correlations between facts which will enable us to predict the future by reference to the past, but to establish principles enabling us to justify, order, and clarify our interpretation and appraisal of the aesthetic facts themselves.”

Abrams’s explanation of his focus on the history of Aesthetics and literary criticism demonstrates his overarching purpose in the book. Rather than focus on surface analysis or factual discussions, he emulates romantic thinkers by highlighting the foundations of literary criticism and poetry itself to create a more integrated critical approach.

“The first test any poem must pass is no longer, ‘Is it true to nature?’ or ‘Is it appropriate to the requirements either of the best judges or the generality of mankind?’ but a criterion looking in a different direction; namely, ‘Is it sincere? Is it genuine? Does it match the intention, the feeling, and the actual state of mind of the poet while composing?’”

This description of the shift in evaluative criteria in the romantic period highlights the importance of the poet and emotion in romantic poetry and critical thought. Abrams shows that the means by which scholars and poets judged poetry looked at whether the poem was “sincere” and “genuine” to the poet’s subjective and emotional experience.

“We tend to describe the nature of something in similes and metaphors, and the vehicles of these recurrent figures, when analyzed, often turn out to be the attributes of an implicit analogue through which we are viewing the object we describe. And if I am right, Plato’s deliberate use of analogue and parable differs from that of many other inquirers less in tactics than in candor.”

Here, Abrams accomplishes two important things for his larger argument—he explains clearly a standard non-literary use of metaphor and simile that connects literary criticism and literature simultaneously to other disciplines. He also includes a caveat, “if I am right,” which builds his ethos, demonstrating that though he believes this is the correct argument, there is clearly room for interpretation, which reinforces his larger points throughout the book.

“The endemic disease of analogical thinking, however, is hardening of the categories. For as Coleridge said, ‘No simile runs on all four legs’; analogues are by their nature only partial parallels, and the very sharpness of focus afforded by a happily chosen archetype makes marginal and elusive those qualities of an object which fall outside its primitive categories.”

This passage features two of Abrams’s repeated rhetorical strategies throughout the book. The first is his meta approach to criticism in the metaphorical connection between categorical thinking and heart disease in the first line; that meta-approach explicitly explains his argument while demonstrating the same argument figuratively. This continues into the Coleridge quotation, which is another of Abrams’s strategies—to reference poet critics as authorities to enhance his own focus on the philosophical framework of the poet.

“But whether poets or speakers in prose, we cannot discuss the activities of the mind without metaphor. In the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the transformation of the key images by which critics pictured the process and product of art is a convenient index to a comprehensive revolution in the theory of poetry, and of all the arts.”

Abrams’s repeated insistence on the value and importance of metaphor in understanding the history of poetic criticism ties the language of poetry to the critique of poetry. The shift in the metaphorical language doesn’t just signify a shift in thinking, but is the change in philosophy itself.

“The change from imitation to expression, and from the mirror to the fountain, the lamp, and related analogues, was not an isolated phenomenon. It was an integral part of a corresponding change in popular epistemology—that is, in the concept of the role played by the mind in perception which was current among Romantic poets and critics.”

This passage illustrates one of Abrams’s most effective rhetorical moves: connecting literary criticism and poetry with philosophy. Throughout the book, he references philosophers and philosophical schools of thought, and relates them to art and poetry. This connection accomplishes an increase in ethos of both Abrams as a scholar and literary criticism as a field.

“The Copernican revolution in epistemology—if we do not restrict this to Kant’s specific doctrine that the mind imposes the forms of time, space, and the categories on the ‘sensuous manifold,’ but apply it to the general concept that the perceiving mind discovers what it has itself partly made—was effecting in England by poets and critics before it manifested itself in academic philosophy.”

Abrams regularly ties philosophy and poetry together, using philosophical movements to describe and contextualize poetic movements. Here, however, The Marriage of Poetry and Philosophy reverses the importance and profundity of the connection between the two disciplines. Poetry actually uses “the Copernican revolution in epistemology” before philosophy can describe or explain it.

“We may say, then, by way of summary, that in the theory of Coleridge (partly though not consistently paralleled by that of Wordsworth) the primary and already creative act of perception yields the ‘inanimate cold world’ of the ever-anxious crowd. This coincides roughly with the inert world of both empirical philosophy and of common sense, which is perceived only in so far as it serves our practical interests and aims.”

Abrams’s poetic approach to explaining Coleridge’s theories of creation and perception linguistically references The Marriage of Poetry and Philosophy. The descriptions of the world without the addition of poetic creation as “cold” and “inert” subtly reinforce Coleridge’s point that poetry is part of the life of experience.

“In his discussion of the special quality of Hebrew style, Lowth posits a distinction between prose as the language of reason and poetry as the language of emotion which looks back to Dennis’ use of passion to differentiate poetic from prosaic language, and ahead to Wordsworth’s statement that ‘Poetry is passion,’ the opposite of ‘Matter of Fact, or Science.’”

The difference in definition between poetry and prose is a recurring element of Abrams’s exploration of The Nature of Poetry. Here, he ties prose to “reason,” “Fact,” and “Science” referencing multiple poets and scholars to demonstrate a historical cohesion in definitions.

“The same antithesis between the language of nature and of art, together with the rejection of art, prompts the epithets Wordsworth applies to the characteristic diction of the eighteenth-century poets. This diction is ‘artificial,’ and the result of ‘false refinement or arbitrary innovation’; detached from the laws of human nature, and therefore ‘arbitrary and capricious’; ‘spoken by rote’ rather than ‘instinctively ejaculated’; and in consequence, it replaces the natural and universal language of men by ‘a family language,’ passed on from father to son ‘as the common inheritance of Poets.’”

Abrams only occasionally turns to of language analysis, and here he focuses on Wordsworth’s work on poetic language and its connection to the natural world. Wordsworth’s complaint about much of the poetry of the 18th century was its artifice. Presenting an argument for poetic diction naturally occurring is one element of Abrams’s exploration into The Nature of Poetry.

“By defining a poem as a means to an ‘object,’ ‘purpose,’ or ‘end’ (terms which he employs as synonyms), Coleridge, quite in the tradition of neo-classic criticism, establishes the making of poems to be a deliberate art, rather than the spontaneous overflow of feeling.”

This discussion of Coleridge’s definition of a poem highlights both the differences between Coleridge and Wordsworth and provides an element of The Nature of Poetry. Although Coleridge agreed that poetry’s core was the expression of emotion, he refines Wordsworth’s theories to place value in the poet’s creative and intentional thought.

“In sum, Coleridge holds that the greatest poetry is, indeed, the product of spontaneous feeling, but feeling which, by a productive tension with the impulse for order, sets in motion the assimilative imagination and (balanced by its antagonists, purpose and judgment, and supplemented by the emotion inherent in the act of composition itself) organizes itself into a conventional medium in which the pars and the whole are adapted both to each other and to the purpose of effective pleasure.”

This description of Coleridge’s concept of the act of poetic creation, and his criteria for evaluation treats Coleridge as a foundational literary critic, enhancing The Poet as Critic as a central theme in the book. Coleridge moves beyond Wordsworth’s nature-oriented definitions to offer a complex and philosophical perspective of evaluation, analysis, and poetic creation.

“To enjoy literature is to reachieve the catharsis of its creator; the question of taste reduces mainly to the congruence of one’s emotional needs with those of a particular writer; when the reader looks at the work, what he finds is a veiled reflection of if its author.”

This passage connects Mimetic, Pragmatic, and Expressive Theories in the concept of catharsis. In all three schools of thought, there is agreement that poetry reflects, expresses emotion, and evokes emotion in the audience. By showing a common ground between these theories, Abrams reinforces his initial point that although he’s separated theoretical movements, there are no serious theories that ignore any element of poetic creation and experience.

“What we now call the psychology of art had its origin when theorists in general began to think of the mind of the artist as interposed between the world of sense and the work of art, and to attribute the conspicuous differences between art and reality, not to the reflection of an external ideal, but to forces and operations within the mind itself.”

The philosophical necessity to turn to art in an attempt to understand the workings of the mind is perhaps the most compelling element of The Marriage of Poetry and Philosophy. In acknowledging the living state of the world, Hume and others had to acknowledge the creative force of the mind, and therefore acknowledge the benefit of poetry and art to humanity.

Otherwise stated: if the process of imagination is conceived as images moved by purely mechanical, or efficient causes of attraction—each present image pulling in the next automatically, according to the accident of its inherent similarity or of its contiguity in past experience—how are we to explain that the result is a cosmos instead of a chaos? And how are we to account for the difference between the incoherent associations of delirium and the orderly, productive associations of a Shakespeare?”

The questions Abrams poses here invite the reader into the broader discussion of art and poetry explored in the first half of the book. The rhetorical choice to ask and then provide a variety of answers to a given question commonly encourages reader engagement, but it also underscores the importance of that element of the discussion. Here, the conundrum faced by Hume becomes the common problem of Abrams and the reader.

“Indeed, it is astonishing how much of Coleridge’s critical writing is couched in terms that are metaphorical for art and literal for a plant; if Plato’s dialectic is a wilderness of mirrors, Coleridge’s is a very jungle of vegetation. Only let the vehicles of his metaphors come alive, and you see all the objects of criticism writhe surrealistically into plants or part s of plants, growing in tropical profusion…The fact is, Coleridge’s insistence on the distinction between the living imagination and the mechanical fancy was but a part of his all-out war against the ‘Mechanico-corpuscular Philosophy’ on every front.”

Abrams’s flowery prose here marks a shift in his own purpose and discussion. In the first half of the book, Abrams focused on facts of historical literary criticism, and naming and explaining the important shifts at the start of the romantic period. Here, however, his focus on Coleridge’s language shows Abrams entering into the discussion for which he’s laid the groundwork.

“The dominant English psychology of empiricism had no place either for the concept of growth or of the subliminal in the activities of the mind. The psychology of Leibniz, on the other hand, so influential in Germany in the latter eighteenth century, was favorable to both those concepts.”

Abrams actively connects the subliminal activity of the unconscious mind to romantic poetic ideas of imagination and organic growth in Shelley and Coleridge. Combining traditionally philosophic and psychological concepts with literary criticism advances The Marriage of Poetry and Philosophy and connects that theme to The Nature of Poetry.

“Certainly in [Coleridge’s] criticism he appropriated nothing that he did not assimilate to his own principles, he restated little that he did not improve, and he succeeded better than any of his predecessors in converting the organic concept of the imagination into an inclusive and practicable method for specifically literary analysis and evaluation.”

Abrams argues here that Coleridge was a true philosopher in that he individually advanced the concept of an organic, living universe beyond the German philosophers who established the theory. This argument supports The Marriage of Poetry and Philosophy by characterizing Coleridge not only as a philosopher, but as a philosopher who advanced a complex and novel view of the universe by engaging questions related to the creation of poetry.

“Which leads us to the further discovery that each of these portraits of Milton bears a notable likeness to the portraitist. Coleridge, miserably unhappy with Sara Fricker and in love with Sara Hutchinson, saw Milton in a similar predicament, longing for a wife as comely and tractable as Eve. Blake re-created Milton in his own antinomian image. And if it seemed to Shelley that Milton projected his hatred of tyranny in the character of Satan, Shelley’s own life was a classic case history of rebellion…It would appear, then, that a biographical interpretation of a work may, on its own principles, be interpreted by the biography of the interpreter.”

The suggestion here that interpretation reveals more about the interpreter than the subject of interpretation is either supportive of Expressive Theory’s focus on the Artist, or a possible flaw in the romantic approach. Although Abrams doesn’t follow through in either direction, allowing for the possibility of a serious issue with Expressive Theory opens up avenues for new approaches in further criticism.

“If the process of composition is thus conceived to be a kind of encoding, the task for criticism becomes one of decoding; and Keble shamelessly undertakes to lift the veils with which the ancient poets—Greek and Roman, epic, tragic, and lyric—had modestly screened their intimate selves.”

The conditional “if” at the beginning of this passage linked with the evocative “shamelessly” is a subtle linguistic strategy that suggests Keble is either wrong, or that Keble demonstrates a problem in Expressive Theory related to interpretation. Similarly to the previous passage, reducing writing a poem to encoding and decoding leads to possibly inaccurate and misleading perspectives on even the most well-known and respected texts.

“At one extreme are the critics who agreed with Hume that ‘the mind is displeased to find a picture, which bears no resemblance to any original.’ At the other, we find Thomas Twining who agreed wholeheartedly with what he thought to be the opinion of Aristotle, that the end of poetry is pleasure, and that therefore we must justify in poetry ‘not only impossibilities, but even absurdities, where that end appears to be better answered with them, than it would have been without them.’”

This passage focuses on the tension within Pragmatic Theory and the Enlightenment about the relationship between poetry and truth. Placing Hume in opposition to Aristotle, and by extension Pragmatic Audience oriented thinkers demonstrates the ongoing importance of pleasure in defining poetry and even considerations of truth.

“According to the most fundamental neo-classic frame of reference, language is the ‘dress’ of thought, and figures are the ‘ornaments’ of language, for the sake of the pleasurable emotion which distinguishes a poetic from a merely didactic discourse.”

Throughout the second half of the book, Abrams complicates his own co-ordinates of poetic theory, which invites more investigation in future criticism. The conflict regarding truth and usefulness in discussions of poetry highlights connections between theories—here the language oriented analysis reinforces the Pragmatic view of poetry as useful because it provides pleasure to the reader.

“The traditional scheme underlying many eighteenth-century discussions of the relation of poetry to other discourse may be summarized in this way: poetry is truth which has been ornamented by fiction and figures in order to delight and move the reader; the representation of truth, and nothing but the truth, is non-poetry; the use of deceptive or inappropriate ornaments is bad poetry. For Wordsworth and the Wordsworthians, on the other hand, the equivalent paradigm was this: poetry is the overflow or expression of feeling in an integral and naturally figurative language; the representation of fact unmodified by feeling is non-poetry; the simulated or conventional expression of feeling is bad poetry.”

In Abrams’s discussion of truth, he offers several models that describe poetry and its opposite, or poetic truth in opposition to scientific truth. Here, he provides a model that also offers a potential definition of poetry that can continue beyond the romantic period.