"A Thing to Mind": The Materialist Aesthetic of William Morris

Abstract

Perhaps because poetry descends to us through an early tradition of recitation and performance, poets set a high value on the integration of medium and message. In an ideal relation, form and content interact completely, as Yeats argued when he imagined the fusion of the dancer and the dance. Yeats applied that figure of an integral art to a specifically poetic ideal; and he did so because he knew how difficult the ideal had become for the practicing poet. In a social environment dominated by typographical media and their institutions, the poet no longer stands in the same immediate relation to his work as the dancer might be imagined to stand. A physical gap has opened between the poet and the execution of the poem. From Yeats's perspective at the beginning of the twentieth century, the gap had become an institutionalized gulf. The work of William Morris, like that of Blake and Dickinson, seems to me most significant as an effort to come to grips with this problem of poetry's relation to its material encoding.l In Morris's view the problem had become especially acute about four hundred years earlier, when the scriptural tradition began to pass over into the age of print. So long as printing and bookmaking were skilled crafts carried out in a culture of artisanal practices, the problem was, according to Morris, a manageable one. But processes of mechanization developed rapidly, and poets had increasingly to accommodate the production and distribution of