Mill's Theory of Culture: The Wedding of Literature and Democracy

Abstract

Ever since M. H. Abrams directed attention to John Stuart Mill's essays on the nature of poetry, it has been generally recognized that his literary speculations, however slight in proportion to the main body of his work, are worthy of study. The 1833 essays, "What is Poetry?" and "The Two Kinds of Poetry," are now to be found in anthologies of nineteenth-century literature, as is the definition of poetry as moral inspiration from the 1867 Inaugural Address at St. Andrews University. Much has been written about Mill's theory of poetry, including a booklength study which makes his attitude towards poetry the basis of an inquiry into the relation between poetry and philosophy as such. Most discussions of Mill's writings on literature have considered them as isolated phenomena of the early part of his career, laudable yet temporary diversions of a mind essentially political from its fundamental interests. Since most of the specifically literary pieces appeared in the early part of Mill's career (before 1840) they are viewed as so many outgrowths of the mental crisis from which he recovered with the aid of poetry. When he had paid sufficient tribute to what had saved him, it is quietly assumed, he returned to his old non-literary occupations.