Stylistics: A Bridging of Life and Art in Seventeenth-Century Studies

Abstract

ANUMBER of recent articles1 have pointed out that twentiethcentury critical ideals of organic wholeness, disinterested appreciation, and ahistorical universality, while innocuous in themselves, have, almost unnoticeably, brought about some deleterious results. The very stress on the self-completeness of art has tended to exclude both author and reader from serious attention, to force consideration of the work as an objective entity, rather than as a tool that makes a connection between the author and the reader, or as what Kenneth Burke calls equipment for living.'2 As soon as this detachment of the work occurs, it tends to become value-free: Milton thought he was writing to enable personal redemption and social revolution; we note merely that he revived certain epic devices.1 As the quotation indicates, value-free art must have form to recommend it; our moral detachment has brought about an unseen bias in favor of those pieces of literature whose completeness of design implies fulfillment within a given scheme of things, and until recently even Milton's poetry has not qualified for inclusion in that canon. Fearing the dullness of propagandistic and slice-of-life art, both writers and critics have repeatedly insisted that art is not and cannot be life. Yet that insistence, important as it is in some respects, tends to isolate art, and to discount the creative influence that life and art can have upon each other. Whether their relationship is defined as mirror imagery or the stages of a continuum, there is a point where they touch, and can be described by identical techniques, confronted in