The Romantic Matter of Fact

Abstract

A shilling life will give all the facts. The note of knowing scorn in the opening line of Auden's sonnet Who's Who (Collected Poems 126) suggests, not that are wrong exactly, but that the only are ever likely to establish in the public realm (how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night) are bound to disappoint never bring you? very close to who's really who. But the poem is far from against per se, with the turn of the sonnet turns toward the kind of that, were knowable, would tell just what want to know. But these are private realities that the archives are never going to disclose: he sighed for one Who, say astonished critics, lived at home; Did little jobs about the house with skill And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still Or potter round the garden ... Those lines are poignantly invested with the rapt enchantment that domestic routine usually enjoys in Auden's poetry: here, life of unremarkable detail, far too dull to find place in the records, inaudibly subversive of the grander myths which normally order the lives of Great Men. Auden later paid sombre homage to Clio, of History, who bears witness to such exceptional yet unremarkable truths: Muse of the unique--Historical fact (Collected Poems 612); but the circumstantial charm of unique, riddling, inassimilable had long entranced his verse in much less august style. Well? As matter of the farm was in Pembrokeshire ... (English Auden 87) The feel of enters the poetry as an unmitigated non sequitur, at once comical weirdly off-putting--a piece of horrible photography, thought Empson, and I remember shuddering as I first set eyes on it (Empson 98). Auden's attachment to such uncompromising matters of fact, whether reverent or darkly amused, might feel like good example of his anti-Romanticism--or, to put that another way, good example of his modernism, sharing the principled suspicion of imagination its excesses that prompted Eliot, for example, to insist upon the proper primacy of a very highly developed sense of fact (Eliot, 31). (1) For one Romantic attitude toward is very well known, may even appear definitive. Facts--stubborn facts!--none of your Theory Coleridge once wrote in his notebook, A most entertaining & instructive Essay--the sooner the better (Notebooks iii.3737). Like many Coleridgean, projects the sooner done the better, that one was never, in fact, done; but many of the works that did get written instead communicate well enough his hostility, rejecting that reverence for the unmediated which (as Coleridge saw matters) had so corrupted modern intellectual life. To attempt to argue any great question upon only, is absurd, Coleridge was reported table-talking: you cannot state any before mixed audience, which an opponent as clever as yourself cannot with ease twist towards another bearing, or at least meet by contrary fact, as is called. I wonder why were ever called stubborn things... Facts, know, are not truths (Table Talk ii.154). The uneducated rustic, according to Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, is the sort of person who deals in insulated facts; the wise man is the one to whom facts are valuable ... chiefly as they lead to the discovery of the indwelling law, which is true being of things (Biographia ii.52; 53). Sceptical Hazlitt doubtless had Coleridge in mind when he diagnosed the shortcomings of poets outside the airy world of their lyrics: When they light upon the ground of prose matter-of-fact, they seem not to have the same use of their feet (Hazlitt xii.5). Coleridge was an idealist--an extreme Idealist, I.A. Richards once called him (Richards, Coleridge 19). And no idealist can easily afford to make too much of because of what feels to be their defining attribute--that which ensures their factuality: namely, the sheer, intransigent, unique givenness of them. …