W. K. Wimsatt on the Unity of Imagery

W. K. Wimsatt's essay "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery" is a typical -- and typically useful -- New Critical essay. He argues that Romantic nature poetry employs images of nature that are modified by imagination in order to uncover a subjective similitude (or insight of similitude) that exceeds the result of intellectual comparison only.

To exemplify his point, Wimsatt distinguishes between the "tenor" and the "vehicle" of a given poem. I understand them better as the "tone" or "emotional teleology" of the poem and the "content" of the poem. Wimsatt points out how the content of a Wordsworth poem works with its tone to achieve an organic unity. He writes that "[p]oetic structure is always a fusion of ideas with material." For Wimsatt, Romantic poetry leans toward sensory experience of nature rather than an intellectual exercise that characterizes neoclassical poetry. But the Romantic poet reads the spiritual into these sensory experiences, especially by confronting the mysterious in nature.

Though Romantic and neoclassical poetry find quite different places on the spectrum from "sensory" to "rational," the good poetry of each mode achieves the type of fusion Wimsatt explains. It's interesting that one of the New Critics finds something to admire in poetry of the Romantic era. I've started reading an essay by Allen Tate, who is a good deal less favorable when he discusses a poetic figure by Shelley. Maybe I'll write about that tomorrow.