The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

* An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on ii June 1956.

elegy on a deceased Canon of Christ Church, a May-day Masque for Somerville or an election ballad for his successor. I should at least be working in the medium to which I am accustomed.

But these are not his duties. His primary duty is to give lectures—which presupposes that he knows something which his audience does not. You have chosen for your new Professor someone who has no more right to the learned garb he is wearing than he would have to a clerical collar. One of his secondary duties is to deliver every other year on oration in Latin. You have chosen a barbarian who cannot write in that tongue and does not know how to pronounce it. Even barbarians have their sense of honor and I must take this public opportunity to say that, for the alien sounds I shall utter at Encaenia, my "affable familiar ghost" has been Mr. J. G. Griffith of Jesus.

But it is my primary duty which I must attempt to do this afternoon. If I am in any way to deserve your extraordinary choice for what one of the noblest and most learned of my predecessors so aptly called The Siege Perilous, then I must find some topic about which I cannot help knowing something simply because I have written some poems, and, for an inaugural lecture, this topic should be of general and, if possible, central concern to the verbal Art of Numbers.

Many years ago, there appeared in Punch a joke which I have heard attributed to the scholar and poet A. E. Housman. The cartoon showed two middle-aged English examiners tak­ing a country stroll in spring. And the caption ran:

first e. e. O cuckoo shall I call thee bird

Or but a wandering voice? second e. e. State the alternative preferred With reasons for your choice.

At first reading this seems to be a satire on examiners. But is it? The moment I try to answer the question, I find myself thinking: "It has an answer and if Wordsworth had put the question to himself instead of to the reader, he would have 'deleted bird as redundant. His inner examiner must have been asleep at the time."

Even if poems were often written in trances, poets would •still accept responsibility for them by signing their names :and taking the credit. They cannot claim oracular immunity. Admirers of "Kubla Khan," the only documented case of a •trance poem which we possess, should not lightly dismiss "what Coleridge, who was, after all, a great critic, says in his .introductory note:

The following fragment is here published at the re­quest of a poet of great and deserved celebrity (Lord Byron) and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the grounds of any supposed poetic merits.

It has, of course, extraordinary poetic merits, but Coleridge was not being falsely modest. He saw, I think, as a reader can see, that even the fragment that exists is disjointed and "would have had to be worked on if he ever completed the poem, and his critical conscience felt on its honor to admit this.

It seems to me, then, that this might be a possible topic. Anyone who writes poetry ought to have something to say about this critic who is only interested in one author and •only concerned with works that do not yet exist. To dis­tinguish him from the critic who is concerned with the al­ready existing works of others, let us call him the Censor.

How does the Censor get his education? How does his at­titude towards the literature of the past differ from that of the scholarly critic? If a poet should take to writing criticism, what help to him in that activity axe the experiences of his Censor? Is there any truth in Dryden's statement: "Poets themselves are the most proper, though not, I conclude, the only critics"?

In trying to answer these questions, I shall be compelled, from time to time, to give autobiographical illustrations. This is regrettable but unavoidable. I have no other guinea pig.