Virgil's Pilgrim's Progress

Extract

Poetry has four appeals: the romantic, the sensuous, the intellectual, and the formal. We may enjoy the story, the sound, the thought, or the shape of a poem. Almost everybody can appreciate the first; and a reciter trying to convert an audience suspicious of poetry might begin with Alfred Noyes's ‘Highwayman’. Susceptibility to the second appeal seems innate in a fortunate few. Some men loved the music of Keats's ‘Nightingale’ long before they understood the words. But others are tone-deaf (I know a Doctor of Divinity who calls Kubla Khan rubbish), and in most of us the appreciation of verbal harmony grows but slowly. And the last two appeals are much more limited. Few can be bothered to master the ‘criticism of life’ of Arnold's ‘Resignation’ or Browning's ‘Rabbi ben Ezra’, or to estimate the place of Troilus and Cressida in Shakespeare's intellectual development, or to discuss the merits of the Spenserian stanza, or to criticize the structure of ‘The Lotus-Eaters’ or the arrangement of the books in Paradise Lost. Such conundrums are left to candidates for Honours in English and the dons who set the papers.

Now if we have only read two or three books of the Aeneid we cannot enjoy the structure of the whole poem. And we shall not apprehend much of Virgil's thought. Indeed, we may misunderstand it, just as, if somebody insists that Milton's God is a bully and the rebel angels heroes, it is fairly safe to infer that he has read only the first two books of Paradise Lost.