One. Introduction: What is Poetry?

BOSWELL. ‘Then Sir, What is Poetry?’

JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.’

We are reminded of Cowley's question in his Ode. of Wit:

What is it then, which like the Power Divine

We only can by Negatives define?

Indeed, Johnson seems to have studiously avoided offering a definition of poetry. He said in his Life of Pope: ‘To circumscribe poetry by a definition will only shew the narrowness of the definer’ (Poets, III, 251). The fact that Johnson shared the Horatian terminology of his Renaissance ancestors regarding the ‘end’ of poetry, ‘to instruct by pleasing’, indicates the general trend of his thought; but it does not take us very far towards his own particular view of poetry. Johnson's comment to Boswell, then, directs us towards ‘indirections’, to derive a critical understanding of his poetics conversely from his negative statements about poetry. The reader is justified in investigating the parallels, comparisons, antitheses and analogues in Johnson's criticism, which in true Augustan fashion often carry the weight of his meaning. The critic may also extrapolate Johnson's views from the faults he finds and the insufficiencies he feels in the writings of earlier authors, and interpret his brief accolades and reverential silences in the face of works he truly admired. Above all, Johnson's own poems - the products of a highly self-conscious age in which the critic and the poet coalesced, as often did criticism and poetry - may be viewed as manifestations of his poetics. They become touchstones that determine the pattern and validity of the scattered suggestions about the nature of poetry that Johnson's writings provide.