OXFORD LECTURES
ON POETRY

BY

A. C. BRADLEY

LL.D., Litt.D.
FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
AND FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE

MACMILLAN

London · Melbourne · Toronto

ST MARTIN’S PRESS
New York
1965

This book is copyright in all countries which
are signatories of the Berne Convention

First Edition, May 1909. Second Edition, November 1909
Reprinted 1911, 1914, 1917, 1919, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1934,
1941, 1950, 1955, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1965

MACMILLAN AND COMPANY LIMITED
St Martin’s Street London WC2
also Bombay Calcutta Madras Melbourne

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED
70 Bond Street Toronto 2

ST MARTIN’S PRESS INC
175 Fifth Avenue New York 10010 NY

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

TO
MY OXFORD FRIENDS
1869-1909

‘They have seemed to be together, though absent,
shook hands, as over a vast; and embraced, as it
were, from the ends of opposed winds.’

PREFACE

This volume consists of lectures delivered during my tenure of the Chair of Poetry at Oxford and not included in Shakespearean Tragedy. Most of them have been enlarged, and all have been revised. As they were given at intervals, and the majority before the publication of that book, they contained repetitions which I have not found it possible wholly to remove. Readers of a lecture published by the University of Manchester on English Poetry and German Philosophy in the Age of Wordsworth will pardon also the restatement of some ideas expressed in it.

The several lectures are dated, as I have been unable to take account of most of the literature on their subjects published since they were delivered.

They are arranged in the order that seems best to me, but it is of importance only in the case of the four which deal with the poets of Wordsworth’s time.

I am indebted to the Delegates of the University Press, and to the proprietors and editors of the Hibbert Journal and the Albany, Fortnightly, and Quarterly Reviews, respectively, for permission to republish the first, third, fifth, eighth, and ninth lectures. A like acknowledgment is due for leave to use some sentences of an article on Keats contributed to Chambers’s Cyclopaedia of English Literature (1903).

In the revision of the proof-sheets I owed much help to a sister who has shared many of my Oxford friendships.

NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION

This edition is substantially identical with the first; but it and its later impressions contain a few improvements in points of detail, and, thanks to criticisms by my brother, F. H. Bradley, I hope to have made my meaning clearer in some pages of the second lecture.

There was an oversight in the first edition which I regret. In adding the note on p. 247 I forgot that I had not referred to Professor Dowden in the lecture on “Shakespeare the Man.” In everything that I have written on Shakespeare I am indebted to Professor Dowden, and certainly not least in that lecture.

CONTENTS

POETRY FOR POETRY’S SAKE

POETRY FOR POETRY’S SAKE1

(INAUGURAL LECTURE)

One who, after twenty years, is restored to the University where he was taught and first tried to teach, and who has received at the hands of his Alma Mater an honour of which he never dreamed, is tempted to speak both of himself and of her. But I remember that you have come to listen to my thoughts about a great subject, and not to my feelings about myself; and of Oxford who that holds this Professorship could dare to speak, when he recalls the exquisite verse in which one of his predecessors described her beauty, and the prose in which he gently touched on her illusions and protested that they were as nothing when set against her age-long warfare with the