Modern Age - Winter 2017 - 89

LITERATURE AND MORALITY

1	 See Amanda Anderson and Jane S. Shaw, "To Be or Not To Be: Shakespeare in the English Department," Pope Center Study on Shakespeare (October, 2007), which takes to
task universities and colleges in the Raleigh, NC, area that lack a Shakespeare requirement for English majors.
2	 Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W. K. Wimsatt Jr. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960),
33.
3	 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).
4	 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 75.
5	 The Rambler, No. 4 (March 31, 1750), in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and
W. K. Wimsatt Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 157.
6	 Samuel Johnson, Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, 25. See Hamlet 3.3: "the purpose of
playing . . . was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."
7	 Selected Poetry and Prose, 158.
8	 Ibid., 158-59.
9	 Ibid., 159.
10	 John Keats, "To John Hamilton Reynolds," February 3, 1818, The Norton Anthology of
English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams et al., 5th ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton,
1986), 2.864.
11	 John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard
University Press, 1978), 283.
12	 John Keats, "To George and Thomas Keats," 21, 27, December 1817, Norton Anthology,
863.
13	 "To Richard Woodhouse," ibid., 868.
14	 W.  K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," in Wimsatt, The
Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,
1954), 5.
15	 Sidney's "The Defence of Poesy" and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin
Alexander (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 34.
16	 W. K. Wimsatt Jr., "Poetry and Morals," in Verbal Icon, 87.
17	 Ibid., 88.
18	 Ibid. "Poetry and Morals" was first published in 1948 before the postmodernist deluge.
At that point Wimsatt did not have to worry about the moral implications of, for example, cultural materialism, suggested by a chapter title from Alan Sinfield, Shakespeare,
Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism (London and New York:
Routledge, 2006), 53-67: "How to Read The Merchant of Venice Without Being Heterosexist." I am prescinding from such immoral moralism in this essay, since dealing with it
would lead us too far astray from my present purpose. In any case, I have dealt with
such matters at length, most notably in At War with the Word: Literary Theory and Liberal
Education (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999).
19	 Ibid., 97.
20	 Ibid., 95-95, 284n6. He also quotes modern defenses of the play by Croce and S. L.
Bethel only to dismiss them.
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