albatross and suffered for his deed.

Now the subject, in this sense (and I intend to use the word in no
other), is not, as such, inside the poem, but outside it. The contents
of the stanzas _To a Skylark_ are not the ideas suggested by the word
"skylark" to the average man; they belong to Shelley just as much as the
language does. The subject, therefore, is not the matter _of_ the poem
at all; and its opposite is not the _form_ of the poem, but the whole
poem. The subject is one thing; the poem, matter and form alike, another
thing. This being so, it is surely obvious that the poetic value cannot
lie in that subject, but lies entirely in its opposite, the poem. How
can the subject determine the value when on one and the same subject
poems may be written of all degrees of merit and demerit; or when a
perfect poem may be composed on a subject so slight as a pet sparrow,
and, if Macaulay may be trusted, a nearly worthless poem on a subject so
stupendous as the omnipresence of the Deity? The "formalist" is here
perfectly right. Nor is he insisting on something unimportant. He is
fighting against our tendency to take the work of art as a mere copy or
reminder of something already in our heads, or at the best as a
suggestion of some idea as little removed as possible from the familiar.
The sightseer who promenades a picture-gallery, remarking that this
portrait is so like his cousin, or that landscape the very image of his
birthplace, or who, after satisfying himself that one picture is about
Elijah, passes on rejoicing to discover the subject, and nothing but the
subject, of the next--what is he but an extreme example of this
tendency? Well, but the very same tendency vitiates much of our
criticism, much criticism of Shakespeare, for example, which, with all
its cleverness and partial truth, still shows that the critic never
passed from his own mind into Shakespeare's; and it may be traced even
in so fine a critic as Coleridge, as when he dwarfs the sublime struggle
of Hamlet into the image of his own unhappy weakness. Hazlitt by no
means escaped its influence. Only the third of that great trio, Lamb,
appears almost always to have rendered the conception of the composer.

Again, it is surely true that we cannot determine beforehand what
subjects are fit for Art, or name any subject on which a good poem might
not possibly be written. To divide subjects into two groups, the
beautiful or elevating, and the ugly or vicious, a