SOURCE: "Poetry as Catharsis: John Keble and Others," in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Oxford University Press, 1953, pp. 138-48.

In the essay that follows, Abrams examines John Keble's Lectures on Poetry, in which he links the cathartic function of poetry to primitive instincts, in a prefiguration of psychoanalytic interpretations of the role of literature in human existence.

Latent in the term 'expression' is the notion of something that is forced out by a pressure from within. The alternative metaphor, 'overflow,' by suggesting the fluid nature of feeling, also involves a question in regard to the hydrodynamics of the poetic process. It was to be expected that some romantic critics should find the impulse to composition in the pressure of pent-up feeling, or in the urgency of unfulfilled desires. And naturally enough, Aristotle's description of the cathartic effect of tragedy upon the...