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Notes on John Stuart Mill’s “What is Poetry?” (1833)
Mill begins with the traditional view that “the object of poetry is confessedly to act upon the emotions” (138). He also distinguishes sharply between narrative or “story” and poetry. The former is essentially descriptive, providing “a true picture of life” when it’s done well and appealing strongly to children and primitive people. Poetry, by contrast, aims “to paint the human soul truly.” This is true even of descriptive poetry, which gives us landscapes “seen through the medium and arrayed in the colors of the imagination set in action by the feelings” (141). Mill’s language here is mimetic—poetry represents something, but that “something” is inward: the movements of the mind, the play of deep emotions, etc.
Still more refinement is needed in defining the nature of poetry, and Mill achieves it by distinguishing poetry from oratorical eloquence. It’s fine for Ebenezer Elliott to say that poetry is “impassioned truth” or for the Blackwood’s writer to characterize it as “man’s thoughts tinged by his feelings” (141), but why might not a great speech be described in the same way? Mill’s point is that a speech is designed to be heard, while poetry is overheard. Poets are, then, talking to themselves: “What we have said to ourselves we may tell to others afterwards. . . . But no trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself” (142).
This way of talking about poetry resembles Wordsworth’s theory in his 1802 “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” where he describes poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility.” For Wordsworth, poetic composition is a species of meditation, with its primary subject being the emotions of the person doing the meditating. Mill is so taken with his own distinction between oratory and poetry that he applies it to music: there is the outward-tending, “garrulous passion” of a Gioacchino Rossini, and there is the brooding, sometimes stormy, introspective “poetry” of the romantic composer Beethoven.
What we may see in Mill, on the whole, is a species of romantic expressivism: poetry is, he says, neither to be classed as rhetorical eloquence nor as storytelling. Instead, the main thing is that poetry involves the empire of emotion, and that is what it represents, if we want to use that mimetic term. The mind turns in upon its own resources, and the result is what we “overhear.”
The romantic poets and theorists hoped for something like a direct transmission of emotion from the poet’s spirit, as borne by his or her words, to the reader or listener’s spirit. They betray a certain anxiety about this potential—is language really up to being the bearer of the living spirit? If, however, we say that readers are “overhearing” words that poets utter for themselves, that is a different matter. In any case, those who possess considerable self-culture, it seems, can best appreciate poetry.
If we consider more recent notions about what poetry and poetic language are, symbolism is among the most interesting. For the symbolist, the language of a poem slips beyond us and becomes something sacred, and a refuge or repository for the soul.
Notes on John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859)
In On Liberty, Mill asks the fundamental questions of social and political science:
1. What is human nature?
2. How can we best educate and develop it?
3. What is the ideal society?
4. Who can lead us towards the material implementation of this ideal?
Since Mill proposes a model of development, he must specify the agent that will bring the desired changes. What forces are repressing liberty and impeding progress today?
Mill quotes Wilhelm von Humboldt on human nature: “the end of man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal or immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. . .” (148). This is a modification of Greek and Renaissance humanist ideals about self-development. Mill continues, “Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth, as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience. But it is the privilege and proper condition of a human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and interpret experience in his own way” (148).
Like a true descendant of the European Enlightenment, Mill favors education as a vehicle for self-development. He also insists upon specificity with regard to the goal towards which the educator should strive. Ultimately, the educator should seek a robust but balanced development of humanity’s capacities.
Mill seems to agree with John Milton’s claim in “Areopagitica” that “reason is but choosing.” He says, “The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice” (148). Custom, then, is the enemy of genuine individualism. Again, “He who lets the world … choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the apelike one of imitation” (149).
To what extent, we might ask, would Mill countenance the consumer model of bourgeois liberalism? It seems clear that he challenges this model, whereby we link our sense of self to material objects, and mistake the accumulation of owned objects for true progress, and reduce originality to mere imitation and “fashion.” On the paradoxical quality of fashion, it’s hard to beat baseball great Yogi Berra’s comment about some club or restaurant, “That place isn’t popular anymore—everybody goes there.”
Mill insists that “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing” (149). As he suggests, a society built by robots would not be a good thing. Humanity is constituted by potential that requires experience, if it is to be realized and actualized by the individual who possesses it. This romantic principle cuts against the atomistic, mechanical conception of human nature in the pure utilitarian scheme of Jeremy Bentham.
As for our emotional side, Mill writes as follows: “Yet desires and impulses are as much a part of a perfect human being, as beliefs and restraints: and strong impulses are only perilous when not properly balanced…. It is not because men’s desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak” (149). Mill demands the same freedom and exercise for impulses and desires that William Blake does in his poetry. The Victorian critic is all in favor of “energy,” but with the addition of a need for balance. Mill defines the word character as belonging to a “person whose desires and impulses are his own” (150).
Mill refers—no doubt consciously—to Thomas Carlyle’s nemesis, the “steam engine universe.” Then he goes on to criticize Carlyle rather directly, if politely: “In some early states of society, these forces might be, and were, too much ahead of the power which society then possessed of disciplining and controlling them. There has been a time when the element of spontaneity and individuality was in excess… To overcome this difficulty, law and discipline… asserted a power over the whole man…” (150). However, he continues, “society has now fairly got the better of individuality; and the danger which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences” (150).
Therefore, Carlyle’s feudalism, though it’s meant to maintain genuinely human ties among people, is anachronistic and rooted in nostalgia. It can’t supply the needed pattern for contemporary life, proposing as it does to deal with inauthenticity by forcing an anachronistic form of life on everyone.
Mill goes on to write that in his early Victorian social environment “everyone lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual or the family do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? … They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position?” (151) Ah, the vital importance of keeping up with Lord and Lady Jones!
Most damning of all when it comes to the financially ascendant and culturally coming-on middle class, writes Mill, is that “It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary.” So much for England as the supposed cradle of fiery individualists and eccentrics, and the guardian of imagination and interiority. “The early-Victorian sheeple” should be ashamed of themselves—or at least, they should look around them and see if being ashamed is fashionable at the moment. FOMO is a harsh goddess!
We can see that in Mill’s view, dull middle-class conformity is the enemy—it’s the same bourgeois attitude against which Carlyle takes aim. But Mill’s idea is that the UK’s stultifying middle class has come by a much more radical and effective means of control: not violent repression but the persistent and forced internalization of socially acceptable thoughts, until it is no longer necessary to think at all.
Mill continues with his critique of Carlyle, saying that such conformism is only acceptable on the “Calvinistic theory.” In that theology, “the one great offense of man is self-will.” So Calvin stands in for Carlyle here—Mill’s criticism is largely against Carlyle’s social vision in Past and Present, which suggests that modern “Captains of Industry” should emulate the spiritual power and dynamism of the old feudal warriors and lords, and become a new, legitimate aristocracy that will replace all those “game-preserving dukes” and other fools who now run England.
According to Mill, “‘Pagan self-assertion’ is one of the elements of human worth, as well as ‘Christian self-denial.’ There is a Greek ideal of self-development” (151). This kind of statement seems to flow from Mill’s understanding of Goethe—a modern kinsman of the classical humanists. The Greek statesman Pericles is the ideal—full development of all the person’s faculties, all human potential.
Mill writes that “In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others” (152). His social theory argues that richer individual “units” will lead to a richer mass of people. What benefits the single person, the idea goes, will in time benefit everyone who is open to being benefited. This brand of individualism takes account of larger social needs, so while Mill is not a collectivist like Carlyle, he by no means ignores “the many.” He is still a Utilitarian, after all, and ultimately, the point is to achieve “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”
Furthermore, writes Mill, “To be held to rigid rules of justice for the sake of others develops the feelings and capacities which have the good of others for their object. But to be restrained in things not affecting their good, by their mere displeasure, develops nothing valuable, except such force of character as may unfold itself in resisting the restraint” (152). Mill opposes excessive restraint as a means to impose social conformity, though he recognizes that such restraint is a powerful force to be reckoned with. The need to resist unnecessary constraints, Mill would agree with Sigmund Freud, accounts for a good deal of misdirected individual and social energy, and lot of unhappiness.
Of course, it’s true that since Mill promotes self-culture in England’s increasingly laissez-faire, free-market capitalist economic and social milieu, so his theory is destined to be taken as one idea among others in the marketplace of ideas. We remain haunted by the possibility that, as Bentham himself insisted, “pushpin is as good as poetry,” and shadowed by the ever-present possibility that the great mass of the people will, as Mill has suggested is happening, reject the ideal of self-cultivation in favor of a cheap reach for simple, hedonistic oblivion.
This is a difficult problem to resolve, and one that Oscar Wilde summed up brilliantly in his quip, “A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.” The quest for genuine originality and authenticity is rather easily commodified and broken into an endless series of poses. At some point in its development, we might say, “originality” turns into just another fashion statement. This commenter recalls a fine video skit in which two outlawish bikers dressed the same way are placed next to each other. The first says, “Hey man, I’m an individualist!” And the second one says, “Yeah man, me too!” Enough said.
Well, custom, insists Mill, turns us into machines: “Persons of genius…are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom” (). Genius requires freedom and variety as its atmosphere, while the middle-class public sphere thrives on middling intellects, on comfortable mediocrity (153). This is hardly an argument invoking the potential of “mass culture,” and it differentiates Mill strongly from Carlyle, who shows little interest in the concept of genius—his heroic ideal isn’t about genius but about the worship of force and personal charisma or energy.
Mill says that he will have none of Carlyle’s hero-worship. Instead, he prefers to promote the eventually salutary influence of the most thoughtful citizens. He writes, “when the opinions of masses of merely average men are everywhere become or becoming the dominant power, the counterpoise and corrective to that tendency would be, the more and more pronounced individuality of those who stand on the higher eminences of thought” (154).
What authority do such people command? Well, says Mill, all the eminent thinker may claim is “freedom to point out the way.” He is not promising a quick fix, to be sure—what he’s describing is bound to be a slow operation, the work of decades and generations rather than the rapid transition from one government to another, or some similarly brief period of time.
Mill is genuinely indebted to the romantic authors he has been reading. As mentioned above and with special reference to our own time, fashion is one major challenge to this organic model of genius and development, and it flourishes in a contemporary consumer-capitalist model of the sort we experience today.
Fashion, that is, links individual expression to an ever-recyclable system of objects—generating a sense of self that stems from endless repetition and consumption. We identify with an image of ourselves, and take all necessary (economic) steps to conform to that image, but the image keeps giving way to another one. This model of the self mechanizes and harnesses the old romantic “problem of the infinite procession of desire,” stripping it of its link to organic theory, to three-dimensional humanistic conceptions of human nature.
A key problem with what we may label as the consumerist or fashion-based model of identity has long been its tendency to be satisfied with its own shallowness. As Oscar Wilde would say late in the Victorian Age, “Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.” Mill seems to have figured that out long before Wilde did, though they both deserve credit for the insight.
How does all the above relate to the status and health of democracy? Mill writes, “The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement….” Still, he continues, “The progressive principle, however, in either shape…is antagonistic to the sway of Custom …” (155). Mill, then, doesn’t see liberty and improvement as necessarily incompatible. The enlightened person should always be aiming to improve.
But it’s also fair to point out, as does C. B. MacPherson in The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, that there is nothing inherently developmental about bourgeois liberal democracy. The accumulation of objects is not development, so liberal democracy all too easily betrays its foundations in Whig gentility, whereby society is something like a gentlemen’s agreement to let progress take its slow course towards the spiritual and intellectual betterment of all. Materialist capitalism annuls this kind of “slow time” in favor of perpetual immediacy. Today, we tend to call that a demand for “instant gratification.”
Mill’s borrowings from the romantics may commit him to the long deferral of improvement, and to a tacit cultural elitism. Still, it seems fair to say that Mill sees democracy as something people need to work at, not as an already perfect system. That is a point in his favor.
Notes on John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869)
In general, Mill’s position agrees with that of George Eliot and other notable feminist authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft before him and Simone de Beauvoir or Betty Friedan long after him. Mill decries the hypocrisy involved in a supposedly progressive age’s ignoring the “woman question.” Why have there been so many reforms, and yet women are still treated as second-class citizens?
In Mill, we see the same emphasis on calling out the bad faith and selfishness men show when they educate women, or rather fail to educate them. As Mill writes, because men have long wanted something more than mere obedience from women, the latter have been “brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others” (157).
Women, that is, are expected to live not for themselves but for men. That’s the way men have schooled or conditioned women to regard themselves: the best way to get people to conform is not by physical brutality. It’s much easier for the masters if their servants internalize the most convenient definition of themselves and the rules they’re supposed to obey. But as Mill points out, modern times run against this kind of conformism: “human beings are no longer born to their place in life … but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable” (161).
With so much social and economic mobility in Victoria’s England, why are women still chained within an archaic notion of marriage? Marriage should imply mental equality, not servitude. Let competition decide what the future status of females will be. Mill rejects outright the notion that the alleged “nature of women” is anything but an artificial construction of men’s making. He writes, “I deny that any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another” (162).
Furthermore, Mill declares, “Of all the difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which form human character” (162). The whole affair of defining the qualities of gender takes on the cast of a badly conducted scientific experiment, with the observers’ biases, desires, and expectations contaminating the results from the outset, and no hope for an objective assessment of any differences there may be between men and women.
Mill deserves full credit for making such a bold assertion over a century-and-a-half ago, when it must have been an affront to the sensibilities of a great many men. He points out, by way of elaboration, that the only woman with whom most men have any real acquaintance is their own wives: hardly a large enough statistical sample from which to make generalizations about women.
As a utilitarian philosopher, Mill is somewhat partial to the ideology of the market, with its law of competition working to satisfy human needs and desires, and he puts this terminology to good use in favor of women’s freedom of opportunity: “What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody asks for protective duties and bounties in favour of women; it is only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favour of men should be recalled” (165).
Are women most suited to be wives and mothers? Well, says Mill, you’d certainly think so, to hear men talk. But how should they know? Like Wollstonecraft, Eliot, and Fuller, Mill believes that marriage should be a reciprocal undertaking governed by genuine conversation; he argues that submission and false gender-definitions deprive both partners any chance to achieve this.
All in all, Mill believes he has history on his side, and he is willing to challenge a powerful mid-Victorian consensus about the nature, limitations, and value of women. His wife Harriet Taylor surely had much to do with the strength of his stance: by all accounts, Mill treated his wife with great regard, not as a servant or a sheltered “angel of the house,” to borrow a phrase from the famous poem by Coventry Patmore.
Edition: Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 11th edition. Volume E, The Victorian Age. New York: 2024. ISBN-13: 978-0393543322.
Copyright © 2026 Alfred J. Drake
Document Timestamp: 3/10/2026