Not content with the contents

Degas once complained to Mallarmé that he had been trying to write a sonnet, unsuccessfully, though he had had such a good idea for it. ‘Alas, my poor Edgar,’ was the reply, ‘poems are made with words, not with ideas’. A neat comment, but is it always possible to distinguish between the two? Even a ‘nonsense poem’ is not devoid of ideas: ‘The vorpal blade went snicker-snack’. Nonsense words, yet the idea is evident. How to separate aesthetic delight from content?

The question becomes more acute still when you turn to consideration of the novel. Nabokov, better critic than novelist to my mind, went for aesthetic delight, ‘the tingle in the spine’. ‘Cherish the details,’ he said. Fair enough, but there is of necessity more to a good novel than this. Ford Madox Ford, a better critic and novelist than Nabokov, thought that imaginative literature was the greatest of art forms because it could make you think and feel at the same time.