ABSTRACT
Illusion and Reality, from which the following extract is taken, falls into two parts. The first is a Marxist account of the historical evolution of poetry from its putative roots in primitive societies, when poetry was a communal art directly linked to production in harvest rituals and the like, to the early, middle, and late bourgeois epochs in which the poet is fatally compromised by the contradictions and injustices of the social and economic system that supports him. The chapter reprinted below (originally entitled 'English Poets II. The Industrial Revolution') is taken from this part of the book. The latter half of Illusion and Reality is more concerned with theoretical problems in literary aesthetics, and displays Caudwell's capacity for original thought in these areas as well as his assimilation of the three hundred and fifty books in his bibliography. As Sartre was to do much later in What is Literature? (see below, pp. 371-85), Caudwell made a stark distinction between poetry (conceived in terms of modern symbolist poetics) and prose fiction, which is seen as much more directly mimetic of experience and therefore more amenable to Marxist analysiS. But unlike Sartre, Caudwell was clearly deeply attached to poetry of the symbolist sort, and this creates an interesting tension in his critical theory, not entirely resolved by the resonant sentence with which he ends his book: 'Thus art is one of the conditions of man's realization of himself, and in its turn one of the realities of man.'
