The conception of the purpose of poetry by the poets and the critics of the Elizabethan age is of fundamental importance to the student who seeks to determine the content of their criticism. This problem has been the burning one in literary criticism from the Greeks to the present time and is the lodestone around which all other critical problems cluster. Find out what a given critic says on this point, and there will be revealed to you the fundamental philosophic and social preconceptions on which his work is built.

It is customary to begin the discussion of purpose with an examination of the Puritan attack on poetry and the answers of her defenders. We shall follow the tradition here. It is also customary to end the discussion with the replies to the attack. This, however, we shall not do, for it will be our contention that...