Upjohn’s posthumous article on Cronshaw

Upjohn’s posthumous article on Cronshaw recasts a dead poet’s precarious final years as a polished literary legend. By shaping Cronshaw’s life and funeral into a contrast between art and conventional respectability, Upjohn produces a strikingly successful piece of criticism—but one that elevates its author and gives the poems away before their book publication can make its own impression.

From Funeral to Publication

The article takes shape immediately after Cronshaw’s funeral. As Philip and Upjohn follow the hearse in the single carriage Philip has ordered, Upjohn says that the poems have not yet appeared and proposes writing a preface, having begun to think about it during the drive to the cemetery. He then revises the plan: rather than use the material only as a preface, he will write an article for a review and print it afterward as an introduction to the volume.

A few weeks later, Philip sees the article appear. Its publication creates a stir, and newspapers reproduce extracts. Upjohn’s decision gives the account a life beyond the impending poetry collection: the article circulates first, shaping readers’ image of Cronshaw before the volume itself reaches them.

The Poet Made into a Figure

The article’s biographical portrait is necessarily incomplete. Little is known of Cronshaw’s early life, so Upjohn does not offer a comprehensive life history. Instead, he draws delicate, picturesque scenes of Cronshaw in the Latin Quarter, talking and writing poetry, and presents him as an English Verlaine. The portrait’s impression of intimacy and coherence comes from its crafted images and style, not from a claim to exhaustive knowledge.

That shaping becomes especially pronounced in the account of Cronshaw’s decline. Upjohn describes the shabby room in Soho and the effort to move the poet to a cottage among honeysuckle and a flowering orchard. In his telling, Cronshaw was instead taken to Kennington, where his last weeks unfolded amid surroundings Upjohn treats as irreconcilably middle-class. The article turns the contrast between the imagined cottage and the actual setting into an aesthetic and social opposition: the poet’s life is made to stand for art placed among what Upjohn sees as vulgar respectability.

Irony, Funeral, and the Article’s Effect

Upjohn’s account makes Cronshaw’s death the culmination of that opposition. He depicts the poet as enduring the well-intentioned awkwardness of the young student who had appointed himself his nurse, and casts Cronshaw’s final surroundings as a triumph of Philistia over art and beauty. The article’s description of the funeral extends the irony: an ordinary, middle-class ceremony becomes evidence, in Upjohn’s framing, that a poet who ought to have been buried like a prince or a pauper has been defeated by convention.

The wreaths at the funeral feed directly into this literary construction. Philip has bought two wreaths so the coffin will not look neglected, while Lawson, unable to attend, has sent another. Upjohn transforms the gesture into a beautiful image of a laurel wreath laid on the dead poet’s heart, and closes the article by making the funeral the final emblem of art’s defeat. The account thus converts practical care and a modest ceremony into components of a dramatic critical argument.

The finished article is described as delicate, tender, picturesque, and full of charm, but its elegance also makes its framing persuasive. Upjohn prints Cronshaw’s best poems in the article itself. When the volume subsequently appears, much of its force has already been spent: readers have encountered the poems and a compelling interpretation of their author in advance. The article therefore both memorializes Cronshaw and alters the reception of his work.

Critical Success and Limits

The article becomes a turning point for Upjohn. It is judged the best thing he has written, and its humanity makes a warmer impression than his earlier aloofness. The success advances his position: he is thereafter regarded as a critic to be reckoned with. Cronshaw’s death supplies the occasion, but the public recognition belongs to the writer who organizes the poet’s life into a memorable narrative.

The work’s achievement and its limitation are intertwined. Upjohn writes with tenderness and imaginative grace, yet the portrait’s strongest effect depends on a sharp symbolic arrangement of Cronshaw’s last days: poet against middle-class convention, beauty against ordinary respectability. That arrangement makes the article powerful, while its use of the poems ahead of the volume reduces the later book’s distinctiveness. The posthumous portrait preserves Cronshaw in public memory, but it also shows how a critic’s art can shape—and partially pre-empt—the work it seeks to honor.