"The writer who defines his audience by its limitations is indulging in the unforgivable arrogance. The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all."The word coterie should not frighten us too much; neither should it charm us too much; writing for a small group does not insure integrity any more than writing for the many; the coterie can corrupt as surely, and sometimes as quickly, as the big advertising appropriation. But the smallness of the coterie does not limit the 'human' quality of the work. Some coterie authors will no doubt always be difficult and special, like Donne and Hopkins; but this says nothing of their humanity. The populist critics seem to deny the possibility of broad humanity to those who do not have a large audience in mind, yet the writers they would cite as exemplifying breadth of humanity did not themselves feel the effect of their imagination depended on the size of their audience. 'Very bookish, this housebred man. His work smells of the literary coterie' -- this is T.E. Shaw's opinion of the author of the Odyssey. Chaucer wrote for a small group; Shakespeare, as his sonnets show, had something of the aspect of the court poet; Milton was content that his audience be few, although he insisted that it be fit. The Romanticists wrote for a handful while the nation sneered. Dostoevski wrote for a journal that considered that it was doing well when its subscribers numbered four thousand. And our Whitman, now the often unread symbol of the democratic life, was through most of his career the poet of what was even less than a coterie.
"This stale argument should not have to be offered at all, and it is a grim portent of our cultural situation that, in the name of democracy, critics should dare attempt to make it the sign of a poet's shame that he is not widely read. ...
"In actual fact the occasions are rare when the best literature becomes, as it were, the folk literature, and generally speaking literature has always been carried on within small limits and under great difficulties."
(from Trilling's essay, "The Function of the Little Magazine," which originally appeared as the introduction to a Partisan Reader anthology in 1946, and was later included in Trilling's The Liberal Imagination.)
See also: "Art Is Freedom"
