In the middle years of the twentieth century, the methods of New Criticism (close textual analysis, attention to word choice, verse forms, etc.) were the common pedagogy of college and university English departments, and the standard mode of instruction in grade, middle, and secondary schools. Poems were analyzed as poems, and more often than not, as reflexive objects that had poetry as their not so hidden topic. A good short example of this is Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son”:
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy:
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ’scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, “Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
The son’s name, like the father’s, was Benjamin, which means, in Hebrew, son of the right hand. But the right hand is, by implication, also Jonson’s writing hand, and the word poetry comes from the Greek word that means making. So the making of the son and the making of the poem are parallel acts, and in this case, the one substitutes for the other. The embedded inscription, “Here doth lie / Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry,” gestures, in a way that is technically called deixis, pointing or indicating, to the fact that the poem itself functions like a funeral monument. (“Here” is the sign, often found on actual monuments.) The enjambed line (“Here doth lie / Ben Jonson”) suggests both a colon and a question (who lies here?), while the use of “his,” in what is now an archaic form (“Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry,” rather than “Ben Jonson’s best piece of poetry”), allows for a double meaning: what lies “here” is both the poet’s “best piece of poetry,” or making, and also Ben Jonson, the father and the son. The personal adjectives and personal pronouns in the lines that follow (“for whose sake”; “all his vows”; “what he loves”) continue the willed conflation or confusion of father and son. “On My First Son” becomes the monument; the word “on,” typical of epigrams, essays, and other short pieces in the period, is also a pointer gesturing toward the poem. (This is what rhetoricians call deictis.)
This kind of analysis will be familiar to any reader of midcentury critical classics like W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon or Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn, the titles of which provide examples of the phenomenon they describe. (Brooks’s title comes from John Donne’s “The Canonization.” Two other “urn” poems, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” became similar iconic touchstones for close readers of poems about poetry.) I’d like to point out a number of corollaries to this method of reading, which is the one in which I was trained and which I still find deeply satisfying: first, the method validates those works that fit its methodology. Thus, poems about poetry, or poems that could be read as poems about poetry, including most so-called metaphysical verse, gained high status, including the poems of Andrew Marvell, many Romantic lyrics and Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” Shakespeare’s sonnets and “Phoenix and Turtle,” and a good deal of modern poetry, from Yeats to Wallace Stevens.
Conversely, poems that seemed to resist or to deny the validity of this reading method—like, for example, Cavalier lyrics or Byron’s Don Juan—tended at the time to be rated lower on the scale. And poems that were either narrative (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Crabbe’s The Village) or epic (Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Pope’s Dunciad or Rape of the Lock) were either quarried for verbal gems that could be explicated as if they were lyrics, or else subjected to a different regime of criticism, one that treated them like works of fiction (plot, character, etc.) or works of “influence” (Milton echoes and rewrites Spenser, who echoes and rewrites Virgil; Wordsworth and all the Romantics echo and rewrite Milton; Stevens rewrites Wordsworth, etc.).
A sense of boredom—the New Critical reading, while elegant, was at the same time predictable—and limitation led to the resuscitation and reinvigoration of other critical modes, often versions of the same modes so strongly repudiated by the New Critics: historical, contextual, biographical, editorial, and overtly political or overtly religious readings, that depended as much upon context or history as the actual language on the page. No orthodoxy of reading is without its blind spots. New Criticism’s rigorous pointing toward the text needed to be corrected or at least was augmented when the next generation of readers and critics readmitted history to the realm of possible literary evidence. Deconstruction, an extension of rather than a replacement for New Criticism, looked precisely for the blind spots, the apparent discordances, opacities, or unresolvabilities of the literary text, rather than the moments of concord or pleasurable but controllable ambiguity. The deconstructive aporia—not a new or fanciful coinage but an old and honored word from the history of rhetoric (“Aporia, or the Doubtfull, [so] called … because oftentimes we will seem to cast perils, and make doubt of things when by a plaine manner of speech wee might affirme or deny him”1)—was, in fact, the counterpart of the New Critic’s ambiguity, the desirable goal and end point of a literary analysis. Aporia, as perplexing difficulty, has a long history of usage and has only recently—and unhistorically—been reclassified as critical jargon. This blind spot, or aporia, is analogous to Freud’s description of the “navel of the dream,” the place where “it reaches down into the unknown.”2
Literature produces, and is in turn produced by, modes of critical analysis. Literature reads us as much as we read literature. As certain kinds of critical or social thinking become popular, the kind of literature they are effective in analyzing become the kind of literature we recognize as good or even great.
It is potentially risky to paraphrase any critic’s words on the subject of paraphrasing. Nonetheless, it’s a risk worth taking, both because Cleanth Brooks’s essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase” poses a deft and cogent argument well worth revisiting, and also because Brooks twice goes out of his way to discuss, in signifying quotation marks, the “uses of poetry.” Poetry, says Brooks—and here he does not wish to distinguish poetry from other imaginative writing, like novels or plays—cannot be reduced to, or summed up in, a statement, proposition, or message. “What the poem ‘says’ ” is not only not equivalent to the poem or its value; it is also ultimately undeterminable because of vital issues of tone, style, and irony. “The paraphrase is not the real core of meaning which constitutes the essence of the poem.”3 “The ‘prose-sense’ of the poem is not a rack on which the stuff of the poem is hung … it does not represent the ‘inner’ structure or the ‘essential’ structure or the ‘real’ structure of the poem.”4 In fact, he suggests, “one may sum up by saying that most of the distempers of criticism come about from yielding to the temptation to take certain remarks which we make about the poem—statements about what it says or about what truth it gives or about what formulations it illustrates—for the essential core of the poem itself.”
For Brooks, poems are not received truth but “parables”5 about poetry. It is this self-referential element to his formalism that has led some successors to feel that his readings have a certain family similarity, that they all wind up in a similar place, affirming the value of poetry and gesturing toward the iconicity of the poem itself, the “well-wrought urn” of Donne’s “Canonization” that provides Brooks with the title of his essay collection. But Brooks goes out of his way in this essay and elsewhere to insist that he is not interested in a “special ‘use of poetry’—some therapeutic value for the sake of which poetry is to be cultivated.”6 In a short manifesto in The Kenyon Review, originally entitled “My Credo,” he insists that “literature is not a surrogate for religion” and “the purpose of literature is not to point a moral.”7 Formalists, he says, assume an ideal reader because, in taking into account “a lowest common denominator” of possible readings, “we frankly move from literary criticism into socio-psychology.”8 And while Brooks acknowledges that different critics may have different goals, from editing texts to writing book reviews to presenting papers to the Modern Language Association, he is genially dismissive of both “applied” readings and the supposedly less “drab,” “brighter, more amateur, and more ‘human’ criticism” that flourishes “in the classroom presided over by the college lecturer of infectious enthusiasm, in the gossipy Book-of-the-Month-Club bulletins, and in the columns of the Saturday Review of Literature.”9 Brooks doesn’t think these versions do much harm, but nor do they do much good. “The reduction of a work of literature to its causes does not constitute literary criticism; nor does an estimate of its effects. Good literature is more than effective rhetoric applied to true ideas.”10 “Literature is not inimical to ideas. It thrives upon ideas but it does not present ideas patly and neatly.”11 Insofar as literature has “uses,” it is the task of the critic to analyze the ways that ideas perform in literary works, not how works “exemplify” or “produce” them.
After many years of being old-fashioned, close reading is again fashionable, although, like all revived fashions, it wears its retrospection with a difference. Suddenly—or not so suddenly—students, graduate and undergraduate, are alight with excitement about this category of analysis, for so long relegated to the supposedly naive past, the heyday of I. A. Richards and practical criticism, and of “new” critics like Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and William Empson, to name only a few of the literary luminaries of that era. While they continue to resist some of the basic tenets of New Criticism, like the Intentional Fallacy described by William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley and the Affective Fallacy proposed by Wimsatt, young scholars and critics, for so long immersed in historicism and context, are again intrigued by the idea of close reading a work of literature. Reading, that is to say, not for what the work says about the time when it was produced, or about the author or the reading public, but about how its language functions.
Here it may be useful to say a word about those famous fallacies, and about the genealogy and lineage of close reading, to try to see how the practice (which I would prefer to call simply reading) has become both so controversial and so out of fashion that it is once again new.
The intentional fallacy says that the intention of the author has no ultimate control over the meaning of the work. If we were to discover, for example, a letter from William Shakespeare to one of his fellow actors, saying that in Hamlet he intended to express his dismay about the corrupt state of contemporary politics, or the parlous economic situation of actors, or his Christian faith, or his loss of faith in marriage, or his belief in providence, or his worry about political succession—this would have no definitive effect on our readings of Hamlet. It would be another piece of evidence, but it would not trump or sideline other readings of the play, even readings that run counter to whatever the author’s letter asserted. The author, in other words, is entitled to his opinion. But what he intends, even assuming that we could know what that is, is just one point of view among many. (Imagine another letter, written at the same time, to his wife, contradicting the assertions he made in the letter to his fellow actor: the play is about his idealization of love, his loss of Christian faith, his doubts about providence, his confidence in the political system.) The work of literature has a life of its own; it takes on meanings, in the plural, as it is read and performed and discussed.
Discounting intention does not suggest that all meanings are equally persuasive or valid. When Hamlet says in a letter to the king that he is “set naked on your kingdom” (4.2), he does not mean that he is wearing no clothes but that he has no weapon; when Mercutio and Romeo exchange witticisms about Romeo’s “pump,” they are talking about his shoe style, not about a mechanical device for retrieving water—although as their jesting continues, a wide range of other meanings may attach to this word. So some readings can be “wrong” because of what might be called underreading—not giving enough credit to the historical meanings of modern words. But sometimes even the wrong reading can be right, if defended or presented in a convincing way. Baz Luhrmann’s film Romeo + Juliet makes much erotic sport of the idea of pumping, and even though this seems in part either a resistance to or a failure to understand, the idea of a pump as a kind of shoe (for men as well as for women, in Shakespeare’s time) the scene can be made to work.
The belief in intention belongs to a historicist moment, or to at least two historicist moments: the one against which the New Critics were actively reacting, and the one that inevitably came to react against them. Both historicisms (the second, called “new historicism,” and the other—rather unfairly—dubbed in a species of back-formation “old historicism”) put strong value in biography, context, “the archive,” and a kind of allegorical reading of historical events. But intention—as we will see in relation to questions of biography and truth—can get in the way of close reading, since it forecloses some interpretive options as inappropriate, untimely, unsuitable, not what the author could have meant.
The affective fallacy warned against feeling, or feeling too much, or being carried away by the rightness of a feeling. When W. K. Wimsatt wrote about it in the 1940s, it was a response to the excesses of belletrism and impressionistic criticism. The inevitable bounce-back against the too stringent enforcement of such a fallacy led to reader-response criticism, the idea of interpretive communities, and most recently, an explicitly affective criticism that is all about feelings, whether negative or positive, encompassing the poles of infatuation and disgust. Sometimes, in this era of fact and science, the affective emotions are tied to the hardwiring of the brain, which produces smells, colors, sounds, synesthesia (the blending of the senses), etc. Whatever we may think about affect, I think it is fair to say that it marks a response to the work, rather than a reading of it. However closely affective arguments are tied to language, there is always a hypothetical suture (a word, phrase, or image “makes me feel like” this or that or, less convincingly, “produces the effect of” this or that). As with polling data, there are outliers, responses that don’t seem to fit the prevailing pattern as urged or detected by the critic. But rather than sparking an exciting argument based upon this divergence, such dissent seems to push against the very idea of a community, so that what is occasionally sought is an alternative community that does, or would, or might have, responded in the way that the minority or disaffected reading suggested. In any case, one object of affective criticism (“old” or “new,” impressionistic or scientific) would seem to be an explanation of why the feeling was right for the reader.
Although they have sometimes been dubbed critical fallacies, intention and affect (the intention of the author, the response of the reader) remain central to the curiosity and desire of many scholars, critics, and ordinary readers of literature. What did the author have in mind, and what led him or her to write? How does what I feel when I read a poem or a passage derive from the language and imagery on the page? Do other readers feel the same, and if not, is one of us right and another, wrong? Indeed, the provocation for calling such ideas fallacious was that they were so widespread. Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that such questions were not literary, and that they led the reader instead into regions of historical research and individual psychology. One of the persistent goals of scholarship and criticism has been to try to reframe these desires (to know and to feel) within the language of literary investigation: to pose these questions, exactly, as literary questions.
Let’s consider one of the most anthologized and analyzed of all twentieth-century poems in English, Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” The poem is very brief—two lines—which makes it ideal for close reading. But as will be immediately evident, not every reading is close in the sense of attention to form.
Take, for example, the question of the text of the poem, which you might think would be, if not an easy, then at least a resolvable question. But in fact that is not the case. In its earliest printing, in Poetry magazine on June 6, 1913, the poem was printed this way:
Shortly thereafter, in T.P.’s Weekly for June 1913, Pound published another version of the poem:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
And in his collection of poetry called Lustra (1916), the poem appears in a similar form, except the colon at the end of the first line has been changed to a semicolon.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
This is how the poem is almost always printed today. Pound commented extensively on its genesis and offered detailed (and changing) instructions for its proper punctuation.12 The existence of these varied versions, each with its printing provenance and with the attached explanatory comments of the poet, constitute a good example of what is now known as genetic criticism, the history of drafts and versions or, as its proponents call them, avanttextes or pretexts.13 Pretty clearly, the difference in spacing and punctuation will influence both the performative reading of the poem (how is it spoken aloud? with what pauses and emphases?) and also, potentially, its meaning. But we have begun with the problem of establishing the text, and the text here is already, even in a demonstrably modern era, one of many variants, each sanctioned by the author, with an explanation, in some cases, of his intentions and of the effect, or affect, he expects the poem to produce. The first version of the poem was thirty lines long; later the two-line text modeled on the Japanese haiku derived from it.
Almost every account of this short and brilliant poem alludes, at some point, to Pound’s evolutionary description of how he came to write it:
Three years ago in Paris I got out of a “metro” train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation … not in speech, but in little splotches of color …
Any mind that is worth calling a mind must have needs beyond the existing categories of language, just as a painter must have pigments or shades more numerous than the existing names of the colors.
Perhaps this is enough to explain the words in my “Vortex”:—
“Every concept, every emotion, presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form. It belongs to the art of this form.”
In these ruminations published in 1916, Pound went on to discuss the haiku (spelled hokku in his text):
The “one-image poem” is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work “of second intensity.” Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence:—
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.”
I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.14
Here is the author, front and center, naming his poem’s genre (hokku-like; “one-image poem”), explaining its moment of origin, its visual inspiration, its title, its poetic progress from thirty lines to fifteen to two. To read the poem, must one read this account or know of it? And if so, do we have to believe it? What authority does the author have?
Many critics, contemplating “In a Station of the Metro,” have zeroed in on the word apparition, which stands out from all the others in that it is multisyllabic, Latinate, abstract, conceptual as well as visual. Several have detected a mythological substrate, indebted to classical literature’s descents to the underworld (“apparition” + “faces in the crowd” = shades of the dead, whether experienced by Orpheus, Odysseus, or Aeneas). Some recent commentators have singled out the poem’s ethnopoetics,15 and at least one, close reading Pound’s account of the poem’s origin, has seen the “foundational cluster beauty / woman / child / lovely /[poetry]” as posing a feminist conundrum: “One idea is that beauty / the feminine matters in the construction of poetry; the other is that it does not.”16
If one did not have in hand Pound’s autobiographical account, would it be tempting to imagine that the faces were flashing by on a moving train, rather than being glimpsed on the station platform, as he seems to describe them? And if one had never heard of haiku, would it matter? What if this were the first one-image poem the reader encountered? How much background or generic context is necessary to read a poem? And if we wanted, for any reason, to read against Pound’s authority rather than in obedience to it, what might that mean?
Pound calls it a one-image poem, but arguably, it is a two-image poem, if one counts the title. Suppose we did not have the title phrase—or if he had excised the title in a further editorial moment? Without that situational marker, which anchors the perception in modernity and in urban space, the two lines might be read quite differently. If we were to compare the poem to, for example, some fragments of ancient verse, recognized as fragmentary, unrecoverable as wholes, what would that do to the poem? Pound famously collaborated with T. S. Eliot in assembling The Waste Land, with its paradigmatic assertion that “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” In his account of the genesis of the “Metro” poem, Pound claims that “the image is itself the speech”—that images are not “ornaments.” But is the title part of the image? Or is it an ornament?
Another well-known modern instance of an author severely cutting a poem for a similar tightening effect is Marianne Moore’s decision to reduce her poem “Poetry” from five stanzas to three lines—a distilled version of the three lines that began the original poem.
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.
These revisions were accepted as canonical—i.e., as the author’s version of the poem—when Moore’s collected poetry was published in 1967, but when facsimiles of the (out-of-print) 1924 volume Observations came under review by scholars, debates ensued about whether the editorial changes Moore introduced should be regarded as improvements. In any case, the two poems called “Poetry” are formally and textually quite different, and the shorter of the two does not contain one of Moore’s most famous and most quoted phrases, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”
It is not uncommon for works of literature, whether in verse or in prose, to exist in more than one version. I mention it here because the question of reading may be thought, naturally enough, to involve reading a particular something, and that something (usually called the work or the text) is increasingly, in these sophisticated editorial days, a plural something—like, for example, the two different, “authentic” versions of King Lear that are now regularly printed by editors of that play, or what used to be called the “Bad” Quarto of Hamlet.
The First Quarto of Hamlet included this version of a speech that would become celebrated in a very different form:
To be, or not to be, I, there’s the point,
To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
And borne before an euerlasting Iudge,
From whence no passenger euer retur’nd,
The vndiscovered country, at whose sight
The happy smile, and the accursed damn’d. (7.114–121)
Will any non-academic reader claim that this is the “real” (since apparently “original”) “To be or not to be,” or ask whether it has been effectively superseded by the more familiar text? For an increasing number of Shakespeare scholars, the First Quarto (no longer dubbed “the Bad Quarto,” as if it had a moral flaw) has a legitimacy all its own, regardless of the wider admiration accorded the Second Quarto and Folio. Actors have performed the first version with considerable success, unhampered by the overfamiliarity that breeds not contempt but its affectively positive equivalent, stultifying adoration. The total effect is often that of an aria performed, applauded, and experienced as a whole. The experience of the First Quarto is both disorienting and refreshing—the pleasure of encountering the energies of this astonishing play anew. If it sends us back to the more familiar version, all the better—but this passage seems to suggest a set of rhythms, and an acting style, that show us something powerful and strong.
Coleridge described prose as “words in their best order” and poetry as “the best words in their best order.”17 Close readers in the middle of the twentieth century tended to use poem in an extended sense—to refer, for example, to plays in verse, especially the plays of Shakespeare, and by extension, other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. “Hamlet, the Prince or the Poem” was the title of an essay by the critic C. S. Lewis,18 and the use of poem here is indicative. Teachers of fiction, and especially of long novels, used close reading to direct attention, for example, to the opening sentences or first paragraphs of these works. This pedagogical technique had a strategic as well as an aesthetic and intellectual payoff, since even those students who had not read the work in question—or had not read far into it—could be brought into a conversation about artistry, word choice, tone, voice, irony, and foreshadowing. A classic instance is the beginning of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
A skilled teacher can elicit discussion of this single sentence for an extended period before turning to the second sentence, which not only superbly undercuts the first but makes the reader reread and reconsider it:
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
Again, a whole discussion might well be devoted to the single word property, which has major resonances throughout the novel and through Austen’s work more generally. Bear in mind that the single man with the good (not great) fortune alluded to in this first sentence is the amiable and pliable Mr. Bingley, not the far wealthier and more complex Mr. Darcy. The novel sidles into the narrative of its central love affair through this delectably wicked glance at local customs, town gossip, and the neat slide from high-toned philosophical bromide (“it is a truth universally acknowledged”) to the bathetically domestic, or the domestically bathetic, “must be in want of a wife.” Think for a second about how else the sentence might have concluded: “should put his money in a safe place”; “should consider the welfare of others before his own comfort”; “should be grateful for the prudence of his forebears and the providence of a beneficent deity,” etc.
The reading tactic deployed here is, as I’ve noted, what has been variously called close reading or slow reading or reading in slow motion. The latter phrase is that of Reuben Brower, a professor of English at Harvard in the fifties and sixties and, before that, professor of Greek and English at Amherst College.19 Brower was the legendary teacher of an equally legendary Harvard course, Humanities 6, almost always referred to as Hum 6.
Perhaps the clearest and most eloquent demonstration of how close reading works was offered by one of Brower’s former assistants in the course, Paul de Man, who would become one of the most admired literary exponents of deconstruction, and whose own pedagogy produced a roster of critics as accomplished as Brower’s. Here is de Man’s account, from an essay first published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1982. In its clarity and descriptive analysis, it is well worth quoting at length.
My own awareness of the critical, even subversive, power of literary instruction does not stem from philosophical allegiances but from a very specific teaching experience. In the 1950s, [Walter Jackson] Bate’s colleague at Harvard, Reuben Brower, taught an undergraduate course in General Education entitled “The Interpretation of Literature” (better known on the Harvard campus and in the profession at large as HUM 6) in which many graduate students in English and Comparative Literature served as teaching assistants. No one could be more remote from high-powered French theory than Reuben Brower. He wrote books on Shakespeare and on Pope that are models of sensitive scholarship but not exactly manifestos for critical terrorism. He was much more interested in Greek and Latin literature than in literary theory. The critics he felt closest to, besides Eliot, were Richards and Leavis, and in both of them he was in sympathy with their emphasis on ethics.
Brower, however, believed in and effectively conveyed what appears to be an entirely innocuous and pragmatic precept, founded on Richards’s “practical criticism.” Students, as they began to write on the writings of others, were not to say anything that was not derived from the text they were considering. They were not to make any statements that they could not support by a specific use of language that actually occurred in the text. They were asked, in other words, to begin by reading texts closely as texts and not to move at once into the general context of human experience or history. Much more humbly or modestly, they were to start out from the bafflement that such singular turns of tone, phrase, and figure were bound to produce in readers attentive enough to notice them and honest enough not to hide their non-understanding behind the screen of received ideas that often passes, in literary instruction, for humanistic knowledge.
This very simple rule, surprisingly enough, had far-reaching didactic consequences. I have never known a course by which students were so transformed. Some never saw the point of thus restricting their attention to the matter at hand and of concentrating on the way meaning is conveyed rather than on the meaning itself. Others, however, caught on very quickly and, henceforth, they would never be the same. The papers they handed in at the end of the course bore little resemblance to what they produced at the beginning. What they lost in generality, they more than made up for in precision and in the closer proximity of their writing to the original mode. It did not make writing easier for them for they no longer felt free to indulge in any thought that came into their head or to paraphrase any idea they happened to encounter.
At the end of this account of the surprising effects of Reuben Brower’s pedagogical method, de Man offers an analysis that may seem even more surprising.
Mere reading, it turns out, prior to any theory, is able to transform critical discourse in a manner that would appear deeply subversive to those who think of the teaching of literature as a substitute for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history. Close reading accomplishes this often in spite of itself because it cannot fail to respond to structures of language which it is the more or less secret aim of literary teaching to keep hidden.20
It’s worth doing a close reading of the last sentence, the topic of which is close reading. De Man’s elegant formulation is built on a series of negations and reversals: “in spite of itself”; “it cannot fail”; “the more or less secret aim … to keep hidden.” When it is coupled with “deeply subversive” in the previous sentence, we have what might be described as a critical language of reluctant but persistent uncovering. The concept of literary teaching here is explicated immediately above: the methods of “those who think of the teaching of literature as a substitute for the teaching of theology, ethics, psychology, or intellectual history.” Language, in all its waywardness, slows down and diverts the goal of identifying a “meaning”—meaning that the text will then be said to express. This is why close reading is “subversive”: what it subverts is a rush to a corresponding meaning outside the text. Reading in slow motion, frame by frame—does not allow for the “general impression,” which is so often an imprecise paraphrase of what the reader thinks the poem, or novel, or story, or play, ought to be saying. What it actually says may get in the way of that confident appropriation. Details emerge that may derail the express.
We might draw an analogy with what was known in my childhood as “look-say” reading as opposed to phonics or “sounding it out.” Confronted with the image of an equine quadruped and the letters H-O-R-S-E, the eager reader cried out “Pony!”
De Man’s essay was called “The Return to Philology,” and the quiet irony is evident. Philology, that supposedly old-fashioned discipline, was the most radical way of reading. Radical in the sense of word roots, and radical in the sense of destabilizing common sense when it conflicted with what the words on the page were saying and doing. Writing in the early 1980s, de Man saw the analogy between Brower’s course and what came to be called “theory.”
The personal experience of Reuben Brower’s Humanities 6 was not so different from the impact of theory on the teaching of literature over the past ten or fifteen years. The motives may have been more revolutionary and the terminology was certainly more intimidating. But, in practice, the turn to theory occurred as a return to philology, to an examination of the structure of language prior to the meaning it produces.21
Had this essay been written a few years later, it might have observed not only the turn to theory (what, in other fields, like history and anthropology, became known as “the linguistic turn”) but also a kind of inevitable response (I hesitate to call it a backlash) in the turn—or return—to history. History, rather than theology or psychology, became, for many readers and teachers, the anterior “meaning” of literary texts.22
When historicism emerged as a central defining practice in English departments in the later twentieth century, one of its core practices was to do powerful close readings of historical texts in the context of the readings of works of literature. The elements of surprise, consternation, and arrest were introduced into the reading of what had previously been described as secondary texts for literary study: a treatise on witchcraft, say, or an instruction manual on swordsmanship or mathematics, or a conduct book for young ladies or young gentlemen. Work of this kind was invaluable in returning to prominence questions of historical reference in literary texts that had sometimes been ignored, or consigned to footnotes, by formalist practices of close reading.
The importance of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 as a reference for Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or the changes in domestic fiction brought about by the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, or the observations of the early modern astronomer, ethnographer, and translator Thomas Harriot when he traveled to the Americas with Walter Raleigh in 1585–86—all of these became focal points for important scholarship in English and American literature and culture. But every practice is prone to its own excesses, and over time it has occasionally been the case that the historical fact took preeminence over the literary work. When history is regarded as the “real” of which the poem, play, or novel is (merely or largely) a reflection, something crucial is lost, and that something is literature.
Some early examples of English poetry exhibit a striking kind of fictive usefulness, embedded in the artifice of poem-making. In these cases, the poem—or the rhyme, or the perfect word—comes to the poet as inspiration, whether from God or from the muse of poetry, supplying words where they were lacking, and changing or healing the speaker. These stories are legendary and exemplary. Here are three examples, one from the earliest-known English poem, another from a religious lyric, and a third from a love sonnet.
The story of “Caedmon’s Hymn” is told, movingly, by the monk and scholar known as the Venerable Bede. Caedmon was a lay brother who worked as a herdsman at the monastery. Once, when the monks were feasting and singing, he retreated to sleep with the animals because—says Bede—he knew no songs. He dreamed that “someone” came to him and told him to sing a song of the beginning of creation. At first he demurred but then began to sing the short—and beautiful—poem known as “Caedmon’s Hymn.” The next day he reported these events to the monastery, was asked to write another poem, and, having complied, was invited to take monastic vows. He became—again according to Bede—a prolific poet of religious verse, all composed, like the hymn, in the vernacular—that is to say, in Old English, not in Latin. Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, which reports this, is, however, written in Latin.
Like all foundation myths, this one can, if we choose, be regarded as an invention, a fiction, an allegory, an embellishment of fact, or any other species of instructive story. But the hymn exists in a number of dialect versions, and what it records is a story of literary inspiration. “Sing,” the command given to Caedmon, remains throughout much of the history of English—and earlier—literature the figure inviting or initiating poetic performance (Virgil’s Aeneid famously begins “Arms and the man I sing”). The moment of inspiration (after a period of mute or stumbling incapacity) is not infrequently restaged in later poems as a birth, or rebirth, of song and creative fluency.
Consider, for example, George Herbert’s poem “Denial,” which begins
When my devotions could not pierce
Thy silent ears,
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse:
My breast was full of fears
And disorder.
and ends
O cheer and tune my heartless breast,
Defer no time;
That so thy favors granting my request,
They and my mind may chime,
And mend my rhyme.
The mended rhyme comes with the word “rhyme,” which accords with “chime” and “time,” and repairs the loss of rhyme in the previous stanza, which ends in “disorder.” Herbert expertly deploys the final lines and stanzas of his poems to perform this kind of mind-mending, in poems like “The Collar,” “Love (III),” and the “Jordan” poems, among others. As with Caedmon, the literary fiction—whatever the spiritual reality—is that of divine assistance, inspiration, collaboration.
A more secular version of this trope—for it is a trope, a figure of speech—is on display in the first of Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella sonnets, where the lover, seeking words to describe his passion, turns dramatically from rhetoric to spontaneous feeling:
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she dear she might take some pleasure of my pain:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled stepdame Study’s blows;
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”
(1–14)
This great sonnet is deeply—and deliberately—disingenuous in its ingenuity. Disclaiming artifice, study, and literary device, it deploys them with consummate artistry. The poem is a primer in literary figures, from anadiplosis, the repetition of the last word from a previous clause or phrase at the beginning of the next, to the vivified pun on “feet” (anatomical and poetical), and finally to the professions of incapacity “helpless in my throes”; “truant pen”) and the triumphant breakthrough when the Muse dictates the manner of plain speech (“look in thy heart and write”). Significantly, it is the Muse’s speech, not the poet’s, that comes to end (and mend) the sonnet—although the Muse herself is, like Invention and stepdame Study, one of the invented personae of the poet’s text.
The naive voice in such a poem is achieved through learning, not despite it. Elizabethan and Jacobean poets were skilled in the use of rhetorical devices, having learned them in school and through the examples found in numerous rhetorical textbooks, like Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence Conteyning the Figures of Grammer and Rhetorick (1577), Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique, for the use of all suche as are studious of Eloquence, sette forth in English (1553), and George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy (1589). Modern students may be familiar with metaphor, simile, personification, and a handful of other figures of speech, but the poetic toolbox of earlier poets contained dozens, indeed hundreds, of tropes. Recognizing them, and the twists and turns that made them new, was one of the manifold pleasures of reading. For a modern reader, the reverse is the case: the identification of tropes and figures often comes after the first and second readings of the poem, if at all, and is often associated with the classroom rather than with the immediacy of aesthetic or intellectual response.
These rhetorical treatises directly address the question of use. The poet, equipped with skills in language and style, is enabled to move in courtly circles and to affect both language and politics.23 The idea of material advancement through poetry was not an exaggeration. It was possible to overcome the disadvantages of low birth through education. Archbishop Cranmer (himself not born to the aristocracy) contended that “poor men’s children are many times endued with more singular gifts of nature … eloquence, memory, apt pronunciation, sobriety, and such like, and also commonly more apt to apply their study, than is the gentleman’s son delicately educated.”24
Puttenham’s title, The Art of English Poesy, should be inflected with a stress on the word English: he took for granted the effectiveness, importance, and art (in the largest sense, encompassing rhetorical skill, craft, politics, and eloquence) of earlier poets, both historical and divine. What he set out to do, by tracing the role of the poet through Western cultural history and “Englishing” the names of some classical literary tropes, was to define the potential use of poetry, poetics, and poets for the emerging English nation. The explanatory subtitle of Chapter 2 is “That there may be an art of our English poesy, as well as there is of the Latin and Greek”; the explanatory subtitle of Chapter 3 is “How poets were the first priests, the first prophets, the first legislators and politicians in the world”; the explanatory subtitle of Chapter 4 is “How the poets were the first philosophers, the first astronomers, and historiographers, and orators, and musicians of the world,” and so on. Taken together with the address to the queen, this framing constitutes a political as well as a social and aesthetic argument. Poets are good for nation-building, and a national literature is good for the nation.
Moreover, the idea of poets as legislators and politicians—a concept that, by the time of Shelley’s Defense of Poetry, had become rhetorical in the abased sense of that term—was, for the Elizabethans, a practical reality. Shelley would claim that poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” but in ancient Greece and throughout the Renaissance, poets were, in fact, fully acknowledged as political players. “Poet” was not a full-time occupation to the exclusion of other pursuits. Philip Sidney was a diplomat, Walter Raleigh a courtier and explorer, George Herbert a priest.*
John Donne was trained as a diplomat and anticipated a career in government until his marriage produced a breach between Donne and his political patrons. Edmund Spenser pursued a political career in Ireland (his prose pamphlet A View of the Present State of Ireland recommended aggressive conquest of the Irish native population and the instigation of English language and customs); his prose epic The Faerie Queene, one of the masterworks of the English literary canon, was written in hopes of obtaining a place at court—hopes that did not come to fruition for political reasons. As one of Spenser’s early-twentieth-century editors wrote, “Poetry was a noble pastime, even a vocation, but for a gentleman it was not a profession. All it could do for him would be to bring his talents to the notice of those who were in the position to better his fortunes.”25
The argument of The Faerie Queene, setting forth its poetic program, was addressed to Spenser’s friend Walter Raleigh. Spenser explained that “the generall end” of the book was “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” So this, too, was a use of poetry. The choice of a fictional narrative for what Spenser called his “continued Allegory, or darke conceit,” was connected—or so he alleged—to the idea of fashioning the moral character of his gentle or noble readers:
To some I know this Methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather hauve good discipline deliuered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they use, then thus cloudily enwrapped in Allegoricall deuises. But such, me seeme, should be satisfied with the vse of these dayes, seeing all things accounted by their showes, and nothing esteemed of, that is not delightfull and pleasing to commune sense.26
Excuse or not—since allegory’s “dark conceit” was also, equally usefully, a way of disguising controversial views under the device of fiction—this explanation for why one of the most brilliantly imagined poems in the English language takes the form of poetry and fiction rather than precepts and sermons is a good example of the use of use. In Spenser’s letter to Raleigh, “the vse of these dayes” is customary practice, what people are used to, what they like or prefer—in this case, “showes.” A few years later, Ben Jonson would excoriate mere “showes” as the stage design and props provided by his collaborator, Inigo Jones, as contrasted with the greater complexity of poetry: “O showes! Showes! Mighty Showes! / The Eloquence of Masques! / What need of prose/Or Verse, or Sense, t’express Immortal you?”27 But “showes” for Spenser still seemed to include literary exhibitions or fictions.
So the uses of rhetoric, eloquence, “poetical ornament,” figures of speech, and fictional examples were, for the poets, scholars, and politicians of the English Renaissance, a way of (1) fashioning gentlemen, (2) inculcating moral virtues as painlessly and pleasurably as possible, (3) concealing or disguising unpopular opinions under the guise of fiction or allegory, and (4) seeking—and sometimes obtaining—political, social, and financial advancement. Literature had uses: it did things, it gained things for the poet, even though—and perhaps because—his profession was not “poet” but something else.
The combination of poetry and advocacy, we might note, is as vital and necessary today as it was centuries ago. When the poet Robert Bly accepted the National Book Award for poetry in 1969, he invoked the moral authority of the radical intellectuals of the sixties:
We have some things to be proud of. No one needs to be ashamed of the acts of civil disobedience committed in the tradition of Thoreau. What Dr. Coffin did was magnificent; the fact that Yale University did not do it is what is sad. What Mr. Berrigan did was noble; the fact that the Catholic church did not do it is what is sad. What Mitchell Goodman did here last year was needed and in good taste … In an age of gross and savage crimes by legal governments, the institutions will have to learn responsibility, learn to take their part in preserving the nation, and take their risk by committing acts of disobedience. The book companies can find ways to act like Thoreau, whom they publish. Where were the publishing houses when Dr. Spock and Mr. Goodman and Mr. Raskin—all three writers—were indicted? …
You have given me an award for a book that has many poems in it against the war. I thank you for the award. As for the thousand-dollar check, I am turning it over to the draft-resistance movement, specifically to the organization called the Resistance …28
The only dated part of the speech is the amount of the check. Today’s National Book Award winners each get ten thousand dollars and a trophy.
But there is something moving about the spectacle of a poet trying to change the world with “many poems against the war” and a thousand-dollar check. Especially when we contrast it to the cancellation of a proposed White House symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice” convened by First Lady Laura Bush for Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 2003. When the poet and editor Sam Hamill responded to the invitation by sending out an e-mail urging invitees to send him poems and statements opposing the invasion of Iraq, he received over 5,300 submissions, from poets as well known as Adrienne Rich, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Levine, and Diane di Prima. The symposium was postponed indefinitely, and the White House put out the following statement: “While Mrs. Bush understands the right of all Americans to express their political views, this event was designed to celebrate poetry.”
Outside of the classroom poetry is often a specialized interest, what consumer guides call a niche product. But in recent years audiences have been drawn to two kinds of in-person cultural performances: the poetry reading and the poetry slam. The former typically takes place in a bookstore, café, or college auditorium. The speaker is a well-known poet or several—often, but not always, appearing in connection with the publication of a new book. The slam features individuals or teams who speak within a strict time limit (three minutes) and are awarded points by a judge for their performance. Participants in poetry slams are usually young, often influenced by hip-hop or dub poetry, and sometimes connected to youth poetry organizations. Although in both formats—the reading and the slam—poets occasionally recite works by others, the characteristic mode is personal performance of one’s own work.
Responses to slam culture have, predictably, been varied. The New York Times reported that Harold Bloom called poetry slams “the death of art.”29 Still, it’s undeniable that poetry has attracted new enthusiasts, younger participants, and high energy in recent years, in part through this medium of performance.*
The Renaissance lyric gained popularity through the performances of troubadours and the global phenomenon of Petrarchism, so it’s not so unlikely that a new generation, for whom downloading songs on iPods and other MP3 players is second nature, should make the connection between song and poem. The word lyric dates back etymologically to a time when a poem was sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, and has, since the end of the nineteenth century, also meant the words of a popular song—surely the most common use of the term today.
Despite the occasional gloomy prognosis, poems and poetry are alive and well today—in the classroom, the poetry magazine, the writing workshop, the lecture hall, the bookstore, on the Internet, and in the streets. The death of art is always being predicted somewhere, and is perhaps a necessary pronouncement to ensure the tangible edginess, the sense of delighted transgression, that comes with practicing a living and changing art or craft.