Close Readings

 I picked up Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn mostly to see what the methodology of "New Criticism" has to offer. Brooks's collection of essays is considered to be a representative work of the movement (which is almost a century old at this point, so hardly "new" anymore), and I was wondering what insights his vaunted technique of the "close reading" of poems might disclose. Having finished the book, I'm not sure I'm convinced. 

The famous tenets of the Brooks approach include: 1) concentrate on the work itself, rather than the biography of the author; 2) examine the "structure" of the poem; and 3) avoid paraphrase—or at least, never mistake a paraphrase for the true and complete "meaning" of a poem. Beneath the surface clarity of these doctrines, however, it's not always clear that Brooks is genuinely applying his own principles—or how much they contribute to our understanding of the poems if he is. 

Eschewing biography seems fine, as a rule—though less enjoyable than the alternative—since biography and history are interesting, and surely shed some light at least on what the poet had to say. 

"Structure" is confusing in this context, because Brooks uses it as a special term of art. By it, he seems to mean not form and meter, or anything else related to prosody, which most of us would call the "structure" of a poem. Rather, he points out literary devices, which he misleadingly labels "structure"—things like symbols, images, and allusions—or else more nebulous concepts still, like "irony" and "paradox" (how are those "structure"?)

As for the "paraphrastic heresy," I perfectly agree with the thesis that a poem is not the same thing as its abstracted "summary"—otherwise, why would we need the poem? But—was anyone ever seriously contending anything different? Who was saying that a poem's entire meaning can be disclosed in its paraphrase? Whom did Brooks think he was arguing against? 

Plus, I see no reason why this is more true of a poem than it is of any literary work. Surely, a novel is not the same thing as its cliffs notes version; a play is not the same things as its synopsis. But this does not mean that one cannot abstract theme, plot, and character from the larger artistic whole, and talk about them. One can in fact do so, and can do so with a poem just as easily, as Brooks's own essays demonstrate. They are full of exactly such paraphrastical discussions, and they are often illuminating as a result. 

The true value of the book therefore seems to lie not in any new technique for literary analysis it discloses—but simply that it forces us to reread certain acknowledged classics of the English canon with close attention. It was a great pleasure to revisit these poems, and Brooks's discussion of their uses of irony and paradox does in fact lead one to extract new meaning from their lines. 

Even here, however, the most interesting parts of the book are often those in which one's response to the poems departs most dramatically from Brooks's. 

Take Wordsworth's famous ode on "the Intimations of Immortality." This is a poem I've probably read with close attention about once per decade—and each time I revisit it, with another ten years of accumulated experience behind me, it discloses some new layer of feeling.

The last time I read it, the first four stanzas packed the greatest emotional charge; they are the ones that dwell most achingly on Wordsworth's sense that there was something he once knew in his youth—some "visionary gleam"—to which he cannot find his way back now. 

The lines take on special poignancy in light of Wordsworth's own political development (there's that forbidden biographical method creeping back in!—but I insist that the poem genuinely loses force and meaning without any acknowledgement of it!) One is therefore tempted to interpret the lost "gleam" as the abandoned political idealism of Wordsworth's youth (Shelley certainly interpreted it in this light, and pointed up the irony of the fact that Wordsworth could be both the greatest eulogist of idealism as well as its worst scourge in maturity). 

So, the last time I read the poem, I suppose I felt the pathos of the departing "visionary gleam" most keenly, because I knew that the certainties of my own political infancy were likewise irrecoverable. Not because they had been disproved by experience; but rather because they rested on a set of unfalsifiable direct intuitions that are simply inaccessible to me now. What is "alienation," for instance—from which the Marxist revolution was to save us? I knew the answer without needing to be told, back when I was a teenager. But I could not for the life of me tell you what it means now. 

Reading the poem again in my thirties, though—while the opening stanzas retain their great emotional power—for the first time the middle section of the poem disclosed new meanings to me as well. As I was nearing the center of the poem, this time around, I started to see its message more in light of the disappointments of one's adult career. I thought of myself as a young boy, and how excited I was each day to fantasize about a future life in which I would go to an office and do a grown-up's work—and how hard it is to recapture such feelings now that I have the actual opportunity of doing so. I pictured myself sitting on the floor of my closet as a child and coloring in various "logos" for the hypothetical companies I would one day found.

And no sooner than I had formed this image of myself in childhood in my mind—but no later either—there came Wordsworth, conjuring up a precisely analogous image: "Behold the child [...] See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,/ Some fragment of his dream of human life,/ Shaped by himself with new-learned art [...]" And it was as if Wordsworth had mysteriously led my thoughts in exactly the direction in which he intended them to go; or else that our parallel thought-processes were flowing by natural effect in perfect synchrony. 

What was fascinating to me, in then comparing the poem with Brooks's analysis, is that this new set of imagery that struck me so deeply occurs in precisely the stanza that Brooks says he would gladly remove from the poem, if given the choice (or, as he more delicately puts it, "I am not sure that the poem would not be improved if Stanza VII were omitted"). He writes: "the stanza must still be accounted very weak, and some of the lines are very flat indeed." So strange—for, as I say, it was precisely the one that meant the most to me upon a second reading. 

The final third of the poem, then, failed to resonate entirely, upon this reading—and in all candor, my attention wavered. Perhaps, since I responded most to the first third upon the first reading, and unlocked the middle third upon the second, then, when I read the poem again a decade hence, I will finally get something out of the closing four stanzas.

Perhaps all this really serves to show us is how deeply personal our response to poetry is, and how much it depends on the resonance of our own life experience with whatever insights the poet is trying to communicate. If this is true, then criticism—whether "New" or otherwise—can have very little value. Or else it has only that value that Oscar Wilde attributed to it—namely, that it is interesting for what it tells us about the critic, and their life history and experience, rather than whatever it says about the work itself. 

Take, as a further illustration, Brooks's discussion of Gray's famous "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." Here again, there was a strange discrepancy between the discussion of the poem in Brooks's essay, and my own response upon turning to the text of the work itself, in the book's final appendix.

Brooks spends some time engaging with William Empson's political critique of the poem, which in fairness emerges as an even worse reading than Brooks's own. As quoted in Brooks, Empson apparently saw Gray's "Elegy" as a complacent defense of the English class system. In his telling, the poem portrays the prevailing social order as ultimately justified, because, in cruelly depriving the poor of access to education and the professions, it shields them from having to participate in the "ignoble strife" of ambition and vanity. 

Brooks sees more in the poem that this; he perceives, as Empson does not, that the speaker of the poem ultimately chooses to share the lot of the deceased in the country churchyard, rather than to opt for a more splendid burial, with all the vain trappings of power, and that this implies a sort of identification with their plight that belies mere complacency with the established order. 

Yet, what both readings seem to miss—or at least, to woefully underemphasize—is that the poem is not really about the poor people buried in the churchyard at all. The problem that actually concerns the poet is his own sense of obscurity—his fear of meeting death before his work and talents are recognized, as well as his ambivalence toward the contrary scenario of success and fame. The poet—or at least the speaker—is plainly the "flower born to blush unseen,"—or at least so he fears he will prove to be. The people buried in the churchyard are just an image, a metaphor, through which he expresses his own self-doubt. 

One can thus criticize the poem on political grounds for using the poor as a mere vehicle; one can object to the educated speaker projecting his own concerns upon the underprivileged, and thus using them as a means to an end—an extension of his own self-pity. But this is a very different critique from the one Empson offers, which takes for granted that the poet is actually talking about the poor people in the churchyard—rather than using them as a metaphor for the plight of the obscure and forgotten poet, who dreads lest he never receive his due attention. 

Though I am open here, too, I suppose, to the charge that I am simply offering another purely personal reading. Maybe this is what Gray's elegy "said" to me, on this occasion, because it is what I am worried about myself. I am the one pouring his heart out to the world in voluminous writings, without getting the attention the writer inevitably feels he is owed. I am the "flower born to blush unseen"!

But if this is true, then it is merely another illustration of what we said above: criticism is wasted, if we think it is meant to tell us something about the original work. What criticism is truly good for, as Wilde has stated the case most eloquently, is disclosing aspects of the critic's own character and experience, as the poem reacts upon them and brings them to light. 

None of which is tolerated under the strictures of a puritanical version of the "New Criticism." But without it, it seems to me, poetry—and indeed, criticism—would be deprived of most of its interest and meaning.