The Craft of Poetry

Dialogues on Minimal Interpretation

Derek Attridge, Henry Staten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317532583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book presents an innovative format for poetry criticism that its authors call "dialogical poetics." This approach shows that readings of poems, which in academic literary criticism often look like a product of settled knowledge, are in reality a continual negotiation between readers. But Derek Attridge and Henry Staten agree to rein in their own interpretive ingenuity and "minimally interpret" poems – reading them with careful regard for what the poem can be shown to actually say, in detail and as a whole, from opening to closure. Based on a series of emails, the book explores a number of topics in the reading of poetry, including historical and intellectual context, modernist difficulty, the role of criticism, and translation. This highly readable book will appeal to anyone who enjoys poetry, offering an inspiring resource for students whilst also mounting a challenge to some of the approaches to poetry currently widespread in the academy.

1

MINIMAL INTERPRETATION (WILLIAM BLAKE, “THE SICK ROSE”)

DOI: 10.4324/9781315724980-1

Dear Henry,

As you know, I’ve been trying for a while to articulate an understanding of the literary critic’s task that rests on a notion of responsibility, derived in large part from Derrida and Levinas, or, more accurately, Derrida’s recasting of Levinas’s thought, one aspect of which is an emphasis on the importance of what I’ve called variously a “literal” or “weak” reading, and what you’ve called “minimal reading.” That is to say, I’ve become increasingly troubled by the effects of the enormous power inherent in the techniques of literary criticism at our disposal today, including techniques of formal analysis, ideology critique, allusion hunting, genetic tracing, historical contextualization, and biographical research. The result of this rich set of critical resources is that any literary work, whether or not it is a significant achievement in the history of literature, and whether or not it evokes a strong response in the critic, can be accorded a lengthy commentary claiming originality and importance for it. What is worse, the most basic norms of careful reading are sometimes ignored in the rush to say something ingenious or different. (Part of the problem here is the model of literary criticism whereby the critic feels obliged to claim that his or her interpretation trumps all previous interpretations, and another part is the institutional pressure to accumulate publications or move up the promotional ladder.) We may be teaching our students to write clever interpretations without teaching them how to read.

The notion that it’s smarter to read “against the grain” rather than to respond accurately and affirmatively to the singularity of the work can compound this disregard of what is truly important. This is not to say that the use of literary works as illustrations of historical conditions or ideological formations (including abhorrent ones) is invalid or reprehensible; just that to do so is not to treat the works in question primarily as literature. Nor am I suggesting that what is important in a literary work is immutable and capable of transcending history; on the contrary, both literary creation and the practice of interpretation take place, it should go without saying, within historically engendered cultural contexts. (The relevant context may, however, be of considerable historical duration and geopolitical extent.)

You too have expressed a desire to promote some kind of minimal interpretation as a critical virtue, and it occurred to me that an exchange of e-mails about what this means in the reading of a single poem might give us an opportunity to discuss these issues, focusing on what we each take to be essential to an interpretation (as well as what a concern with the essential makes possible and perhaps what it excludes). The choice of an example is going to be pretty arbitrary, but let me suggest – partly because of its shortness, partly because it has been subject to a huge amount of interpretive ingenuity – Blake’s little poem “The Sick Rose.” Are you up for it?

With best wishes,

Derek

Dear Derek,

I think that yours is a very needed project, and that no one is better qualified than you to undertake it because of your marvelous knowledge of the history of English literature and in particular of English meter – knowledge few literary critics can approach (certainly not me). My own work on this kind of reading has convinced me that it must be “dialogical”: if something is “in” a poem, then it must be so not just to me but to others as well, if not initially, then with a bit of pointing out. (Caveat: if someone takes it as axiomatic that everything in a text is always up for interpretive grabs, this person will resist all such pointing out. The interlocutor must be open to the possibility that there can be general – not universal – agreement, across ideological divides, on certain features of the text, and willing to take such agreement, when and if it happens, as pointing to something significant about the text.) So I think a dialogue between us on a specific poem is a very good way to approach the question of the obvious.

One more preliminary before we get down to cases. Since critics who consider themselves “formalists” or “close readers” have for a long time criticized what you call “ideology critique” along lines that superficially sound similar to yours, I want to underline the fact that you are as critical of “formal analysis” as you are of “ideology critique.” Close reading readily becomes a display of the richness of the reader’s imagination and her virtuosity as a reader of poetry; but virtuoso displays of reading by definition go where other readers can’t follow on their own. In my conception of “minimal” reading, there’s a certain rejection of virtuosity in reading. I don’t know if you agree with this. Clearly one must have a lot of skill as a reader to read poetry adequately; but an important part of this skill involves knowing where to stop.

You’ve suggested that we talk about Blake’s “The Sick Rose.”

O Rose, thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

On the face of it, this is a poem about a flower that is being killed by some kind of vermin; which, if we take this image in its ordinary sense means that the vermin is eating it. But that’s not what the poem says; what it says is that the rose is being destroyed by the worm’s “dark secret love.” So, if we approach the poem at the level of what it “means” we are immediately up to our necks in those qualities that get interpretive enthusiasm going: ambiguity, symbolism, multiple meaning. But there’s a very different way of reading this and most poems, to which you point in your discussion of this poem in The Singularity of Literature. You mention its “deployment of syntax to achieve an unrelenting forward drive that climaxes on a single powerful word” (66). This observation sums up the power of the poem at an absolutely fundamental, and visibly manifest, level: that of the poem as a structure of grammatically formed, meaningful sound. Your discussion goes on to quickly note the multiple meanings of the key words, and this points into the depths of interpretation; but then you return to the sound-structure and talk about it as follows:

The simplicity of the strongly articulated phrasal movement contributes to this experience. The arresting initial statement, “O Rose, thou art sick,” – one line, two beats – is followed, after a pregnant pause, by an extension that takes up the seven remaining lines. This extended elaboration of the opening line is made up of three lines of anticipation, followed by the stanza break which further heightens the tension, and then a four-line arrival. And those three lines of anticipation form a crescendo of intensity – “The invisible worm / That flies in the night, / In the howling storm,” – while the stanza of arrival varies the 1:3 balance of the first stanza by taking the reader through two climactic statements of equal length: “Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy; // And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.”

(69–70)

This is a perfect demonstration of what I referred to above as a skillful analysis that is not ingenious, not something tied to the refined individual sensibility of the interpreter, but which brings into play basic analytical tools that must be the common stock of poetry critics. This is how the poem is put together at the most basic, nuts-and-bolts level.

And now, having taken the trouble to look first at how the poem is organized as a syntactic, temporal, rhythmic structure (I call this the “cadence” of the poem), you conclude in a way that resolves the interpretive problem I posed at the outset: “The final two lines, phrasally no more than an extension of the previous statement, work semantically to explode the thus far barely contained nursery-rhyme narrative into the most adult, and most terrible, of scenarios” (70). Instead of treating the relation between worm and love as a question of ambiguity or multiple meaning, you treat the transition to love as a function of the poem’s action or gesture, what it does rather than what it means. There is a temporal, syntactic movement that builds up to the eruption of the erotic scenario, and to perceive this movement is to perceive the formal design of the poem.

On my reading, however, the poem doesn’t seem like a “nursery-rhyme narrative.” “Thou art sick,” “invisible worm,” and “howling storm” introduce a dark foreboding into the poem from the outset. The contrast between the conclusion and the rest of the poem is not so much between innocence and experience as it is between animal–vegetable process and sado-masochistic eroticism. But the “dynamics” of the worm–love relation remain the same in either case, and are based, as you show, as much syntactically, in the cadence of the poem, as they are semantically. Your main point, concerning the overall movement of the poem, I would say is indisputable.

What both you and I want to do with poems, I think, is look at them at the level of how they work, how they’re put together (which I call the poem’s techne), rather than at the level of meaning. When you speak of the erotic scenario that erupts at the end of the poem you are taking it at face value, not digging into it; and we need to restrict ourselves to this sort of “minimal meaning” to trace the manifest features of the poem.

DA: Dark foreboding, yes: what I meant by “barely contained nursery-rhyme narrative” was that the intimations of something terrifying strains the nursery-rhyme qualities of the first six lines – their insistent rhythm, simple vocabulary, straightforward syntax, and the charged imagery speaking directly to childhood experience (the rose, sickness, the worm, the night, the storm). This tension is obvious, I would say, to anyone with the necessary linguistic and cultural knowledge – knowledge which is widely shared and in no way privileged.

HS: “The intimations of something terrifying strains the nursery-rhyme qualities of the first six lines.” Yes, very well put.

DA: When you speak of “the level of how it works, how it’s put together, rather than at the level of meaning,” you touch on an aspect of your own work that I’ve found extremely valuable: your emphasis on the shared techne or know-how available to an artist at any given time and place. Presumably, “The Sick Rose” has an immediacy today, over two centuries after its creation, because the techne (let’s drop the italics) that enabled Blake to write his poetry is, in large part, still accessible to us. The rhetorical forms of the lyric (such as the apostrophe – “O Rose … ”), the basic rhythmic templates of the English verse tradition (the whole poem works as a single sixteen-beat unit, the simplest and most popular rhythmic form available to Blake as it still is to us), the symbolic cultural heritage of the West (the rose as beauty, perfection, virginity, love, Christian sacrifice, and so on): these seem to be some of the resources Blake was able to draw on, and that still, by and large, engage us in the same way. So perhaps it’s not quite right to say “rather than at the level of meaning”? Doesn’t meaning – of the kind you describe, “surface” meaning – form an important part of techne?

HS: You’re right. My wording was misleading there; meaning is an essential dimension of the materials and techniques a poet works with and of the poem we read. I shouldn’t draw such a sharp line between what the poem means and how it works, because what it means is an important aspect of how it works. But it’s essential, I think, to keep the functional aspect foremost and to understand the meaning aspect in and through the functional.

DA: Now you may say that to read the rose as a symbol of beauty, perfection, etc. is to leave the surface, and the garden plant, and therefore the realm of the obvious, to enter the depths about which there cannot be general agreement. But don’t these connotations constitute an aspect of the generally agreed meaning of the word rose? Or perhaps we need to distinguish between the obvious and the more recherché aspects of the word’s symbolic force. Of the associations I mentioned, beauty, perfection and love are surely not much less general than the literal botanical meaning.

HS: There are many associations that a word like “rose” can potentially arouse; but which of these associations are in fact activated within a specific poem, in a way that we actually need to bring out, in order to get the bold, sharp outlines of the poem’s action? Perfection doesn’t seem to me to play a significant role in the major dynamic of “The Sick Rose” – a dynamic you’ve described so well – and therefore I would say this meaning is not saliently activated here (certainly not at the level of what is or can become obvious). The rose is sick, and sickness doesn’t attack perfection as such, it attacks health. Beauty is no doubt there in some way, since flowers in general have this connotation; but even beauty plays no direct role in the drama of the poem; “bed of crimson joy” suggests a kind of exuberant organic vitality in the rose more than it does its beauty. The drama foregrounds the joyous vitality of the rose, on the one hand, and its vulnerability to the worm, on the other hand; and in this connection the associative resonance would be, rather, with the softness of rose petals, so easily crushed, don’t you think?

An important difference between this softness and beauty or perfection is that the latter are culturally validated meanings of roses, prominent in the tradition of representation, but softness is much less so; it belongs more directly to our sense experience of roses. When I’m teaching a poem I like to start, not with the literary resonances, but with the physical, sensual characteristics of the phenomena named or implied by the words, and then to feel around in the associational fields of these characteristics. This keeps us focused on the primary physicality on which the functioning of the words is based. There are strong pedagogical reasons for going this route, since our students often don’t know the cultural resonances of words and images; but they do have senses. Also, I believe that poets are crucially committed to this primary physicality, and that poems often manifest this interest.

Love, by the way, is a different case altogether from perfection or beauty, or softness, since it is named within the poem. We don’t need to make the association; the link is given.

DA: The Christian associations, the evocation of The Romaunt of the Rose, the pointing towards images of the Christ-child holding a rose: these perhaps belong to the domain of the non-obvious. For Blake, however, Christian associations were probably much more powerful and widely perceived than they are today. Isn’t our task as readers – responsible readers – to rediscover those lost or faded webs of association?

Or take the worm. As I noted in The Singularity of Literature, for Blake’s initial (few) readers, the word worm could well have evoked much more than the garden creature: the monstrous “loathly worm” of medieval ballads, the worms that prey on the damned in hell, the worm that seduced Eve, and more. Obvious to Blake but not to us? (There are, of course, instances where what is needed is not so much the recovery of older meanings but caution about assuming the relevance of newer meanings; for example, one word that has to be treated carefully when it occurs in earlier texts is gay.)

Of course, here’s where disagreements start. Historical disagreements, for one thing: what associations a particular word would have had at a particular time is a notoriously difficult thing to retrieve. But there is also the question of what potential symbolic meaning is in fact relevant, which raises a further test of obviousness. Let us imagine a reader arguing that “dark secret love” raises the question of racial difference. This would be moving beyond the obvious because, among other reasons, nothing else in the poem coheres with this interpretation. (A detailed analysis of Blake’s references to race – in “The Little Black Boy,” for instance – could possibly provide some justification for this reading, but it would still not form part of the poem’s minimal meaning, and would remain an intriguing suggestion.) So coherence of some sort would seem to be an aspect of the kind of reading you and I are endorsing.

HS: Absolutely. Everything rests on looking at how the structure of meaning in the poem as a whole hangs together. We don’t have to make a metaphysical fetish of “unity” in order to recognize that the poetic craft or techne as traditionally practiced aimed at giving a beginning, middle, and end to poems, in a way that produced a well-joined and completed artifact. I think one good reason to define a discipline of minimal reading, and to differentiate this discipline from that of “deep” or “strong” reading, is so that we can re-open the space for talking about how poems are unified, or how they fail to be unified, at the level of the craft of poem-making. The “fissures” in poems that cunning contemporary readers discern occur not at the level of visible craft-mistakes but at the level of the deep historical resonances of words.

As you note, retrieving what a word might have meant to the author, but not to us, by means of historical research, is very hard; it also opens a wide field of speculation. But the specific examples you give here of the historical meanings of “worm,” strike me as cancelling each other out, in the sense that they all amount to exemplifications of the balefulness of worms, a balefulness that is already fully evident in the poem itself. And, to the degree that they might seem to add anything that isn’t already brought out by Blake, it’s something that doesn’t clearly cohere with the poem. For example, the worms in hell gnaw the damned; but how is the rose parallel to the damned? Is she a wicked sinner who is being justly punished? And Eve is not invaded and destroyed by her worm’s love; she is tempted verbally in a way that activates her own desire; she then willingly eats the fruit; God punishes her with mortality; and she lives out her life to die a natural death. The more detail we add, the weaker the parallel with the drama of the rose gets. What often happens in class is that students suggest this sort of supposed parallel, which then takes a lot of time to dispose of, because once you have a hypothesis in your head you can always invent clever ways in which to make it fit; and meantime we’re not reading the poem for the effects it’s actually, manifestly, creating. So, unless the fit with the poem is very tight, I prefer either not to mention such historical resonances at all, or I briefly summarize them, stressing that they’re not very important individually (which is exactly how you bring them in in Singularity).

DA: You may have doubts about the symbolic suggestiveness of rose and worm in themselves, but what about the sexual symbolism in their conjunction? Sexual symbolism in its ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Dialogical poetics
• 1. Minimal interpretation (William Blake, “The Sick Rose”)
• 2. Figurative language (Emily Dickinson, “I started Early”)
• 3. Historical context (Wilfred Owen, “Futility”)
• 4. Intellectual and cultural context (John Milton, “At a Solemn Music”)
• 5. Situated subjects (Langston Hughes, “Lenox Avenue: Midnight” and “Song for a Black Girl”)
• 6. Poetic commentary (Shakespeare, Sonnet 116)
• 7. Modernist poetry and discursive logic (T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”)
• 8. The poetry of ellipsis (Denise Riley, “A Nueva York”)
• 9. Translation (Charles Baudelaire, “Au Lecteur”; Federico García Lorca, “Romance de la luna, luna, luna”; Rainer Maria Rilke, “Sonnets to Orpheus II.13”)
• Index