As I was telling you about in my last post, my high school English teacher had some pretty formalist ideas about interpreting poetry. I would always become frustrated when I had to interpret something because I would try to relate it to the world I know but the poems always seemed to be about communism or something strange to me. One of the famous quotes I remember my teacher always saying is, "you can interpret a poem in any way you want as long as you can support it from the text."This seems, for me, to relate to Wimsatt and Beardsley's affective fallacy. You can't just talk about how the poem made you feel, but had to talk about what the poem "is."

We weren't allowed to talk about what the poem means to us in our situation because that delves into water of relativism. Analyzing poems in that way feels so scientific. Breaking down each line, each word and examining the significance of each word seems to reduce the brillancy of a poem. And it is confusing as to what exactly Wimsatt and Beardsley mean by what a poem is. I can distinguish what a poem does (what emotion it evokes, the reader's response), but knowing what a poem is is difficult especially when you take away the author's intention. If the reader's response does not give significant meaning to the poem and if the author's intention doesn't either, what exactly does give it its meaning?

The intentional fallacy. Does the author's intention really matter? I think in some cases it does help to know what the author was thinking and going through when they wrote the poem. You can maybe get one interpretation from just looking at the poem itself, but sometimes knowing where the poet was at helps to bring a new interpretation or deepens the one we already had. I think that having as many layers as possible in a poem is what makes a poem interesting, and having the author's intention adds another layer.

Of course, Wimsatt and Beardsley would greatly disagree with me. For them and other Formalists it is about the poem itself. The author's intention doesn't matter because if the author did their job successfully then we would be able to figure out their intention in the poem itself. They say we should not assign the words of a poem as coming directly from the poets mouth, but from the dramatic speaker. This reminds me of my high school English teacher who would always mark off points in our essays for writing that "the poet says" when analyzing poetry instead of "the speaker of the poem says." That always annoyed me because I was like, "Well the poet wrote the poem...." Maybe a good compromise would be "the poet had the speaker of the poem say..." but that could get long and complicated.... I don't know. I'm glad I'm not in high school anymore.

I definitely think my high school English teacher ascribed to formalist views because she would just hand us a poem with no explanation, no dates as to when it was written and say "interpret this." Now, I was not the most clever of students when it came to interpreting poetry (and still am not), but I would try to write what I thought each line was saying even though I didn't know half the words. I was always frustrated because I would come to a line and be like "if this poem was written in last century I would think it would be referring to this, but if it was written last year I would think it was referring to that." I was a very confused child, and usually I picked the wrong interpretation and always got the 6 out of 9 points. (She always used the 9 point scale for grading essays and it bugged me to no end).

Now, I don't think that all poems should be written in a romantic style as an outpouring of emotions inexplicably linked to the poet, but when poetry is written like that I see the value in knowing a little bit about the poet. I also see value in looking at poetry as a craft or an art form rather than just a means of expressing inner most feelings. But ultimately I see value in the postmodern view of situatedness, where a person has a certain way of seeing things and that view will ultimately find its way into their work or into their interpretations of poems.

I just finished reading Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow" about a man who travels to a warm climate, and while he's there, he loses his shadow. He was sitting on his balcony and couldn't help but notice the building across the street. It looked like nobody lived in it, but there were beautiful flowers that grew there that had to be constantly watered. That night he made his shadow go into the door (which was ajar) in that opposite building to find out who lived in that house. But the shadow never came back.



A few years later the man has moved back north and someone knocks at his door. He answers it but doesn't recognize who it is. It turns out that the man at the door is actually his shadow. The shadow slowly becomes more of a man, and the shadow's man slowly falls into the role of the shadow. The shadow eventually becomes so much more humanlike that he establishes himself as a man. And when the original man threatens to tell everyone that the man is actually a shadow, no one believes him. And the shadow has him executed.



One thing that struck me that really made this story relevant to our class was that when the shadow went next door the thing that he found living there was poetry. And it was through reading all the poetry in the world that the shadow learned and became more like a man. "I remained there three weeks, and it was more like three thousand years, for I read all that has ever been written in poetry or prose; and I may say, in truth, that I saw and learnt everything."



This statement seems to convey the idea that you become more human when you read. Reading brings you knowledge that you might not ordinarily receive. When the shadow enters the door, the room he goes into is filled with light and fire. I remember Shelley and Emerson using fire images to describe the creative process and poetry. Poetry seems to act as the illuminating light which dispells any darkness or ignorance.

T.S. Eliot seems to be somewhat of an opposite to Romanticism. He puts more emphasis on tradition and reading past poets than Wordsworth and Coleridge did. Romantics focused more on the individual and creating something new while Eliot seems to say that you must read past poets because you will be compared to them. Eliot says, "No poet, no artist of any art, has ahis complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead" (1093). A poet must know the forms of poetry and develop skills before their work can become unique. We have to be aware of the poetry of the past so we can create our own tradition.

Unlike the Romantic poems, T.S. Eliot does not see poetry as a spontaneous outpouring of feelings and emotion, but sees it as a collection of emotions and images stored up over time. Eliot says, "If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark" (1096). If I remember anything from Romantic class its that the sublime was the big goal. It was like the holy grail for Romantic poets. Now, I kind of like the notion of the sublime, where you see or experience something so beautiful that you just can't help but try to capture those feelings in a poem. It's a nice notion, but I know I've never experienced something that intense in my life, and if I did, I know I would never be able to capture it in words in a way that would make people want to read it over and over again. So, I also like Eliot's notion of poetry. I think it's more attainable than what the Romantics write about.

Eliot takes the approach that a man's experiences are not necessarily reflected in his poetry. It's the "medium" that's important, not the "personality." And the emotions in the poetry may not really be important to the poet. The poet should not have to strive for the sublime, for some new incredible emotional experince. "The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinay ones and , in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.

For another class I had to read Vladimir Nabokov's "Good Readers and Good Writers," and I thought it pertained to what we are talking about in lit. crit. Nabokov has certain ideas about reading and how one should approach reading. He thinks that to fully appreciate the text and to get the most out of it you should leave all preconceived notions about the text at the door before you read it.

One shouldn't come to a book and only focus on its elements of social commentary because you'll miss other aspects of it. Nabokov says you should "fondle [the] details" of a work. We should enter into the world of the book or novel and forget our world, and we shouldn't rely on those works to give us a complete picture of the real world.

Nabokov says a good reader should have "imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense." Both Nabokov and Percy Shelley place importance on imagination. Similar to the romantics Nabokov thinks the reader should bring his or her imagination to the work. Reading shouldn't just be a passive activity. It's an active activity that should engage the mind.

But I think Nabokov has more elements of Modernism in his theory. He places a lot of emphasis on the artistic sense and seems to detatch the author from the work. The reader has to detatch themselves from their world and use an "impersonal imagination" to read the text with.

a little music, anyone?

I read an essay about Emerson and the Aeolian harp which made me think about the British Romantics and their value of that same harp. The Romantics, as we all know, valued nature, and Emerson had this Platonist view of things, thinking that there was an ideal realm to try and capture in poetry.

Well, the Aeolian harp is a box with strings that sits in your open window, and when the wind blows through the window and the harp, the harp plays music. This music is, as far as I can tell, supposed to be that idealism played out by nature. I think most of the Romantics equate it to that spiritual experience that occurs in perfection. It tries to capture nature’s soul, a soul of goodness and perfection.

Emerson finds ideal beauty in nature and considers the harp the most beautiful instrument, so it makes sense why this Aeolian harp is such a big hit. It unites the beauty of nature’s wind with the harp creating beautiful music. Everything in the earth is a symbol of another world including everything in nature, and through the Aeolian harp we get an aural manifestation of the ideal world.

Shelley and Arnold each seem to strive for a type of perfection in their writing. For Shelley, perfection can never be written down into a poem. A moment of inspiration (or I might interpret it as perfection or sublime as we called it in Romantic class) comes but by already starts receding before the poet can record it.

Arnold just keeps on reaching for perfection. He writes that Culture is the way to perfection; it has “its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection” (826). Culture entails all the good things like helping your elderly neighbor with her groceries, getting up early in the morning to help your dad repaint the basement, “diminishing human misery”… you know, stuff like that. Arnold defines culture as the best that is known and thought which should propel us into doing good. The pursuit of perfection should bring about beauty, for beauty is just as important as goodness.

Culture brings about “the two noblest things, sweetness and light” (832). Sweetness and light refer to beauty and intelligence (or goodness). Poetry for Arnold links this sweetness and light better than a formal religion. The beauty of poetry and its strive for evoking perfect humanity falls into culture, making it Arnold’s substitution for religion.

Shelley’s definition of poetry echoes closely to Arnold’s culture: “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds” (714). It seeks to capture a moment of perfect beauty. It “purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity” and exposes something beautiful out of something ordinary.

The perfection comes in that moment of beauty, but similar to Arnold’s strive for perfection, Shelley’s poetry “is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet.” (This line also echoes Emerson’s concept of the poets who try to write those “primal warblings” down but cannot produce a perfect copy because our human imperfections keep interfering.)

I guess what I’m trying to conclude is that poetry in its ideal form is perfection and poets try to capture that perfection so it can better mankind, but in reality the poet’s humanness interferes causing the poem to be notches below the poem’s ideal form. Yet, the poet still strives to capture that ideal and to reach that perfection.

a little something about Emerson

Some Emerson (Ralph Waldo that is)

Since in class we’ve been talking about what is an author, what is literature, reading and such, I thought about those things as I read today’s assignment.

Emerson seems to place a lot of emphasis on creativity and original thoughts. From what I understand, which may not be much, there is a right way and a wrong way of reading. On page 722 from “The American Scholar” Emerson says, “Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading.” The reader should be able to take something out of what he reads. “One must be an inventor to read well” (723). For me that means you have to work to get something out of it. You have to go beyond the surface text.

Sometimes, what we read affects what we get out of the text. According to Emerson we can “be fed by any knowledge” (723), just as the body “can be nourished by any food” (723). But if what we read is not as nourishing, we have to work harder to feed ourselves.

In Emerson’s essay “The Poet” we find Emerson’s theory about what it means to be a poet, and in my interpretation I link the word author with poet. For a poet to be a true one he/she must “announce that which no man has foretold” (726). Again this idea of originality and creativity come into play. One illustration Emerson gives is about starting a fire. You can’t just rub some sticks together and create smoke, you have to create something that will last and give off something, like fire. For Emerson it is not the artistic craft of meter and rhythm that give a poem its meaning. A poet creates a poem where the argument or content comes alive and speaks to people.

The poet also seems to observe the world and “articulates” its contents. He studies nature and sees the symbols in it. From what I gather the poet is supposed to take the tangible thins of this world and translate it into man’s soul, so that when he reads a poem he feels it and it moves him.