Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :The Well Wrought Urn
We tend to say that every poem is an expression of its age; that we must be careful to ask of it only what its own age asked; that we must judge it only by the canons of its age. Any attempt to view it sub specie aeternitatis, we feel, must result in illusion.
Perhaps it must. Yet, if poetry exists as poetry in any meaningful sense, the attempt must be made. Otherwise the poetry of the past becomes significant merely as cultural anthropology, and the poetry of the present, merely as a political, or religious, or moral instrument […] We live in an age in which miracles of all kinds are suspect, including the kind of miracle of which the poet speaks. The positivists have tended to explain the miracle away in a general process of reduction which hardly stops short of reducing the "poem" to the ink itself. But the "miracle of communication," as a student of language terms it in a recent book, remains. We had better not ignore it, or try to "reduce" it to a level that distorts it. We had better begin with it, by making the closest possible examination of what the poem says as a poem.
In this preface to The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks justifies his whole approach to reading poetry. He says we have a knee-jerk reaction to what poems are about; we just "say that every poem is an expression of its age." And then we just keep on blindly walking that interpretive path.
Like, Pope's Rape of the Lock gets framed as a great poem that expresses the 18th century's idea of what poetry should be. So then old-school scholars asked questions like: What does The Rape of the Lock tell us about 18th-century culture? And about 18th-century hairstyles?
But wait, says Brooks. If we ask questions like that, we're only looking at Rape of the Lock as a great 18th-century poem—not as just a great poem period.
Brooks warns us that we tend to do the same thing with our own age's poetry: poems are just a sophisticated outlet for political and moral messages. Right? Wrong.
Brooks is against this way of thinking about poetry because it reduces this complex, ambiguous, beautiful thing to one little moral. But he doesn't stop at bellyaching. He suggests how he's going to change literary analysis by studying "what the poem says as a poem."
Quote :The Well Wrought Urn (2)
It is important to see that what "So wore the night" and "Thus night passed" have in common as their "rational meaning" is not the "rational meaning" of each but the lowest common denominator of both. To refer the structure of the poem to what is finally a paraphrase of the poem is to refer it to something outside the poem.
To repeat, most of our difficulties in criticism are rooted in the heresy of paraphrase. If we allow ourselves to be misled by it, we distort the relation of the poem to its "truth," we raise the problem of belief in a vicious and crippling form, we split the poem between its "form" and its "content"—we bring the statement to be conveyed into an unreal competition with science or philosophy or theology. […] By taking the paraphrase as our point of stance, we misconceive the function of metaphor and meter. We demand logical coherences where they are sometimes irrelevant, and we fail frequently to see imaginative coherences on levels where they are highly relevant.
Brooks starts this passage with a line from a Robert Browning poem: "So wore the night." (This is also the line that his fellow New Critic, Yvor Winters, had previously analyzed in depth: see our "Texts Through the Looking Glass" Section for more.)
Here, dude explains that we could easily sum up the action of the line, "So wore the night," as, "Thus night passed." But this kind of "translation" of poetry only captures what Brooks calls the "lowest common denominator" of meaning. The poetic line is obviously doing something more than relating that basic meaning of "night happened."
That's what makes it poetry.
Brooks uses this tiny example to talk about a way bigger problem with literary analysis. He says scholars' tendency to paraphrase poetry in a straightforward manner is exactly what's wrong with the literary criticism of his time. He even gives this practice a name: "the heresy of paraphrase."
According to Brooks, when we paraphrase, we split the poem into two elements: content (what it says) and form (how it says it). And this division leads to trouble. It privileges content, even though, as we've just said, what really makes poetry an art form is its form.
So, if we look at a poem and just immediately start hunting for its moral message, it's like we're saying, "Hey, this poem is okay and all. But what we're really after is the moral." And what happens to the poem after we've extracted that moral? Is it like wrapping paper for a present, thrown away as soon as we take out the gift that's inside?
Here, Brooks rightly argues that we need to pay attention to the stuff that makes poetry a unique literary genre, like metaphors and meter. As a poet himself, this guy knew that a poem is far more than its central themes. Poetry is all about how the message is conveyed—in all of its "imaginative coherences."