[Tim Love]

[a spin-off from Metrical Poetry:My Secret Kept Alive]

Porridgeface - I can't appreciate what I don't at all understand

Carol Taylor - If a critic says, "I don't understand this but I don't need to understand it to like it," then I know that that critic and I have opposite definitions of poetry

I wonder how others feel about this issue? When reading recently about William Empson (Lowell thought him "the most intelligent poet writing in our language and perhaps the best") I was impressed by how a formidable close-reading theorist like him was happy to say that he loved some Dylan Thomas pieces, but didn't have much of a clue why.

Sometimes I meet poems which don't fit in with my idea of what a good poem should be, but I like them nonetheless. It's a funny world ...

[Richard Wakefield]

Tim: I didn't follow the controversy over at Metrical Poetry, so in commenting here I may be provoking all kinds of unexpected antagonisms. So be it.
The whole issue of intentionality is vexed. Mostly, we have no way of knowing for sure what anyone means by anything. For that matter, we have no way of knowing whether other people even exist -- for sure. I also wonder why I should believe a writer's vaguely articulate claims about a poem rather than the poem itself. That is, if a writer claims that I misunderstood her poem, why should I assume she is any more able to articulate her meaning spontaneously than she was in verse? I often don't know why I do or say things, and I suspect other folks are pretty much the same way. Sometimes we're pretty good at inventing reasons post hoc, though.
But look, our purpose on these boards is to move one another forward. Talk back to a poem, and see what the writer says in response to what you said. People of good intentions will tend to converge, not necessarily in their tastes but in their understanding of one another. We can hope so, at least. If I "misread" a poem, you may well have "miswritten." Or you may have written differently, maybe better. Or maybe I just didn't explain my response very well.
It has to be a conversation. Even Criticsim, capital "C," has to be just one voice in a conversation of many voices. If we all agreed from the get-go, there'd be no "verse" in the conversation.
RPW

[graywyvern]

there are different kinds of excellence. the musical kind
("melopoeia") doesn't require intellectual understanding,
nor does the making of visual imagery ("phanopoeia"). ideally,
a poem should succeed on several levels.

i looked at the thread. seems to me what there is disagreement
about is rather, should some degree of semantic/metaphorical
looseness or "play" be considered out of bounds in this game we
like to think is an art?

and i can only answer: if it persuades me to read it again, no.

but the world contains critics who, as in the Sufi parable, if
you point out the moon to them, will only look at your finger.

such people miss many beauties; perhaps the most important
ones.



[This message has been edited by graywyvern (edited January 17, 2002).]

[Nigel Holt]

But why do they look at the finger? Perhaps the immediate has a greater mystery than the distant, despite its familiarity - and is just as incomprehensible?

Looking at the finger does have its attractions - it all depends on why you do it - that's not to say that most finger-gazers don't know their arse from their elbow.

N

[Alder Ellis]

Strictly speaking, it seems absurd to pretend to appreciate something which you don't understand, unless a very limited definition of "appreciate" is applied. But I think it is possible to have a legitimate aesthetic appreciation of poetry without being able to explicate its meaning, as would be the case with Empson enjoying but "not having a clue about" Dylan Thomas. There is indeed a certain irony in the fact the Empson, one of the arch-angels of New Critical close reading, would express this, but the very fact that he had studied the whole matter of explicable meaning so exhaustively (and, no doubt, with extraordinary intelligence) adds weight to his testimony.

So how can you appreciate something without being able to say what it means? This would entail a kind of tacit, non-explicit understanding. This partly involves the non-intellectual aspects graywyvern refers to, but intellectual aspects too.

One of the hallmarks of modernist poetry is that it tends to resist interpretation. "It must be difficult," I think Harold Bloom says somewhere (but he also endorses Wallace Stevens: "It must give pleasure.") And it is no coincidence that the impulse to elude interpretation coincided, historically, with the monstrous growth of the critical faculty that more or less set out to conquer poetry & reduce it to explicable meanings.

I've been looking at Hart Crane a little bit recently. He is an incredibly difficult poet, but if you stay with him, he begins to make a different kind of sense. There is a difference between "reading" a poem, in the sense of assimilating it to yourself, and "living with" a poem, in the sense of accepting it on its own terms and being patient with it. We tend to consume poetry in the fast-food mode, especially in the extremely time-sensitive environment of the internet. Gulp it down (thoughtfully, of course, but quickly), & report any reactions. This does not encourage subtle poetry.

Hart Crane has some interesting theoretical remarks on these matters too. here's a sentence I marked:

"it is as though the poem gave the reader as he left it a single, new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader's consciousness henceforward."

I like this as a formula for the potential (& valuable) tacit, inexplicable, meaning of a poem.

But, as a practical matter, it's true that I don't like stuff I can't understand. Unless something convinces me somehow that the writer knows what he or she is doing. Then, maybe, give it room and let it work, as best it can.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

T. S. Eliot:

I do not think of enjoyment and understanding as distinct activities--one emotional and the other intellectual...It is certain that we do not fully enjoy a poem unless we understand it; and, on the other hand, it is equally true that we do not fully understand a poem unless we enjoy it.

[ginger]

I'm not familiar with the thread that prompted this one, so my comments are strictly in response to the question raised here.

When I read a poem, understand could mean a few things:

1) I am able to articulate one or more 'responsible' (my english prof's term) interpretations of the poem as a whole.

2) I can't summarize the whole but a recognize a good deal of truth in many of the pieces.

3) I have no idea what the author meant by any of it, but I can articulate the meaning I'd arbitrarily impose on it (the 'what it means to me' when I disregard all evidence of the author's intentions).

I can like, or dislike for that matter, a poem under any of these circumstances.

If I don't understand a poem because I lack some neccessary factual knowledge, and I have reason to believe that I would otherwise enjoy the piece (reputation, recommendation, or something in the work that I find attractive) then I'll do the legwork and try to understand.

If, however, I get the feeling (subjective, I know) that the author is being elusive or esoteric for his or her own self-gratification then I don't enjoy the poem and won't give any additional time to it. (Same I way I refuse to try to understand a canvas painted over in a single color as art.)

I suppose that with all the sensual pleasures readily available these days I need literature to tickle my intellect at least a little in order to enjoy it.

Ginger

[H Roland Angus R]

It's always unwise to draw analogies too freely between writing and the visual arts, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Compare non-representational art. There is no obvious way to 'understand' what a Mondrian painting is of - but you can still like it. It works on an immediate aesthetic level irrespective of 'meaning'.

But - Vermeer's work has similar visual qualities to Mondrian's, but his paintings are actually of something. I certainly think that the combination of impact and meaning is better than just impact on its own. And only the very best non-representational work really pulls off that trick anyway - mediocre abstract art, without the redeeming human interest, is fantastically dismal.

Harry

[Mlle. Marilyn]

To continue the comparison with visual art...
I would argue that there is an element of "understanding" in non-representational art, which is the understanding of the intent. That is, you cannot grasp "subject matter" as in a picture of something, but you can grasp theoretical subject matter, for instance that an abstract painting might be intended to make one ponder on the universality of form (the canvas is blue because "blue" is going to be experienced more similarly by all different people than an actual scene, which is likely to be culture-specific, etc.). In my experience, this theoretical type of musing is often intended by "modern" art/literature. The problem is that much of it seems like nonsense unless the concept is fully explained. I think the question, therefore, is whether it is legitimate for "art" of any kind to need so much explanation; whether that hinders our appreciation.

Personally I would agree that a blend of meaning and interesting/innovative form is desirable. To emphasize form it is not necessary to isolate it from meaning--but perhaps in the course of art history artists have felt that such a radical divorce was necessary to prove a point.

::Marilyn::

[Roger Slater]

The comparison with the visual arts is apt. Also consider music. When you listen to Bach or Chopin, do you know what it's "about"? Yes, of course you do. Can you explain it to me in words? No, in all likelihood you cannot. You can stammer out your impressions, etc., and tell me how it made you feel, but you probably can't translate the music into useful critical discourse containing an explanation of what the music "meant" or "was about."

Some people (at times I'm one of them) feel frustrated by the inability to validate their experience of music or Mondrian with words that we can write down and initial in the margin. But it's not really fair to experience such frustration. To say that the only "meaning" that matters in art is meaning that is susceptible to paraphrase or easy critical analysis is to define away all art that doesn't lend itself to criticism. (It's like choosing to look for a lost item only where the light is good --it ignores the possibility that the object may be in the dark.)

Of course, a poem may resist understanding because it's badly written, or its thoughts are illogical, or because it tried to convey something that it failed to convey, and this would be a flaw in the poem. But there are poems, like Dylan Thomas and others wrote, that resist understanding because they aren't "meant" to be understood in entirely paraphrasable ways but to be understood as music or visual arts are understood. It's harder to discus such poems, but that doesn't make them flawed. It points to a shortcoming of criticism, not the poem.