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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Lucid, entertaining and full of insight, How to Read a Poem is designed to banish the intimidation that too often attends the subject of poetry, and in doing so to bring it into the personal possession of the students and the general reader. * Offers a detailed examination of poetic form and its relation to content. * Takes a wide range of poems from the Renaissance to the present day and submits them to brilliantly illuminating closes analysis. * Discusses the work of major poets, including John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, W.H.Auden, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and many more. * Includes a helpful glossary of poetic terms.

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Leseprobe

Cover

Table of Contents

Dedication

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: The Functions of Criticism

1.1 The End of Criticism?

1.2 Politics and Rhetoric

1.3 The Death of Experience

1.4 Imagination

Notes

Chapter 2: What is Poetry?

2.1 Poetry and Prose

2.2 Poetry and Morality

2.3 Poetry and Fiction

2.4 Poetry and Pragmatism

2.5 Poetic Language

Notes

Chapter 3: Formalists

3.1 Literariness

3.2 Estrangement

3.3 The Semiotics of Yury Lotman

3.4 The Incarnational Fallacy

Notes

Chapter 4: In Pursuit of Form

4.1 The Meaning of Form

4.2 Form versus Content

4.3 Form as Transcending Content

4.4 Poetry and Performance

4.5 Two American Examples

Notes

Chapter 5: How to Read a Poem

5.1 Is Criticism Just Subjective?

5.2 Meaning and Subjectivity

5.3 Tone, Mood and Pitch

5.4 Intensity and Pace

5.5 Texture

5.6 Syntax, Grammar and Punctuation

5.7 Ambiguity

5.8 Punctuation

5.9 Rhyme

5.10 Rhythm and Metre

5.11 Imagery

Notes

Chapter 6: Four Nature Poems

6.1 William Collins, ‘Ode to Evening’

6.2 William Wordsworth, ‘The Solitary Reaper’

6.3 Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’

6.4 Edward Thomas, ‘Fifty Faggots’

6.5 Form and History

Note

Glossary

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover Page

Dedication

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Glossary

Index

Wiley End User License Agreement

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“From the first page, the reader of How to Read a Poem realises that this, at last, is a book which begins to answer Adrian Mitchell’s charge: ‘Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’. Eagleton introduces himself as ‘a politically minded literary theorist’. The remarkable achievement of this book is to prove that such a theorist is the only person who can really show what poetry is for. By a brilliant and scrupulous series of readings – of Yeats and Frost and Auden and Dickinson – framed in a lively account of the function of criticism as perhaps only he could expound it, Eagleton shows how literary theory, seriously understood, is the ground of poetic understanding. This will be the indispensable apology for poetry in our time.”

Bernard O’Donoghue, Wadham College, University of Oxford

Terry Eagleton

The author is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester. His recent publications include The English Novel (2004), Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003), The Idea of Culture (2000), Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth‐Century Ireland (1999), Literary Theory: An Introduction (second edition, 1996) and The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996), all published by Blackwell Publishing.

To Peter Grant,

who taught me poetry and a good deal more

How to Read a Poem

Terry Eagleton

BLACKWELL PUBLISHING

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148‐5020, USA

9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

The right of Terry Eagleton to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

5 2008

Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Eagleton, Terry, 1943–

How to read a poem / by Terry Eagleton.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN‐13: 978‐1‐4051‐5140‐5 (hbk. : alk. paper) ISBN‐13: 978‐1‐4051‐5141‐2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. English poetry—History and criticism. 2. American poetry—History and criticism. 3. Poetry—Explication. 4. Poetics. I. Title.

PR502.E23 2007

808.1—dc22

2006008194

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Set in 10.5/13pt Dante

by Graphicraft Ltd, Hong Kong

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom

by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid‐free and elementary chlorine‐free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards.

For further information on

Blackwell Publishing, visit our website:

www.blackwellpublishing.com

Preface

This book is designed as an introduction to poetry for students and general readers. I have tried to make what some find an intimidating subject as lucid and accessible as possible; but some bits of the book are inevitably harder going than others. Less experienced readers might therefore prefer to start with Chapter 4 (‘In Pursuit of Form’), Chapter 5 (‘How To Read A Poem’) and Chapter 6 (‘Four Nature Poems’), before moving on to the more theoretical chapters. Even so, I think the book makes more sense if it is read from start to finish.

I am deeply grateful to John Barrell at York University, Stan Smith at Nottingham Trent University, Emma Bennett, Philip Carpenter and Astrid Wind at Blackwell, and William Flesch at Brandeis University for their helpful suggestions.

Dublin, 2005

Acknowledgements

The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book:

W. H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts,’ from Edward Mendelson (ed.),

Collected Poems

Alan Brownjohn, ‘Common Sense,’ from

Collected Poems

. London: Enitharmon Press, 2005. Reprinted by permission of Enitharmon Press.

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), ‘Sea Violet,’ from Louis L. Martz,

Collected Poems 1912–1944

Philip Larkin, ‘Days,’ from

The Whitsun Weddings

Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘Pencil it in,’ from

Here nor There

. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. John Pudney, ‘For Johnny’ from

For Johnny: Poems of World War II

. London: Shepheard‐Walwyn, 1976. Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates Limited.

Stevie Smith, ‘Not Waving but Drowning,’ from

Collected Poems of Stevie Smith

. New York: Shepheard‐Walwyn, 1975. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith; copyright the Estate of James MacGibbon. Reprinted by permission of James & James (Publishers) Ltd and New Directions Publishing Corp.

Dylan Thomas, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,’ from

The Poems of Dylan Thomas

William Carlos Williams, ‘This is Just to Say,’ from Christopher MacGowan (ed.),

The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909–1939

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Chapter 1The Functions of Criticism

1.1 The End of Criticism?

I first thought of writing this book when I realised that hardly any of the students of literature I encountered these days practised what I myself had been trained to regard as literary criticism. Like thatching or clog dancing, literary criticism seems to be something of a dying art. Since many of these students are bright and capable enough, the fault would seem to lie largely with their teachers. The truth is that quite a few teachers of literature nowadays do not practise literary criticism either, since they, in turn, were never taught to do so.

This charge may seem pretty rich, coming as it does from a literary theorist. Wasn’t it literary theory, with its soulless abstractions and vacuous generalities, which destroyed the habit of close reading in the first place? I have pointed out elsewhere that this is one of the great myths or unexamined clichés of contemporary critical debate.1 It is one of those ‘everybody knows’ pieties, like the assumption that serial killers look just like you and me, keep themselves to themselves, but always have a polite word for their neighbours. It is as much a shop‐soiled banality as the claim that Christmas has become dreadfully commercialised. Like all tenacious myths which refuse to vanish whatever the evidence, it is there to serve specific interests. The idea that literary theorists killed poetry dead because with their shrivelled hearts and swollen brains they are incapable of spotting a metaphor, let alone a tender feeling, is one of the more obtuse critical platitudes of our time. The truth is that almost all major literary theorists engage in scrupulously close reading. The Russian Formalists on Gogol or Pushkin, Bakhtin on Rabelais, Adorno on Brecht, Benjamin on Baudelaire, Derrida on Rousseau, Genette or de Man on Proust, Hartman on Wordsworth, Kristeva on Mallarmé, Jameson on Conrad, Barthes on Balzac, Iser on Henry Fielding, Cixous on Joyce, Hillis Miller on Henry James, are just a handful of examples.

Some of these figures are not only eminent critics, but literary artists in their own right. They produce literature in the act of commenting on it. Michel Foucault is another such outstanding stylist. It is true that thinkers like these have sometimes been ill served by their disciples, but the same goes for some non‐theoretical critics. But the point, in any case, is irrelevant. For it is not as though many students of literature today do not read poems and novels fairly closely. Close reading is not the issue. The question is not how tenaciously you cling to the text, but what you are in search of when you do so. The theorists I have mentioned are not only close readers, but are sensitive to questions of literary form. And this is where they differ from most students today.

It is significant, in fact, that if you broach the question of form with students of literature, some of them think that you are talking simply about metre. ‘Paying attention to form’, in their eyes, means saying whether the poem is written in iambic pentameters, or whether it rhymes. Literary form obviously includes such things; but saying what the poem means, and then tagging on a couple of sentences about its metre or rhyme scheme, is not exactly engaging with questions of form. Most students, faced with a novel or poem, spontaneously come up with what is commonly known as ‘content analysis’. They give accounts of works of literature which describe what is going on in them, perhaps with a few evaluative comments thrown in. To adopt a technical distinction from linguistics, they treat the poem as language but not as discourse.

‘Discourse’, as we shall see, means attending to language in all of its material density, whereas most approaches to poetic language tend to disembody it. Nobody has ever heard language pure and simple. Instead, we hear utterances that are shrill or sardonic, mournful or nonchalant, mawkish or truculent, irascible or histrionic. And this, as we shall see, is part of what we mean by form. People sometimes talk about digging out the ideas ‘behind’ the poem’s language, but this spatial metaphor is misleading. For it is not as though the language is a kind of disposable cellophane in which the ideas come ready‐wrapped. On the contrary, the language of a poem is constitutive of its ideas.

It would be hard to figure out, just by reading most of these content analyses, that they were supposed to be about poems or novels, rather than about some real‐life happening. What gets left out is the literariness of the work. Most students can say things like ‘the moon imagery recurs in the third verse, adding to the sense of solitude’, but not many of them can say things like ‘the poem’s strident tone is at odds with its shambling syntax’. A lot of them would just think that this was funny. They do not speak the same language as the critic who said of some lines of T. S. Eliot: ‘There is something very sad about the punctuation.’ Instead, they treat the poem as though its author chose for some eccentric reason to write out his or her views on warfare or sexuality in lines which do not reach to the end of the page. Maybe the computer got stuck.

Let us take the first stanza of W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

A summary of this would be fairly straightforward. The Old Masters or great painters, so the poem claims, understood the incongruous nature of human suffering – the contrast between the sheer intensity of it, which seems to point to some momentous meaning, and the way its everyday surroundings appear so casually indifferent to it. All this, we might suspect, is an allegory of the contingent nature of modern existence. Things no longer form a pattern which converges on the hero or martyr at its centre, but collide quite randomly, with the trivial and the momentous, the guilty and the innocent, lying casually side by side.

What matters, however, is how all this shapes up verbally. The poem begins in casual style, as though we have just dropped in on someone’s after‐dinner conversation; yet there is a certain understated drama about this opening as well. It sidles obliquely into its theme rather than starting off with a fanfare: the first line and a half reverse the noun, verb and predicate, so that ‘The Old Masters were never wrong about suffering’, which would be far too bald a proposition, becomes the more angled, syntactically interesting ‘About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters’.

A more elaborate version of this syntactical sidling, in which the regular order of grammar is inverted, can be found in the loftily throwaway opening sentence of E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India: ‘Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.’ These first words are actually a choice piece of irony, since the caves will prove to be central to the entire action. The novel opens with what sounds like a parody of a rather snooty guidebook. A mild air of patrician languor broods over the entire, exquisitely balanced sentence.

Auden’s poem is not in the least snooty or kid‐gloved; but it has an air of well‐bred worldliness about it. A faint sense of dramatic expectancy is created by the opening lines, as we have to step across the line‐ending to find out who exactly was never wrong about suffering. ‘The Old Masters’ is in apposition to ‘they’, which lends the lines a relaxedly conversational air – as in a sentence like ‘They’re noisy, those freight trains.’ The same colloquial idiom is obvious a little later in words like ‘doggy’ and ‘behind’, though this kind of speech is more the raciness of the gentleman than the vulgarity of the plebeian.

The weighty trisyllabic word ‘suffering’ sounds out resonantly at the very start, rather than being tucked away at the end of the clause as the sense might seem to dictate. The tone of the piece is urbane but not hard‐boiled. It is civilised, but not camp or overbred, as some of Auden’s later poetry can be. ‘Dreadful’ is a typical English upper‐class adjective, as in ‘Darling, he was perfectly dreadful!’, but we do not feel it to be an affectation, however ineffectual a description of martyrdom it may be. The poem has an authority about it which seems to spring from mature experience, and to which we are therefore inclined to listen. If the poet can see how well the Old Masters understood the truth of human affliction, then he must surely be on equal terms with them, at least in this respect. The poem seems to speak on behalf of a very English common sense and normality; yet it also asks implicitly how certain extreme situations can be fitted into this familiar frame of reference. Is that normality therefore to be questioned as too narrow, or is it just in the nature of things that the ordinary and the exotic lie side by side, with no particular connection between them?

The stanza stretches literally from human agony to a horse’s backside, and so involves a sort of bathos. We are cranked down a tone or two from the solemn ‘How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting / For the miraculous birth’, to the deliberately flat ‘there always must be / Children who did not specially want it to happen’, a line which has too many words of different shapes and sizes to flow smoothly. The syntax conspires with this deflationary effect: the comma after ‘How’ holds the sentence in suspense, allowing us an uplifting moment (‘when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting . . .’) only to bump us prosaically down again.

Yet even here the verse maintains its civility: ‘did not specially want it to happen’ may mean just what it says: the children are not opposed to the birth, but not enthused by the prospect either. But it could also be a polite way of saying that they couldn’t give a damn about the miraculous birth, rather as ‘not a little boring’ is polite English understatement for ‘unbelievably boring’. The poem preserves its good manners by a kind of verbal indirection. It isn’t clear, though, quite how it moves from the idea of suffering to the idea of the aged reverently waiting for the miraculous birth. How exactly is reverent expectancy a matter of suffering? Because suspense is painful? Or is the suffering in question the birth itself ?

One problem the piece faces is how to be suitably wry about suffering without being cynical about it. It has to tread a fine line between a lightly ironic wisdom and sounding merely jaded. It needs to demythologise human pain, but without seeming to devalue it. So the tone – mannered, but not callous or cavalier – has to be carefully managed. This is not the kind of voice whose possessor is likely himself to believe in miraculous births, indulge in excessive reverence, or get himself martyred. It is too secular and commonsensical for that, as well as too sceptical of grand designs. It wants to take the false heroics out of suffering by ‘decentring’ it, insisting on how marginal and haphazard it generally is. Yet there is also a humaneness about the speaking voice which suggests an understated sympathy.

So the stanza is disenchanted but not debunking. It is as though the poem wants to honour human torment by being coolly realistic about it, rather than subscribing to some sentimental myth for which such torment brings the whole world to a dramatic halt. It may feel like this to the sufferer herself, but the poem’s hard‐headed realism refuses to identify with the unimaginable anguish of another. (Another of Auden’s poems, one about wounded soldiers, enquires: ‘For who when healthy can become a foot?’, meaning no doubt that the healthy are those who are able to take their bodies for granted.) When it comes to suffering, neither the perspective of the patient nor that of the observer is wholly reliable. The deepest respect we can pay to the afflicted, Auden seems to suggest, is to acknowledge the unbridgeable gap between their distress and our normality. There is what one might call an absolute epistemological break between sickness and health. Like many a literary work of the 1930s, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ would rather be thought heartless than sentimental. Its anti‐heroism is also a typical 1930s stance. It is just that this toughness of mind, pressed to an extreme, can be a devious form of the very sentimentalism it repudiates.

There is another bit of dramatic suspense in the phrase ‘its human position’, whose meaning is not really clear until we step past the semicolon and find out. We then get a rather plodding, straggling sort of line – ‘While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’ – which in its inelegant slinging together of clauses seems just to jog dully along. ‘Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse . . .’ is another such stumbling, overpopulated line, its untidiness suggestive of the clutter of human experience itself. Children, dogs and horses go on doing their childlike, doggy or horsey things in the midst of massacre and martyrdom, and this, so the poetic voice seems to intimate, is just the way things are. They could no more be different than dogs could behave like children. Human existence is an unavoidable matter of irony, as the trifling and the terrible exist cheek by jowl. How something looks from the outside is not how it feels on the inside, and what is central to you is peripheral to me. Irony here is not just a tone but a clash of perspectives. It is as though it is built into the world, rather than simply an attitude towards it. And this adds to the sense of inevitability. You could no more change this condition than you could grow an extra limb overnight.

We might, however, take leave to question this outlook. It may well be true of some sorts of suffering, but isn’t the poet rather dubiously universalising his claims? Is this really the ‘human position’, pure and simple? In the poem’s second stanza, Auden implicitly compares an indifference to human disaster to the sun shining, as though the former were as natural as the latter. Yet the poem appeared in 1940, at a time when Europe had lived through the Spanish Civil War (in which Auden was briefly involved) and was now in the throes of a global war against fascism. This kind of suffering was surely not always a private, hole‐in‐the‐corner affair. On the contrary, it could be a collective experience. If death and grief showed up the unbridgeable gaps between people, they were also realities that could be publicly shared. Catastrophe and the common life came together in the bombing of British cities. Suffering was not just something people got on with privately, like a hobby; there was to some extent a common language between sufferer and spectator, soldier and civilian.

So the poem’s technical brilliance and worldly‐wise tone may persuade us into accepting too readily a highly contentious proposition: that the private life is one thing, while the public world is quite another. Suffering is a private event, to which no public language could be adequate. Behind the work lurks the view that each of us is the private possessor of our own experience, eternally walled off from the sensations of others. A good deal of modern philosophy has been devoted to exposing the fallacy of this apparently commonsensical view; and there is no reason why criticism should not appeal to such arguments. We do not have to take the beliefs of a poet on trust.

If this is a ‘modern’ poem, it is partly because of its scepticism of grand narratives. Suffering is not part of any overall design, even if its intensity makes us suspect that it ought to be. It is arbitrary and contingent, and it is the contrast between this objective status and its subjective dreadfulness which is so shocking. The poem itself, by contrast, is intricately designed, but in a way which makes us feel that it isn’t. Its conversational tone belies its subtle artistry. It is possible to read it, for example, without realising that it rhymes. The rhyme scheme, however, is pretty irregular, rather like the rhythm, which is one reason why we may not notice it. It provides the merest skeleton of form across which the poet can drape his apparently free‐flowing thoughts. The rhymes are discreet and diplomatic to the point of semi‐invisibility; and part of what makes them so unobtrusive is the constant enjambement, as the flow of thought overrides the line‐endings.

The same goes for the syntax. This first stanza is actually a single, impressively sustained sentence, full of sub‐clauses and grammatically complex constructions, but we hardly notice this as we read it. (Auden cheats a little here, however: there are a number of colons and semicolons which could in fact function as full stops.) The poem is highly shaped, but surreptitiously so, so as to foster an impression of colloquial spontaneity. It is artfully artless. And this sense of listening in on a well‐tempered voice conversationally unfolding its reflections on life somehow confirms us in our scepticism of grand designs. The anti‐heroism of the poem’s argument finds an echo in the low‐key anti‐rhetoric of its style.

Auden wrote a poem in the same year as ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ entitled ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, the first stanza of which casts an interesting light on the former poem:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,

And snow disfigured the public statues;

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree

The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Rather than turning casually away from the disaster of Yeats’s death, the world seems to conspire in its sorrowfulness. But this, of course, is gravely tongue‐in‐cheek. It is as though the poet makes a courteous pretence that the brooks were frozen, the statues disfigured and the airports almost deserted because of his fellow poet’s death, while knowing perfectly well that the connection between suffering and its surroundings is just as arbitrary here as it is in ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. There is a kind of poetic licence at work here, as the so‐called pathetic fallacy – the belief that Nature shares our own moods and feelings – is invoked ironically, as a kind of solemn wit. The verse carefully does not claim that the day was a bleak one on account of Yeats’s death; it simply allows us to infer the possibility. The very next stanza of the poem undercuts this apparent solidarity between humanity and the world in general: ‘Far from his illness / The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests . . .’ Reality is what turns its back upon us, resisting our infantile demand that the world should serve as our looking glass.

1.2 Politics and Rhetoric

I have argued that literary theorists may safely plead not guilty to the charge of having sabotaged literary criticism. Even so, there may seem something strange about a politically minded literary theorist like myself recalling us to the words on the page. Surely punctuation is one thing and politics is another? It is doubtful, in fact, that this distinction holds water. It would not be hard, for example, to show how the punctuation of D. H. Lawrence’s writing, creating as it does an effect of flow and spontaneity, is related to his ‘organic’ vision of the world, and that in turn to his critique of industrial capitalism. There is a politics of form as well as a politics of content. Form is not a distraction from history but a mode of access to it. A major crisis of artistic form – let’s say, the shift from realism to modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – is almost always bound up with an historical upheaval. In this case, the upheaval in question was the period of political and economic turmoil which culminated in the First World War. This is not to claim that modernism was no more than a symptom of something else. But a deep enough crisis of cultural form is usually an historical crisis as well.

To look at the historical high points of literary criticism is to witness a kind of dual attentiveness: to the grain and texture of literary works, and to those works’ cultural contexts. This is as true of Romantic criticism as it is of the so‐called Cambridge school of F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards and William Empson. It is the hallmark of some of the twentieth century’s towering literary scholars: Mikhail Bakhtin, Eric Auerbach, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Robert Curtius, Kenneth Burke, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Edward Said. For almost all of these critics, there is a politics implicit in the painstaking investigation of the literary text. It is no accident that William Empson, who analysed poems more scrupulously than any critic had ever done before, was also a political liberal with socialist leanings, who was expelled from the University of Cambridge for supposed sexual misconduct and subsequently taught in conditions of considerable hardship in China and Japan. Empson’s alertness to poetic ambiguities was also an openness to conflicting kinds of cultural meaning, including those which might well seem alien to most English gentlemen of his kind. A son of the Yorkshire landed squirearchy, Empson rebelled against his hunting‐and‐shooting background to become an oddball, a dissident and an outsider; and his fascination with textual dissonances and multiple meanings was closely bound up with this spiritual nonconformism.

In a similar way, F. R. Leavis’s focus on the sensuous detail of a poem reflected among other things his opposition to an industrial order which was governed, so he felt, by abstraction and utility. Poetry, however indirectly, was thus a form of political critique. For I. A. Richards, the delicate equipoise of a poem offered a corrective to an urban society in which human impulses were no longer harmoniously integrated. All of these critics, along with the others I have mentioned, were deeply responsive to social history, in however nostalgic or idealist a fashion. Yet all of them, to adopt a phrase of Fredric Jameson’s, felt at the same time an ‘obligation to come to terms with the shape of the individual sentences themselves’.2 It is just that in their view, this obligation also involved coming to terms with the forces which helped shape the sentences, forces which include a good deal more than the author. For these critics, there was no simple‐minded option between ‘history’ and ‘the words on the page’. As philologists or ‘lovers of language’, their passion for literature was bound up with an engagement with entire civilisations. What else is language but the bridge which links the two? Language is the medium in which both Culture and culture – literary art and human society – come to consciousness; and literary criticism is thus a sensitivity to the thickness and intricacy of the medium which makes us what we are. Simply by attending to its own distinctive object, it can have fundamental implications for the destiny of culture as a whole.

Another great philologist, Friedrich Nietzsche, constantly preached the value of knowing how to read well. He presents himself as a teacher of ‘slow’ reading, and regards this as cutting against the grain of an age obsessed with speed.3 Close reading for Nietzsche is a critique of modernity. To attend to the feel and form of words is to refuse to treat them in a purely instrumental way, and thus to refuse a world in which language is worn to a paperlike thinness by commerce and bureaucracy. The Nietzschean Superman is not an e‐mail user. Yet this relation between politics and textuality goes a good deal further back – all the way, in fact, to the oldest form of literary criticism we know, the rhetoric of the ancient world.

Throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages, what we know today as criticism was in effect known as rhetoric; and the word in the ancient world had both a textual and a political sense.4 It meant both the study of verbal tropes and figures, and the art of persuasive public speech. The two were closely interrelated: professional rhetoricians were on hand to instruct you in what verbal devices could best achieve the political effects you were seeking. In ancient Roman schools, this was at times practically equivalent to education as such. The ancients recognised a special variety of discourse known as poetry; but there was no hard‐and‐fast distinction between this and other species of language. Rhetoric was the science of them all, and poetry, like history, was just a sub‐branch of it. It was a kind of meta‐discourse, defining the procedures of successful communication for any mode of language whatsoever. The point of studying stylistic strategies was a political one: it was to know how to put them to use most effectively in your own rhetorical practice. Speaking gracefully and thinking wisely were thought to be closely allied. An aesthetic error could lead to a political miscalculation.

Rhetoric, then, was a kind of discourse theory, one inseparable from the political, legal and religious institutions of the ancient state. It was born at the intersection of discourse and power. The Roman historian Tacitus tells us that Julius Caesar, along with the emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius, were all accomplished orators.5 But the art of rhetoric was not simply a weapon of emperors. In its belief that all citizens must be taught to speak well, it was closely bound up with ancient Greek democracy. For the Greeks, a free man was one who was to be persuaded by speech rather than, like slaves or foreigners, to be coerced by violence. Language was thus the supreme capacity which differentiated free, equal citizens from their human or non‐human subordinates.

Once these political conditions had passed away, a decline that can already be observed in the late Roman Empire, rhetoric was cut off from practical social life, to dwindle in the Middle Ages to a sterile inventory of literary devices. It was now a scholastic rather than a civic pursuit, one which belonged to the study rather than to the public sphere. Generally speaking, rhetoric was now subordinate to logic. The art enjoyed a triumphant revival with Renaissance humanism, which brandished rhetoric as its chief weapon against the medieval scholastics. Once again, in an epoch of wars, imperial expansion and deep‐seated social change, the question of persuasive political speech shifted to centre‐stage. Gradually, however, rhetoric became reduced to the question of style or subsumed into poetics, thus shedding its public, political functions. Later still, as eloquence and metaphor came under suspicion in an age of scientific rationalism, the word ‘rhetoric’ began to gather some of the negative connotations it has for us today: bombast, hot air, specious manipulation. The wheel, in fact, had come full circle, since this was pretty much what rhetoric had meant to Plato in his wranglings with the Sophists.

Rhetoric for the ancient world was language as public event and social relationship. If it was performative, it was also dialogical, as a form of speech which constantly overheard itself in the ears of others. It was not a way of seeing which would long survive either the invention of printing or the growth of rationalism. By the seventeenth century, rhetoric’s figurative flourishes and passionate eloquence were seen by some as an obstacle to truth, not as a means of access to it. Both passions and metaphors clouded an objective vision of the world, and rhetoric involved both. John Locke, the father of modern philosophy, condemns rhetoric in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding as a ‘powerful instrument of error and deceit’. There was still a scholarly fascination with rhetoric in the eighteenth century, not least among Scottish Enlightenment writers. In general, however, truth in the age of Enlightenment had become non‐oral, non‐dialogical, non‐poetic, non‐contextual and non‐affective. Ideally, it was independent of language altogether, since language – the very medium of truth – was also a potential obstacle to it. The fuzziness of words got in the way of the lucidity of meanings. Truth was also growing a good deal more specialised and compartmentalised; and since rhetoric claimed to be a universal discourse, it was increasingly thrust out of business.

For the rationalists and empiricists, verbal embellishment distracted you from the facts of the matter. Formal flourishes were giving way to concrete investigations. If, for example, you were keen to tackle social injustices, you needed to know in soberly prosaic spirit how things stood with men and women; and flights of rhetoric or fantasy were unlikely to help. They were the privilege of those who could indulge their fancies while others lacked food. Wordplay was the enemy of welfare. Feelings were not a mode of access to the world, but a sentimental or demagogic distraction from it. An emergent democracy was nervous of rhetoric’s authoritarian overtones – ironically, given rhetoric’s political origins; but it was also wary of the kind of populist rhetoric which might stir the anarchic passions of the mob.

Romanticism, among other things, was the revenge of the poetic on this rather bloodless brand of Enlightenment reason. Now, however, poetry was pitted against rhetoric, as it is in the programmatic preface to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Rhetoric still meant deceitful, manipulative public discourse; it was just that what would resist it now was not rational inquiry or disinterested scholarship, but the truths of the human heart. Poetry was at war with the kind of discourse which has palpable designs on us. Unlike classical rhetoric, which meant nothing without a public to respond to it, it was in grave doubt about whether it actually had an audience at all. Perhaps the poet, in Shelley’s fine phrase, was simply a nightingale singing in the dark. In the absence of an assured audience, there was a new cult of the inspired author. With English Romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Keats and Byron, poetry was still strenuously engaged with the public sphere; but the word ‘public’ was now beginning to assume pejorative overtones, and poetry was coming to speak a language altogether different from commerce, science and politics. It was part of what one might call a counter‐public sphere; but it had not yet been privatised, as it would be, in effect, by some later Romantic artists.

It was about this point that a phenomenon called Literature was brought to birth. The word ‘Literature’ had previously covered various forms of writing, both factual and fictional; but now it was a signal that the virtues of all writing were epitomised in one, peculiarly privileged species of it: poetry. Poetry was the condition to which all the most authentic kinds of writing aspired. ‘Literature’ was a matter of feeling rather than fact, of the transcendent rather than the mundane, of the unique and original rather than the socially conventional. Poetry abhorred abstractions, and dealt only in the specific and the individual. It was concerned with what you could feel on the pulses, not with general notions. From this viewpoint, a theory of poetry is really a contradiction in terms. You cannot have a science of the concrete. There can be no systematic knowledge of the individual. You can have a science of several million individuals, known as demography or sociology or anthropology, but you cannot make a scientific study of the retired admiral in the cottage down the road.

So the prejudice that poetry deals above all in concrete particulars is actually fairly recent. In one sense, to be sure, it runs back all the way to Plato, who saw poetry as an ungovernable mob of unruly particulars, and banished it from his ideal state for much the same reasons that he expelled democracy. Aristotle, by contrast, saw poetry as dealing in universals; while for some early Christian thinkers like St Augustine, to attend to the particular as an end in itself, rather than to read it ‘semiotically’ as a sign of God’s presence in the world, was an act of impiety. It is really with the growth of modern aesthetics in the mid‐eighteenth century, and then with the flourishing of Romanticism, that the idea of concrete particularity as precious in itself burst upon the literary scene in a big way. The assumption that poetry busies itself with the sensuously specific, and is sceptical of general ideas, would no doubt have come as a mighty surprise to Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Johnson. It would even have been news to a good many Romantics. There is hardly much sensuous specificity in Wordsworth. Not all poets have subscribed to the dangerous doctrine that only what we feel on the pulses is true. It is a belief at least as typical of neo‐fascists as it is of creative artists. A nervousness of general ideas is as much a mark of the philistine as the poet.

In any case, if some Romantics insisted on the sensuous particularity of the poem, they were also inclined to speak of its universal nature. And the two would seem hard to reconcile. Even so, a resolution lay conveniently to hand, known as the symbol. The Romantic symbol is supposed to flesh out a universal truth in a uniquely specific form. In some mysterious fashion it combines the individual and the universal, setting up a direct circuit between the two which bypasses language, history, culture and rationality. To penetrate to the essence of what makes a thing uniquely itself is to discover the part it plays in the cosmic whole. This idea runs steadily through Western civilisation, all the way from Plato’s Forms and Leibniz’s monads to Hegel’s World Spirit, Coleridge’s symbols and Hopkins’s ‘inscapes’. What it meant in the case of poetry, translated into rather less exalted terms, was that poets now had two ways at their disposal of avoiding actual history. They could look ‘below’ it, to the ineffably particular; or they could rise above it to universal truths. With the aid of the symbol, they could even do both at the same time.

In going transcendent, poetry in the Romantic period cut increasingly adrift from the public world, moving both upward and inward. Yet it was also its very distance from that public sphere which allowed it to act as a critique of it, and so to engage with it after a fashion. The imagination soared higher than prosaic reality, but in poets like Blake and Shelley it still figured as a transformative political force. It could conjure up enthralling new possibilities of social existence; or it could insist upon the contrast between its own sublime energies and a drably mechanistic social order. Poetry could model a type of human creativity, along with ‘organic’ rather than instrumental relationships, which were less and less to be found in industrial society as a whole.

In Victorian England, this sense of the imagination as a political force gradually faded. It was still eloquently at work in the writings of John Ruskin and William Morris; but poetry, according to John Stuart Mill, was now to be overheard rather than heard. It had retreated from the public forum to the parlour. Having begun life as a sub‐branch of rhetoric, it was now the precise opposite of it. Despite the enormous public esteem bestowed on the most eminent poets of the age, poetry itself had essentially been privatised. Tennyson might hold the public post of Poet Laureate, but his finest writing was more lyrical than epic, more tremulously introspective than robustly engagé. Challenged by the most powerful public genre of the age (the novel), and spurned by the dominant philosophy of Utilitarianism, poetry was in danger of being overlooked rather than overheard. In a new division of literary labour, the novel was now seen as a social form, dealing in ideas and institutions, while poetry had become the preserve of personal feeling. It was as though the lyric poem defined the entire genre. So it would remain, until modernists like Eliot, Yeats, Pound and Stevens sought to revive it as a major genre. Perhaps poetry might become a central art form once again in a modern age whose sense of solitude and spiritual anxiety matched its own. Perhaps it was in articulating this intensely private experience that it could, ironically, become most publicly representative.

The story of rhetoric, then, is not an encouraging one. After a promising start in the ancient city‐states, it was fossilised by the medieval scholars, suppressed by scientific rationalism, and finally routed by a privatised poetics. A sophisticated ancient art ended up as synonymous with tub‐thumping, brazen cajolery and the cynical inciting of mass emotion. In the United States today, it means teaching freshmen where to insert semicolons. The art of rhetoric did, however, exact a belated sort of revenge. In his notes on the subject, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that the study of rhetoric as the art of public persuasion should play second fiddle to the study of it as a set of tropes and figures – figures, he comments, which are the ‘truest nature’ of language as such. What Nietzsche did was to generalise rhetoric (in the sense of figurative or non‐literal discourse) to the whole of our speech. All language worked by metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, chiasmus and the like; and this meant that from the viewpoint of truth and communication, all language was thoroughly unreliable.

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