Poetry Criticism Untangled
Two Ways to Read a Poem, and Why It Matters
Whether you favour a "new critical" or a "textual" approach to reading poetry makes a real difference to what you get out of it.
Why and how you read poetry are questions worth thinking about. Do you read to be able to write poetry, do you read for pleasure, or do you read to access artistic tradition? The rewards for reading poetry depend a lot on how you tackle it. Here are two possible approaches, adapted from schools of literary criticism.
The Formal or “New Critical” Way
With this approach, you are most concerned with the technical aspects of the poem, such as form, rhyme, metre and theme. You are treating the poem as an independent piece of art, detached from the poet and from the reader. The use of poetic techniques in the poem to produce a unified whole will allow you to judge whether the poem is good or bad.
The New Critical way of reading literature was popular between the 1920s and 1960s and was the underlying philosophy behind textbooks such as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1950 and 1938).
Some of the ideas of New Criticism seem radical today. As well as a concern with technical aspects of poetry and qualities as ambiguity, paradox, irony and tension, critics in this school held that matters outside the text were of minimal importance. These matters would include the reader’s reaction and the author’s intention, including the context in which the poem was written. In fact, placing emphasis on the reader’s reaction and the author’s intention were labelled “affective” and “intentional” fallacies.
Ironically, the New Critical movement itself may have grown from its context, a reaction to mass media and the popularisation of literature, and a desire to preserve a “western” tradition of “high art”.
The “Textual” Approach
In contrast, in his book The Crafty Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) Robert Scholes advocates reading a poem first for its ordinary meaning, “situating” the poem in its historical context, and considering matters such as whether you are persuaded by the poem and whether, in fact, you like it. Scholes argues that “human concerns…are the ultimate value of poetry” and that if “poetry does not communicate, it becomes the Mandarin discourse of a comfortable elite.”
This approach does not discount form, but places more emphasis on the context of a work of art. It assumes that we need additional information to understand a text, which may be provided by the writer’s (or reader’s) historical or cultural circumstances. Scholes argues that only by understanding the context of literature can we evaluate it critically and understand the power it has over us.
Forging Your Own Approach
Your natural way of reading a poem is likely to favour one or the other of these approaches. For most readers it’s a matter of emphasis, of “where you go first” in your reading.
Your approach may depend in part on your purpose. If you are a poet learning to write in forms and with traditional techniques, you may take a “new critical” approach to much of your reading for a time. You may learn most by employing the technique of “close reading”, or careful attention to words, form and technique.
Even if you are reading for knowledge and appreciation, you will benefit from having a look at the formal aspects of the poem. But you are likely to be equally concerned with its subject, the author’s attitude, the way the poem sounds, and what it means in your life.
There are many other ideas that can be drawn from literary criticism and from such disciplines as the science of teaching to develop an approach to reading poetry. No method is right or wrong, provided you read widely, read carefully, and read mindfully.
