The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry is a 1947 collection of essays by Cleanth Brooks. It is considered a seminal text [1] in the New Critical school of literary criticism. The title contains an allusion to the fourth stanza of John Donne's poem, "The Canonization", which is the primary subject of the first chapter of the book.
The Well Wrought Urn is divided into eleven chapters, ten of which attempt close readings of celebrated English poems from verses in Shakespeare's Macbeth to Yeats's "Among School Children". The eleventh, famous chapter, entitled "The Heresy of Paraphrase," is a polemic against the use of paraphrase in describing and criticizing a poem. This chapter is followed by two appendices: "Criticism, History, and Critical Relativism" and "The Problem of Belief." Most of the book's contents had been previously published before 1947, and the position it articulates is not significantly different from Brooks's earlier books, Understanding Poetry and Modern Poetry and the Tradition. The unique contribution of The Well Wrought Urn is that it combines the close reading analysis of the previous volumes while answering some of the criticism directed at Brooks's theory. [2]
The book was written in reaction to a prominent stream of literary criticism: the historicist/biographical. [3] This interprets each poetic work within the context of the historical period from which it emerged. Because literary tastes change so much over time, it seems reasonable to the historicist to evaluate each writer according to the standards of his own age. Brooks vehemently rejected this historical relativism, believing it amounts to "giving up our criteria of good and bad" and thus repudiating "our concept of poetry itself". [4] : 198 Brooks opts instead to offer "universal judgments" of poems and treat them as self-contained entities, able to be interpreted without recourse to historical or biographical information. As H.L. Heilman writes,
to declare the literary work self-contained or autonomous was less to deny its connections with the nonliterary human world, past and present, than to assert metaphorically the presence in the poem of suprahistorical uniqueness along with the generic or the hereditary or the culturally influenced. [5]
By distinguishing the "supra-historical" from the "non-historical", Heilman highlights an important, and often misunderstood distinction in New Criticism. This is that Brooks and the New Critics did not discount the study of the historical context of the literary work, nor its affective potential for the reader, nor its connection to the life experiences of the author. As he wrote in his essay The Formalist Critics, such study is valuable, but should not be confused with criticism of the work itself. It can be performed as validly for bad works as good ones. In fact, it can be performed for any expression, nonliterary or literary. Thus an historical/biographical study of literature fails on two counts: it cannot tell good literature from bad, and cannot distinguish literature from other cultural productions.
The bulk of the book is devoted to close reading of poems by John Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Keats, Lord Tennyson, Yeats, Thomas Gray, and T. S. Eliot. In The Well Wrought Urn, theory illuminates practice and vice versa. The poems are meant to be "the concrete examples on which generalizations are to be based". [4] : 26 Thus the first chapter tells us in its title that poetic language is "The Language of Paradox".
It is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations. And I do not mean that the connotations are important as supplying some sort of frill or trimming, something external to the real matter in hand. I mean that the poet does not use a notation at all—as the science may be properly be said to do so. The poet, within limits, has to make his language as he goes. [4] : 8
Unlike the scientist, who seeks to cleanse his work of all ambiguity, the poet thrives on it because with it he can better express experience. The rest of the first chapter is devoted to the close reading of Donne's "The Canonization". Brooks in his interpretation challenges the conception of Donne as being an early example of the use of eccentric metaphor, anticipating Yeats and Eliot, instead asserting that he is an extreme example of what all good poetry exemplifies, namely, paradox. Brooks does this by comparing the symbolic imagery of Donne's verse with that of Shakespeare in Macbeth. [2] : 218
In order to prove that the language of poetry is paradox, he must treat poems that have traditionally been thought straightforward. He takes Herrick's poem, "Corinna's going a-Maying", and reveals that the speaker in the poem has a complex attitude toward his carpe diem theme. [2] : 221 In doing so, Brooks brings up another central tenet of his critical theory, one which he will deal with more explicitly in the coming chapters: the notion that no true poem can ever be reduced to its paraphrasable prose content.
In a similar vein, Brooks analyzes Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". The message of this poem seems straightforward and was duplicated by many other "graveyard" poems of the late eighteenth century. Therefore, according to Brooks, what makes it one of the most famous in the English language cannot be the poem's message. Brooks instead focuses on the poem's dramatic context as the source of its power. [2] : 223
The most famous and best-known application of this doctrine of dramatic appropriateness is Brooks's analysis of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn". Widely considered to be one of his best poems, Keats's "Ode" ends on what many think a sententious note with its proclamation that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." But Brooks sees this as dramatically appropriate; it is a paradox that cannot be understood except in terms of the entire poem, if we take seriously Keats's metaphor of the urn as a dramatic speaker. [4] : 165
Part of the intent of The Well Wrought Urn is to dispel the criticism that Brooks in his earlier works had dismissed the eighteenth and nineteenth century English poets, particularly the Romantics. Brooks thus includes "Intimations of Immortality" by Wordsworth and "Tears, Idle Tears" by Tennyson along with the Pope, Gray, and Keats poems. He claims that Wordsworth and Tennyson frequently wrote better (i.e., more paradoxically) than even they were aware. Wordsworth sought to write directly and forcefully, without sophistry or wordplay. But his language is, according to Brooks, nevertheless paradoxical. For example, Brooks takes the opening lines of Wordsworth's sonnet, "It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free:"
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun,
Breathless with adoration...
Brooks points out that while the evening is described as quiet and calm, it is also breathless with apparent excitement. There is no final contradiction between this kind of excitement and this kind of calm, but the meaning of the words are being modified by each other, moving away from their purely denotative meaning. This is a good example of what "paradox" means to Brooks: the poet expresses himself in words that are metaphorical and thus protean in their meaning, that contradict one another because of their connotations. [4] : 9
Brooks thus uses the same criteria to analyze and judge these poems as he did for the modern and metaphysical verse. This was a rejection of the typical method of interpretation for these poets, which is to judge them by the Romantic standards of their day and in the light of their biographies. [2] : 226
In his summary chapter, Brooks articulates his position that it is "heresy" to paraphrase a poem when trying to get at its meaning. Poems are not simply "messages" expressed in flowery language. The language is crucial in determining the message; form is content. Thus to try to abstract the meaning of a poem from the language in which that meaning is rooted, the paradoxical language of metaphor, is to disregard the internal structure of the poem that gives it its meaning. [4] : 199 The temptation to think of poetry as prose draped in poetic language is strong simply because both are composed with words and differ only in that poetry has meter and rhyme. But Brooks instead wants us to see poetry as like music, a ballet, or a play:
The structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme...most of us are less inclined to force the concept of 'statement' on drama than on a lyric poem; for the very nature of drama is that of something 'acted out'—something which arrives at its conclusion through conflict—something which builds conflict into its very being. [4] : 186–187
The poem is a "working out of the various tensions—set up by whatever means-by propositions, metaphors, symbols". [4] : 207 It achieves a resolution through this working out of tensions, not necessarily a logical resolution but a satisfactory unification of different "attitudes", or dispositions towards experience. Therefore, any intellectual proposition within the poem must be viewed in the context of all the other propositions expressed in the highly changeable language of metaphor. The poem does not try to find the truth-value of a particular idea; it tries to juxtapose many, contradictory ideas together and reach a sort of resolution. The poet is trying to "unify experience" by making poetry not a statement about experience but an experience itself, with all the contradictory elements contained in one cultural expression, i.e., the poem.
An ode is a type of lyric poetry. Odes are elaborately structured poems praising or glorifying an event or individual, describing nature intellectually as well as emotionally. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also enter.
Poetry, also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
The phrase pathetic fallacy is a literary term for the attribution of human emotion and conduct to things found in nature that are not human. It is a kind of personification that occurs in poetic descriptions, when, for example, clouds seem sullen, when leaves dance, or when rocks seem indifferent. The English cultural critic John Ruskin coined the term in the third volume of his work Modern Painters (1856).
"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near the house that he shared with Keats in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It soon became one of his 1819 odes and was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. The poem is one of the most frequently anthologized in the English language.
In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, via close attention to individual words, the syntax, the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as well as formal structures.
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
William Kurtz Wimsatt Jr. was an American professor of English, literary theorist, and critic. Wimsatt is often associated with the concept of the intentional fallacy, which he developed with Monroe Beardsley in order to question the importance of an author's intentions for the creation of a work of art.
Cleanth Brooks was an American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education. His best-known works, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) and Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), argue for the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a way of understanding poetry. With his writing, Brooks helped to formulate formalist criticism, emphasizing "the interior life of a poem" and codifying the principles of close reading.
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819, first published anonymously in Annals of the Fine Arts for 1819.
Poetic diction is the term used to refer to the linguistic style, the vocabulary, and the metaphors used in the writing of poetry. In the Western tradition, all these elements were thought of as properly different in poetry and prose up to the time of the Romantic revolution, when William Wordsworth challenged the distinction in his Romantic manifesto, the Preface to the second (1800) edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wordsworth proposed that a "language near to the language of men" was as appropriate for poetry as it was for prose. This idea was very influential, though more in theory than practice: a special "poetic" vocabulary and mode of metaphor persisted in 19th century poetry. It was deplored by the Modernist poets of the 20th century, who again proposed that there is no such thing as a "prosaic" word unsuitable for poetry.
Understanding Poetry was an American college textbook and poetry anthology by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, first published in 1938. The book influenced New Criticism and went through its fourth edition in 1976.
"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" is a Petrarchan sonnet by William Wordsworth describing London and the River Thames, viewed from Westminster Bridge in the early morning. It was first published in the collection Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807.
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" is a poem by William Wordsworth, completed in 1804 and published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). The poem was completed in two parts, with the first four stanzas written among a series of poems composed in 1802 about childhood. The first part of the poem was completed on 27 March 1802 and a copy was provided to Wordsworth's friend and fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who responded with his own poem, "Dejection: An Ode", in April. The fourth stanza of the ode ends with a question, and Wordsworth was finally able to answer it with seven additional stanzas completed in early 1804. It was first printed as "Ode" in 1807, and it was not until 1815 that it was edited and reworked to the version that is currently known, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality".
"The Heresy of Paraphrase" is the title of a chapter in The Well-Wrought Urn, a seminal work of the New Criticism by Cleanth Brooks. Brooks argued that meaning in poetry is irreducible, because "a true poem is a simulacrum of reality...an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience." Brooks emphasized structure, tension, balance, and irony over meaning, statement, and subject matter. He relied on comparisons with non-verbal arts in order to shift discussion away from summarizable content:
The essential structure of a poem resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or, to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonization, developed through a temporal scheme.
"Tears, Idle Tears" is a lyric poem written in 1847 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), the Victorian-era English poet. Published as one of the "songs" in his The Princess (1847), it is regarded for the quality of its lyrics. A Tennyson anthology describes the poem as "one of the most Virgilian of Tennyson's poems and perhaps his most famous lyric". Readers often overlook the poem's blank verse—the poem does not rhyme.
"She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" is a three-stanza poem written by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth in 1798 when he was 28 years old. The verse was first printed in Lyrical Ballads, 1800, a volume of Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poems that marked a climacteric in the English Romantic movement. The poem is the best known of Wordsworth's series of five works which comprise his "Lucy" series, and was a favorite amongst early readers. It was composed both as a meditation on his own feelings of loneliness and loss, and as an ode to the beauty and dignity of an idealized woman who lived unnoticed by all others except by the poet himself. The title line implies Lucy lived unknown and remote, both physically and intellectually. The poet's subject's isolated sensitivity expresses a characteristic aspect of Romantic expectations of the human, and especially of the poet's condition.
"The Canonization" is a poem by English metaphysical poet John Donne. First published in 1633, the poem is viewed as exemplifying Donne's wit and irony. It is addressed to one friend from another, but concerns itself with the complexities of romantic love: the speaker presents love as so all-consuming that lovers forgo other pursuits to spend time together. In this sense, love is asceticism, a major conceit in the poem. The poem's title serves a dual purpose: while the speaker argues that his love will canonise him into a kind of sainthood, the poem itself functions as a canonisation of the pair of lovers.
Historical poetry is a subgenre of poetry that has its roots in history. Its aim is to delineate events of the past by incorporating elements of artful composition and poetic diction. It seems that many of these events are limited to the phenomenon of war, merely because war in and of itself foments not only hostilities amongst men, but also severely transposes the character of a society in general. The poetry of Walt Whitman, for instance, reflects scenes of the American Civil War which occurred during his lifetime.
In literature, the paradox is an anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas for the sake of striking exposition or unexpected insight. It functions as a method of literary composition and analysis that involves examining apparently contradictory statements and drawing conclusions either to reconcile them or to explain their presence.