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.
The textbook "widely influenced ... the study of poetry at the college level in America."[1] The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has named the book one of the "Fifty best books of the century."
Understanding Poetry, according to an article at the Modern American Poetry Web site, "codified many of the so-called New Critical ideas into a coherent approach to literary study. Their book, and its companion volume, Understanding Fiction (1943), revolutionized the teaching of literature in the universities and spawned a host of imitators who dominated English departments well into the 1960s."[2]
Even those who are highly critical of the textbook's approach to poetry have acknowledged the reach and influence of the volume. Poet Ron Silliman has called it "the hegemonic poetry textbook of the period."[3]
According to Warren's obituary in The New York Times: "Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction, which he wrote with Mr. Brooks, taught an entire generation how to read a work of literature and helped make the New Criticism dominant in the decade surrounding World War II. It was an approach to criticism that regarded the work at hand as autonomous, as an artifact whose structure and substance could be analyzed without respect to social, biographical and political details."[4]
Writing in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Harold B. Sween said: "Among the rank and file of university faculty in the English-speaking world, few works of this century have gained the influence of two of his [Brooks'] textbooks written in collaboration with Warren, Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943). They revolutionized the teaching of literature in thousands of classrooms for 25 years . . . Brooks and Warren gained universal recognition for changing the focus of reading poetry (and fiction).[5]
Contents
These contents refer to the third edition (1960), which may differ in some respects, particularly in poems used as examples, from other editions.
Preface
Poetry gives us knowledge. It is a knowledge of ourselves in relation to the world of experience, and to that world considered, not statistically, but in terms of human purposes and values.
—from the Preface
Poetry is inherently "dramatic," the authors say, defining dramatic as something concrete which involves a process and a conflict in an effort to find meaning. There are other ways to think of poetry other than as knowledge, the authors concede, but that is "the assumption behind this book."
Poems should not be thought of as carrying messages or statements that can be translated more concisely or exactly in prose. Instead, the reader must "surrender to" the impact of the poem as a whole, which includes comprehending the form of the poem. In fact, the kind of knowledge that poetry gives readers can be comprehended "only through form." Readers should carefully observe the human events, images, rhythms, and statements of the poem.
Context is also important. The form of a poem is a person's attempt to deal with a certain problem, "poetic and personal." Poems are written within a historical and cultural context, and the reader also has a context and needs to understand the "dramatic implications of the form."
Preface in the third edition
For the third edition, the authors add in the preface (in a section dated January 24, 1960) that the introductions to the several sections have been expanded, some discussions from the previous edition have been dropped and others added. The exercises have been changed and expanded; selections of poems have been changed to better represent some periods; two appendices have been dropped ("Ambiguity, Added Dimension, and Submerged Metaphor" and "the Poem Viewed in Wider Perspective"), with much of their material put into the exercises and discussions; "How Poems Come About: Intention and Meaning" has been revised, with new material added; Section VII, "Poems for Study" has turned into an anthology, although not a systematic survey, of modern poetry.
Introduction
People communicate not just to convey information for businesslike practical reasons, they also convey feelings and attitudes. Telling a joke, passing the time in conversation and greeting old friends are some examples, and poetry is another. Some propositions — including many involving values, emotions, feelings, attitudes and judgments — can't be conveyed through communicating practical information or with scientific precision. Like science, literature (and especially poetry) uses a specialized language for the purposes of precision in matters different from science.
In ordinary life, people must deal with forms of communication that use some of the methods of poetry, including editorials, sermons, political speeches, advertisements and magazine articles. Yet when approaching poems, many people confuse practical or "scientific" kinds of communication with poetic communication, sometimes as a way of justifying their interest in poetry, and so fall into certain mistakes.
One mistake is "message-hunting" — looking only for a profitable statement or idea in a poem. A short prose statement can work better than a poem for communicating advice. Something else is at work in poetry.
Another mistake is thinking that poetry deals only with emotion or sensation, or even thinking that poetry can express an emotion such as grief the way tears would express it, or bring up the emotion in the reader. But poetry can never do that as well as real experience, the authors say, and a poem, such as Keats'Ode to a Nightingale, used as an example here, may really convey the poet's interpretation of an experience.
A third common mistake is an attempt to mechanically combine the first two, defining poetry as the "beautiful statement of some high truth", or "truth" with "decorations". This mistake can lead to thinking of poems as collections of pretty language pleasing for its associations with pleasant things. But even Shakespeare and Milton wrote fine passages bringing up unpleasant and disagreeable associations. The things represented don't themselves shape the poetic effect, which depends on the "kind of use the poet makes of them."
These mistakes look at poems in a mechanical way rather than in an organic way in which the elements (such as meter, rhyme, figurative language, along with attitude and emotion) need to be understood to be acting in a fundamental, intimate, organic way with each other.
The introduction also states (but doesn't develop the thought )that poems are inherently dramatic, with an implied speaker who reacts to a situation, scene or idea.
"I. Narrative Poems"
In a "Foreword" introducing discussions of individual poems, the authors say that poetry takes the general human interest that people have in other people (expressed at other times in news articles about such things as outlaws, lovers killing lovers or other tragedies, to cite some examples) and put into a form "that preserves it" even after initial curiosity wanes.
Poems that tell a story use the reader's natural curiosity about how a story will turn out (the most obvious way we become interested in literature), although readers or listeners who know the ending still enjoy the poems. The story element can be prominent, as in "Frankie and Johnny" or much less prominent, as in Robert Frost's, "Out, Out". Narrative is a way for the poet to provoke certain emotional reactions and ideas in readers.
Using the ballad "Johnie Armstrong" as an example, the authors show how a narrative poem, far more than a novel or even a short story, will use bare "facts" in a dramatic way that gives them an emotional and intellectual meaning, whether or not the reader or listener has analyzed those or other elements. Poems are more concentrated or "closely" organized than prose in that they tend to present concentrated, sharper selected details in a concentrated, carefully arranged way, giving them more "intensity." By presenting concrete, explicit statements (as in "The Wife of Usher's Well"), the poet can convey an emotional impact as well as information, which more abstract language can't do. The reader can also be drawn into a more immediate appreciation of a poem by drawing out ideas from suggestions rather than the poet making explicit statements. Yet not every implication of a poem needs to be understood consciously for a reader to enjoy the work.
The theme of a poem can be properly described (to give a fuller understanding of the poem) without the process becoming "message hunting" if the reader understands that "the poem gives the theme its force", not the other way around.
"II. Descriptive Poems"
The poems in this section give readers an impression of some scene or object showing the impression they gave the poet either through his senses or imagination. Conveying fresh, vivid impressions of things is fundamental to good poetry, the authors assert.
Descriptions in poetry are linked closely to our lives and our values, just as narratives are. When a poet describes an object it is separated from its context in the natural world and therefore looks different to the reader. We feel it carries associations, emotional or intellectual or both, that the natural object doesn't. If nothing else, we know that the poet has chosen the object to describe and we wonder why.
"III. Metrics"
Rhythmical language in poetry is one of the ways we can see the tendency of poems towards a high degree of organization — there tends to be far more emphasis on rhythm in poetry than in prose.
Verse, a specialized form of rhythm in language, is one of the elements that, when related to other elements in a poem, combines to form poetry. Rhythm is often associated with powerful or intense states of emotion, and while poetry is not concerned with only the emotional elements of human experience, it does try to "do justice to" those elements. "[P]oetry is a result of a relationship among various elements and does not ever inhere specially in any single element. It is the fusion of all the elements that counts." (page 152, 3rd edition)
Verse may seem trivial but is a powerful way of "establishing a pervasive impression of unity." Stanza patterns do the same. They reveal a "certain formality" to the text and focus our attention. Since poetry frequently defies common sense, metrical form, in a way, offers the reader hope that the text will ultimately make sense, even that all parts of the poem will ultimately make sense.
Meter can also be a subtle way for a poet to emphasize and de-emphasize. By occasionally breaking the metrical pattern, the poet can emphasize a word, for example. Certain metrical situations don't automatically produce particular effects — the use of meter achieves an effect only within the context of sense and feeling. The same is true for stanza forms, which are worth considering only as far as they help produce the particular effect of any given poem. Free verse, with varying line lengths and sometimes little else to distinguish it from prose, uses the particular lengths and line breaks to call attention to particular words or details.
"IV. Tone"
In poems, tone is the expression of attitude. Tone is also linked with poetic voice.
"V. Imagery"
metaphor simile personification
"VI. Theme: Statement and Idea"
"VII. Poems for Study"
Poems are simply presented here without "critical apparatus" directing the student. The poems are meant to be modern (although, in the third edition at least, the authors recognize that it's a stretch to include Gerard Manley Hopkins). With poets who are relatively recent and mostly still living, the works come from the same world as the student. The poems are put in "natural groupings" for convenience, although other groupings of the same poems could also be made.
"VIII. How Poems Come About: Intention and Meaning"
The poem itself is what's important to the reader, but knowing something about the origin of a poem may help us better understand and appreciate it and poetry in general. Understanding the cultural context of a work of literature is also vital.
↑ Robert Penn Warren biographical sketch at the Academy of American Poets Web site, accessed January 25, 2007
↑ Bohner, Charles, "Robert Penn Warren's Life and Career", accessed February 6, 2007
↑ Silliman, Ron, "The Desert Modernism", article in The Electronic Poetry Review, accessed February 6, 2007
↑ "Robert Penn Warren, Poet and Author, Dies", obituary article, no byline noted on New York Times Web page, The New York Times, September 16, 1989, page 1, accessed February 6, 2007
↑ Sween, Harold B., "Cleanth Brooks: Courtly Enigma", a review of Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism, by Mark Royden Winchell, in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1998, accessed February 6, 2007
External links
Web page at the University of Pennsylvania describing the book
Online excerpt from the second edition of book (on Andrew Marvell's "Horatian Ode")
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.
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.
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.
Prose is a form of written language that follows the natural flow of speech, uses a language's ordinary grammatical structures, or follows typical writing conventions and formatting. It differs from traditional poetry, where the format consists of verse: writing in lines that follow rhythmic metre or a rhyme scheme. The word "prose" first appears in English in the 14th century. It is derived from the Old French prose, which in turn originates in the Latin expression prosa oratio.
Poetry analysis is the process of investigating the form of a poem, content, structural semiotics and history in an informed way, with the aim of heightening one's own and others' understanding and appreciation of the work.
La Vita Nuova or Vita Nova is a text by Dante Alighieri published in 1294. It is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and verse.
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.
In literature and writing, stylistically elements are the use of any of a variety of techniques to give an auxiliary meaning, ideas, or feeling to the literalism or written.
In literary theory and aesthetics, authorial intent refers to an author's intent as it is encoded in their work. Authorial intentionalism is the view that an author's intentions should constrain the ways in which a text is properly interpreted. Opponents, who undermined its hermeneutical importance, have labelled this position the intentional fallacy and count it among the informal fallacies.
"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.
"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 Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry is a 1947 collection of essays by Cleanth Brooks. It is considered a seminal text 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.
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.
A line is a unit of language into which a poem or play is divided. The use of a line operates on principles which are distinct from and not necessarily coincident with grammatical structures, such as the sentence or single clauses in sentences. Although the word for a single poetic line is verse, that term now tends to be used to signify poetic form more generally. A line break is the termination of the line of a poem and the beginning of a new line.
Poetic devices are a form of literary device used in poetry. Poems are created out of poetic devices via a composite of: structural, grammatical, rhythmic, metrical, verbal, and visual elements. They are essential tools that a poet uses to create rhythm, enhance a poem's meaning, or intensify a mood or feeling.
The poetry in The Lord of the Rings consists of the poems and songs written by J. R. R. Tolkien, interspersed with the prose of his high fantasy novel of Middle-earth, The Lord of the Rings. The book contains over 60 pieces of verse of many kinds; some poems related to the book were published separately. Seven of Tolkien's songs, all but one from The Lord of the Rings, were made into a song-cycle, The Road Goes Ever On, set to music by Donald Swann. All the poems in The Lord of the Rings were set to music and published on CDs by The Tolkien Ensemble.
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