A Note About Meaning

 It is a given that many readers will be moved to distill a “meaning” from a poem. To that end, they will rely on its literal sense, in most cases lending disproportionate weight to some of its words and discounting others, or dig out biographical facts to unearth the psychic or actual experiences presumed to have given birth to the poem, or regard it in relation to other poems written by the poet or other poets, and thereby bestow some discernable meaning on the poem, usually one that fits within a stock response that has been validated by a number of literary critics. But the reduction of the poem in this way eviscerates the work’s unique character and, at least by some degree, misleads the reader.

 Susan Sontag argued that the search for an artwork’s meaning evolved from the elevation of content above form, thus it became understood that all art represented an act of will to make a statement about something. According to this way of thinking, the content of the art was intended to serve a purpose beyond the “decorative” or entertainment value of its form. Certainly, the early English and European art that dwelled on religious, moral, or ethical subjects did have the general purpose of fostering the adoration of God and good behavior in society. Today, contemporary works of art often raise our awareness by addressing important social and political issues. Nevertheless, the form of a poem’s expression (i.e., the particular language, manner, and tone used by the poet) introduces difficulty, mostly because the poem’s structural, musical, and figurative elements significantly affect and even alter its prosaic sense.

 With reference to poetic expression, in particular, Ludwig Wittgenstein said: “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” Thus, poetic expression is not the utilitarian use of language typified by our usual mode of discourse. But then, is it something that can be truly understood? Sontag advocated the right of art to be “meaningless,” while contending that it could still “nourish” consciousness: “To become involved with a work of art entails, to be sure, the experience of detaching oneself from the world. But the work of art itself is also a vibrant, magical and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.” Though this positive view of art (viz., that it promotes the general well-being of the individual) represents Aristotle’s response to Plato, it eschews any of the moral and ethical bases that Aristotle used to justify it. To Sontag “the experience of the qualities and forms of human consciousness” was the primary gratification for which we come to art and supersedes any utilitarian knowledge we might gain from our interaction with the text, painting, sculpture, music, dance or film. Works of art are “living, autonomous models of consciousness.” Nevertheless, one cannot interact with such a “model of consciousness” without some understanding of the particular language of its expression, even if we grant that its “meaning” may not be ultimately pronounceable. Otherwise, our appreciation would be the equivalent of a non-English-speaking literary critic attempting to explain the subtleties of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, or a color-blind art critic attempting to appraise the paintings of Mark Rothko or Willem de Kooning.

 In Practical Criticism, I.A. Richards devised a unique experiment to explore the way poems are read and interpreted. He collected a diverse array of students and individuals as his test subjects, then gave them a broad range of poetic texts from different eras, omitting the titles and authors’ names. Naturally, “obscure” poems, by virtue of the density of expression and the particular strategies of the author, presented the greatest difficulty. This is what Richards had to say about the poetic expression vis-à-vis rationality and coherence:

What we think of it as sense is, however, not the important point here, but rather a general question of the place of the plain prose sense, or thought, in poetry.

No general rule, of course, can be laid down. Every case must be judged on its own merits, and the particular structure of the poem under judgment must be fully taken into account. There are types of poetry (Swinburne’s Before the Mirror for example) where the argument, the interconnection of the thought, has very little to do with the proper effect of the poem, where the thought may be incoherent and confused without harm, for the very simple reason that the poem is not using the argument, and so the incoherence may be neglected. There are other types where the effect of the poem may turn upon irrationality, where the special feelings which arise from recognizing incompatibility and contradiction are essential parts of the poem. (Not always mirthful feelings; they may be desperate or sublime. Compare the close of Marvell’s The Definition of Love.)

 Richards wrote that there were four different kinds of meaning or functions in language:

Sense – “We speak to say something, and we listen we expect something to be said. We use words to direct our hearer’s attention upon some state of affairs, to present to them some items for consideration and to excite in them some thoughts about these items.”

Feeling – We have “some feelings about these items, about the state of affairs we are referring to. We have an attitude towards it, some special direction, bias, or accentuation of interest towards it, some personal flavour or colouring of feeling; and we use language to express these feelings, nuance of interest.”

Tone – “The speaker has ordinarily an attitude to his listener. He chooses or arranges his words differently as his audience varies, in automatic or deliberate recognition of his relation to them. The tone of his utterance reflects his awareness of this relation, his sense of how he stands towards those he is addressing.”

Intention – “Finally, apart from what he says (Sense), his attitude to what he is talking about (Feeling), and his attitude to his listener (Tone), there is the speaker’s intention, his aim, conscious or unconscious, the effect he is endeavouring to promote. Ordinarily, he speaks for a purpose, and his purpose modifies his speech. The understanding of it is part of the whole business of apprehending his meaning. Unless we know what he is trying to do, we can hardly estimate the measure of his success.”

 But even this taxonomy seems inadequate when the poem itself is an abstraction of many sorts, a mask of many faces, and sense, feeling, tone, and intention may be subsumed within formal elements of the poem. Aside from these, differing perspectives have an effect on the way the poem is apprehended. This is clearly true when one considers the variety of critical lenses through which one may read a given poem, e.g., structuralist, deconstructionist, post-structuralist, Marxist, objectivist, and so forth. Even the author’s own understanding of the work and what it says is not controlling, as Roland Barthes explained in “The Death of the Author.” In embracing this viewpoint, one does not necessarily subscribe to quot homines tot sententiae or to Derrida’s post-structuralist view of indeterminacy, but instead sees the poem as an organism or state of being which we readers experience through our intellectual and sensory perceptions, consequently developing different paradigms of analyses in response to ever-evolving perspectives on the poem.

 Meaning and purpose is what an audience bestows on a work of art when, at least in many instances, the medium itself makes a complete understanding of the work ineffable. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land ” and John Berryman’s “The Dream Songs,” as well as the entirety of Wallace Stevens’s work, are understood today as having a cognizable discourse, but history tells us that the majority of scholars had great difficulty with these works when they were first published, when critical opinion had not coalesced to discern their themes and artistic methods. Critics put a frame around the poem in order to make sense of it, and that frame often holds for a generation or more until another critical opinion reframes and consequently reshapes the poem for a new generation of readers.

 Instead, we should approach a poem as if entering a new country, as Randall Jarrell advised, and learn its language and terrain. In his preface to The Wedge (1944), William Carlos Williams used an alternative metaphor: “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. . . . It isn’t what [the poet] says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes.” Poems should be given the same sensory respect that pictorial, choreographic, sculptural, and other visual works of art receive. But, while the eye may intimately scan a painting and other visual works in a matter of moments, “one cannot read a book, one can only reread it,” as Nabokov observed. “We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details.” It is only through successive readings that the mind, as distinguished from the eye, may achieve a finer understanding of the author’s creation.

 Yet the act of reading a poem should not be entirely an intellectual affair of puzzling out its sense. If the poem doesn’t contain a high entertainment value for you, where you take delight in intimately experiencing the poem and, as Sontag would have it, communing with the human consciousness behind it, you have to check yourself. Maybe you haven’t absorbed the total experience of the poem and need to read and study more. Like Jarrell, Nabokov counsels us to study the new world of the author’s creation “as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.” You either surrender your preconceptions at the door to the poem, as in the old days, when cowboys were made to surrender their guns before they were allowed to drink at the saloon, or carry them with you and be turned away from the opportunities the poem offers to expand your horizons, especially when the poet is someone with real talent. But if more studying and reading doesn’t help the cause of the poem, then the poem is probably not for you. To each his own. Poems do communicate intelligible ideas and can mean many things, but as much as they do that they should also give us great pleasure in the reading, even if it is in ways that we can only verbalize incompletely.

 For more on the subject of meaning in poetry, I recommend Reginald Shepherd’s brilliant essay, “On Difficulty in Poetry,” which originally appeared in the May/Summer 2008 issue of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ magazine. Essential too is George Steiner’s earlier essay, “On Difficulty,” which categorizes four different aspects of difficulty in poetry. A discussion of the experiential side of things may be found in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford Univ. Press 2004), an exploration of the “presence effect” of art, the way it affects our senses and bodies, which is another kind of surrender to the aesthetic intensity of a work of art that goes beyond merely identifying pictorial art by way of form and color or understanding the poem by its language and figurative devices, but experiencing the art as a species of feeling wherein we become threaded with the emotional content of the artwork in a way that is an alternative to what we commonly call “interpretation.”