Introduction to Poetry

by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

This is one of the dilemmas teachers and student find themselves facing; what does it all mean? The poem is distilled language. Like a fine whiskey or scotch, the distillation condenses flavors and rolls across the tongue with a kaleidoscope of sensations and tastes. Poetry is an acquired taste. Poetry can also go to your head, or it can sway your heart. And some people claim they are too young*, as yet, to appreciate it or approach it.

So, poetry is language distilled--condensed--in its meaning. That means we need to tease it apart, dissect it, put it under the microscope, right? Not necessarily. Like Billy Collins says, we should take poems "to the light" and "press an ear against [their] hive[s]." Poems should be experienced.

However, it is often a fruitful exercise and an instructive endeavor to look closely at poems (and stories and other forms of literature) in order to see how language works and why it affects us so. We can use these close reads or explications as models for our own writing, of course, but also we can look at a poem in the same way we look at an argument--to see whether we can agree. We can look at a story to see its bones and how its words build its tone; we can see how its sentences set the pace and how the characters come to life. The writer has created a world for us to explore within his or her piece--sometimes we need to map it in order to get our bearings.

Some critics used to believe that all meaning is in the poem itself. They believed that authorship and context were irrelevant. Some still might. I would not argue such extremes myself, but the approach they promoted, Close Reading, is one way "in" to a work of literature and can at least work with other elements such as social context or biographical context to find more meaning from a work of literature or discovery the fuller voice of the author and poem itself.

* However, as many of us should recall, poetry is also simple; what would a mid- 20th Century to early 21st Century childhood be without the Cat in the Hat, Mulberry Street, or Horton the Elephant? Even now, I can recite One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish as well as I can the song lyrics from 1970s and 80s pop music. The rhythm is in my head, the sounds rattle around in my ears.

(and the Close Reading of Literature)

When you are presented with this approach to literature, you can think of it as wringing all of the meaning out of the piece that you can. The critics of the New Criticism (or Chicago School) use this approach. The piece of writing is a whole that is picked apart for meaning, like a dissection. Outside information is extraneous, though the critics do follow the trails (or entrails) of the literary and historical allusions for understanding. The biography of the author is not included, the historical or cultural contexts are set aside. In this form of analysis, the writing piece itself has primacy**.

Another term for this view of literature is Formalism, or Formalist Literature. Critics and theorists such as I. A. Richards, Viktor Shklovsky, Leon Trotsky, Boris Eichenbaum, John Crowe Ransom, William Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren viewed a work of literature as autonomous. Again, this means that the intentions of the author, the reactions of the reader, and outside contexts are considered irrelevant. For the purposes of the assignment in this module, we will apply the term Explication to close readings of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.

This is a controversial theory, but the exercise of writing a close read as a student of literature is helpful for understanding how genre and language work. This is a way into meaning that does not require much in the way of research Think about it as one of the first steps in viewing literature as something communicated, something that might have its own life, as separate from the reader's own experience. This is one of the areas of controversy or contention that lead to Formalism's fall as the main form of literary attack after about 1970 or so. From Formalism or New Criticism some critics and theorists moved to Deconstruction or Structuralism--these went even deeper into language's meanings. Other, later critics and theorists reacted by bringing back the role of the writer, of psychology, of cultural contexts, of mythology. Each of these later theories exposed a greater connection to other disciplines, particularly in the social sciences.

Types of Formalist, Literary Analysis Writings

Close Reads