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Poetics Today 25.3 (2004) 529-540



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New Criticism for the Twenty-First Century

English, Yale
Shira Wolosky, The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xi + 226 pp.

At the center of this intelligent, lucid, useful book is a chapter on poetic meter which contains this sentence of commonsense approach to the conflicting demands of rule and individuation or tradition and the individual talent: "What happens is, the regular pattern sets up an expectation, which the poet can then surprise" (137). Since this book as a whole purports to be a primer—that is, an elementary presentation of the "regular patterns" of various sorts that distinguish poetry and the analysis of poetry—we can suppose that anyone who brings to a reading of it some previous acquaintance with poetry (surely the virtual whole of its readership, unless the book is misadopted as a text for students too young) must be in search of its surprises, its imaginative triumphs over the mechanical sorting of elementary knowledge into the "regular pattern" of reasonable categories. Though the choice of organizing categories is itself interesting, what is required for the book to be a primer is just that sorting and clear exposition of elementary knowledge; what is required for the book to be of interest (to readers of poetry and literary theory) are those moments of wondrous surprise, transcending the categories into which the book is organized. Wolosky must therefore [End Page 529] steer a careful and even course between the Scylla of the predictable, the teachable things the general reader might look for, and the Charybdis of her own imaginative engagement with a whirlpool of possibilities and surprises.

How does she do it? Part of the answer concerns the savviness of the organization of the book. Chapters on syntax, metaphor, verse form, rhythm, and various tropes might be expected of such a book. The surprises are the chapter "Gender and Poetic Voice," whose very title says something of the way a particularly polemical school of literary criticism is assimilated into a broader, general concern; and the culminating chapter entitled "Incomplete Figures and the Art of Reading," in which all matters of allusion, both extraliterary reference and the relation of a given work to the literary tradition, make strange bedfellows. But to get beyond the politics of the book to its true genius, we need to follow closely how Wolosky handles the problems in explicating individual poems. Consider the discussion of Robert Frost's "Desert Places" in the chapter entitled "Rhetoric: More Tropes." The segue into her discussion of this beautiful poem is the trope of oxymoron, and under oxymoron she introduces as ostensibly contradictory the descriptive and the blocked vision—making us aware of the combined blocking agents (impediments to vision) of snow falling, night falling, and the hurry of the poet "going past." Because this is a primer, not (ostensibly) a work on the vanguard of literary theory, there is no extended meditation on the notion of blockage comparable to the work of Neil Hertz in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (1985). Yet Wolosky's carefully chosen phrase about snow falling and night falling almost defining "a condition of unseeing" (178) is subtly, tacitly informed by a dialectic of blindness and insight (Paul de Man) and a Stevensian seeing and unseeing of the eye, what the curiously comparable poem "The Snow Man" calls the "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." With Wolosky's gentle guidance, one rereads the poem with Clintonesque attention to what the meaning of is is:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less— [End...

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