Cleanth BrooksRessenyes

How can this have an average rating of three paltry stars? It's so well-written and considered.

OK, OK, so I'm doing my time-dishonored 'review way before finished' thing, here, but -- Wimsatt and Brooks give great attention to Plato and Aristotle before moving on. The coverage and discussion, at least in what I have read, is truly fine.

Compilation of scholarly lectures reduced to essays assaying themes in great Western tragedies. From Sophocles' to T.S. Eliot.

In suffering there is victory. Values are clarified in drama, and humans are unified, by what may be compassion or schadenfreude. Editor Cleanth Brooks compiled these autonomous pieces to reaffirm the "continuity" of our lives in which we are our own problem. She uses the phrase "ultimate oneness of man", not intending the slur. [3]

All Tragedies make serious sport with the meaning of suffering. With Oedipus, one of the most promising heroes, Sophocles tore the concept of "heroic" to shreds. Is the suffering "accepted"? [4-5] Hamlet's Polonius urges "To thine own self be true", yet is this good for Saint Joan, or Hercules? Notwithstanding Racine's Phedre with its magnificent love declarations defying modernist pretentions, is anyone able to overlook his secret Jansenism, his yearning for unity?

Rhetoric is an interesting thing in the present day. We still need to have a good grasp of it, but it seems that it has fallen out of favor when it comes to things being studied. I mean, what even is rhetoric? Well, Rhetoric is defined as the art of persuasion. It is the use of different methods to argue a case or persuade someone of something. If you communicate with human beings, the time will come where you need to argue a position. It might be something really innocuous, like whether Captain Kirk is better than Captain Picard. Or it could be something essential and important, like the passage of a law.

Modern Rhetoric is a textbook that covers all of these items and more. It is sometimes dry and pedantic but overall it is very informative and effective. The dryness comes from the book being a textbook intended for a College Course. The book was published back in 1958 since I have the second edition. This makes for an interesting read since some of the things you read about just don’t occur anymore. For instance, the book discusses the methods used in advertising by talking about what brand of cigarettes to buy. It suggests a situation wherein a heavyweight champion promotes a particular brand of ‘smokes’ which isn’t something that happens. The point is to discern between garbage arguments and good arguments, but it still is a bit off-putting. The book is also somewhat racist, but it is merely a product of the times, so that isn’t really bad either.

As I mentioned, this book is a College Course textbook. It contains all the rules and information you need to communicate effectively. That is the main idea in this book, effective communication. If you need to go and work on your writing skills, this book is really good for that. The presentation is of the sort that makes me think of an informative movie from the 1950s. You know, the man talking has a clear, pleasant voice that resonates and makes you think of a leather chair that you can sink into, the video is in black and white, and he wears a suit.

All in all, the book is slightly outdated, but this is only due to the references it makes. The idea of being able to communicate your ideas and convince other people of things is really important, even though people seem to be losing the ability to concentrate on things.

Offering all of the extant letters exchanged by two of the twentieth century's most distinguished literary figures, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate: Collected Letters, 1933-1976 vividly depicts the remarkable relationship, both professional and personal, between Brooks and Tate over the course of their lifelong friendship.

An accomplished poet, critic, biographer, and teacher, Allen Tate had a powerful influence on the literary world of his era. Editor of the Fugitive and the Sewanee Review, Tate greatly affected the lives and careers of his fellow literati, including Cleanth Brooks. Esteemed coeditor of An Approach to Literature and Understanding Poetry, Brooks was one of the principal creators of the New Criticism. His Modern Poetry and the Tradition and The Well Wrought Urn, as well as his two-volume study of Faulkner, remain among the classics read by any serious student of literature. The correspondence between these two gentlemen-scholars, which began in the 1930s, extended over five decades and covered a vast amount of twentieth-century literary history.

In the more than 250 letters collected here, the reader will encounter their shared concerns for and responses to the work of their numerous friends and many prominent writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Robert Lowell. Their letters offer details about their own developing careers and also provide striking insight into the group dynamics of the Agrarians, the noteworthy community of southern writers who played so influential a role in the literature of modernism.

Brooks once said that Tate treated him like a younger brother, and despite great differences between their personalities and characters, these two figures each felt deep brotherly affection for the other. Whether they contain warm invitations for the one to visit the other, genteel or honest commentaries on their families and friends, or descriptions of the vast array of social, professional, and even political activities each experienced, the letters of Brooks and Tate clearly reveal the personalities of both men and the powerful ties of their strong camaraderie.

Invaluable to both students and teachers of literature, Cleanth Brooks and Allen Tate provides a substantial contribution to the study of twentieth-century American, and particularly southern, literary history.

About the Editor -
Alphonse Vinh is a writer and works as a Reference Librarian for National Public Radio in Washington, D. C. His publications have appeared in Southern Quarterly Review, Southern Cultures, Crisis Magazine, South Carolina Review, and the New Oxford Review.

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Brooks makes some interesting readings of poems here. His chapter on Eliot's Waste Land is particularly useful. But as with so much literary criticism, the book could easily have been a chapter- Brooks has a few theses, and proceeds to quote poems which back up his theses. I think we can do better, that we can actually argue about books rather than making huge claims like 'All poetry is symbolist poetry,' then picking our favourite authors to 'prove' this claim, and declaring that anything which isn't, say, symbolist poetry, is weak poetry.
If you say "look, Pope is a great poet, and not symbolist at all," Brooks' response is "Pope's best poetry is symbolist, like this obscure little ditty I found written on a dishcloth." Infuriating.

A classic, of course. The ideas have been so thoroughly assimilated that they may seem elementary and even banal. But it's important to re-read occasionally and reflect not only their novelty at the time they were first propounded, but also the dangers of taking good, decent, sane thoughts and, by pushing them too hard and too far, transforming them into lunacy.

I rather enjoyed reading through this 1947 book, which is relatively free of exogenous literary theory. Brooks takes one work from each of ten significant poets from Shakespeare and John Donne to Tennyson and Yeats, and presents an interesting essay on it, taking account of imagery, metaphor, and symbolism.

Understanding Fiction by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren is still one of the best text books on how fiction works. Even though the book is old, I still, think it is essential to the young writer who must also seek to become a strong reader. I bought this book while I was still in high school and found it much more engrossing and thoughtful than any of my school literature texts and better certainly better than my high school teachers.

This book is proof that literary criticism once had a point. A long, long time ago.

Long before any dialectologists attempted the task of tracing American dialects to their European roots, Brooks took a near-amateur stab at it and successfully traced Southern American dialect features to souther England, and specifically to the West Country. I love this book.

My undergraduate advisor was writing a doctoral dissertation designed to show how modern criticism (called then, in the 1950s, and called still, the New Criticism) grew out of a rediscovery and renewed appreciation of the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England. I don’t think he ever completed the dissertation, but he attempted to prepare me for graduate school by urging me, practically requiring me, to specialize in that area within my major. As I recall, I took eight courses in the English Renaissance (six of which he taught himself) and none in the eighteenth, nineteenth, or twentieth century, either British or American. In one of these courses, he focused, of course, on John Donne. Thinking to do me a favor, when he assigned each of us a Donne poem to explicate, he choose “The Canonization” for me. Of course, I was totally unprepared for its subtlety of language or complexity of structure. Naive young country boy that I was, I didn’t even know that “to die” in Elizabethan language, referred to the experience of sexual orgasm.

So to one neutrall thing both sexes fit,
Wee dye and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.

Wee can dye by it, if not live by love . . . .

To help me overcome the handicap of my simplicity, he had me begin my study by reading the first chapter in The Well Wrought Urn by Cleanth Brooks (Harcourt, Brace, 1947), one of the classic documents of the New Criticism. This chapter, entitled “The Language of Paradox,” of course, introduces the book as a whole and illustrates the thesis that will be developed through the succeeding ten chapters, culminating in “The Heresy of Paraphrase.”

From paraphrase to paradox: that was the direction to which the New Critics pointed. Brooks simply gives detailed demonstrations of the paradoxical nature of genuine poetry, before he sets his readers straight as to the error of their critical ways in his diatribe against “paraphrase,” or conventional commentary on literary classics.

To Brooks, the New Critical method is required by the nature of authentic poetry. His conviction appears first in statements that are almost adages:

. . . paradoxes spring from the very nature of the poet’s language: it is a language in which connotations play as great a part as the denotations.

The poet, within limits, has to make up his language as he goes.

He must work by contradiction and qualification.

The method of art can, I believe, never be direct—is always indirect.

“The Canonization,” of course, serves as the ideal prototype of such a authentic “paradoxical” poem. The poem begins with “ironic banter,” proceeds with almost a parody of “threadbare Petrarchan conventionalities,” and then settles into the complex metaphors, the more serious tone, and the linguistic ambiguities of the last three stanzas. The lovers die, and thus live; they two are one; the sacrifice of self in sexual “dying” is saintly. Instead of “tombes and hearse,” lovers will be memorialized in verse:

And if no peece of Chronicle wee prove,
We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes;
As well a well wrought urne becomes
The greatest ashes, as halfe-acre tombes . . . .

And so the poem not only illustrates Brooks’ thesis; it also provides his controlling image, dominant metaphor, and the title of his book: the sonnet, or small poem, as a well wrought urn. His analysis of the metaphorical language and underlying irony of this poem leads him to his statement of the primal unity of poetry: it is itself an example of what it suggests as its theme. “The poem must not mean but be.” Or as Brooks summarizes,

"The poem [i.e., “The Canonization”] is an instance of the doctrine which it asserts: it is both the assertion and the realization of its assertion. The poet has actually before our eyes built within the song the ‘pretty room’ with which he says the lovers can be content. The poem itself is the well wrought urn which can hold the lovers’ ashes and which will not suffer in comparison with the prince’s ‘half-acre tomb.’" [p17]

The emphasis, of course, is on the phrase “well wrought.” For the language of the poem suggests level upon level upon level of meaning. With the metaphor of sainthood, the union of the lovers (their dying into one another’s life) becomes a metaphor for the union of the saint and God, and this union furthermore can be seen as the union achieved through the creative imagination, what Coleridge called “the reconciliation of opposites.” Or as Brooks himself says, “that fusion . . . welds together the discordant and the contradictory.” Genuine poetry, therefore, will be inherently paradoxical; it must always unify apparent opposites, incorporate ambiguities, celebrate rather than resolve complexity. It cannot be direct; it must be oblique.

Poetry, you see, just gained its uniqueness as a form of discourse, completely separate from scientific discourse in which clarity and directness are prerequisites. It just found its soul. (It also just lost its readership, but that’s another story—one that the New Critics were sure their teaching would obviate. Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry, they felt certain, would produce a whole generation of sophisticated readers, readers who would not only understand paradox, but even demand it. And so it proved to do, but in the Academy, not among the populace.)

The bulk of Brooks’ Well Wrought Urn goes on to explore the underlying irony in poems definitely NOT associated with the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals; for example, Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Wordsworth’s Intimations ode, Keats “Grecian Urn,” and even Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears.” Genuine poetry is genuinely paradoxical. So the simplicity of the paraphrase, and of conventional literary criticism, must be abandoned. To use Robert Penn Warren’s metaphor, the poetic image must be refined by the fires of irony.

"In other words, the poet wishes to indicate that his vision has been earned, that it can survive reference to the complexities and contradictions of experience. . . . If the poet, then, must perforce dramatize the oneness of the experience, even though paying tribute to its diversity, then his use of paradox and ambiguity is seen as necessary. He is not simply trying to spice up, with a superficially exciting or mystifying rhetoric, the old stale stockpot . . . . He is rather giving us an insight which preserves the unity of experience and which . . . triumphs over the apparently contradictory and conflicting elements of experience by unifying them into a new pattern." [pp212, 213-14]

The close textual analysis of the literary critic, therefore, as demonstrated by the exegeses in this book, must not restate the meaning of the poem but examine the methods by which the poet achieves the experience of oneness in the “new pattern” of the poem.

The sublime must be oblique. So be it. I didn’t argue with that. I simply dropped out of graduate school after a year and resorted to teaching—my life’s work. Almost immediately I discovered that, for me, sublimity ranged farther afield than John Donne and T. S. Eliot, than irony and ambiguity. It was there waiting to be found in the works of John Keats and William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and eventually even in the “egotistical sublime” of William Wordsworth (though that took a while!). But, of course, I never forgot the lessons of the “well wrought urn” nor resorted to the “heresy of paraphrase” ever again. No serious student of literature could. The New Critics are no longer new, nor do they any longer reign supreme. Post-structuralism and deconstruction have seen to that. But much of what they said underlies much of what everyone says now.

I chose to put my emphasis on the “experience” of the poem, its vision, as it, indeed, reflects the “conflicting elements of experience.” Hence, my well-wrought urns have been Blake’s “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,” Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison,” Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Robert Frost’s “Design,” Sylvia Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” Thom Gunn's "Black Jackets," Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Marianne Moore’s “Poetry,” Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" and, yes, the Simplon Pass passage and other parts of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Occasionally, I reread Donne’s “Canonization.” But not often.½

I grew up as a student of literature, then as a teacher, at the height of the influence of New Criticism. My new testament—and I mean that word quite literally—consisted of works like Cleanth Brooks’ The Well-Wrought Urn, Laurence Perrine’s Sound and Sense, John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean, and Brooks’ and Warren’s trilogy, Understanding Poetry, Understanding Fiction, and Understanding Drama (with Robert B. Heilman). My undergraduate advisor was a John Donne scholar; his dissertation was to have been on the relationship between Donne and the development of modern criticism (I’m not sure he ever finished it before he entered his father-in-law’s business and became a prominent Republican politician; we lost touch.) When, in his course on the metaphysical poets, he assigned me to do an explication of Donne’s “The Canonization,” I’m sure he chose deliberately to expose me to Brooks’ reading of the poem in The Well-Wrought Urn. Because most of my undergraduate major had been focused on an historical approach to literature, he recommended that I purchase and read on my own Understanding Poetry (rev ed, Henry Holt, 1950). So I did. I can recapture my initiation into close reading and my excitement in the process by perusing the tiny, neat marginal notes and the underlined passages in my copy.

Frankly, I backed into being an English major, and I think I was able to accept this role only because the New Critics had rejected, vociferously, the vague impressionistic criticism prevalent then and the isolated emphasis on technical aspects of literature. “A poem should always be treated as an organic system of relationships,” Brooks and Warren insisted (p. xv), and “pure impressionism can be eliminated from the debate” (p. xix). Understanding Poetry, then, is a handbook in close textual analysis. Its authors clearly urged readers to avoid what William Wimsatt and colleagues had called “the affective fallacy.” It is not how a poem makes one feel, or even what a poem means, that they are interested in: “the poem is not a vehicle for its idea, but is [italicized for emphasis] its idea, its meaning.” Or, as Ciardi would put it later, it’s not what the poem means, but how the poem means.

How curious then that, all these years later, I find an implicit statement of the basis of reader-response criticism to which I eventually turned my attention and professional loyalty. It comes after one of my underlined passages and apparently went unnoticed by me at the time: “The good reader of poetry knows that there are no ‘official’ readings. he knows that there is only a continuing and ever-renewing transaction between him and the poem, a perpetual dialectic.” Exploring that “transaction,” that “dialectic,” became my principal focus in teaching and in writing. Close textual analysis of the poem, of course. But also close attention to how the reader is processing the text, and why.

At the time I gave my attention fully to the textual complexity of the poem, to the elements that distinguished a poem from its prose equivalent: “the greater selectivity in use of detail, the emphasis on suggestiveness [or obliqueness, rather than direct statement], and the importance of placing details in relation to the central intention of the poem [not of the poet but of the poem]” as well as “the high degree of organization in poetry,” particularly “the use of rhythmical language.” Poetry is not necessarily verse, but verse “is best discussed in relation to the meaning of the poem as a whole.” Understatement is one manifestation of the subtlety of poetic language: “the theme does not give the poem its force; the poem gives the theme its force”; “suggestiveness plays an important part”; “the poem does not state all that it has to say”; “action proper is suppressed, or only hinted at.”

Yes, Brooks and Warren taught a whole generation of us how to read, especially how to read a poem. They taught us to look carefully at all the elements of the poem (its narrative and descriptive surface, its metrics, its tone, its imagery, its theme, its “ambiguity, added dimension, and submerged metaphor”), but even more important, they taught us to judge a poem by the extent to which all these elements are bound together in a primal unity. “Such arguments . . . do not tend to diminish the power of the sound (the inherent rhythm) when it works in conjunction with sense and feeling [this clause italicized for emphasis]. In fact the close co-operation of the form with the meaning—modifying it and being modified by it in ways that though subtle are, in general, perfectly intelligible—is the chief secret of Style in poetry.”

By the time of this revised edition of Understanding Poetry, the New Critics had come in for reproach for their “reading between the lines.” They respond, and in responding they offer what they consider more palatable terms for ambiguity and indirection, but their defense of ambiguity and indirection as qualities of serious poetry is still manifest.

“Because, therefore, of our deep-settled language habits, praise of a poet for his use of ‘ambiguous associations,’ and emphasis upon indirection as a characteristic of poetry, can easily suggest that the poet is trying to be difficult or obscure. It can even suggest that reading poetry is primarily an exercise in detecting the hidden references and unraveling the problems that the poet has cunningly set for us. Nothing, of course, could be more absurd. . . . ¶ Poetry, as we have said, does not lead directly [italics] to its subject: it encompasses its subject. When seems to be indirection [italics] when measured against the standard of two-dimensional expository prose, is really massiveness and density. By the same token, ‘ambiguity’ is seen to be depth and richness.”

Massiveness. Density. Depth and richness. These became our expectations, the hallmarks of good poetry, for the next fifty years. Obliqueness. Difficulty. Obscurity. Those became the common reader’s response, the basis for widespread suspicion and downright distaste for serious poetry. Poets-in-residence and professors in creative-writing programs in colleges and universities were judged on precisely these criteria: density, subtlety, complexity. Literary critics in departments of English were required if students were to learn to interpret, analyze, “read” such difficult, obscure poems. A whole profession defined itself.

But recently there has developed on the side, in the streets, outside the academy, in poetry jams, another loyal community of poets and readers of poetry. Poet Laureate Billy Collins gave it a term: accessibility. Could it be? Is the New Criticism about to give way to the New Age? Can there possibly be good poetry that is not subtle, indirect, ambiguous, or obscure?

We shall see, we shall see.

In the meantime, for a whole generation the term “Brooks and Warren” has been synonymous with “understanding poetry.” Even post-modernists, deconstructionists, and reader-response critics, those of us who have emphasized “transaction” and “dialectic—all of us have taken our stand upon “close textual analysis,” or as one textbook rephrased our approach, “close imagining” of the text.

A standard text for the study of drama.

My rating of this book is based on what I've read of it (btwn a third and half); I can only say that I wish I'd had it to hand when I slogged my way through Absalom, Absalom! (by choice, no less: I wasn't assigned it for a class), or even through some of Faulkner's other, not quite as dense works. Brooks' book helped me through the latter half of the Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion; The Long Hot Summer comes from The Hamlet), and informed and instructed me in the other novels I read about. The "Notes" section at the back of the book includes such useful material as a chronology of the events in Sanctuary, discrepancies between it and its sequel, Requiem For a Nun, five pages (including 3 pages of diagrams) explaining "How Ratliff Outsmarted Flem" in the Snopes Trilogy, a chronology of the events in The Mansion, and several pages of tables listing fact-checking and conjectures about Thomas Sutpen and his children from Absalom, Absalom!.

I've read 9 Faulkner novels at this point (8 set in Yoknapatawpha County, plus The Wild Palms) and will doubtless read more (and re-read some of what I've read); but one novel that I can almost guarantee that I won't read is The Reivers, unless Brooks' chapter on it magically convinces me otherwise.

Contents Include: commentaries on Donne's "The Canonization"; Shakespeare's "Macbeth"; Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso"; Herrick's "Corinna's going a-Maying"; Pope's "The Rape of the Lock"; Gray's "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard"; Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"; Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"; Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears"; Yeats's "Among School Children"

Edition: // Descr: xiv, 300 p. 18.5 cm. // Series: Call No. { } Contains Appendices and Index. // //

...but it probably won't sell bc there's a new edition, so.... fitty cents!