Cleanth Brooks defines the h. of p. in the concluding chapter of The Well Wrought Urn (1947). Following I. A. Richards ‘ formulation, he insists on the essential difference between scientific statements (which are para-phrasable) and poetic statements (not paraphrasable): in the former, the “same” content can be expressed in other words; in the latter, form and content are inseparable, so that any change of wording is a change of meaning, and the poem cannot be reduced to a prose précis.
There is no denying that the critic must sometimes resort to discursive summary statements about the meaning of a poem. However, such plain statements are always put into question by the formal structure of the poem itself. As Brooks puts it, “whatever statement we may seize upon as incorporating the ‘meaning’ of the poem, immediately the imagery and rhythm seem to set up tensions with it, warping and twisting it, qualifying and revising it.”
This “warping and twisting” process is the indispensable structural principle from which the very meaning of the poem is derived. For Brooks the poem is not a clear-cut and ready-made scientific proposition: it is “a structure of gestures and attitudes” that constitutes an autonomous poetic universe.
In this sense the poem resembles dramatic structure: “the poem does not merely eventuate in a logical conclusion. It is ‘proved’ as a dramatic conclusion is proved: by its ability to resolve the conflicts which have been accepted as the données of the drama.” Thus a poem has a “meaning” because a dramatization of experience is enacted structurally within the poem: its tensions are set in motion; its elements are played one against the other; its conflicts are embodied in metrical pattern and metaphors.
This dynamic process—modifications, qualifications, revisions—comprises the inner fabric and meaning of poetry. It is not through logical proof, abstract symbols, and discursive statements, but through irony, ambiguity, and paradox, Brooks holds, that the poem speaks.
Certainly the elaboration of new modes of reading poetic texts after New Criticism (q.v.) seem to suggest that the concept of the h. of p. no longer has the theoretical urgency it once had. Yet it is no less clear that Brooks’ formulation, with its implications about the nature of poetic meaning, remains a fundamental contribution to the formalist analysis of poetry.
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