Journal Article

Poems out of Our Heads

Izenberg, Oren

2008

Overview

Let's start with the old new lyric studies. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley begin their classic essay “The Intentional Fallacy” with a few propositions, “abstracted to a degree where they seem to us axiomatic.” To elucidate the first of these (that although a poem is an intentional object, its author's intentions are not the standard by which artistic success is to be judged), the authors cite in passing Elmer Edgar Stoll's remark that “the words of a poem … come out of a head, not out of a hat.” Wimsatt and Beardsley do not linger long enough to provide a source for Stoll's aperçu; they move swiftly on from their initial metaphysical claim that the work of art is caused by the intentions of a “designing intellect” to the epistemological problem that the poem poses for the reader and critic: “How is he to find out what the poet tried to do?” (4). In answer, they famously declare that a poem, like a pudding or a machine, must “work”; that the evidence of its working is entirely “internal,” located in “the art of the poem itself” (4), its “semantics and syntax” and its “feats of style” (10, 4); and that these features, like puddings and machines or like the human beings that poems are about, are “object[s] of public knowledge” (5). Together, these propositions systematized for a second generation the program of reading—demanding, democratic—that had come to be known as the New Criticism.

• Publisher: Modern Language Association of America,Cambridge University Press
• Subject: 1800-1899 / Alliteration / American literature / Consciousness / Dickinson, Emily / Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886) / Imagist poetry / Language attitudes / Literary criticism / literary studies / Lyric poetry / Metaphysical poetry / Number (Grammatical) / Person / Poetry / Poets / Qualia / Religious poetry / The New Lyric Studies / Visual perception