The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry

by Cleanth Brooks

A classic that has been widely used by several generations, this book consists of detailed commentaries on ten famous English poems from the Elizabethan period to the present. Index.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Theory, Literature, Nonfiction, Essays

314 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published February 23, 1947

Reviews

[Elena · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my freshman year of college, I remembered reading Brooks' essay on Keats: A Sylvan Historian, I was completely engulfed with Mr. Brooks interpretation of the poem. It gave me a different perspective on how to further analyze Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. Moreover, when I read the essay, I felt like I was having a conversation with someone who I hoped to emulate one day. Years later, to use a Bloom word, The Well Wrought Urn did not reach the apotheosis of critical writing I remembered reading during my Freshman year. My disappoinment led to my ambivalence in rating this book a 3 or a 4 star, but gave it a four because it is a great introduction to poetry criticism.

The collection is a great start for anyone who would like to further their studies in criticism. It gives a close examination of the 10 poems in the collection, and it practices a theme of paradoxical interpretation; although this theme was a bit contrived, the collection was still an elevated criticism of poetry.

Also, I enjoyed the rather simple yet fitting definition Mr. Brooks gave of a poet and their occupation,
He is rather giving us an insight which preserves the unity of
experience and which at its higher and more serious levels,
triumphs over the apparently contradictory and conflicting
elements of experience by unifying them into a new pattern.

Talk about the anxiety of influence.

[Matt · Rating 1 out of 5]

Blah. he has some good readings of Keats and Donne, but too much time is taken up with quarrels with unheard of authors who seem to have pissed him off somehow. I'm perfectly fine with that- and I'm pretty much ok with much of the nominal tenets of New Criticism- but the results aren't all that interesting or incisive.

Some good sections, interesting passages, but on the whole nothing that really affected me much. I thought there was more to be found. I won't look any further this way again.

[Mia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I particularly likes Heresy of Paraphrase.

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cleanth Brooks was a literary critic who had some success with programs making poetry more intelligible & apprciable to undergraduate students and who, I guess emboldened by this success, wrote a number of books discussing poetry. What he wanted to achieve in so doing is not exactly clear to me -- this book's main thesis is that paradox is a principle element in all great poetry, and proceeds by discussing ten poems (or rather eight lyric poems, Pope's Rape of the Lock, and Macbeth) and exposing the paradox employed by their authors within each work. In some cases, as in Donne's Canonization or Wordsworth's Childhood ode, the paradox turns out to be a more or less a pointing-out that the poem's course of argument is incoherent, and that its nevertheless high quality is proof that paradox makes poetry. Elsewhere, he discusses mediocre elements of poetry, such as the repetitive and borrowed imagery of Milton's L'allegro/Penseroso and Gray's Elegy, and claims that the author was being mediocre intentionally, for ironic purposes, and that the coherence of irony itself is a paradoxical. Elsewhere still, as with Pope or Shakespeare, Brooks wisely elects to avoid discussing the frequent rhetorical paradoxes employed by those poets, and instead discusses the uncertainty around which the narrative is built (can Macbeth really gain power? is there substance to Pope's superficially-minded world of manners?) and then claims that these scenarios depict the fundamental uncertainty of life, which is paradoxical for reasons I guess having to do with things seeming one way but actually being another. With Yeats and Keats, Brooks forgets about his metaphor, and spends a while summarizing the contents of the poem and then saying this summary supports the poems conclusion (not at all certain with Keats' Grecian Urne), leaving the reader to infer that Brooks probably thinks philosophical distinctions are inherently paradoxical.

From there, Brooks draws his conclusions: because poetry is poetry, therefore it cannot be represented in any other form than the original poem, and thus all attempts to summarize or paraphrase poems are "heretical" and inherently false. He forgets again about his theory of paradox except for a brief comment, saying at once that the paradoxicality inherent to all poems is proof o this conclusion, but also that his paradox-hunting method also is good because it proves that one cannot summarize poems. Then, with seemingly no relation whatsoever to the rest of the book, he spends a fifty page appendix making pedantic criticisms of rival theorists' attempts to characterize what poetry is -- those who say it is mysterious are wrong because it is intelligible, those who say it is reducible are wrong because it's unsummarizeable. Therefore ... well, no actual conclusion or raison d'etre for this epilogue is given.

I don't understand what the purpose of this book is or why it was deemed worth writing, printing or reading; Brooks summarizes (with varying degrees of competence) ten poetical works, and then comments that poetry cannot be summarized. I kind of agree with his theory of poetic irreducibility, but he argues for it so poorly arguments for the opposite arise -- namely, that obviously one can make a narrative account of the rational elenchus within the poem, stopping to sum up its connotative effects, and then employ it perfectly rationally for the literary criticism Brooks seems to have thought at once totally impossible and yet absolutely necessary ... his feelings about paraphrase are jumbled together with speciously relevant arguments about unique semiotics and the fallibility of translation, which are very valid concerns but far too abstract for concern with literary theory. This he conflates with a Wallace Stevens -like belief in poetry qua poetry, as a metaphysical and inviolably pure entity which he never questions, never discusses, and never seems to have consciously thought about ... in effect, then, his book essentially just iterates that Brooks is a fan of poetry, and so zealously devoted to it that he refuses its sanctimony be questioned at all, while feeling that his (I hate to use the following term) Word Game of identifying paradox within poetries, as scholastic in its refusal to doubt its eventual solution as irrational in its blindness to whatever result it may achieve so long as it can be plausibly called paradox. Indeed, Brooks' bafflingly stupid approach to the phiosophy of language is so sloppy that, taken to its natural conclusion, would present a worldview where any sort of synonymity could be posited without violent refusal, where all writing must be treated as a poetic statement in which one MUST find paradox (as no distinction of poetry from any other form of writing, or indeed speech, seems discernible), and by result communication seems dubiously possible given the impossibility of both definition and coherence.

Ultimately, one can understand why Brooks thought students were unable to understand poetry, given his feelings about the subject, and why he felt that poetic literacy was in decline everywhere. One can, with this being a leading & celebrated critic, also understand why that decline has continued.

[Jesse Hilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read the whole book. I’m dismayed by Cleanth Brooks’ general tone. In the movie Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams has his students tear out the introduction to their poetry textbook. I’m exaggerating but it feels like New Criticism is the Introduction they tore out. It’s dry and stale. This book was published in 1947. There’s ten poems in the back of the book and then the main body of the book is not interpretations, not paraphrases of the poems, but quite merciless “close readings.” I get that as readers of poetry under New Criticism you should only go with what you can extract from the text of a poem itself, and no more. It’s a limited proving ground with rigid parameters. But Cleanth, dude, do you have to leech all the fun and life out of reading poetry? Where there were insights I just sensed the writer slamming my desk drawer on my fingers like a bitter schoolteacher. I may reread the first and last chapters of The Well-Wrought Urn in the future to get more of the gist but for now I’m glad this book is over.

[Archit Joshi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another gem of close reading. The ten seminal poems are read closely and intricately. Along with Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, this can be used to further one's expertise in close reading. The last two chapters deal with criticism battles of that era and can be skimmed. All in all a very illuminating book for lovers of close reading of poetry.

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Well Wrought Urn combines many ideas of formidable cogency, wider ranging in its perspective than any other collection of critical essays that I've encountered so far. At its core is a monograph of literary criticism, academic in its approach and comprehensiveness. It also includes what amounts to a manifesto of the New Criticism movement. Finally it offers a perspective on the English canon – the critical essays cover ten poems or plays ranging from Donne and Shakespeare through W. B. Yeats – that opens a reevaluation of the history of English literature. This last contribution was perhaps more important when the book was first published in 1943 than it is to readers eighty years later. The second point, its enumeration of principles of New Criticism, is of greater personal interest to me and for that reason I feel fortunate that it came into my hands when it did.

What I've come to realize as I have begun reading more and more in recent years is that I am lacking a framework to better understand what I am reading. I feel (as each of us might) that my taste is well developed and that I can readily point to works and passages within that strongly appeal to me. Whether it be a story by Ocampo or Kafka, a poem by Plath or Wordsworth, a novel by Ishiguro or Nabokov, however, I struggle to satisfactorily articulate the essence of what appeals. I find myself reaching for generalities, for observations that strike me as superficial on subsequent consideration, or wandering among disconnected details. It is as if I lack the language to satisfactorily engage in language that speaks to me. To remedy that state I've resolved to spend more time with literary criticism and theory. New Criticism may not be the framework that ultimately resonates with me, but I needed to begin somewhere, and I'll admit an appeal in its adherence to the primacy of the text to the exclusion of other "external" factors – historical, cultural, philological, biographical, or psychological – that have traditionally framed literary criticism.

The book is organized into chapters which are effectively stand-alone essays but which occasionally reference points made in one another. The acknowledgements note that some of the chapters appeared in contemporary journals or collections before being collected into the own book. The last chapter is titled "The Heresy of Paraphrase," and amounts to as cogent an articulation of the principles of New Criticism as any I have read. Nowhere in the book have I noted Brooks' use of the term "new criticism," as that term had evidently not yet reached currency. The "The Heresy of Paraphrase" has its own wikipedia page that includes some choice quotes aiming to summarize (paraphrase?) its arguments. Hopefully I'll be excused in piling on another; to me this best summarizes the impossibility of paraphrasing a poem in a simple "proposition":

If the [previous] propositions offered seem in their forthright simplicity to make too easy the victory of the poem over any possible statement of its meaning, then let the reader try to formulate a proposition that will say what the poem "says." As his proposition approaches adequacy, he will find, not only that it has increased greatly in length, but that it has begun to fill itself up with reservations and qualifications––and most significant of all––the formulator will find that he has himself begun to fall back on metaphors of his own in his attempt to indicate what the poem "says." In sum, his proposition, as it approaches adequacy, ceases to be a proposition.

For me the most insightful aspect of the book, the motivation for this 5-star review, is the practice New Criticism's approach to poems, as exemplified in ten case studies that comprise the bulk of the text. The GR listing lacks the details, but from the jacket copy of my edition they are:


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: Imitations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"
Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears"
Yeats' "Among School Children"


Two of these works, Wordsworth's Intimations Ode and Keat's Grecian Urn, I know reasonably well, and I've reread Macbeth fairly recently. Texts of all of the poems (excepting Macbeth and Rape of the Lock) is included in an appendix, so that the reader may carry out their own "close reading" of the text while following Brooks' analysis. His analyses of these works opened for me a completely new perspective on reading and interpreting poetry, all the more insightful for the two poems that I thought that I had known so well. It is as if a new dimension suddenly opened and I were able to step into the poem, to experience it as "dramatization of ideas and language," to crib an image that Brooks returns to again and again.

Attempting to recapitulate one of the analyses in a review is not realistic. Because Brooks is so quotable, however, I feel that it's possible to indicate the line of argument – only the points A and B, so to speak, indicating its direction – from one of the more successful examples from the book. It concerns Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where Brooks quotes T. S. Eliot, who complained that, "this line ['Beauty is truth, truth beauty'] strikes me as a serious blemish on an beautiful poem; and the reason must be either that I fail to understand it, or that it is a statement which is untrue." One is reminded that Eliot is considered one of the founders of New Criticism, so watching a fellow critic address Eliot's objection within the same framework is instructive. As already indicated, I will substitute a full recapitulation with Brooks' own closing summary:

And now, what of the objection that the final lines break the tone of the poem with a display of misplaced sententiousness? One can summarize the answer already implied thus: throughout the poem the poet has stressed the paradox of the speaking urn. First, the urn itself can tell a story, can give a history. Then, the various figures depicted upon the urn play music or speak or sing. If we have been alive to these items, we shall not, perhaps, be too much surprised to have the urn speak once more, not in the sense in which it tells a story – a metaphor which is rather easy to accept – but, to have it speak on a higher level, to have it make a commentary on its own nature. If the urn has been properly dramatized, if we have followed the development of metaphors, if we have been alive to the paradoxes which work throughout the poem, perhaps then, we shall be prepared for the enigmatic, final paradox which the "silent form" utters. But in that case, we shall not feel that the generalization, unqualified and to be taken literally, is meant to march out of its context and compete with the scientific and philosophical generalizations which dominate our world.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

From what I understand, this is sort of the flagship of the close-reading/ new critical movement. As one might guess, it is full of polemical stuff about how one should value a poem as a poem and how one ought to recognize and appreciate the complexity and unity of poems, especially their imagery. That said, the readings of the poems in the book are really strong and help one's appreciation of them, even if they do seem a little-- shall we say-- self-involved.
Do I wish I was as smart as Cleanth Brooks? Very yes.

[Ron Scrogham · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a classic work that, through the examination of English language poems by Milton, Pope, Keats, and Yeats, among others, attempts to provide an approach to a response to poetry. It is a thoughtful engagement with the question of the meaning of a poem. What sense does it make to ask what a poem means? How does this meaning relate to what a poem says? Can a poem say and still mean while remaining a poem? It is worth reading this book if such questions matter.

[Gilbert Wesley Purdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the finest studies of poetry ever written. The depth of understanding communicated in these 300 pages goes beyond impressive. An essential read even for those who might think that the New Criticism is outdated.

[Lyle Carating · Rating 3 out of 5]

i hate this :( :( :( :(

[Jeremy]

Read the first essay ("The Language of Paradox," on Donne's "Canonization") on May 21, 2018.

"The Language of Paradox"
3: "the language of poetry is the language of paradox"; nod to Chesterton as a master of paradoxes; "paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry"
10: "Even the most direct and simple poet is forced into paradoxes far more often than we think, if we are sufficiently alive to what he is doing."
11: In Donne's "Canonization," "the poet daringly treats profane love as if it were divine love"; "Donne takes both love and religion seriously"
17–18: "I submit that the only way by which the poet could say what 'The Canonization' says is by paradox. More direct methods may be tempting, but all of them enfeeble and distort what is to be said. This statement may seem the less surprising when we reflect on how many of the important things which the poet has to say have to be said by means of paradox: most of the language of lovers is such—'The Canonization' is a good example; so is most of the language of religion—[18] 'He who would save his life, must lose it'; 'The last shall be first.' Indeed, almost any insight important enough to warrant a great poem apparently has to be stated in such terms"
18–19: "Coleridge has of course given us the classic description of its [the creative imagination] nature and power. It 'reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of saneness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old [19] and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order'"
20: "If the poet is to be true to his poetry, he must call it [two lovers?] neither two nor one: the paradox is his only solution"

"The Heresy of Paraphrase"
212–13: Johnson claimed that Donne and similar poets simply "wished to impress their audience with their cleverness" [Brooks's words, not Johnson's]; "Yet there are better reasons than that of rhetorical vain-glory that have induced poet after poet to choose ambiguity and paradox rather than plain, discursive simplicity. It is not enough for the poet to analyse his experience as the scientist does, breaking it up into parts, distinguishing part from part, classifying the various parts. His task is finally to unify experience. He must return to us the unity of the experience itself as [213] man knows it in his own experience. The poem, if it be a true poem is a simulacrum of reality—in this sense, at least, it is an 'imitation'—by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience. [par. break] Tennyson cannot be content with saying that in memory the poet seems both dead and alive; he must dramatize its life-in-death for us, and his dramatization involves, necessarily, ironic shock and wonder"
213: Keats's "Urn must, in its role as historian, assert that myth is truer than history"

[Gui Nabais Freitas · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the advent of New Formalism (Richard Strier, Marjorie Levinson) Cleanth Brooks is ready to be brought off the book shelf and re-considered for the attention which he gives to the poem as an aesthetic object. Of course, the idea of a "self-sufficient" aesthetic object is more of an ideal than a reality (often leading to a neglect of important political and contextual readings of a text), this caricature of critics like Brooks is being slowly and carefully being dismantled. As Strier has pointed out, the historical enmity between formalists and historicists of various stripes has often been pointless and the best criticism has always combined close attention of the text with the context which informs and moulds it.

Brooks makes it clear that the "heresy of paraphrase" is something which everyone from critic to layman alike must be ready to ward. Carrying all the authority of an ecumenical council of old, Brooks makes it clear in no uncertain terms that we shouldn't ask what a poem is "about"? Why? Because such a question reduces the poem and robs it of its very purpose; sure, the 'Wasteland' is in some sense "about" 20th century alienation but if that's what T.S. Eliot wanted to write about an essay, treatise, even a novel would have got to that point in a clearer and more concise way. We don't ask what Mahler's second symphony is "about" and nor should we a poem. Each chapter then carefully considers what it means to think about this "Well Wrought Urn" (an allusion to Donne).

An old work of criticism but one, I would argue, which deserves re-visiting and re-incoporation. Brooks offers important ways to think about poetry as a form on its own terms. Perhaps Brooks could have done more to make explicit the interconnectedness of form and context but if we keep that in mind, I think reading him can make our reading of poems all the more penetrating and subtle.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, Cleanth Brooks makes what I feel is a compelling argument for the succession of structuralism by postmodern critical theory. He shows how the main spokesman of the New Criticism, I.A. Richards, frequently adopted a method of literary criticism in which he referred to the structure of a poem to what was, essentially, a paraphrase of the poem itself. This is a technique, he says, that is equivalent to referring to something outside of the poem itself and such a move is, of course, strictly forbidden according to the principles of literary criticism. This new technique espoused by Brooks had a related effect in that it banned the splitting of form and content, which was significant in that it allowed the critic who is trained in the humanities to establish a discourse that can contend for a competitive foothold on the level of science, sociology and the philosophy of religion. In this way, the study of literature can be understood as a historical narrative regarding the progress of humanity through the development of public reason. It seems literary critics from the 1940s are not much read in today's academic and intellectual environment but, in my opinion, a return to their texts can be revealing in that they show how the idea of modernity, as portrayed in the intersection of textual artifacts and the development of the critical perspective, led to the extension of the meaning and function of literary symbols and, specifically, how the more universal and ideal relations that cannot be expressed adequately have been sublimated in the battle over the use of poetry as it has been waged over the last fifty-plus years. Three stars.

[Peter Crofts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Bloom, Brooks spends a lot of time (wasting yours in the process) grumbling about other aacademics he doesn't agree with. Actually maybe a better term would be, he doesn't like. Both of them are grating at times, petty and obsessed.

But, again like Bloom, he offers a lot of very interesting insights into whatever literary text he's looking at.

Brooks was one of the leading thinkers of the "New Criticism" movement in literary interpretation. What is basic tenets are will be found in the text. It's all rather fish bowl grumbling. I'm outside of the privileged self important halls of academia and I really couldn't careless. I wonder how often such Olympian types get down from the podium and actually try to write something creative themselves. As anyone who labors at it knows, it is a very demanding discipline. These tenured cultural snobs don't make it any easier.

So, as you can see, he irritated the heck out of me, as does Bloom, as do all self important critics. But he's also got some very interesting things to say.

[Talkbookish · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the very few books of criticism that makes sense. Maybe because it's written originally in English, and not a convoluted translation. Brooks, one of the pioneers of the school of New Criticism, is of the opinion that poetry and paradox are not mutually exclusive. The language of paradox is the language of poetry. He also deviates from the traditional method of analysing literature based on its historical, political and author's biographical backgrounds. He instead emphasises on the prosody-metrics, form, structure and how these in turn make up the content of the poem. He also puts forth the argument that the form of poetry cannot sustain the bluntness and blandness of paraphrasing. Brooks substantiated his arguments by drawing examples from Romantic, Neo-classical and Elizabethan poets. It's also interesting to note that the distinction between irony and paradox becomes blurred through the length of reading the text, irony is in fact incorporated within the paradox.

This is a very easy and interesting read, honestly. Won't bore you anymore. Bye!

[Ardyth]

Very interesting, and I appreciate that this collection focuses on the structure of each selected poem as a work of art (instead of the reader's response, or the artist's context and possible intent) and does so in-depth for only a few poems ... but by the third essay I realized it's above my skill level. This is something like 301 while I'm only 101. Going to pause and see whether something else can bridge the gap.

[Kathy Austin · Rating 3 out of 5]

As far as literary criticism books go, this one was reasonably easy to read. The language is clear, and Brooks doesn't introduce a bunch of unfamiliar terminology that the reader has to spend extra time looking up in order to understand what he's saying.

[Breanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

So normally I hate critical books but this was a joy to read. I truly felt like I learned so much about poetry and didn’t mind the process. It was also broken down enough that I believe anyone could benefit from this book.

[Renee Rasmussen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this one...I found it helpful to see examples of the way New Critics would analyze a poem. Paired with with Ransom's book...I feel as though it's difficult to understand one without the other.

[Octoberbear · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cleanth Brooks的诗评总是能把我对诗歌的一些拿捏不准的体会一针见血地分析个清透，读他的结构分析总是很愉悦的，因为你能获得自我感官的提升，同时又不会对他引用的文学理论感到生涩。唯一美中不足的是，译者实在是太捉急，诗歌翻译地韵律全无，用词肤浅而“正派”，却少了很多微妙细腻。真是遗憾。

[Tiago Filipe Clariano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Desde que li «Mimesis» de Eric Auerbach que tenho vindo a procurar outros "manuais de crítica" literária (encontrei a recente «Viagem pela Literatura Europeia» de Mega Ferreira, que aborda os grandes clássicos), acima de tudo para entender o próprio conceito de crítica e os seus mecanismos. Ao passo que Auerbach analisa as formas de representação do real por via do ficcional, Cleanth Brooks toma as ideias de paradoxo e ambiguidade e procura provar como são o grande propulsor de muita poesia romântica pós-Shakespeare (talvez os primeiros capítulos sejam pré- e o próprio Shakespeare, não consigo confirmar, sei que há um capítulo de crítica a Shakespeare). ... ... ... Fui confirmar e os autores abordados são: Wordsworth, John Donne, Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson, Herrick, Pope, Gray, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson e Yeats.
Os temas em tensão da vida e morte, invólucro e conteúdo, decoro e actualidade reunem-se na críticas à "Ode to a Grecian Urn" de Keats (e, por sinal, no título): a urna, a "well-wrought urn", de acepção fúnebre, é uma parábola da própria poesia, guarda dentro de si os despojos de algo que já foi vivo, em cinzas, e expõe uma aparência luminosa, mitológica, imagética no exterior, como o poema retém alguma intencionalidade do momento, das escolhas métricas e metafóricas (olha, o Álvaro Campos a fazer rimar, de modo inglório 'Londres' e 'escondes'), culminando como a expressão viva de uma experiência anterior (morta).
A obra culmina na teoria crítica da "Heresia da paráfrase", tendo sido exposta anteriormente de um modo prático: a paráfrase serve para a crítica de indicador e não de tradutor de conteúdos, parece-me ser a grande lição a tirar, mas para entender é preciso o percurso de pelo menos um dos outros capítulos e a "Ode" de Keats ou a "Ode" de Wordsworth são bons exemplos disso.

[Rosy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sigh. I want to say, I wish I were smarter, but I wish I were a little less lazy might be more to the point--or at least the first step. I do cop to this series of thoughtful essays being dry and sometimes difficult, although I was frequently aware of how much more difficult they could have been.

But: A great snapshot, in the context of my limited awareness, of a very particular time in the history of literary criticism, partly as recognized and discussed by Brooks himself and partly from my particular vantage. And: a reintroduction to some old poetic chestnuts, some of which are or were familiar old friends to me and one or two of which I might actually never have read before. So not unsatisfying, now that I'm done.

[Joana · Rating 4 out of 5]

"(...) the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme."

Apesar de só ter lido o capítulo "The Heresy of Paraphrase" fiquei sem dúvida intrigada em ler o resto do livro. Texto muito bem estruturado que levanta questões muito interessantes sobre como devemos ver a Poesia (será que está pode ser decifrada? Será que deve ser decifrada? Afinal a tua fabricação é importante? E noções como Ironia, Metáfora, Métrica e Ritmo?).

Um livro para mais tarde pegar e, quem sabe talvez, dar as tão merecidas 5 estrelas.

[Nadosia Grey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every time I read this book I find something newly problematic/interesting about it. This is New Criticism at its finest, containing all the central formalist tenants that you will find in any other other formalist theorist. Most valuable is the treatment of poetry in itself and the inherent paradoxes found in works that disrupt the "scientific language". I love Brooks but so many of his concepts now face significant altercations. This does not mean his ideas are outdated, but it would be naive to think that this book would go unchanged after the post-structural movement.

[Chris Pfeiffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic parallels drawn between the nature of paradoxical elements in poetry itself, and the scientific notion that is paradox. Poetry doesn't need to be bound by the same scientific notions as scholarly writing; i.e. It can draw on parallels, metaphor etc. in order to convey its point or 'intent'. Very glad I decided to read this, as it certainly adds to the context that I now read poetry in

[Greg · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not sure why I read this. It's supposedly a "classic" in poetry studies but hopefully poetry studies have come a long way since this was written. If you're intrested in reading some smart things about old poems, this is a good one for you.

[Ke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recommend this book to anyone looking for a challenging primer on poetry criticism. Brooks dissects 10 "poems" (in a non-scientific way), including Keats, Yeats, Shakespeare's "Macbeth," Pope's "Rape of Lock," etc.

[Ron Tuohy]

Old me, still enamored of the the New Criticism.

[EvaLovesYA · Rating 3 out of 5]

En rigtig god kilde ifb. med et semesterfag på engelskstudiet.

- Brugt på universitetet (engelsk)