It's "The Orators"--no that that matters very much, but still---
Jacek
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marcia Karp" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2003 1:22 PM
Subject: Something on reading poems
> I've just come across something I found of interest. I think others
> might find it to be so. The first part is William Empson, as quoted by
> Christopher Ricks, then Ricks' comment.
>
> The following line from Auden’s Orators is quoted as ‘free
> association’, therefore demonstrably bad or rather null. It
> seems to me plain realism.
> Well?
> As a matter of fact the farm was in Pembrokeshire.
> We are told that though the separate lines of the poem have
> isolated prose meanings they are only connected by Auden’s
> memory or subconsciousness, so cannot make poetry. But if you
> get the general context, of a man making a shameful confession,
> this creaking pretence of ease and nervous jerk into irrelevance
> is no kind of breach with ‘meaning’, whether with poetry or not;
> nor is it ‘obscure’. It is a piece of horrible photography, and
> I remember shuddering as I first set eyes on it. But of course
> if a critic goes on expecting Pembrokeshire to symbolize
> something he is likely to get irritated. Often indeed when a
> poem goes on living in your mind, demanding to be re-read, you
> do not so much penetrate what at first seemed its obscurities as
> forget them; they turn out to be irrelevant. The critic
> therefore cannot come in and demonstrate that a poem is bad
> because it has no meaning—obviously, in the first place, because
> he may merely not know the meaning, but he can say it is too
> hard to know; yet there may be an answer to this too—that he is
> wrong to expect a meaning at the point he has chosen.
> [Criterion, xv (1936), 519.]
>
> What liberates Empson’s criticism here—and Auden’s line—is the
> respect for story. So the hope is that to ask about the story in
> Empson’s poems will help with their meaning, not only in making
> clearer at some points what their meaning is, but also in making
> clearer at others why it is not exactly meaning that we should be
> expecting. [Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry, “William Empson:
> The Images and the Story” 182-183]
>
>
>
> Marcia
>
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