Do Poets Ever Mean What They Say?

Abstract

cultural institution of poetry and to address some problems to which the notion of such conventions gives rise. Such a topic, one suspects, would scarcely have been comprehensible before the advent of modern linguistics. But now it seems easy enough to assent to Jonathan Culler's claim that reading poetry, like understanding speech itself, involves the operation of a set of learned rules, an internalized grammar,' or to agree with Barbara Herrnstein Smith that when we read something as poetry, certain covert categories come into play and govern our reading.2 Where critics once tried to generalize about poetry by singling out the special qualities of the poet's imagination, or the essential end or function of poetry, or the unique features of poetic language, they now speak of the special conventions that we employ when we read poems, the implicit knowledge, on the part of both poet and reader, that constitutes poetry. As John Ellis has put it, speaking not just of poetry but of literature: Literary texts are not defined as those of a certain shape or structure, but as those pieces of language used in a certain kind of way by the community. They are used as literature. This sounds circular ... and so the notion of 'using as literature' must be expanded. we are looking for is the characteristic use of these particular texts as opposed to other pieces of language.3 The question, then, is no longer What is a Poet? or What is Poetry? but How do readers behave when they read something as a poem? are the rules or conventions they employ? For example-and this is the example we will keep before us throughout this essay-consider the old question of the poet's sincerity. The question might once have been put: Do poets mean what they say in their poems? Or: Does a poem express its author's feelings and beliefs directly? Or: Do poems consist of statements or pseudostatements? And the new question might run something like: When we read something as a poem, do we read the assertions we find in it as the poet's own assertions? It would be unsettling, I think, to discover a serious discrepancy in our answers to such questions; to discover, say, that one of the rules that governs our reading of poetry directs us to