History in Understanding Poetry

Abstract

UNDERSTANDING POETRY has never been a stable artefact, the linguistic components of which can be isolated and analysed for their intrinsic qualities, but rather a continuously developing text, which went through several, occasionally surprising, transformations. When Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren initially published their textbook in 1938, the editors had in mind mainly immediate and practical concerns. Barely two years had passed since they had published their more comprehensive Approach to Literature. As Brooks recounted on various occasions, their decision to put forth a separate study of poetry was intended as a provisional solution, designed very much in response to their experiences with their students at Louisiana State University.1 It was only in the course of several editions, each with substantial alterations to content and organisation, that the latter anthology would become what one critic describes as ‘the single most influential textbook published this [twentieth] century’.2 These alterations contribute to the textbook’s increasing authority and influence, reflecting the authors’ growing ability to convey a sense of set principles about the study of poetry to an increasingly broad audience of students across America. They also are noteworthy in the ways they document the continuing evolution of the editors’ responses to the problems of textual analysis which they took up. Any account of Understanding Poetry, then, should be mindful of its history of revisions across successive editions, from the poems they chose to include to the extensive textual apparatuses in which the editors laid out what it means to read poetry for its intrinsically literary qualities.3 Focused attention to single poems – the present essay takes, as its case, Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ – brings into view fundamental questions about how the proper study of poetry, as a classroom activity, is framed for its readers.