HISTORIOGRAPHY and biographical research are indispensable for the study of any poet's work. They give us his personal background and the poetical atmosphere of his period. and without these our view of him would be severely and dangerously limited. But in themselves they cannot give us the secret of his poetry, show us the magic that illuminates it from within, lead us towards that inner form without which a poem is, at best, only competent verse. Exegesis, again, does not'reveal the secret architecture of a poem if it goes no further than explanation. It is only a preparatory process, and if it fails to go beyond this stage, it does not make any real distinction between poetry and prose-a fact that can be easily forgotten when one is studying the more 'difficult' poets from Mallarme onwards. To explain a poem by Mallarme and then stop suddenly is really to transform the poem into intelligible prose; that is to say, to destroy it. It has long been my opinion that the process which can derive the maximum benefit from exegesis, biography and historiography -and from the text I-is analytical criticism. This does not, of course. mean dissection: to dissect is to kill. Analytic criticism simply consists of looking carefully into a poem, as a physicist looks into the secret structure of matter and discovers that it is swarming with hidden energies, whatever its outward appearance may be. I deliberately use this comparison because I can see no fundamental difference between science and analytical criticism. At the same time, it is necessary to point out that in all analysis there is a subjective element. The thing analysed-poetry or matter -is an object. and the quality of this object is partly determined by the perceptiveness and sensibility of the subject, i.e. the observer. What Newton saw in the falling of an apple no one else had seen before him. A, Band C can carefully examine a poem and not see in it what D sees. I even wonder whether the poet himself is sometimes in the same position as A, Band C-hence my query, a little further on, as to whether Vigny was completely aware of the effects that he had packed into the first stanza of Le Cor. Analytic criticism is, then, a close study of the relations between
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Apr 3, 1976
A R Chisholm 