American Poetry of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Dr. Danica Čerče

Professor
danica.cerce@ff.uni-lj.si
• Wallace Stevens: “The role of a poet is to help people live their lives.”
• W. H. Auden: "Poetry is a battlefield for the contention between Prospero
and Ariel, i.e. between aiming at social/political engagement and grouping
the words in an aesthetic game.“
 Philip Larkin

"Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much—
the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end.
[…] Hearing it means you’re dragged along at the speaker’s own rate, missing
things, not taking it in, confusing there and their and things like that. […] I think
poetry readings grew up on a false analogy with music […]. This fashion for poetry
readings has led to a kind of poetry that you can understand first go: easy rhythms,
easy emotions, easy syntax. I don’t think it stands up on the page."
• Louise Glück: "The problem with listening is that you can‘t get both
the poem‘s music and its logic."
• T. S. Eliot: "If from the first deciphering of a poem a reader gets
something out of it, nothing but laziness can prevent the desire for
fuller and fuller knowledge.“
T. S. Eliot (1956): "[T]he meaning of the poem as a whole […] is not
exhausted by any explanation, for the meaning is what the poem
means to different sensitive readers."
David Richter, ed. Falling into Theory. St. Martin‘s, 2000.

Do we write the text we read?

Stanley Fish: "How to Recognise a Poem When You See One“

Jacobs-Rosenbaum
Levin
Thorne
Hayes
Ohman (?)
Stanley Fish: "Reading is never just reading; it is always reading as.“
Readers are involved in creating the text they read. They bring their
expectations to the texts.
• In the past, "texts were naively assumed to be the product of the
intentions of their authors.“
• E. D. Hirsch and P. D. Juhl argued that "when we interpret any ambiguous
utterance (and almost every poem is potentially ambiguous), we seek what the
author most likely intended by it."
In "The Death of the Author,“ Roland Barthes writes: “We know now that a text is
not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the
Author-God), but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of
them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the
innumerable centres of culture. […] A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from
many cultures and entering into mutual relations, but there is one place where this
multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the
author – a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”
• Julia Kristeva – intertextuality
• It breaks with a traditional notion of authorship - "subverts the concept of the
text as self-sufficient, hermetic totality, foregrounding instead the fact that
literary production takes place in the presence of other texts“
• a text is constituted in the moment of its reading - "the reader's own previous
readings, experiences and position within the cultural formation also form crucial
intertexts"
• Wayne C. Booth – "The primary danger in reading is reader distortion:
blinded by our own values, our own agenda, we will turn all texts into
the same texts, the text we happen to be interested in reading.“
• Gayatri Spivak, Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe - "identity politics" – "our literary
interpretations are seen as announcing who we are, what we believe in and how
we relate to texts by men and women, whites and blacks, colonisers and
colonised."

• "Milton‘s attitude towards women, Shakespeare‘s prejudice against Jews and

blacks, Kipling‘s attitude towards indigenous people would be politically
intolerable today, notwithstanding these authors‘ other contributions to western
culture.“
“Writers indeed put words down on paper, but their class, their
moment in history, and their milieu speak through them.”
(Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author")
 The title and the poem

• Is the title a part of the poem?

• What is the relationship?
• Ironic? Indicative? A commentary? A syntactic part?
What the title does…

• claims association with the poem - i.e. the title can be a

commentary/critique/praise …
• directs our attention (e.g. to form)
• puts the poem in a relationship with other poems/poets/…
"directs our attention to"…

• Form (Sonnet, Villanelle, etc.)

"directs our attention to…“

• Content
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Dedication / Occasion

• “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” (John Dryden)

• “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (W. H. Auden)
An invitation / a response?
• Then call me traitor if you must,
Shout reason and default!
Say I betray a sacred trust
"To Certain Critics“
Aching beyond this vault.
Countee Cullen
I'll bear your censure as your praise,
For never shall the clan
Confine my singing to its For never shall the clan
ways
Beyond the ways of man. Confine my singing to its ways
Beyond the ways of man.
The 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg7ff6Pr7IM

• Louise Glück
• https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-3659/