"Irony as a Principal of Structure" by Cleaneth Brooks, and "Morning at the Window" by T.S. Eliot

As an opening aside, I find it amusing that this essay is about grappling with the idea of irony. The assertion that in poetry "few statements are devoid of ironic potential," yet asserting also that irony is over-stretched as a term. That it is "nearly the only term available by which to point to a general and important aspect of poetry."

Brooks would go on to write "Understanding Poetry," the book which (as I understand) laid out the basic structure of how literary analysis has been taught in American high school English classes for the past 80 years. The same school of thought which birthed all the shallow pedants who criticize the way other people use the word "ironic." 

My chain of reasoning there is loose, but it's none the less amusing to me. 

—

Really the key thrust of this essay seems to be that a poem (or any work of art) must be appreciated as a whole thing. Its various parts 'Are not related to one another as flowers in a bouquet, but as the different elements of a growing plant. As stem, leaf, flower, fruit, and root.' 

Great art, then, in trying to make its statement "does not leave out what is apparently hostile to its dominant tone, fusing the irrelevant and discordant with itself, [thus] coming to terms with itself, and become invulnerable to irony."  

Admittedly I am a bit confused by what Brooks means here by "invulnerable to irony." My best attempt at understanding it is that a good poem uses ironies with purpose to create meaning. Thus the poem resists externally applied, mocking irony. He follows this with a simile about stone arches: "the very forces which are calculated to drag the stones to the ground actually provide the principle of support."

One point that stuck with me is that irony is not just sardonic—not only or merely sarcasm. It can be 'tragic, self -ironic, playful, arch, mocking, or gentle.' This is something I'd like to be on the lookout for. 

—

Brooks' examples of irony in various poems was instructive for me.

From William Shakespeare

Who is Silvia? what is she,

    That all our swains commend her?

Holy, fair, and wise is she;

    The heaven such grace did lend her,

That she might admirèd be.

Is she kind as she is fair?

    For beauty lives with kindness.

Love doth to her eyes repair,

    To help him of his blindness;

And, being helped, inhabits there.

Then to Silvia let us sing,

    That Silvia is excelling;

She excels each mortal thing

    Upon the dull earth dwelling;

To her let us garlands bring

  Brooks points to the un-theological idea that this Silvia's grace was lent her primarily so she could be admired as an irony. Likewise the line "For beauty lives with kindness" seems ironic. It is perhaps being suggested that people who wish to flatter a beautiful person will say they are kind, but that the one rarely actually engenders the other. 

From William Wordsworth 

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

—Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

 There's a clear irony in comparing this woman both to "a violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye" and something as obvious and easily seen as "a star when only one is shining in the sky." These two completely opposed ways of describing her beauty demand that the reader resolve them together. Perhaps that she is like a violet to the world, but like a star to the one who loves her. 

From William Wordsworth (again)

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

 The clearest irony here is that this dead woman has "no motion," yet also is "rolled round in earth's diurnal course." It is a peculiar way to think of death. As a riotous tumbling about within the earth. Something about it brings tears to my eyes. 

—

Morning at the Window
By T.S. Eliot

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.

The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs. 

Harkening back to William Empson, I'm immediately curious if there's an ambiguity here between the homonyms Morning and Mourning. Eliot's expressions of city life all express a sort of tragedy about how the humanity of the people living in them are demeaned. This one certainly suggests a mournful attitude on the part of the speaker. 

The damp housemaids sprouting despondently seems to me the sort of irony that Brooks was talking about. Damp→Sprouting points to a growing plant, imagery typical of someone who is thriving. Yet to be a damp person is awful, and the housemaids are despondent.  So we must resolve that irony in our own minds. I suppose we all grow--in the sense of moving through the cycle of our lives--whether we're thriving or not. 

After sitting with a poem for awhile on my own, I've been turning to Poetry Verse as a source of a more educated assessment. In the essay, Cleaneth Brooks' insisted that a poem can only be understood as a whole interconnected thing. The Poetry Verse analysis points out that the movements of city workers are being compared to an ocean's tides. It's something that only seems to be supported when you consider many of the poem's minor elements with one another: the seabed of the basement kitchens and the trampled street, the damp souls, the brown waves of fog, the twisted faces. It's still obscure to me, even having read the explanation and seeing what they're talking about. 

The Intentional Fallacy by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, & Cousin Nancy by T.S. Eliot

This one is blessedly straightforward: we cannot know what an author intended, and thus we cannot use their intention as a basis from which to understand or criticize their art. 

On the one hand it seems so obvious as to be trivial. None of us ever has real access to the mind of another. We try to approximate it in different ways, and art is one of those ways, but art doesn't fully bridge the gap. 

Yet the more Wimsatt and Beardsley lay their argument out the more clear it is that the idea of "the artist's intention" is baked deeply into how we talk about art. There's one bit in the essay I found particularly notable where they lay out some "Passwords of the Intentional School," and oppose them with "More precise terms of evaluation."

Passwords of the Intentional School	More Precise Terms of Evaluation
Sincerity Fidelity Spontenaity Authenticity Genuineness Originality	Integrity (As in how it holds together presumably, not in the sense of personal ethics) Relevance Unity Function Maturity Subtlety Adequacy

Another point I found compelling was the outlay of three different sorts of evidence one could use to determine meaning of something in a poem:

1. That which is publicly known. Language, the meanings of words, the way the world works, history, literature, etc. (This is good)
2.  Hearsay about what the author was thinking about when the artwork was created. (This is bad)
3.  Knowledge about the historical and social context in which the artwork was created. Words that had different definitions, tensions between social classes, etc. (This third, secret thing, is kinda like #2, except it's good!)

— 

I'm somewhat torn on this essay. On the one hand I do find the argument presented compelling. Yet I also can't deny that the notion of focusing on intent has been key to elevating my own ability to appreciate art. A shift from "I like/dislike this" to "Was this done with intention?" has been a useful mental tool. 

Though perhaps it's only the word choice that is in conflict with the Wimsatt and Beardsley. It doesn't contradict them to say "The author made this choice. It must have had a function: can I discern that function, and if I can, does the choice that was made succeed in fulfilling that function?"

There is perhaps something awkward about dehumanizing a work of art by cutting off the bond that naturally forms between me when I appreciate art, and the artist who made it. Yet obviously, that bond is superficial, parasocial, and suspect. Not bad, but not something to be trusted when trying to determine meaning? 

Additionally, I do think hearsay about what the author was thinking about when an artwork was created can be rad, actually. I would agree that it's not authoritative, but I don't think including it in a discussion is harmful. It can often be compelling and enriching—though in fairness to Wimsatt and Beardsley this may be what they were talking about when they described Author Biography as an interesting-yet-entirely-separate-field from criticism. 

My biggest issue with this essay is the idea that the meaning of art belongs not to the author, not to the critic, but to the public. I can't really blame Wimsatt and Beardsley for how wrong they are, though. They were not living here with us at the end of history, when this idea has brought about a cultural wasteland. 

I have some awareness of the fact that this essay is foundational to The New Criticism as a school, and that The New Criticism got kinda silly. People just making shit up and calling it interpretation kinda stuff. As I understand the school currently exists in an odd place: "Not taken seriously at all within academia, yet for some reason the only school of criticism taught in high school or low-level college classes." But I'm not even talking about that. 

Appreciating art is a skill. It's a skill we should all have, like cooking, but it's a skill some people will develop to greater or lesser degrees. It's useful for society to have experts. It's useful to be able to appreciate our own cooking, yet also have easy access to really good cooking: both so we can enjoy it, and so we can get a glimpse at a path we might take to improving our own skill. 

—

Cousin Nancy

Miss Nancy Ellicott
Strode across the hills and broke them,
Rode across the hills and broke them—
The barren New England hills—
Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law. 

From the second Stanza, we can get a pretty clear sense that Cousin Nancy is going out and doing stuff the older generation doesn't really approve of. This gives us some useful context for understanding the way she moves in the first stanza. She's going over barriers, to a place beyond, out of sight of home—and she breaks those barriers. Yet after she's broke them we go back to describe those barriers, and the lands she moves through: the hills are barren, she rides over cow pasture. Nancy's bold actions lack some substance. They ring a little hollow. 

(That last bit is not my own realization. I enjoyed getting the first bit on my own, but connecting the barrenness and the cow-pasture to commentary on the quality of Nancy's actions was something I learned by consulting an expert analysis. Very useful stuff!)

I am curious what "Riding to hounds" might mean. Still not sure.  

The last stanza is amusing, as it is in particularly strong conversation with The Intentional Fallacy. First, I wasn't aware that "glazen" was an old-timey way to say "made of glass." So learning that counts as that 3rd secret sort of evidence for finding meaning in a poem. 

 Second, and more notably, there's this whole bit at the end of The Intentional Fallacy specifically about Eliot. His tendency to rely heavily on allusion to other works, and also his tendency to publish his thoughts about his own poems, why he made the choices he did and such. I've got no idea who "Matthew and Waldo" are. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts Eliot had someone in mind. Probably two old poets who wrote about familial duty or feminine chastity or something. 

But to me, I am satisfied to let them simply be two male names. Avatars of masculinity who puff themselves up, yet can't do anything but watch from a perch of glass while Nancy does what she wants.  

Epilogue to Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson, and Preludes by T.S. Eliot

Seven Types of Ambiguity seems like a fascinating book that'd be interesting to read in its entirety someday. For this project, however, I'm just reading the essays selected in The Critical Tradition, and for that only this epilogue is included.

Essentially, points in a text when the meaning isn't completely unambiguous are open to interpretation by the reader, and can produce a variety of meanings. Empson appears to further assert that every statement contains ambiguity (and therefore interperability) of some type or another—even so far as to validate misreading as a locus for useful interpretation. Yet there is a tension always between ambiguity, and the "forces" which hold ideas together. 

Though he holds ambiguity to be beautiful, he also wonders if those forces are presently (in 1930) too weak, and that "the English language is becoming an aggregate of vocabularies only loosely in connection with one another, which yet have many words in common, so that there is much danger of accidental ambiguity, and you have to bear firmly in mind the small clique for whom the author is writing." 

He uses the example of the newspaper headline: "ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER," and points out how unwieldy it would be to parse those words outside that context. Is the assassin Italian, or is the disaster Italian?  Is 'Plot' a noun or a verb? Is 'bomb' a noun, verb, or adjective?

He also touches on how often art requires biography in order to be understood in the way the artist might have predicted a person would understand it. "Those who enjoy poems must in part be biographers," and yet the art can be read and appreciated without that. Perhaps the reader will miss much of what is there, yet perhaps also they will find something that could not be there if they knew more about where the poem came from. 

Empson describes a sort of "noble to naughty" scale of how people appreciate art, in which certain ways of appreciating a thing are "high minded," and other ways of appreciating the same thing are "low minded," yet also for a thing to have a chance at expressing itself in a high minded way it must have something of a low minded charm to it. 

To examine art we must be open to be affected by it. Dispassionate analysis is a dead thing. Unless one is enjoying poetry, one cannot create it, as poetry, in their mind. 

 That was all a bit disorganized, but it has been a disorganized week, and there's a great deal to think about in this essay. Short of reading it all over again and clarifying my notes (not conducive to keeping a good momentum through the material), I'll leave it as a bit of a disorganized mess. 

— 

Now to the poem, another by T.S. Eliot. And speaking of ambiguity, boy howdy, I've been reading through all of these thinking they were part of an intentional Prufrock series. I thought this because this section of my book is titled Prufrock and Other Observations, and the first two poems are so clearly entwined with one another in their themes of sexually frustrated, emasculated young men being awkward around women. Yet apparently that's simply the name of Eliot's first published collection, and the book I've got reproduces that collection. There is not, necessarily, any connection between the poems save that they have the same author. 

That's certainly colored my reading of Conversation Galante, Aunt Helen, and even Preludes.  

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

One of the things that delights me most in poetry is when the title feels like an essential line of the poem. A thing which creates context using the power of giving a name to a thing, and in so doing changes everything about how the rest of the poem is read. Immediately we know these are 4 preludes, and it's easy to see that we never describe the beginning, or the substance of a thing. We don't describe life being lived, we just share these moments of 'before.' Before the evening's rest, before the day's work, before getting out of bed.

I am interested in the pronouns throughout the poem. The bulk of the poem is addressed to "you." The line "You curled the papers from your hair" makes me think that the "you" being addressed is a woman. (Echoes of my assumption that this was a Prufrock poem) I know women often use paper in their hair as part of styling it, and I know protecting long hair during sleep is often an involved process. I can't recall the two things being done together, but I'm not enough of an Eliot biographer to know how women would have cared for their hair in his time and place. Perhaps "papers" are what we would now call curlers? 

Only in 4 does the pronoun change to "His," then finally to "I." Two people distinct from the one addressed in prelude 1, 2, and 3. 

And on that note of ambiguity created by distance from the author, I'm curious about the "smell of steaks in passageways" right at the start. Steaks seem, to me, to imply either a celebration or affluence, yet everything else tells me this is a workaday meal for the end of a working class day, so I wonder how that word is being used. 

I'm also struck by the two occurrences of "vacant lots" in the poem. In Prelude 1 it's where the newspapers come from, before the gusty shower wraps them around your feet. So to is the vacant lot where ancient women revolve as they gather fuel. Presumably these poor women scavenge for newspaper to warm their homes. 

What I saw in this poem was a look at the quiet interludes in daily life. The beats of transition. Yet, from reading the analyses of others, I can see that Eliot is talking specifically about life *in a city* here. Something that would have been becoming increasingly normal during his day. And he doesn't seem to like cities very much at all, focusing on their grime, how cramped they are, how they block out the sky. How they are a place where life moves from beer, to coffee, and back again.