Literary Criticism

 Purposes

 Poetry and other Arts

o "poetry is music set to words", Dennis O'Driscoll
o "One of [Donald Davie's favourite notions] was that there were three useful
analogies for the understanding of literature in general and modern literature
in particular. Poetry was like theatre, as in Yeats; like music, as in Pasternak
and Eliot; and like sculpture, as in Pound", Denis Donoghue, "Words Alone",
2000
o "Poetry, unlike music, is a meta-art, and relies upon non-physical structures
for the production of its effects. In its case, the medium is syntax, grammar
and logical continuity, which together form the carrier-wave of plain sense
within which its deeper meanings are broadcast.", Don Paterson, "The empty
image: new models of the poetic trope",
o "Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that
most clearly asserts the specificity of literature", Jonathan Culler,
"Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature",
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p.189
o "Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will
least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank", Kant,
"Critique of Judgement", p.215
o "Hegel declares that poetry is supreme among the arts, combining music's
apprehension of the inner life of the mind with the determinate phenomenal
character of sculpture and painting. In contrast to many of his contemporaries
who make similar claims, however, Hegel never wavers in insisting that
poetry is the crisis of art as much as it is its triumph. Poetry's uniqueness stems
from the fact that the subject and the object of poetry, the medium and the
message, are one and the same. Unlike painting or sculpture, poetry can deal
with any and every topic in any and every fashion because in the final analysis
what poetry really expresses is the mind's apprehension of itself to itself in
itself", "Derrida, Hegel, and the Language of Finitude", Jan Mieszkowski,
Postmodern Culture, May 2005
 Poetry and Ritual
o "Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal
verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and
ritualistic origins", Dana Gioia, "The Dark Horse", 2015, p.13
o "I suggest that what artists do in all media can be summarized as deliberately
performing the operations that occur instinctively during a ritualized
behaviour: they simplify or formalize, repeat (sometimes with variation),
exaggerate, and elaborate in both space and time for the purpose of attracting
attention and provoking and manipulating emotional response", Dissanayake,
"Aesthetic Incunabula", Philosophy and Literature - Volume 25, Number 2,
October 2001.
o "all art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that
it must always return for nourishment", T.S. Eliot, The Dial 75
 Poetry and Life
 o "poetry gets to be the poetry of life by successfully becoming first the poetry
of poetry", Hollander, "Melodious Guile", Yale Univ Press, 1988, p.15
o "Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record
for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place
he loves" George Oppen, "An Adequate Vision: A George Oppen Daybook",
ed Davidson, IR 26:5-31, p.29.
o "Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be
derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers,
when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse
their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the
passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than
poetry", A.E. Housman, "The Name and Nature of Poetry" (lecture), 1933.
o "The public, as a whole, does not demand or appreciate the pure expression of
beauty. Its cultured members expect to find in poetry, if anything, repose from
material and nervous anxiety; an apt or chiselled phrase strokes the appetites
and tickles the imagination. The more general public merely enjoys its
platitudes and truisms jerked on to the understanding in line and rhyme; truth
put into metre sounds overwhelmingly true", Harold Monro, "The Future of
Poetry", Poetry Review, January 1912
 "artworks not only mime nature; they also mime the accepted modes of miming",
Stephen H. Blackwell, "The Quill and the Scalpel", Ohio State University Press,
2009, p.88
 "art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses
something while at the same time hiding it", Adorno,""
 "What the artist tries to do (either consciously or unconsciously) is to not only capture
the essence of something but also to amplify it in order to more powerfully activate
the same neural mechanisms that would be activated by the original object",
Ramachandran, 1999
 "It is a mistake to suppose, with some philosophers of aesthetics, that art and poetry
aim to deal with the general and the abstract. This misconception has been foisted
upon us by mediaeval logic. Art and poetry deal with the concrete of nature, not with
separate 'particulars,' for such rows do not exist.", Fenollosa, The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry, p.27
 "The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent",
Jacobson
 "The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing", Samuel
Johnson, "Johnson on Shakespeare" (ed. Walter Raleigh), 1908. p.16
 "one’s deepest impulse in writing … is to my mind not "I must tell everybody about
that" (i.e. responsibility to other people) but "I must stop that from being forgotten if I
can" (i.e. responsibility towards subject)", Philip Larkin, "Daily Telegraph interview"
 "All Poetry, to speak with Aristotle and the Greek critics (if for so plain a point
authorities be thought wanting) is, properly, imitation. It is, indeed, the noblest and
most extensive of the mimetic arts; having all creation for its object, and ranging the
entire circuit of universal being", Richard Hurd, "Discourse on Poetical Imitation",
1751
 "Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system,
by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may
enter", "Slip-shod Sibyls", Germaine Greer, Viking, 1995, p.3
 "I want poetry not to be like reality but to be as impossible as reality" - Keston
Sutherland
 "The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of
the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual
position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force", Cocteau, p.12, "La
Mort et les Statues", Paris, 1977.
 "The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high
destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and
more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to
console us, to sustain us", Matthew Arnold, "The Study of Poetry".
 "If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have
direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be
unnecessary", Bergson, ""
 "If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all
art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear", Valéry, "Reflections", p.64,
Collected Works 13:142.
 "The non-mimetic character of language is thus, in a certain way, the opportunity and
the condition for poetry to exist. Poetry exists only to 'renumerate' in other words, to
repair and compensate for the 'defect of languages'" - Gerard Genette, "Valéry and the
Poetics of Language"
 "The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not
as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms
difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception, because the process of
perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important" - Shklovsky, "Art
as Technique", 1917 (in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lemon and Reis,
Univ of Nebraska Press, 1965), p.12
 "Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about
the thing and reticent about the feeling, for as soon as the mind responds and connects
with the thing the feeling shows in the words" - Wei T'ai, 11th century.
 "No longer do we accept the 'sublimation model' according to which 'the function of
art is to sublimate or transform experience, raising it from ordinary to extraordinary,
from commonplace to unique, from low to high'", Rosalind Krauss, October 56,
[spring 1991]:3
 "A poem points to nothing but itself. Information is relative. A poem is absolute", EM
Forster, "Anonymity: An Inquiry", 1925.
 "Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also
offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation" - Brodsky, "On
Grief and Reason", Hamish Hamilton, 1996
 "The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of
ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes
us more moral or more efficient. I hope not. I think it makes us more human, and I am
quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive", Auden, in "The English Auden:
Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939", ed Mendelson, Faber, p.371
 "The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE", BLAST
 "The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual,
reigns in their stead" - C. Day Lewis
 "Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit", Valéry
 "If the value of poetry is seen as dependent on posterity, and thus in opposition to
strategies of intervention in the present, particularly to interventions with any serious
prospect of political effectivity, then contemporaneity is mortgaged to aesthetic
 ambition", Drew Milne, "Agoraphobia, and the embarrassment of manifestos"
(Parataxis, republished in Jacket 20, 2002).
 "Verbal art is experienced as aesthetic because it exploits to the full every option for
making verbal behaviour difficult", Nigel Fabb, "Language and Linguistic Structure",
CUP, 2002, p.217
 "most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in
which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ...
it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets
that matter", Wallace Stevens, "Two or Three Ideas" in "Opus Posthumous", Samuel
French Morse, Knopf, 1975.
 "Poetry is always the most impure and most conservative of the arts", Monroe K.
Spears, "Dionysus and the City", OUP, 1970, p.111

 Definitions

 "As I see it, the value of poetry is that it should matter. It should matter first to the
writer and then to the reader", Michael Rosen
 poetry is the "fusion of three arts: music, storytelling, and painting" where the line
represents the poem's music, the sentence explains the story and the image displays
the 'vision' of the poet, Molly Peacock, "How to read a poem ... and start a poetry
circle", 1999, p.19
 "a poem is an interruption of silence, an occupation of silence, whereas public
language is a continuation of noise", B. Collins
 "A poem needs to find a way into itself", G. Margolis
 "A poem is a detour we willingly subject ourselves to, a trick surprising us into the
deepened vulnerability we both desire and fear. Its strategies of beauty, delay, and
deception smuggle us past the border of our own hesitation", J. Hirshfield, "Nine
gates: Entering the mind of poetry", Harper Collins, 1997, p.125
 Poets "peer into dark places and speak for those who have no voice. They wonder into
the cities and forests, with eyes and ears open, and report on these experiences with
astonishing candor and subtleness", Parini, "Why Poetry Matters", Yale UP, 2008,
p.178
 "Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally
different from conceptual thought", Dana Gioia, "The Dark Horse", 2015, p.17
 "So we start with an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to reward this
reader for this additional investment - text that we find exceptionally suggestive,
apposite, or musical - are usually adjudged to be 'poetic'. ... The work of the poet is to
contribute a text that will firstly invite such a reading; and secondly reward such a
reading.", Don Paterson, "The empty image: new models of the poetic trope"
 "The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified",
Jonathan Culler, "Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of
Literature", Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975, p.191
 "Literature is the question minus the answer", Roland Barthes
 "Poetry is language in orbit", Seamus Heaney, " Sunday Independent", 25 September
1994
 "poetry is to be distinguished from the other arts, according to Lessing, Kant, and
Heidegger, by its freedom from intuition and its disavowal of imitation. In effect,
poetry renders the world by making illusory and even impossible images of things -
by rendering the world as what it is not", Daniel Tiffany, "Infidel Poetics", Univ of
Chicago Press, 2009, p.38
 "uniquely, poetry is concerned as much with the processes and material of language
as it is with its use as an efficient medium of exchange", Richard Bradford, "Poetry:
The Ultimate Guide ", Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p.3
 "poetry is the most versatile, ambidextrous and omnipotent of all type of speech or
writing, yet, paradoxically, it is the only one which is unified by a single exclusive
feature, that which enables us to identify it and which separates it from every other
kind of linguistic expression. This element is the keystone of my definition of poetry
and it is called 'the double pattern' ... One half of the double pattern is made up of
devices, effects, habits and frames of reference that poetry shares with all other
linguistic discources ... The other half of the pattern pulls against this, it announces
the text as a poem by marshalling aspects of language into patterns that serve no
purpose elsewhere in language yet which play a role in the way the poem is structured
and, most significantly, in how it discharges meaning.", Richard Bradford, "Poetry:
The Ultimate Guide ", Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p.25-28
 "Poetry is about language. It shows us that language is brittle, magical, untrustworthy,
arbitrary, but unlike a philosophical essay on such topics, it does not enable us to
answer back. It demonstrates that, on the one hand, language creates it, that
consciousness and language are coterminous but also that we can step outside it",
Richard Bradford, "Poetry: The Ultimate Guide ", Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p.261
 "When [oxygen and sulphur dioxide] are mixed in the presence of a filiament of
platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the
platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum,
and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and
unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum", T.S. Eliot, "Selected Prose
of T.S. Eliot", p.41
 "[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom", Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes"
 "Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. More than meter, more than
rhyme, more than images or alliteration or figurative language, line is what
distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some other kind of
writing", James Longenbach", The Art of the Poetic Line", Graywolf, 2009
 "[poetry is news] brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo", Milosz
 "Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard ... All poetry is of the nature of the
soliloquy", JS Mill, "What is Poetry", 1833
 "What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its
struggle to transcend them", Paz, "L'Arc et la lyre", 1965, p.46
 "Poetry is a satifying of the desire for resemblance", Wallace Stevens, "The Necessary
Angel", 1951, p.116
 "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of
reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which
was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself
actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins",
Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800
 "[Poetry is ] An integral/Lower limit speech/Upper limit music", "A" 12, Zukovsky,
p.138
 "poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible
and the invisible", Genet, "Our Lady of the Flowers", 1963, p.293
 "the poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the
poem returns us to the very social function of art as such", Ron Silliman, "The New
Sentence", Roof, 1987
 "poetry is a verdict rather than an intention", Leonard Cohen
 "Art's effect is due to the tension resulting from the clash of the collocation of
elements of two (or more) systems [of interpretation]. This conflict has the function of
breaking down automatism of perception and occurs simultaneously on the many
levels of a work of art ... All levels may carry meaning", "Analysis of the Poetic
Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.xv
 "Poetic language features an iconic rather than a predominantly conventional
relationship of form and content in which all language (and cultural) elements, variant
as well as invariant, may be involved in the expression of the content.", "Analysis of
the Poetic Text", Yury Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.xxi
 "certain supplementary restrictions imposed on the text compel us to perceive it as
poetry. As soon as one assigns a given text to the category of poetry, the number of
meaningful elements in it acquires the capacity to grow [and] the system of their
combinations also becomes more complex", "Analysis of the Poetic Text", Yury
Lotman, Ardis, 1976, p.33
 "in several ways, one of which is entirely specific to it, poetry contains repetitions in
the signifier which thus work to foreground the signifier. This feature can stand as a
definition of poetry", Antony Easthope, "Poetry as Discourse", Methuen, 1963, p.16.
 "The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow
convey a sense of life set in a framework of order ... all great art ... harmonises
consciousness with the ego-transcending Self", "The Seven Basic Plots", Christopher
Booker, continuum, 2004, p.552
 "[Poetry is] that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a
combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated
to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them." - Banville
 "In literature, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the primary literary aims of
producing a structure of words for its own sake, and the sign-values of symbols are
subordinated to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs", Frye,
"Anatomy of Criticism", p.74
 "[Literature is a form of language that] breaks with the whole definition of genres as
forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a
language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other
forms of discourse its own precipitous existence", Foucault, "The Order of Things",
p.300
 "Verse is a mechanism by which we can create interpretative illusions suggesting
profoundities of response and understanding which far exceed the engagement or
research of the writer", John Constable, PN Review 159, V31.1 (2004), p.40
 "A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there's nothing
sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine,
that is redundant.", William Carlos Williams, "Selected Essays"
 "The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself
... Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act" - "101 Sonnets", Don Paterson,
Faber and Faber, 1999, p.xiv.
 "[a poem is] a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of
words", Valéry, "Complainte d'une convalescence en mai"
 "a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning", Valéry
 "As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and
sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and
pass on their experiments as poetry" - "Short and Sweet", Simon Armitage, Faber and
Faber, 1999, p.xiii.
 "A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years",
Ginsberg
 "verse is the vehicle of exploration rather than the versification of a pre-conceived
idea", Peter Armstrong, Other Poetry II.22
 "[a poet's work] consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for
his words and predominant rhythms", Valéry
 "True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful",
Goethe.
 "Art is the placing of your attention on the periphery of knowing", Robert Irwin, Arts
Magazine, Feb 1976.
 "The power of verse stems from an indefinable harmony between when it says and
what it is.", Valéry, Tel Quel
 "it is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is" - I.A. Richards