Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

misread, or unread-but-theorized in the past) in general from the sanctified
syllabi?
From: Eliot Katz
Subject: more on close reading
In a lecture, I once heard a terrific Rutgers University left political theorist,
Stephen Bronner, talk about a philosopher who described artworks as
containing internal dynamics and external dynamics, a phraseology which I’ve
found really helpful....
As I understand it, the major critique of New Criticism’s way of close reading
is that it too often ignored the external dynamics of poems–the relationship of
texts to important matters (historical events, human lives, political ideologies,
etc.) outside the text.
In so doing, the New Critics priveleged certain poetic elements (e.g. textual
ambiguity and indeterminacy), and unfairly marginalized others (e.g. more
determinate explorations, often radical explorations, of the social world). In
Repression and Recovery, Cary Nelson does a good job of looking at poetry
from the first half of the 20th century that was marginalized by New Critical
standards, without denying the quality of the poetry which New Critics
championed. It seems to me that, by considering both internal and external
dynamics, it becomes easier to talk about the literary value, as well as the
radical potential, of a wider range of poetic styles.