The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry

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Summary: A Book that Shows Us How to Read a Poem
Review: I first read "The Well Wrought Urn" in 1978, when I was a first year grad student. Now I assign it for English majors taking their final undergraduate seminar. "The Well Wrought Urn" is a collection of essays on various poems. The essays were published in various journals in the 1940s. Why is the book still read? It is read because these essays are superb examples of literary criticism at its best: insightful, accessible, graceful, witty. It is read because when one reads a poem, then reads Brooks' essay about it, then reads the poem again, one learns a great deal about how to understand poetry and gain from it meaning and pleasure. Brooks' insights aren't the only valid insights into these poems, but they are good ones. It's not that we read these essays to understand these specific poems, but to understand how to approach any poem. There's a lot of interesting literary criticism available in libraries, though far more is not very interesting or graceful. Few essays, however, are more helpful to students as tools for teaching the technique of literary analysis. Of course, Brooks, as a New Critic, is using a style of literary criticism not presently trendy. Still, the technique of discovering insights about poetry is still the same, no matter what the theory one uses.

The review below this one is worthwhile, but I would suggest that the author misses the joke. What he takes as condescension is a condescension that includes the readers within the circle of initiates. It doesn't scoff at the reader. Thus, it is meant to help English majors think that they are a sort of blessed priesthood who have been initiated into the secrets of the fellowship. (When I was in grad school, that's what I thought we were.) Of course, this is all somewhat tongue in cheek and meant to be witty.

About twelve years ago I had the pleasure of hearing Brooks, then quite elderly (I don't know if he is still alive), present a paper at a conference. I remember him as slim, polite, self-effacing--the essence of the Southern gentleman at his best.

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Summary: What Cleanth Hath Wrought
Review: I've been known to bristle: to bristle at condescension; to bristle at unsupportable proclamations of absolutes. Therefore, as I read the rhetoric of a Cleanth Brooks, whom I suppose I must admire since he is a very famous critic, I become very much in touch with the things that irritate me about literary criticism: the assumption that intellectual capacities have been too early stymied in the reader and the vacuous and malingering abstractions of those whose lofty intellects we are suppose to gasp at in awe as those intellects fly free of the boundaries imposed by earth's pull, demonstrated verbosity the apparent key to wingless flight. Of course, it may well be argued that I am insecure and find new ideas (even old ones examined anew) both threatening and difficult to understand. Or it may be that my philosophical underpinnings have been too heavily influenced by the Greeks, who were often irritated at hubris. It may be that my concept of literature is that it is an egalitarian resource for the mind, the accessibility of which offers more hope to the humble human than all the legions of self-help authors combined, and that my bristling is in part motivated by exclusionary rhetoric. Ideas need not pander, but neither do they need to float down from on high. So forgive my bristling, but Brooks's parenthetical rhetoric-"The underlying paradox (of which the enthusiastic reader may well be unconscious) is nevertheless thoroughly necessary, even for that reader" (4)-early in The Well-Wrought Urn sets off my hubris alarm bells and leaves me, since I have already been condescended to, alert for the unsupportable absolutes that will surely follow. The first one comes clipping fast upon the heels of "the enthusiastic reader": "The calm of the evening obviously means 'worship,' even to the dull-witted and insensitive" (5). This an absolute enforced through ridicule at dissent, and so far the only thing of substance Brooks has demonstrated is my simple innocence and the punishment that will follow disagreement; however, dwelling upon Brooks's rhetoric may cause us to miss the argument within it.
Therefore, let me leave those bristle-producing elements aside in favor of analyzing the argument, bearing in mind, nonetheless, that Brooks has attempted to hang an ad hominem argument over the head of dissention, much like Dionysius hung the sword above Damocles's head. Let us, however, fear not the snapping horsehair; but neither let us miss the feast for love of our defiance. To wit, writes Brooks: "We resent the arrogance implied in judgments which seem to have any tinge of absoluteness about them, and, as a rule, no profession of personal humility on the part of the critic who renders them is sufficient to assuage us" (216).
True enough, and Brooks anticipates the reaction to his own arrogance and rightly points out that "no profession of personal humility" can redeem the critic thus perceived. However, it is the dismissive reader who might then miss what otherwise flows from Brooks: a cogent and persuasive bit of work. So we must choose to ignore the ever-present condescension that drips off of Brooks like an overworked sweat and acknowledge that he has provided in The Well Wrought Urn both insightful analyses and well-considered argument.
This latter remark may seem a reversal of my intuitive bristling, a step away from my belief that what would follow would be an indefensible absolute. Pshaw. Brooks is, indeed, full of it; that's why he needed to hang the sword. Nonetheless there is a sharp edge to his argument, even if the conclusion fails to pierce with a valid point (Indeed, it is blunted by qualification and contradiction).
To the edge then, if not to the point: Brooks's argument has awakened me to a very profound weakness in my own readings, that weakness being an inattention to textual weave, the connectedness of ideas and imagery. Only inconsistently do I concern myself with the details of poetry and, instead, rely on the stuff to wash over me whole, and only here and there do I perceive its intrarelationships.
Of course, there is validity to having the aesthetic of a thing wash whole over its admirer. I for one can stand in front of a Renoir, mesmerized, over long, unbroken periods of time, sensing the beauty and, indeed, reveling in it. But I am no art critic, no expert on what I am seeing. I experience only effect. All well and good for an art admirer and all that is required. If, however, I am a student of art, technique suddenly becomes an issue. That is, if I am a good student. I must understand each brushstroke-each part-in relation to the whole. I must understand why the work is good. Were I to forgo that understanding, I would be a poor student indeed.
And, in fact, that is what Brooks is saying of poetry and those of us who are students of literature; we must immerse ourselves within the poetry we study and uncover the brushstrokes, the paint daubs, the relationships of colors.

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Summary: "Urn" is the antidote for the poison of postmodernism.
Review: Never have students and those interested in liberal education needed more to read Brooks' "Urn," for in clear, readable, and rememberable language Brooks anticipates the neo-nihilism of postmodernism and gives it the lie.

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Summary: Literary Criticism as if Literature Mattered
Review: This book, written nearly a half-century ago, has never been out of print. To read it is to see why. With Cleanth Brooks, who taught at Yale for most of his career, you feel as if you are sitting in a seminar with the most brilliant professor you've ever known, one who is also a true gentleman with extraordinary solicitude for his students/readers. He takes you through the poems line by line and helps you to *see* the artistry of the poet at work. And so sparkling is his prose style that the essays are themselves works of art. This book is especially appropriate for students who are just beginning to appreciate poetry.

Rating:
Summary: Literary Criticism as if Literature Mattered
Review: This is the kind of elegantly written criticism that makes one want to take poetry seriously. One finds no rant or cant, no impenetrable jargon. Brooks takes a broad selection of English poems across periods and styles, and analyzes their rhetorical structure. He seeks the essence of poetic thought and offers the notion of "paradox" as a possible key. The usefulness of extra-poetic ideas is not denied, but he rightly insists that a poem's meaning is not reducible to a simple prose statement. If it is so reducible, then the poem may be judged as true or false by the historian, scientist or philosopher. The book also contains several essays of generalization and the texts of most of the scrutinized works. One of the most satisfying books on the rhetoric of poetry that I've read.