Blackmur R.P., Form and Value in Modern Poetry, Doubleday, 1957.
Justification
This critique was first published as a journal article in The Southern Review, 1936 and later reprinted in the text entitled “Form and Value in Modern Poetry.” The author of the critique describes the meaning behind Yates’ poetry. He also describes Yates’ view of the world and explains how this influences the poetry and the response by many readers towards the work.
Blackmur uses a comparison with other poets of the same era. Blackmur also describes in a way that is easily understood, the poetic devices employed by Yates in his works.
Position of the writer
The position of the writer, is that Yates is a great poet who combines technique with imagination. However, the content of his work and its symbolism is confronting to many readers and may not therefore appreciate the greatness of the poetry.
The critics argument
“The poet (and, as always the reader) has to combine, or fuse inextricably into something like an organic unity the constructed or derived symbolism of his special insight with the symbolism animating the language itself. It is, on the poet’s plane, the labor of bringing the representative forms of knowledge home to the experience which stirred them: the labor of keeping in mind what our knowledge is of: the labor of craft. With the poetry of Yates this labor is, as I say, doubly hard, because the forms of knowledge, being magical, do not fit naturally with the forms of knowledge that ordinarily preoccupy us.”
What Blackmur is arguing, is that magic and the interpretation of this, is dependent on the reader’s knowledge of magic. He continues the argument, by implying that Yates believed that imagination was as valid a way of understanding the world as was logic. Blackmur also argues that because Yates has a view of life, that many readers do not share, the poetry is often interpreted as “sterile”.
Exposition of the critics ideas and relevance
Following the line of Blackmurs’ argument one can only appreciate the greatness of Yates’ poetry by understanding more about magic as a force in real life. However Blackmur claims that use of magic as a tool for poetry has two radical defects. The first defect is a lack of conventional authority outside the poem. The other defect is that Yates’ understanding of magic was not and could not be given in the words of the poem.
Use of appropriate technical language
The publication history of all of John Clare’s work is, in the end, a history about editorial control and influence. Even An Invite to Eternity, written within the confines of a mental institution seemingly distant from the literary world, is not an exception to this rule, for it and Clare’s other asylum poems do not escape the power and problem of the editor. And, further, this problem of the editor is not one confined to the past, to the actions of Clare’s original publisher John Taylor or to W.F. Knight, the asylum house steward who transcribed the poetry Clare wrote during his 20 odd years of confinement. In fact, debates continue and rankle over the role of the editor in re-presenting Clare’s work to a modern audience: should the modern editor present the unadulterated, raw Clare manuscript or a cleaned up, standardized version as Taylor did? Only exacerbating and exaggerating this problem o...
Ryan reminds us of the suggestive power of poetry–how it elicits and rewards the reader’s intellect, imagination, and emotions. I like to think that Ryan’s magnificently compressed poetry – along with the emergence of other new masters of the short poem like Timothy Murphy and H.L. Hix and the veteran maestri like Ted Kooser and Dick Davis – signals a return to concision and intensity.
Fulton, Alice. “You Can’t Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain.” Approaching Poetry: Perspectives and Responses. Ed. Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. 128-29.
Everett, Nicholas From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamiltong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.
Four years after the publication of the first edition of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Wallace Stevens described a modern aesthetic form which necessarily acted against its own status as a (fixed) form1. "What will [temporarily] suffice" in "Modern Poetry" would replace, as the mind's object, what is--or, perhaps more faithfully to the modernist vision, what used to be. The poem of the motion of the mind in time would replace the poem of permanent meaning.
New Criticism attracts many readers to its methodologies by enticing them with clearly laid out steps to follow in order to criticize any work of literature. It dismisses the use of all outside sources, asserting that the only way to truly analyze a poem efficiently is to focus purely on the words in the poem. For this interpretation I followed all the steps necessary in order to properly analyze the poem. I came to a consensus on both the tension, and the resolving of it.
He uses powerful imagery and onomatopoeia to achieve the desired effects that make the poem more realistic. All this combined together produces effective thought provoking ideas and with each read, I gradually get an improved understanding and appreciation of the poem.
Strand, Mark and Evan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New
“Poe’s Theory of Poetry.” The Big Read. Handout One. N.d.. 16. Web. 19 April 2014.
“Billy Collins' “Introduction to Poetry” isn’t an ars poetica poem about writing poetry, but about reading poetry. The speaker is a teacher who tells his students that they should experience a poem, rather than dissect it. The f...
...’s argument, that readings of a text are culturally constructed. Being an English major, I am thrust into an English student’s interpretative community, which enables to see or pushes for me to look past the simplicity of a work (surface meaning) and search for a deeper meaning. Enabling me to understand gaps that implied that Stella made it known that she did not feel the way Astrophil did but she was, in the least intrigued by Astrophil, as she is the one who tells him to just say what’s in his heart. With the eyes of a college English student and writer I looked deeper to find that Sidney was portraying a writer plagued by writer’s block and the solution to counter this evil. As I have faith in my interpretation of this poem I understand that even in my attempt at being impartial I am biased. I implore you to take this into account; I looked in my heart and wrote.
To provide a successful comparison of any two things, one must be able to comprehend all aspects of the articles in question. Many forms of literature are easily comparable due to the very nature of an author transcribing a piece of history or thought directly to paper; however, poetry is not one of these afore mentioned forms of literature so easily compared. This is because poetry itself is as emotionally driven, as it is ambiguous. With there being no definitive set of rules, dictating what is or is not poetry, attention to detail is paramount in fully understanding the relationships between the poems. The utilization of three different poems, by different authors, and all contained in a similar category, allows for a more broad range of analysis; moreover, the stark differences, as well as the shared commonalities between them, become more evident with a comparison of more than two works of an author or authors. The works of poetry in this comparison are “The Mother,” by Gwendolyn Brooks; “The Man He Killed,” by Thomas Hardy; and “Ballad of Birmingham,” by Dudley Randall. At first glance, each of these poems seems to have very little in common with one another. On one hand, they are unique to each specific poem unto itself. On the other hand, these three pieces of poetry are alike in many ways. The analysis of each poem in regards to the theme presented, tone being communicated, imagery used, and the rhyme scheme employed, exposes the coexistence of similarities and differences between the three poems.
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