{"id":8609,"date":"2014-04-20T18:54:31","date_gmt":"2014-04-20T22:54:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/?p=8609"},"modified":"2014-04-20T18:54:31","modified_gmt":"2014-04-20T22:54:31","slug":"the-difficult-art-of-reading-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/the-difficult-art-of-reading-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"The difficult art of reading poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Metonymy<\/a>Synecdoche. Metonymy. Not exactly words that trip lightly off the tongue.<\/strong> Unless, I suppose, you’re Harold Bloom. Those are two of the four fundamental tropes in literature, Bloom tells us. Identified originally by Kenneth Burke, who, as Bloom calls him, was a “profound student of rhetoric.”<\/p>\n

Bloom references Burke in his introduction to The Best Poems of the English Language<\/a> (Harper Collins, 2004), which he both edited and selected. I’ll get back to that book, in a separate post, and discuss whether they are actually the “best” or in fact whether anyone can make such a claim for another reader.<\/p>\n

What I was looking for was how others – scholars and writers in particular – define what is good, moving or important in poetry. Like most art, we believe know what’s good when we\u00a0see\/hear\/experience it. But that’s just a personal, subjective and very ambiguous definition. What are the underlying structures, the rules, the guides to look for?<\/p>\n

Think about pop music and the cycle of popularity: you first hear a song and love it. Just fall all over it. Can’t get enough. Have to listen to it over and over. And then one day you\u00a0can’t stand it. You are weary of turning on the radio and hearing it played over and over and over. What changed?<\/em> Not the music, not the lyrics. What changed is your perception of it.<\/p>\n

Of course, pop music, with its predictable cycle from introduction to over-play and its commercial exploitation driven by corporate financial goals well outside aesthetic ones, may not be the best model in which to frame an artistic discussion.<\/p>\n

What are the standards for art, for music and – what I was particularly looking into: poetry – that stand above and outside personal perspective?\u00a0Finding those requires me to look more deeply into the nature and structure of poetry; the vertebrae that give\u00a0a poem its posture. So I\u00a0started with Bloom. Who in turn starts with Burke.<\/p>\n

Burke’s essay on tropes was published in The Kenyon Review,\u00a0<\/em>Vol. 3, No. 4, Autumn, 1941 (available to read on Jstor<\/a>) and in his book, A Grammar of Motives<\/em> (1945). It’s a might dry.<\/p>\n

The other two tropes he says are irony and metaphor. Burke himself wrote,<\/p>\n

For metaphor,<\/strong> we could substitute perspective;
\nFor metonymy<\/strong> we could substitute reduction;
\nFor synechdoche<\/strong> we could substitute representation;
\nFor irony<\/em><\/strong> we could substitute dialectic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

See? Doesn’t that make it clearer?*<\/span><\/p>\n

Burke wrote<\/a> that his primary concern with these master tropes is “not with their purely figurative usage, but with their role in the discovery and description of ‘the truth.'” By which I gather he’s also trying to define those same, steadfast rules and standards. Burke’s tropes seem the cornerstone for an entire literary debate, so I will have to keep them in mind as I progress. But Bloom is all over the figurative aspect of poetry.<\/p>\n

Apparently I have also\u00a0to learn a new glossary<\/a> like this one, before I progress into the next Circle of this Dantean labyrinth. And here’s another<\/a>. Personally I look forward to the day when I can confidently use words like zeugma, erotema, meiosis and prosopopoeia in everyday conversation.**<\/span><\/p>\n

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This site<\/a> also lists\u00a0these definitions for Burke’s\u00a0tropes:<\/p>\n

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