''The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry'' is a 1947 collection of essays by

Cleanth Brooks Cleanth Brooks ( ; October 16, 1906 – May 10, 1994) was an American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher ...

. It is considered a seminal text in the New Critical school of

literary criticism Literary criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. Th ...

. The title contains an allusion to the fourth stanza of

John Donne John Donne ( ; 22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a clergy, cleric in the Church of England. Under royal patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's ...

's poem, "

The Canonization "The Canonization" is a poem by English metaphysical poet John Donne. First published in 1633, the poem is viewed as exemplifying Donne's wit and irony. It is addressed to one friend from another, but concerns itself with the complexities of r ...

", which is the primary subject of the first chapter of the book.

Introduction

''The Well Wrought Urn'' is divided into eleven chapters, ten of which attempt

close reading In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by close attention to individual words, the syntax, t ...

s of celebrated English poems from verses in

Shakespeare's William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

Macbeth ''Macbeth'' (, full title ''The Tragedie of Macbeth'') is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. It is thought to have been first performed in 1606. It dramatises the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those w ...

'' to Yeats's "Among School Children". The eleventh, famous chapter, entitled "The Heresy of Paraphrase," is a polemic against the use of paraphrase in describing and criticizing a poem. This chapter is followed by two appendices: "Criticism, History, and Critical Relativism" and "The Problem of Belief." Most of the book's contents had been previously published before 1947, and the position it articulates is not significantly different from Brooks's earlier books, ''Understanding Poetry'' and ''Modern Poetry and the Tradition''. The unique contribution of ''The Well Wrought Urn'' is that it combines the close reading analysis of the previous volumes while answering some of the criticism directed at Brooks's theory.Winchell, Mark, ''Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism.'' Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996 The book was written in reaction to a prominent stream of literary criticism: the historicist/biographical. This interprets each poetic work within the context of the historical period from which it emerged. Because literary tastes change so much over time, it seems reasonable to the historicist to evaluate each writer according to the standards of his own age. Brooks vehemently rejected this historical relativism, believing it amounts to "giving up our criteria of good and bad" and thus repudiating "our concept of poetry itself".Brooks, Cleanth. ''The Well Wrought Urn'', New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947 (p. 198) Brooks opts instead to offer "universal judgments" of poems and treat them as self-contained entities, able to be interpreted without recourse to historical or biographical information. As H.L. Heilman writes,

to declare the literary work self-contained or autonomous was less to deny its connections with the nonliterary human world, past and present, than to assert metaphorically the presence in the poem of suprahistorical uniqueness along with the generic or the hereditary or the culturally influenced. Heilman, Robert Bechtold. ''The Southern Connection.'' Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1991 (p.138)

By distinguishing the "supra-historical" from the "non-historical", Heilman highlights an important, and often misunderstood distinction in New Criticism. This is that Brooks and the New Critics did not discount the study of the historical context of the literary work, nor its affective potential for the reader, nor its connection to the life experiences of the author. As he wrote in his essay ''The Formalist Critics'', such study is valuable, but should not be confused with criticism of the work itself. It can be performed as validly for bad works as good ones. In fact, it can be performed for any expression, nonliterary or literary. Thus an historical/biographical study of literature fails on two counts: it cannot tell good literature from bad, and cannot distinguish literature from other cultural productions.

Close reading

The bulk of the book is devoted to close reading of poems by

Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

Milton Milton may refer to: Names * Milton (surname), a surname (and list of people with that surname) ** John Milton (1608–1674), English poet * Milton (given name) ** Milton Friedman (1912–2006), Nobel laureate in Economics, author of '' Free t ...

Alexander Pope Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, ...

William Wordsworth William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Ballads'' (1798). Wordsworth's ' ...

Keats John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculos ...

Lord Tennyson Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Go ...

Yeats William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...

Thomas Gray Thomas Gray (26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771) was an English poet, letter-writer, classics, classical scholar, and professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge, Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is widely known for his ''Elegy Written in a Country ...

, and T. S. Eliot. In ''The Well Wrought Urn,'' theory illuminates practice and vice versa. The poems are meant to be "the concrete examples on which generalizations are to be based". Thus the first chapter tells us in its title that poetic language is "The Language of Paradox".

It is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations. And I do not mean that the connotations are important as supplying some sort of frill or trimming, something external to the real matter in hand. I mean that the poet does not use a notation at all—as the science may be properly be said to do so. The poet, within limits, has to make his language as he goes.

Unlike the scientist, who seeks to cleanse his work of all ambiguity, the poet thrives on it because with it he can better express experience. The rest of the first chapter is devoted to the close reading of Donne's "

". Brooks in his interpretation challenges the conception of Donne as being an early example of the use of eccentric metaphor, anticipating Yeats and Eliot, instead asserting that he is an extreme example of what all good poetry exemplifies, namely, paradox. Brooks does this by comparing the symbolic imagery of Donne's verse with that of Shakespeare in ''Macbeth''. In order to prove that the language of poetry is paradox, he must treat poems that have traditionally been thought straightforward. He takes Herrick's poem, "Corinna's going a-Maying", and reveals that the speaker in the poem has a complex attitude toward his ''carpe diem'' theme. In doing so, Brooks brings up another central tenet of his critical theory, one which he will deal with more explicitly in the coming chapters: the notion that no true poem can ever be reduced to its paraphrasable prose content. In a similar vein, Brooks analyzes

's "

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ''Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'' is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. The poem's origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray's thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742 ...

". The message of this poem seems straightforward and was duplicated by many other "graveyard" poems of the late eighteenth century. Therefore, according to Brooks, what makes it one of the most famous in the English language cannot be the poem's message. Brooks instead focuses on the poem's dramatic context as the source of its power. The most famous and best-known application of this doctrine of dramatic appropriateness is Brooks's analysis of Keats's "

Ode on a Grecian Urn "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819, first published anonymously in ''Annals of the Fine Arts for 1819'' (see 1820 in poetry)''.'' The poem is one of the " Great Odes of 1819", which a ...

". Widely considered to be one of his best poems, Keats's "Ode" ends on what many think a sententious note with its proclamation that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." But Brooks sees this as dramatically appropriate; it is a paradox that cannot be understood except in terms of the entire poem, if we take seriously Keats's metaphor of the urn as a dramatic speaker. Part of the intent of ''The Well Wrought Urn'' is to dispel the criticism that Brooks in his earlier works had dismissed the eighteenth and nineteenth century English poets, particularly the Romantics. Brooks thus includes "

Intimations of Immortality "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (also known as "Ode", "Immortality Ode" or "Great Ode") is a poem by William Wordsworth, completed in 1804 and published in ''Poems, in Two Volumes'' (1807). The poem was ...

" by Wordsworth and "

Tears, Idle Tears "Tears, Idle Tears" is a lyric poem written in 1847 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892), the Victorian-era English poet. Published as one of the "songs" in his ''The Princess'' (1847), it is regarded for the quality of its lyrics. A Tennyson ...

" by Tennyson along with the Pope, Gray, and Keats poems. He claims that Wordsworth and Tennyson frequently wrote better (i.e., more paradoxically) than even they were aware. Wordsworth sought to write directly and forcefully, without sophistry or wordplay. But his language is, according to Brooks, nevertheless paradoxical. For example, Brooks takes the opening lines of Wordsworth's sonnet, "It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free:"

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun, Breathless with adoration...

Brooks points out that while the evening is described as quiet and calm, it is also breathless with apparent excitement. There is no final contradiction between this kind of excitement and this kind of calm, but the meaning of the words are being modified by each other, moving away from their purely denotative meaning. This is a good example of what "paradox" means to Brooks: the poet expresses himself in words that are metaphorical and thus protean in their meaning, that contradict one another because of their connotations. Brooks thus uses the same criteria to analyze and judge these poems as he did for the

modern Modern may refer to: History * Modern history ** Early Modern period ** Late Modern period *** 18th century *** 19th century *** 20th century ** Contemporary history * Moderns, a faction of Freemasonry that existed in the 18th century Phil ...

and

metaphysical Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...

verse. This was a rejection of the typical method of interpretation for these poets, which is to judge them by the Romantic standards of their day and in the light of their biographies.

"The Heresy of Paraphrase"

In his summary chapter, Brooks articulates his position that it is "heresy" to paraphrase a poem when trying to get at its meaning. Poems are not simply "messages" expressed in flowery language. The language is crucial in determining the message; form is content. Thus to try to abstract the meaning of a poem from the language in which that meaning is rooted, the paradoxical language of metaphor, is to disregard the internal structure of the poem that gives it its meaning. The temptation to think of poetry as prose draped in poetic language is strong simply because both are composed with words and differ only in that poetry has meter and rhyme. But Brooks instead wants us to see poetry as like music, a ballet, or a play:

The structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme...most of us are less inclined to force the concept of 'statement' on drama than on a lyric poem; for the very nature of drama is that of something 'acted out'—something which arrives at its conclusion through conflict—something which builds conflict into its very being.

The poem is a "working out of the various tensions—set up by whatever means-by propositions, metaphors, symbols". It achieves a resolution through this working out of tensions, not necessarily a logical resolution but a satisfactory unification of different "attitudes", or dispositions towards experience. Therefore, any intellectual proposition within the poem must be viewed in the context of all the other propositions expressed in the highly changeable language of metaphor. The poem does not try to find the

truth-value In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth, which in classical logic has only two possible values (''true'' or '' false''). Computing In some progra ...

of a particular idea; it tries to juxtapose many, contradictory ideas together and reach a sort of resolution. The poet is trying to "unify experience" by making poetry not a statement about experience but an experience itself, with all the contradictory elements contained in one cultural expression, i.e., the poem.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Well Wrought Urn Books about poetry New Criticism 1947 non-fiction books Essay collections Books of literary criticism

Introduction

Close reading

"The Heresy of Paraphrase"

See also

References