The Close Reading: A Handout of Hints

"Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works that we infer the intention of the artificer."
-- Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy"

The close reading is a method of "cracking the code" of a literary text. Close reading is a formalist mode of encountering a text which revolutionized literary studies in the U.S. in the 1940's and '50's. It is a reading methodology in its own right, but it also provides the cornerstone for many newer reading methodologies. It presumes a few things, most of which are drawn from the New Critics. The New Critics believed that the text (the literary/aesthetic object, the poem, the play, etc.) makes sense on its own. One of its defining features, in fact, is that it can make sense on its own, separate from its historical context. This attitude assumes that there is something almost transcendent or divine in the literary object. (It also makes it hard for texts which have many historical connections, as in the case of Gulliver's Travels, to make good sense or to seem very "literary.î) The New Critics tended to judge literary texts on the basis of their "formal coherence." Even when a poem seems to point us to its origins (say, the poet's despair or fear of death) we should not base our reading of the poem on the author, nor should our reading of the poem be used as evidence for a theory about the author (say, that he was a kleptomanic ). Even though the poem may be a very personal one, we should assign those personal thoughts to a dramatic speaker or persona, which is to be kept separate from the biographical, historically specific author. The New Critics valued the points of tension or indeterminacy within a poem as the sites where the critic needed to say something about its meaning. They based much of this view on the importance of metaphor within much poetry, but best exemplified in the Metaphysical Poets. The playful, sometimes mocking irony of a poet destabilizes language so that we get past a world of pat facts and into the more resonant world of poetry. In the best poems, according to the New Critical definition, the elements of form and content reflect the tension of the poem, which is its meaning or raison d'être. Because the poem (represented through its individually chosen and specific words) is in tension, we should not try to resolve that tension through paraphrase or some statement of its "true" or "rational" meaning. That would do a violence to the poem and would also miss the point of the poem, which will be the whole that is greater than all its parts or paraphrases.