Paul Lauter is an emeritus professor of literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is general editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature.

He followed the discussion of Eric Brandon’s post about close reading and wrote this response.

 

 

 

It’s fascinating to me to see reproduced in this discussion much of the argument about the New Criticism that took place during the 1960s and 70s. In the dim past, I studied with Cleanth Brooks, one of the main architects of the New Criticism, and co-editor of “Understanding Poetry,” perhaps THE most influential of New Critical texts. Mr. Brooks did indeed teach us to read closely. That meant, first, understanding what the words meant, and that often required looking them up so that we could appreciate the range of meanings, and ambiguities, embedded in them. The Oxford English Dictionary was our main tool, but any dictionary was useful. Just to take one example, the word “deferred,” as in “What happens to a dream deferred?” I can imagine, indeed have had, an extended discussion about the relevance of the various meanings of “defer” to the Langston Hughes poem.

 
But second, Mr. Brooks also wanted us to be aware of what the “music” of the poetry suggested or revealed. Take Countee Cullen’s poem “Incident” (which I won’t reproduce here—it’s on line). It is quite deliberately set in a sing-songy, children’s rhythm and rhyme pattern. But then the last line and a half of stanza two shatters that childish peace: “but he poked out/ His tongue, and called me, ‘Nigger.’” That is, from my point of view, apparently “simple,” but in fact one of the most brilliant pieces of modern poetry in terms both of its diction and its implications with respect to racial politics.

 
That said, New Criticism had serious limitations and biases, and the attack on it insisted that we needed to reintroduce contexts, historical and cultural detail, in order fully to appreciate or more richly to understand a poem or a story or a movie. The last two weeks of the course I took with Mr. Brooks were taught by the poet Delmore Schwartz, and he wanted us to write a very different kind of paper, one that made use of historical contexts to explore a text. I wrote on Marvell’s “The Mower Against Gardens,” and to do so I learned more than I ever wanted to know about English and French garden styles, the enclosure movement, and how these shaped the ways people from different classes perceived gardens and gardening. I don’t recommend this as an exercise for most of our students, but it’s an approach that would be helpful in looking at a poem like e.e. cummings’ “Buffalo Bill’s/ defunct” or a story like Jack London’s “Koolau the Leper,” just to select two of thousands.

 
My point in this overlong post is that close reading is a valuable skill, whether we’re talking about poetry, a story, a lease, an indictment, or a political speech. It does not, in fact, lend itself to filling in test-bubbles and anyone who thinks it does is simply missing the point. It is also just one kind of reading skill; there are others that draw upon a variety of contexts and theories. As teachers, we should not be excluding anything that is useful in the classroom and helpful to our pedagogy.