The Word In Poetry and Its Contexts

By Julian Scutts

This books is concerned with the multi-contextual aspect of words found in poetry, for one does not only have that context to consider which determines one relevant sense of a word as when one reads a newspaper. That is one reason we can always discover new meanings in a great poem whenever we reread it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326445409

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The Word In Poetry and Its Contexts

THE WORD IN POETRY AND ITS CONTEXTS

By Julian Scutts

copyright Julian Scutts 2015

AN OVERVIEW

The title of this study is likely to provoke two questions in the minds of those who read it. What is the poet's word, and why is there a reference to its contexts? In the usual way we speak of understanding a word or phrase by viewing it in its context.  A poem itself constitutes the context of all the words it contains and poems in turn may be the subject of comparative studies that involve a regard for yet wider contexts such the one determined by literary tradition.

The first section of this book lays down the theoretical basis on which all subsequent arguments found in the book will rest.  This basis is furnished by the distinction which the noted linguist Ferdinand de Saussure made to differentiate between langue and parole.  Langue signifies language understood as a system to be studied according to certain rules of grammar and the definitions contained in dictionaries: parole signifies language in any spoken or written form, whether in a book, newspaper or a poem. In this section the main principles governing a logocentric approach to the study of literary texts will be shown in action, that is to say, by an examination of particular words such as honourable, breeze and cross within their literary contexts. This procedure will involve a study of the position of words within various contexts including those set by the inner constituency of any poem, the entire body of all works written by the same author and the ambit of literary tradition. The wider the ambit of the contexts considered,  the less likely it will seem that a poet can  precisely determine or predict patterns formed by  all words within so vast an ambit, for  such a task would surely overload human powers of memory and  coordination, but if such patterns should emerge, and we shall consider evidence that they do, the greater the problem for critics and scholars seeking to understand  why and how such extensive patterns emerge without the support of  some force resembling what C. G. Jung called the collective unconscious, it being rather awkward these days to invoke the assistance of a muse.

The second section investigates the phenomenon of  wandering, with particular reference to the term Wanderer  much favoured by Goethe and the Romantic poets by  its inclusion in the titles of their poems and other works, which might allow Wanderer to earn the honour of being deemed  the Poet's Word.  The word Wanderer subsumes all form of the verbs to wander and wandern that give rise to the common derivative of the noun Wanderer. The question as to whether wandern and to wander share the same range of significance to English and German poets, I repeat poets, calls for attention. Suffice it to say at this juncture that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translated Goethe's exquisite Wandrers Nachtlied with the words Wanderer's Night-Songs.  Literary critics and scholars have noted the importance of the  wanderer as a key word or concept  in German and English poetry. Despite differences of approach and the divergent scope of their enquiries, Professor Willoughby and Geoffrey Hartman,  the two literary scholars who have paid particularly close attention to the area of our concern,   agree that wandering is rooted in what C. G. Jung and Sigmund Freud termed the quest of the libido for union with anima, but they disagree on the issue of whether this interior psychological process involved poets in any social and moral commitment relevant to the exigencies of society and the  concerns of common humanity. Willoughby and Hartman do not raise important questions that they could have tackled only by reference the historical background of the sudden prominence of the word Wanderer in the era of Goethe and the Romantic poets. Thus a considerable portion of the middle section of this book is devoted to a survey of this background. Wandering, it is to be shown, lies at the centre of a poet-to-poet dialogue not only between poets in the German-speaking world but also between Goethe and British poets, notably James Thomson, Edward Young and Oliver Goldsmith. Initially Goethe assimilated influences coming from England but in due time the flow of influence turned decidedly the other way. In this two-way process we witness an interchange of ideas and associations closely bound up with the phenomenon of wandering, and language is essentially dialogic in character, both in literary domain and in the marketplace.

The third section of this book serves to demonstrate that the logocentric approach is relevant and applicable to the most diverse questions that interest those engaged in the study of literature. We will consider lines in Hamlet that incorporate the word be, not only in that most celebrated of quotations from the works of Shakespeare. It will also help us to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding Dylan Thomas's wilfully obscure poem Altarwise by Owl-Light and go some way towards answering the question as to whether Godot turned up after all to keep his rendezvous with Pozzo in Samuel Beckett's enigmatic drama Waiting for Godot.

The concluding section of this book differs in tone and orientation from the preceding sections at least to the extend that it comprises a committed statement about the abuse to which literature, though never great literature, has been prone in recent history. This section reflects the same concern with logocentricity shown by the other sections of   this book in as far it treats the  heart as a key word without making it appear obnoxiously symbolic. Mention is made of the fact that the dry and unsympathetic Edward Casaubon in George Eliot's novel Middlemarch dies of heart failure, and what is so symbolic about that? The very frame by which a poem or novel  encloses common objects and events such as daffodils or the onset of illness elevates what seems commonplace and unexceptional to the realm of immortality and the universal.

This book may well be seen as a challenge to the widely prevalent view that poetic language and the language of daily intercourse are of an entirely different order, for it broaches the question why we peruse and usually forget newspaper articles, however well written, and why so short a poem as Wandrers Nachtlied   provides an inexhaustible wealth of insights and pleasure. How is it that a poem written perhaps on the spur of the moment can provide a limitless opportunity for reflection? Such asymmetry poses no small problem to objective critics who wish to balance the input of poetic creation with the output entailed by its reception in the mind of an informed reader.

I: An Integrated Multi-Contextual Approach to the Interpretation and Analysis of Poems and Literary Texts

How can a logocentric, a word-centred, approach  help critics to get a handle on such a  phenomenon as that manifested by the frequent and prominent appearance of words  based on the verbs wandern and to wander in the poetry of  Goethe and the Romantic poets of his time? Can the same approach, the characteristics of which will be elucidated in the following paragraphs, help towards locating and the remedying other blind spots in the area of literary criticism by exploring the concealed depths of  celebrated and yet underappreciated poems such as Robert Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin and some of the more obscure poems by Dylan Thomas? Can it even resolve the question whether Godot in Samuel Beckett's most celebrated play turned up after all?

The reference to the Poet's Word in the title of this collection of essays finds a close parallel in the title of an essay by the Russian Formalist Jurij Tynjanov, namely The Meaning of the Word in Verse. ¹  I owe the theoretical basis on which this series of studies is founded to insights provided by Tynjanov, at least to the extent that I have applied a logocentric method to the study and evaluation of poems or other literary texts in the course of my literary research, the results of which I present in the following pages of this book.

Essentially Tynjanov's logocentric approach to textual criticism is derived from Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between two basic aspects of language, which he termed langue and parole, between the system of language codified in grammar books and dictionaries, and the language articulated in acts of speech and writing. The school of criticism based on de Saussure's theory of language asserts that words provide the basic stuff of poetry. This fact may seem obvious to many, yet critics of literature, scholars and the Imagist poet Ezra Pound have voiced very low opinions of words as the constituent elements of poetry in that they have regarded words as mere fodder to be transformed into images, symbols, quasi-musical motifs or whatever else could be deemed the real and vital stuff of poetry. ²

     The distinction between langue and parole comes into focus if we compare a word as defined in a dictionary with the same word located in any form of speech or writing. The word in the latter case belongs to a body of words and occupies within this its unique position. As a consequence, to clarify the difference between this from the word in a dictionary we might formulate the term a single word occurrence for want of a better designation. Let us consider the following case taken from Shakespearean drama to illustrate this point.                                                                     

In Mark Antony's oration on the occasion of Julius Caesar's burial the word honourable plays a key role. If honourable is understood as a synonym for decent or faithful to a high principle, we can say with little fear of contradiction that the same word is repeated several times in the course of the oration. However, as a single word occurrence each  separately located  instance of honourable constitutes  a distinct and unique particle within the oration,  for the verbal environment of each occurrence, once passed, can never be nullified or revised, the effect of the progress of the oration being irreversible and cumulative.  The flow of words in a text resembles the river which according to Heraclitus no one can enter twice. The final occurrence of honourable in the oration strikes an altogether different chord than did honourable when it first passed the speaker's lips. However, the audience must always keep the general sense of the word in mind or else the irony generated by the disparity of the official meaning of the word and the increasingly negative implication of honourable throughout the oration will be lost. If language comprehends the two indivisible aspects which de Saussure termed langue and parole, a word located in a text unites the specific with the universal, the singularity which it owes to its unique location with its inclusion within the greater whole of the group of words that share the same form and sound. Does this connection become severed in the language of poetry? Advocates of the objective or contextualist schools of literary criticism would have us believe so.

Clearly the reader of a poem will pay particularly close attention to the location of words, their verbal juxtapositions and the alchemical interaction of words clustered together producing a multiplicity of resonances and associations. The reader of a newspaper, by contrast, having ascertained what the subject of an article or report is about, will regard only those meanings of words that accord with that particular subject. In most cases the reader will discard the paper once it has been read. For some reason this is not the case when those with a genuine interest in literature read a poem of their choice. On rereading a