Understanding Poetry

Summary

Understanding Poetry is an American college textbook and poetry anthology by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, first published in 1938. The two Southern critics had met as students at Vanderbilt University and were both Rhodes Scholars at Oxford; in the 1930s they taught English together at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where they also founded the literary journal The Southern Review in 1935. The book grew out of their frustration in the classroom. According to accounts of its origins, the textbooks then in use were full of biographical facts and impressionistic criticism and failed to show how the language of a poem differs from the language of an editorial or other prose. Prompted by their students' difficulty in interpreting poems, Brooks and Warren first prepared a booklet that modeled close reading through examples. Its success led to a series of textbooks: An Approach to Literature (1936), Understanding Poetry (1938), and later Understanding Fiction and Modern Rhetoric. Understanding Poetry argues that poetry should be taught as poetry. The authors warn against reducing a poem to a simple paraphrase, against explaining it chiefly through biography or history, and against reading it only for a moral lesson. Such information may help to clarify a reading, but it is a means to an end. The reader is asked instead to attend to the poem itself: its situation and speaker, its images, rhythm and metre, its tone, and the way these elements work together to produce meaning. The book combines an anthology of poems with discussions and exercises that guide students through this kind of analysis, arranged by elements such as narrative, description, metrics, tone, imagery and theme in later editions. The book was revised for new editions in 1950, 1960 and 1976. It became one of the most influential textbooks of the century, spreading the methods of the New Criticism through American colleges and schools. The critic Arthur Mizener recalled that for young teachers it came as a kind of revelation, because it offered a way of talking about an actual poem in an actual classroom. Later critics have objected that its approach neglects history and context, but even they acknowledge its wide reach.

Top Lessons

• A poem is not its paraphrase

  Brooks and Warren warn that summarizing a poem's message in prose loses what makes it a poem. Students learn to treat form and meaning together.

• Background as a means, not an end

  The authors allow biography and history to clarify a reading but insist that the poem itself comes first. This balances the classical habit of studying context with careful attention to the text.

• Reading for more than a moral

  Brooks and Warren caution against reading poems only as moral lessons. Christian readers can value poetry's moral weight while also attending to how it says what it says.

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