The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in The Structure of Poetry - Introduction

Introduction

The Well Wrought Urn is divided into eleven chapters, ten of which attempt close readings of celebrated English poems from verses in Shakespeare's Macbeth 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.

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 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.

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.