William Empson - 7 Types of Ambiguity

“…a grunt it at once too crude and too subtle to be conveyed by the alphabet at all.”

“…or like the growth of a flower, which it would be folly to allow analysis to destroy by digging the roots up and crushing out the juices into the light of day… I myself, I must confess….unexplained beauty arouses an irritation in me, a sense that this would be a good place to scratch; the reasons that make a line of verse likely to give pleasure, I believe, are the reasons for anything else; one can reason about them; and while it may be true that the roots of beauty ought not to be violated, it seems to me very arrogant of the appreciative critic to think that he could do this, if he chose, by a little scratching.” (9)

“the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.” (3)

“…is all good poetry supposed to be ambiguous?
I think that it is.” (xv)

“What I would suppose I that, whenever a receiver of poetry is seriously moved by an apparently simple line, what are moving in him are the traces of a great part of his past experience and of the structure of his past judgments.” (xv)

“rookie” analysis / Macbeth. (18)

“The human mind has two main scales on which to measure time.” (analysis)

ITALIAN ASSASSIN BOMB PLOT DISASTER

Headline analysis (236)

“The object of life, after all, is not to understand things, but to maintain one’s defences and equilibrium and live as well as one can.” (247)

“They must possess a fair amount of equilibrium or fairly strong defences; they must have the power first of reacting to a poem sensitively and definitely (one may call that feminine) and then, having fixed the reaction, properly stained, on a slide, they must be able to turn the microscope on to it with a certain indifference and without smudging it with their dingers; they must be able to prevent their new feelings of the same sort from interfering with the process of understanding the original ones (one may call that ‘masculine’) and have enough detachment not to mind what their sources of satisfaction may turn out to be.” (247)

“…whether a scientific idea of truth is relevant to poetry at all. It would be tempting, then, to say I was concerned with science rather than with beauty; to treat poetry as a branch of applied psychology.  But, so far as poetry can be regarded altogether dispassionately, so far as it is an external object for examination, it is dead poetry and not worth examining; further, so far as a critic has made himself dispassionate about it, so far as he has repressed sympathy in favour of curiousity, he has made himself incapable of examining it.” (248)

Analytical critic vs appreciative critic. (both in the same; poetry creates the dogma, dogma creates the poetry). (249)

"prosaic knowledge" (252) of criticism "I admit that the analysis of a poem can only be a long way of saying what is said anyhow by the poem it analyses." (a poem says what cannot be said, or what cannot be said any other way -- see: heresy of paraphrase) ...so what's the point?  The point is "such an advance in the machinery of description makes a reader feel stronger about his appreciations, more reliably able to distinguish the private or accidental from the critically important or repeatable, more confident of the reality (that is, the transferability) of his experiences....  What is needed for literary satisfaction is not, 'this ia beautiful because of such and such a theory,' but 'this is all right; I am feeling correctly about this; I know the kind of way in which it is meant to be affecting me." (254)

Best reading: Chapter 1, 2, 8.


So-- for all of Empson's pretensions towards a more scientific criticism, he is not nearly as radical as some of the other New Critics (though Empson is on the earlier side, and British side of things).  He does indeed believe that the full dissection of a poem can kill it.  He is more for a middle ground.

Richard Henry Dana - Two Years Before the Mast

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. describing California Girls in 1836,

“The fondness for dress among the women is excessive, and is often the ruin of many of them.  A present of a fine mantle, or of a necklace or pair of ear-rings, gains the favor of the greater part of them.  Nothing is more common than to see a woman living in a house of only two rooms, and the ground for a floor, dressed in spangled satin shoes, silk gown, high comb, and gilt, if not gold, ear-rings and necklace.  If their husbands do not dress them well enough, they will soon receive presents from others.  They used to spend whole days on board our vessels, examining he fine clothes and ornaments, and frequently making purchases at a rate which would have made a seamstress or waiting-maid in Boston open her eyes.” [ed. Scher, p.81]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F57P9C4SAW4

Just for the historical record, it's worth noting that the first thing Richard Henry Dana, Jr did when he reached San Diego was go surfing (and get heckled by locals).

“I shall never forget the impression which our first landing on the beach of California made upon me.  The sun had just gone down; it was getting dusky; the damp night wind was beginning to blow, and the heavy swell of the Pacific was setting in, and breaking in loud and high “combers” upon the beach.  We lay on our oars in the swell, just outside of the surf, waiting for a good chance to run in, when a boat, which had put off from the Ayacucho just after us, came alongside of us, with a crew of dusky Sandwich Islanders, talking and halooing in their outlandish tongue.  They knew that we were novices in this kind of boating, and waited to see us go in.  The second mate, however, who steered our boat, determined to have the advantage of their experience, and would not go in first.  Finding, at length, how matters stood, they gave out a shout, and taking advantage of a great comber which came swelling in, rearing its head, and lifting up the stern of our boat nearly perpendicular, and again dropping it in the trough, they gave three or four long and strong pulls, and went in on top of the great wave, throwing their oars overboard, and as far from the boat as they could throw them, and jumping out the instant the boat touched the beach, and then seizing hold of her and running her up high and dry upon the sand.  We saw, at once, how it was to be done, and also the necessity of keeping the boat ‘stern on’ to the sea; for the instant the sea should strike upon her broad-side or quarter, she would be driven up broadside-on, and capsized.  WE pulled strongly in, and as soon as we felt that the sea had got hold of us and was carrying us in with the speed of a race horse, we threw the oars as far from the boat as we could and took hold of the gunwale, ready to spring out and seize her when she struck, the officer using his utmost strength to keep her stern on.  We were shot up upon the beach like an arrow from a bow, and seizing the boat, ran her up high and dry, and soon picked up our oars, and stood by her, ready for the captain to come down.”

The whole book is worth it for the descriptions of San Diego and San Francisco alone (aka Yerba Buena, “good herb,” SF before SF was SF.).

John James Audubon - Birds of America

Jennifer Roberts describes J.J. Audubon's process for drawing Birds of America:

"In what amounted to a form of ghastly puppetry appropriate to the age of Frankenstein... he would piece the warm body of the dead bird with sharpened wires and pin it in a lifelike pose to a gridded board before drawing it... He often completed an image just when the carcass had putrefied beyond the point of formal integrity or olfactory endurance.... Fixing the colors on his page as they drained form the specimen, he might be forgiven for feeling, from time to time, as if he were actually succeeding in drawing the life out of the body of the bird, filament by feathery filament, into the covalent body of the drawing. Precisely as the body dissolved, so the drawing evolved, securing ever more fully a sense of physical presence." -- Transporting Visions, Roberts

My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples. So maimed were most of them, that they resembled the mangled corpses on a field of battle, compared with the integrity of living men.

The moment a bird was dead, however beautiful it had been when in life, the pleasure arising from teh possession of it became blunted; and although the  was bestowed on endeavors to preserve the appearance of nature, I looked upon its vesture as more than sullied, as requiring constant attention and repeated mendings, while, after all, it could no longer be said to be fresh from the hands of its Maker.  I wished to possess all the productions of nature, but I wished life with them. -- J.J. Audubon