Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Poetry may be, in the words of Hugh MacDiarmid's encyclopedic poem In Memoriam James Joyce , “human existence come to life” in “the flower and fruit, the meaning and goal, / Which won all else is needs removed by the knife,” but as the metaphor suggests, the fruit or flower depends on the plant on which it grew even if the roots and leaves have to be cut away to be displayed or eaten ( MacDiarmid 1978 : 757). Literary criticism of poetry tends to treat the poem as if its roots in publishing, the funding bodies that fertilized its growth, the readership that supported it, and the other institutions that made it possible could all be cut away without losing any of the significance of the poem itself. This idealization of the poem is usually visualized as a black text printed on the white page of a book of related poems by a single author. Critical analysis and literary history are composed in terms of the cognitive and affective decisions that make this facture possible, interpretations based largely on the critic's introspective attention to the readerly responses that are assumed to be typically elicited by its hermeneutic codes. In MacDiarmid's poem the speaker goes on to narrate a walk through woodland in which he sees beautiful trees still uncut and the imagery invites reflection on the implications of tearing the poem away from its sites of production and reception. Although ... log in or subscribe to read full text