Reading for Difficulty
Sarah Guayante
While it may be easiest to write about what we feel we know about a poem, the work of literary criticism revolves around what’s unknown–the parts of the poem that are interpretively difficult to make sense of. Critics have explained these interpretive difficulties in a couple of ways:
- Tensions between the denotative and connotative meanings of the poem
- Disjunctions in the formal unity of the poem i.e. when the poem’s formal patterns don’t cohere or work in juxtaposition with one another
- Ambiguity arising from the possibility of multiple meanings or contradictions in meaning
Take a look at how William Empson explains the difficulties that arise in a poem in Seven Types of Ambiguity:
The fundamental situation, whether it deserves to be called ambiguous or not, is that a word or a grammatical structure is effective in several ways at once. To take a famous example, there is no pun, double syntax, or dubiety of feeling, in
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,
but the comparison holds for many reasons; because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choir-boys suits well with Shakespeare’s feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for various sociological and historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind.[1]
For Empson, poems work because they exploit how language can mean in multiple ways at once. The poet’s ability to capture multiple meanings in their prose creates the beauty of a poem, but also makes it difficult for the literary critic to distinguish how the poet is creating meaning. This difficulty has sometimes been called an ambiguity, a tension, a difficulty. When we read, we look for these difficulties–these moments when the poem forces us to hold competing interpretations in our mind at once. These difficulties are the starting place for all of our writing.
For each of the poems we read this week, use Hypothesis to identify one line where you see a difficulty emerge: is this difficulty a tension, disjunction, or ambiguity?
- Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. (Great Britain: New Directions, 1947), 2. ↵
Of or relating to the meaning or signification of a term, distinct from the ideas associated with the term.
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“Denotation, N., Sense 5.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1293348204.
inclusion of something in the meaning of a word besides what it primarily denotes; implication.
“Connotation, N., Sense 1.a.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5899197674.
The action of placing two or more things close together or side by side, or one thing with or beside another; the condition of being so placed
“Juxtaposition, N., Sense a.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7558610445.
Originally and chiefly with reference to language: the fact or quality of having different possible meanings; capacity for being interpreted in more than one way; (also) lack of specificity or exactness.
“Ambiguity, N., Sense 1.a.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1070385339.
The use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more meanings or different associations, or of two or more words of the same or nearly the same sound with different meanings, so as to produce a humorous effect; a play on words.
“Pun, N. (1).” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5225091544.
