Interpretation and Descriptive Poetry
"A Reading of Wordsworth's "Yew-Trees
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3205936 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Riffaterre (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1973 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 229 |
| Publication date | 1973-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Literary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/468476 |
| OpenAlex | W2312210344 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
aesthetics. Traditional criticism emphasized the aesthetic aspect; today our attention has fortunately shifted to the more basic problem of meaning. Since poetry says one thing but means something else, the main thrust of interpretation is towards the second, the deep or true meaning. What is more, the difference between the meaning of a literary utterance and the meaning of a nonliterary utterance is found at the level of significance. The assumption is widespread that no difference of this kind can be observed on the surface, at the level of subject matter.' At that level, words in a given type of literary discourse are believed to carry meaning in relation to nonverbal referents, as they do in the corresponding type of nonliterary discourse. Nowhere would this seem to be more obviously the case than in descriptive, or nature, poetry, since everything in it rests upon the representation of reality. The singularity and uniqueness that must mark the poem are recognized, but these characteristics are explained as a departure from reality or from the audience consensus as to what reality should be. We speak of metaphor, of ambiguity, of polysemy, or even of obscurity. Interpretation and value judgment have a common postulate: they define meaning as a relationship between words and things, and they use the poem's consonance with or dissonance from reality as their criterion. Two distinct types of discourse are recognized in a descriptive poem (and poems are classified according to which predominates): the plain record of facts or versification of data; and symbolic discourse. Consonance is generally reserved for the first type; aesthetic judgment calls it pictorialism, sometimes realism. Dissonance is reserved for symbolic discourse and is rationalized as imagination, this last usually being a positive value
Art · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Literature · Poetry · Reading (process) · History · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1980 - 2022 (43) |
| Highly cited | No |