Robotic Ambiguity’s Peek at Poetic Understanding
If you’ve read any of my musings over the years, you’ve probably witnessed me agonizing over understanding poetry—not what it means, necessarily, but rather what makes others consider it good; what causes critics and those immersed in the scene, broadly speaking, to say yeah, this is incredible, or ouch, this is embarrassing.
My latest attempt to gain some clarity on it all has involved reading William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, first published in 1930.[^1] Empson’s looking specifically at English verse,[^2] which includes both drama and poetry—and within that, analyzing how, well, different types of ambiguity make the verse work. It’s an interesting approach, at least in conception. And although it left me no clearer about evaluating poetic merits, it did plant a seed of suspicion about why it's all felt like such a muddle for most of my life, and why other people might be convinced the genre (broadly contained) isn’t for them, either.
Here’s my basic contention: Empson’s so intent on reading every word for every possible meaning it could ever have had from the point it first appeared on this earth to the era in which he was writing that by the time he’s dissected the few lines he offers us, trying to put it all back together again feels like a bad patch job, and even looking at it post-reconstruction makes you lament the wounded thing now in front of you.
Help Me, Spock, with these Illogical Humans!
Empson’s unremitting explanations and his puzzlement, too, make me suspect he might have been a very witty robot, along the lines of that other famous if fictional Brit, C-3PO—or maybe even Star Trek’s Data.[^3] It’s in his chapter on the sixth type of ambiguity, “when a statement says nothing, by tautology, by contradiction, or by irrelevant statements: so that the reader is forced to invent statements of his own and they are liable to conflict with one another,”[^4] that these suspicions are really forced into high gear. I could pick any example from this chapter, but it’s when he’s dealing with descriptions of the storm of emotions caused by infatuation or unrequited love that Empson seems most confounded by the illogical way in which some humans express themselves. He can’t seem to accept the following dialogue between the star-crossed lovers in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida without breaking it down into bits of meaning and determining “the point of the paradox”:[^5]
TROILUS What offends you, lady?
CRESSIDA Sir, mine own company.
TROILUS You cannot shun yourself.
CRESSIDA Let me go and try.
I have a kind of self resides with you,
But an unkind self that itself will leave
To be another’s fool. I would be gone.
Where is my wit? I know not what I speak.
TROILUS Well know they what they speak that speak so wisely.
How could Cressida contradict herself? She’s not making sense! What is this??!? Any lovelorn teenager or fan of pop songs could sympathize without thinking about it, while Empson seems determined to take the wind out of every joke or artfully crafted phrase by explaining how it works. This sort of bafflement (is he really flummoxed, though, or just pretending to be?) might be explicable for someone who’s never been confused in love (perhaps true for Empson), who’s not comfortable in the language in which it's all being discussed (that is, who hasn’t yet mastered a feel for the language, the so-called sprachgefühl, to know how certain words or ways of expressing them can hold multiple meanings), or who has no intuitive sense of the subjective in general (at least Data tried to develop this sense, and knew when he wasn’t hitting the mark).
This need to work out the logic of a space where logic almost has no place also makes me wonder what Empson thinks poetry—or an education in it—is for: developing critical abilities to the point at which emotion has nothing to hold onto, maybe? Of course, the other and equally deadening side of that coin is revelry in schmalzy sentiment, but my probably unfair accusation leads into my other supposition: that Empson’s coming out of an atmosphere in which this sort of thing was encouraged. He’s often counted as part of New Criticism, in which texts get perused in microscopic fashion in order to figure out how they work—I keep thinking of the endeavor as trying to create an operating manual for the text after it’s been written. His inclusion in this movement seems spot-on—but I’ll venture that Empson’s way of approaching and destroying what’s in front of him goes deeper, and is more complicated than just reading a text, or even pronouncing upon it. It has, I think, something to do with the cultural and class atmosphere in which poetry in his day got taught, read, and if not enjoyed, at least held up as one particular badge of belonging.
Why Study Poetry, My Lord?
If you’re trying to write for the “general public,” which the back cover of my 1955 edition claims Empson is doing, you’re going to need to get specific about who it is you’re talking about—instead of, for example, just dropping in “Crashaw believes X” and moving along. Who’s Crashaw? Turns out he was a seventeenth-century poet, but I had to look that one up. Empson frequently drops in chunks of verse without providing the contexts from which he took them, assuming we’re going to know what’s going on in a particular scene from Measure for Measure or something by seventeenth-century poet John Dryden. Maybe that shouldn’t matter, since Empson’s really just trying to get us to see how words or ideas are being used in ambiguous fashion, wherever they’re found—but without a basic knowledge of the dramatic or poetic world into which you’ve just been placed, things get puzzling at best and off-putting at worst.
Of course, there’s the question of what “general reader” meant in Empson’s time and place. Maybe I’m being unfair; British readers would surely get all of this, especially if they were educated when immersion in literature was a given aspect of education; they’d grown up learning about more than the Shakespeare and maybe a bit of Ben Jonson the honors kids got everywhere else, right? But I’m not so sure; somehow, Empson seems to be writing for and making assumptions about the upper-class circles in which he was educated and seems, at least in the mental space of this book, to be mixing with. The sort of people who were offered plenty of time to differentiate between poets of old, and to spend enough time and energy getting it all into their skulls so that they could carry on a conversation without having to specify which Hopkins they were talking about. In other words, time and space to learn which names were valuable and why: cues to allow admission into certain circles, perhaps, but not as a way of indicating or encouraging the assumption that poetry was something to be enjoyed, only to be interpreted correctly. Whether or not depictions of other-than-upper-class forms of education featured in, say, Jane Eyre or any number of Masterpiece Theatre productions were accurate, I’m guessing the kids in the village or the orphanage weren’t granted much time or encouragement to absorb the finer points or even history of English verse. And for one (admittedly impassioned) mid-twentieth-century picture of what education was like if you were poor or working class in Manchester, just listen to some Smiths songs—or read Morrissey’s Autobiography, which by page eight in my copy has begun elaborating about school providing plenty of misery and resentment, but no education or belief that students were even worth taking the time to teach.[^6]
As I began to wonder whether my thoughts had any merit, I also suddenly remembered (and was sort of amazed to discover I’d forgotten in the first place) that I spent a good portion of high school competing in extracurricular literary criticism “contests” (this is actually what the sponsoring organization calls them).[^7] It seems they’re now including more essays as part of it all, but even looking at the site to make sure I wasn’t dreaming still has me more than a little uncomfortable that we, a bunch of impressionable and eager young literature lovers, were, instead of being brought together to discuss and learn and foster our collective and individual appreciation of the depth and complexity of what words could offer, stuck in a room to try and see who was best at understanding literature (guided in large part by everything we duly memorized in our spare time from Harmon’s Handbook to Literature[^8]), with rankings and awards handed out at the end of the day. In what now feels like a very American version of asserting social standing, instead of dropping names in front of each other at tea or a post-lecture gathering, we were sent out to win awards and carefully guard against any of the other students knowing more than we did. Going back to my wondering what Empson thought poetry was supposed to do or be, I have to ask the same question of the undoubtedly well-meaning organizers of my literary tourney. In both instances, the point seemed didactic and competitive at the same time, if differently so (look, ambiguity!) in each situation.
I started to think I might have found at least one key to my difficulty with poetry—because back in the day, I could have told you the difference between a spondee and a dactyl, or what made the Romantics so different from the New Critics. But none of it had ever been allowed to sink in at the level of enjoyment or inspiration or influence; I was simply there to learn what was right and wrong; what if I’d expressed enthusiasm about something T. S. Eliot found distasteful? I’m beginning to suspect I didn’t allow myself to go deeply enough into verse or prose to let myself decide how it made me feel—and by the time I stopped worrying about holding the right perspective, I was sort of hobbled in knowing what was going on or how to proceed.
Real Ambiguity After All
The great thing, though, about reading multiple books at the same time is that one often sheds unintentional light on the other. The relief I’ve recently felt in reading Svetlana Boym’s The Off-Modern[^9] covers a lot of ground, most generally in providing evidence that a warm, enthusiastic, and very creative soul kept figuring out how to form a space for thinkers who didn’t quite fit in anywhere, and who were interested in more than the right answers. But it was toward the end of the book, while talking about how “the serpentine figure.... has the shape of an ultimate hieroglyph, without a singular meaning [... and] has made some philosophers and theologians despise it with a passion, looking for a charismatic invisible hand that twists the lid shut on the open form, eliminating the serpentine temptation from intellectual history,” that I started sensing a welcome and alternate approach to ambiguity and enjoyment for enjoyment’s or intellectual exploration for exploration’s’ sake.[^10] In countering what she says is the contemporary world’s devaluing of intricacy, Boym asserts its wonderful and wondrous nature: “Intricacy involves mental intrigue; it is about the process of plotting without a single masterplot, about the pleasure of narrativity without an overarching narrative.... Intricacy characterizes a human logic of ambiguity and multiplicity for which no single technological algorithm has yet been invented.”[^11]
Empson wasn’t around to experience the sort of algorithms Boym’s talking about here, or that we deal with every day. But I do get the sense that he would have been puzzled by the very concept of “a human logic of ambiguity,” and that in spending a whole book trying to examine how ambiguity is used, he got dangerously close to missing the point entirely. So, too, I think, have I for most of my life, at least where poetry’s concerned. Reading Empson’s Seven Types might have been valuable for the potential clue it offered into my own past approach—but thank goodness Boym came around, and with this quote from seventeenth-century artist and writer William Hogarth to maybe help me start seeing things in a different, far less constrained, light:
“Intricacy in form... leads the eye a wanton kind of chase, and from the pleasure that gives the mind, entitles it to the name of beautiful.”[^12]
To more pleasure, then, in reading poetry or anything else, even if that means with a little less authority-approved rigor! Maybe I’ll yet find my way to clarity, or at least comfort with discomfort.[^13]
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[^1]:William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity: A study of its effects in English verse (New York: The Noonday Press, 1955).
[^2]:T. S. Eliot gets mentioned, but he’s a sort of crossover case; it does seem that this book really focused on British stuff.
[^3]:Part of my confusion about whether Empson was being humorous or not undoubtedly comes down to changes over time... But the communicability of humor from one time or place or culture to the next is another discussion entirely.
[^4]:Empson, 199.
[^5]:Empson, 202. Empson provides the quotation with older spelling; for ease of reading, I’m quoting here from the Folger Library’s version of act iii, scene ii. And once again, my facility with markup is screwing with in-text links, so here you go: https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/troilus-and-cressida/read/3/2/
[^6]:Morrissey, Autobiography (New York: Penguin, 2011). Pulling almost randomly from Morrissey’s condemnation of his school, here's his description of the headmaster as “martyred by his position and... ruled by his apparent loathing of the children.... These educators educate no one, and outside of their occupations they surely lament their own allotted spot?” 9.
[^7]:The University Interscholastic League covers everything from sports to music to more traditionally academic activities.
[^8]:William Harmon, A Handbook to Literature 12th ed. (Boston: Longman, 2012).
[^9]:Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). This conversation is part of a larger argument Boym wants to make about writer and theorist Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of estrangement as “estrangement for the world and not from the world.” 4.
[^10]:Boym, 115.
[^11]:Boym, 116.
[^12]:Boym, 116.
[^13]:Curiously enough, in two different interviews, a couple of upcoming podcast guests got at just this: the importance of taking pleasure in what you’re reading, and in the case of one speaking about poetry, just noticing words or phrases you do like, and letting them stick with you and be enough in themselves. I'll update this note, and maybe elsewhere, as those episodes get released, probably in January and February 2024.