by Ed Simon 

Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]

There is no genuinely effective lyric poem unless there is a line which lodges itself in the brain like a bullet. Often – though not always – these lines are the first in a poem, the better to abruptly propel the reader into the lyric. William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” Walt Whitman’s “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” or Langston Hughes’ “I’ve known rivers.” For example, John Donne and Emily Dickinson are sterling architects of not just the memorable turn-of-phrase, but the radiant introductory line as well. Think “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” or “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died.”

While memorizing poems in their entirety was a common pedagogical exercise at all levels of education until around a century ago, today works remain pressed in the commonplace-book of-the-mind because of a deftly memorable line, a phrase which announces itself like the hook of a pop song. With some irony, contemporary poetry is sometimes maligned by more conservative critics as having a deficit of iconic lines, where the language itself submerges into an undifferentiated mush of abstract nouns and erratically enjambed lines, experimental precociousness and pretentious obscurantism.

Presumably every period of literary history is deluged with bad poetry so that there is a bias towards that which survives, giving a shining glean to previous centuries which they may not entirely deserve. After all, not every poet in the English Renaissance was the equivalent of Shakespeare; most were as if Giles Fletcher or Barnaby Googe. Still, many readers would perhaps find it difficult to name a poetic turn-of-phrase as memorable as those written by Wordsworth, Whitman, or Hughes, not to mention Donne and Dickinson. Read more »