"What's the import?": indefinitiveness of meaning in nineteenth-century parabolic poems - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2002 by Kerry McSweeney

Ominously, Tennyson's shot-silk analogy is one of the epigraphs at the beginning of Jack Stillinger's Reading "The Eve of St. Agnes": The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction (1999), a book that draws on the work of reception theorists like Stanley Fish, David Bleich, Wolfgang Iser, and Louise Rosenblatt. This book is a large-scale example of the dangers of applying a reader-response model to parabolic poems. Stillinger argues that until around thirty years ago, professional literary criticism was based on the notion of a single text and a single ideal reader whose interaction produced a single interpretation. As time passed, one influential reading succeeded another. Thus, the nineteenth-century view of Keats's poem as "a series of pretty pictures" gave way in the 1950s to Earl Wasserman's reading of the poem as a metaphysical progression, a reading in time overturned by Stillinger's own de-idealizing reading of the poem as about voyeurism and seduction. This view remained influential until Stuart Sperr y "skillfully steered a middle course" between Wasserman and Stillinger in arguing that Keats's poem was about wish-fulfillment and contained a self-conscious critique of the romance form and a subtle study of the psychology of the imagination (37-38). But in the last three decades, Stillinger contends, the notion of a single ideal reader has been replaced by that of multiple readers with the result that, when a complex work is read, "the interpretations differ one from another as much as the readers do. It is not possible that only one of the interpretations is correct and all the others are wrong." For all practical purposes, he argues, Keats's poem is interpretively inexhaustible. To buttress his point, Stillinger describes no fewer than fifty-nine interpretations of "The Eve of St. Agnes" (7).

From my point of view, however, the critical history of Keats's romance looks very different from the way it does in Stillinger's account. In this view, successive influential readings do not so much supersede each other as supplement, complement, and qualify earlier readings. Leigh Hunt and other nineteenth-century critics were perfectly correct: Keats's poem does offer "a series of pretty pictures" (with the pejorative undertones of the adjective ignored). How could anyone ever think otherwise? But that is not to say that pictures are all that the poem offers. As for Wasserman and Stillinger, they were each half right: the materials for both readings are present in Keats's poem. Indeed, the ideal love-physical love opposition is one of the most important of the binary contrasts--cold-warmth, youth-age, reality-dream, and artifice-feeling are others--that are essential constituents of the reader's experience of the poem. As for Sperry's discussion, its principal contribution was to bring into focus the refle xive or metapoetical features of "The Eve of St. Agnes," features providing one of the principal ways the poem stimulates reflective inquiry into meaning. These features might be said to qualify and make more complex one's response to the poem's pictures and the spiritual-physical opposition, but they can hardly be said to supersede them.