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

Style, Spring, 2002 by Kerry McSweeney

Similarly, two of the most impressive of the post-Sperry discussions of "The Eve of St. Agnes" have not so much offered new interpretations as they have made informed and nuanced contributions to one or more of the traditional views. In her Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (1988), Wendy Steiner freshly examines the pretty pictures. And in his Keats, Narrative and Audience (1994), Andrew Bennett calls attention to the opposition of unseeing and seeing that is one instantiation of the binary opposition of spiritual and physical. And many of the other fifty-nine ways of looking Keats's poem also either derive from or may be seen to buttress one or another of the four pre-multiple views. As for those interpretations that cannot be so considered: these tend to be what Robert D. Hume calls "a priori readings," that is, applications to a poem of systems of explanation, assumed by the critics using them to have privileged explanatory power, that are ungrounded in the poem's distinc tive properties (183).

From an aesthetic point of view, there is something very wrong with Stillinger's unexamined and unquestioned assumption that the goal of each individual reader of "The Eve of St. Agnes" is to "put together a unique combination of selected and emphasized meanings, adding and suppressing according to his or her own creative activity in the process." Keats's poem is not a puzzle or parlor game. Just because one is able to come up with a new take on the work does not mean that one should. As with any artwork, a precondition of an aesthetic engagement with a parabolic poem is a receptive mental state analogous to Keats's own notion of negative capability in which there is no irritable reaching after meaning but rather an openness to the spell of the poem. But Stillinger is interested in quick results, arguing that an advantage of the multiple interpretation or "no-fault reading" he advocates is that it "speed[s] up the reading process" so that the "relative beginner goes from something like a third reading to some thing like a thirty-third reading in much less time that it would take actually to read the work thirty-three or sixty-three times" (79-80, 92-93).

What's the hurry? A poem's reader, Coleridge observed in the Biographia Literaria, "should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself" (2:14). An aesthetic reading presupposes readers who would have no interest in the analysis of a poem if they were not powerfully drawn into its field of force through its intrinsic qualities. For such readers, meanings are only one of a poem's facets. They may well be essential constituents, but they are never considered in isolation from the other properties of the artwork. The aim of critical inquiry is not interpretation per se, but a more powerful actualization or realization of the text.