Me:
To say a poem says something about something doesn’t make it a syllogism to be held to logical rigour. It’s poetry not philosophy. Poetry turns on paradox, figurative expression, dense prosody, imagery metaphors, symbols, charged language. And it doesn’t follow from a poem not being a syllogism or an explicit line of reasoning that it’s not saying something about something. The notion that the core of a poem is the character of the speaker is to hive off one aspect of poems and illogically make into the whole. This is the fallacy of composition—“The fallacy of composition arises when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole.”
R:
Since Plato and Aristotle almost all theorists agree with you. I am an aesthete deep down, but accept that people want to learn things from fictional works. Learning truths is what high end western civilization is about. That was not what our very distant forbears were concerned with. They knew all they needed, and mostly made it up unless it connected to practice. All they wanted was to believe the same thing, which they did for the sake of tribal mutuality. We want to know more and more and it is an endless quest which gives lots of meaning to many people's lives. Not mine. But of course being infected with the need to be right means that I cannot change my belief that what one gets from fictional literature is illusory intimacy, or virtual intimacy, but just as chimps are happier with rag dolls than nothing, we are happier with substitutes with which we can actually be closer than real folk since one never knows what lurks in the hearts of men. My poetic folk are all and only made from the words of the poem, I make them from the poet's words and I love it when I feel I know the person projected by the artist top to toe and so can respond to many more folk and with greater assurance than in real life. I think I join the billions who are absorbed in stories and may even celebrate the weddings of characters and who don't think they are learning serious things thereby,
Me:
It’s not so much that with respect to whether poems say something about something that we want to learn things be it from poems or from fiction. I don’t think that is why we go to them. For the latter, by and large, we want to get engrossed in stories. Not to learn things as such. We do learn things from fiction as it happens but they’re not didactic or expository, unless they’re explicitly meant to be. More, rather than getting expository teaching, we learn, as the phenomenologists put it, what whatever it may be is like. And there can be a certain kind of truth in that, which we judge to be so if it rings true to our own experience or if we feel particularly compelled.
I may be wrong but I think you though are talking about explanatory truth.
I’d distinguish though between (at least) two types of learning from fiction, broadly speaking: one is, as noted, learning what something is like; the other, internal to the work and arising in literary criticism, is what theme the story gives rise to, what world is being projected, what determining forces, if any, press forward in that world and how they relate to the way the characters are.
Typically, protagonists will in the course of the story embody that relation in what happens to them and how it affects them and how they manage to deal with it. Theme, then, is the summary of how all that can be conceptualized at a certain level of abstraction.
So, thinking through theme isn’t a typical reading experience. Lay readers will typically get what so and such is like, get a sense of the whole story, how they feel about the characters and how it all finally affects them.
Reviewers go further, typically formalizing these responses by coherently articulating them.
And literary critics go further than reviewers by, in at least one mode of criticism, among other things, centrally trying to come to grips with theme.
I’d think with poetry it’s broadly an analogous story with the differences the result of the differences in the genres. While we go to fiction essentially for the stories, we go to poetry essentially for the revelation or illumination of specific experiences rendered in highly changed language deployed to give rise to the various means integral to poetry. In that, revelation is indistinguishable from the compressed art that creates it.
As argued, the psychology of the speakers, coming to know them, sensing them, feeling them, or for or against them, is but one experience of poems, but not the main or only one, which I take it you argue it is and against which I contend.
Typically, readers and listeners experience the poem such that they simultaneously get a sense of what something is like via its poetic revelation at one with its poetic art and too maybe get a feel for the person the voice of the poem evokes.
I guess reviewers deepen and formalize those kinds of responses for the same reason that prompts fiction reviewers—coherent articulation .
As with fiction, literary critics will, in one mode of criticism, among other things, analyze specifically and somewhat minutely how the poetic means rise and cohere into what the poem is “saying” about something, how, putting it differently, form and content are one. How what’s being said about something is the theme of the poem, just as you, your two friends, Randall Jarrell and I came to see Frost’s poem, its speaker, saying something about how at least some people take in or ignore the world, and how the speaker in The Poems Of Our Climate rejects pristine poems (read all art) stripped down to the image as such and affirms hot imperfection in art, “lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.”
By the by, just saying, it strikes me that what this speaker is saying about something in this poem is a more powerful effect, comes across more, than what kind of person Stevens evokes.
R:
I agree completely with what you say. Here is why. After a showing of one of her films that I attended, Margaretta van Trotta was asked by a member of the audience what a certain scene meant. The questioner was pretty clearly assuming that there was allegorical significance to the scene in which two women sit at a table across from each other. One is a jailed member of the Baader Meinhof group the other her sister. Van Trotta said, "Life's like that sometimes." Holy shit, I thought, that's the "message" of every work, or even part of a work, that is to be taken seriously. The question always is how to answer the question, "like what?" I just read Tolstoy's wonderful/awful story Polykushka about Russian peasants faced with having to choose someone from their village to be drafted into the Russian Army. What struck me was that people in the story had to make fateful choices. That is what struck me and yes I would call that a theme, and I'm even willing to say the movie is about that, but it says nothing about what it portrays, other than that it can be tough making hard choices, which I already knew. I have had to make very few that felt that way to me (lucky me) and I was utterly oblivious to what might have been dire consequences when I made some of my choices but turned out fine (lucky me). What did I learn from the story? People respond in different ways, which I knew, so in that sense the story teaches nothing new, but shows "how things are sometimes."
There is an obvious "accident" in the story that triggers the worst consequence, but who cares, good plots, those that don't cheat more or less, are tough to come by.
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