is behaving peculiarly indeed. More important—if the poet were her lover,
why does he merely “bow and pass smiling”? Why no interaction between
the two?
But surely, it will be argued, there isn’t one “correct” reading, is there? If
post-structuralism taught us any thing, it’s that the reader can construct the
text in a variety of ways. True enough, but that is not to say that any thing
goes. For example, if someone argued that “The Young Wife” deals with
trench warfare, at its height in 1916 when this poem was written, everyone
would agree that this is nonsense.
How, then, does one proceed? Perhaps there is ¤nally no alternative to
what was called in the Bad Old Days, close reading. Today’s students may have
no idea what close reading entails, but surely their teachers vaguely remem-
ber close reading or explication de texte, as it was known in French, as some
sort of New Critical or Formalist exercise whereby readers performed dry,
boring, and nitpicking analyses on given “autonomous” texts, disregarding
the culture, politics, and ideology of those texts in the interest of metaphor,
paradox, irony, and what a leading “close reader” of the 1950s, Harvard’s
Reuben Brower, called the “key design” of a literary work.^2 But would a far
reading, then, be better than a close one? Well, not exactly, but perhaps read-
ing is itself passé, what with the possibility that a given poem or novel could
serve as an exemplar of this or that theory, in which case one might only have
to focus on a particular passage. In the case of T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion,” for
example, one need only discuss the speci¤cally anti-Semitic passages so as to
demonstrate Eliot’s racism.
But close reading was hardly con¤ned to the New Critics or to Formalists
of various stripes. There have been stunning Marxist close readings—for ex-
ample, those by T. J. Clark of speci¤c modernist paintings from Manet’s Bar
at the Follies Bergère to DeKooning’s Suburb in Havana. And the best close
readings we have of Williams are probably those of Hugh Kenner, who un-
derstood that poetry was not the equivalent of metaphor or a “key design”
waiting to be unpacked. Indeed, in his readings of Joyce and Beckett, Pound
and Williams, Kenner relied just as heavily on biographical and cultural
information as he did on rhetorical analysis. You could not, for example,
understand the minimalist lyric “As the cat,” he noted, unless you knew what
a “jamcloset” was.^3
Formalist reading, we are regularly told, goes hand in hand with the prem-
ise that the poem is an autonomous artifact. But the privileging of the poetic
function has never meant that knowledge—of the poet’s life, milieu, culture,
and especially his or her other poems—is not relevant. Roman Jakobson’s
great essay on Mayakovsky’s poetic called “The Generation That Swallowed
Introduction xiii