torical constraints and cultural markers were operative? It would be fascinat-
ing to explore such questions, but current discourse about poetry is reluctant
to ask them. Using everything, as Gertrude Stein enunciated the principle, is
out of favor. And speaking of Stein, students who took the young housewife
to be a prostitute and the Kathleen of Danse Russe to be Williams’s girlfriend
were even more misled by Stein’s “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene.” In the course
of this brilliant and witty tale of a lesbian affair and its breakup, we read:
She [Helen] went to see them where she had always been living and
where she did not ¤nd it gay. She had a pleasant home there, Mrs. Furr
was a pleasant enough woman, Mr. Furr was a pleasant enough man,
Helen told them and they were not worrying, that she did not ¤nd it
gay living where she had always been living. [my emphasis]^7I received one student paper called “How Mrs. Furr became Miss Furr,” ar-
guing that Helen Furr and Mrs. Furr are one and the same and that the latter
divorces Mr. Furr because she needs to escape from her sti®ing bourgeois
milieu. Such wholesale misconstruction of “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene”
(whose names play so nicely on “fur” and “skin”) suggests that before we
jump off into speculations about Stein’s epistemology, her treatment of gen-
der, or her situation as a secular Jewish expatriate, we had better read the text
in question. Fortunately, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” is only ¤ve pages long.
Reading Contemporaneously
For the New Critics, who are often considered to be the exemplary practi-
tioners of close reading, the guiding assumption, as I noted above, was that
the given poem would yield up a “key design”—what Reuben Brower called
“the aura around a bright, clear centre.” Cleanth Brooks, for example, based
his reading of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” on the “central paradox” con-
veyed by the phrase “Cold Pastoral!” in the ¤nal stanza:
The word “pastoral” suggests warmth, spontaneity, the natural and the
informal as well as the idyllic; the simple, and the informally charming.
What the urn tells is a “®owery tale,” a “leaf-fring’d legend,” but the
“sylvan historian” works in terms of marble. The urn itself is cold, and
the life beyond life which it expresses is life which has been formed,
arranged.... It is as enigmatic as eternity is, for like eternity, its his-
tory is beyond time, outside time, and for this very reason bewilders
our time-ridden minds: it teases us.^8xviii Introduction