It is from this recognition that Brooks now moves to the enigmatic ending
of the Ode: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all, / Ye know on earth
and all ye need to know.” “The urn,” writes Brooks, “is beautiful, and yet its
beauty is based—what else is the poem concerned with?—on an imaginative
perception of essentials. Such a vision is beautiful but it is also true” (Well
Wrought Urn 164).
This is an admirable reading of Keats’s Ode, but it begins with three prem-
ises few of us would accept today: (1) that the language of poetry is, as Brooks
himself puts it, “the language of paradox”; (2) that this central truth remains
the same across the ages—and, by implication, that it is unrelated to culture,
gender, and a given poem’s historical moment; and (3) that poetics is equiva-
lent to hermeneutics, the critic’s role being to determine what it is a given
poem says. True, Brooks himself was aware of what he called, in a chapter
of The Well Wrought Urn, the “heresy of paraphrase” and insisted that a
poem is “a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, devel-
oped through a temporal scheme” (203). But the resolutions and balances he
speaks of are all thematic—very little is said of rhythm and syntax or, for
that matter, of language itself—and in any case they must be “resolutions
and balances and harmonizations”—which is to say the poem (or novel or
drama) must be centered.
But what happens when, as in so much of the innovative writing of the
present, there is no “aura around a bright, clear centre,” no “balance” be-
tween given “tensions,” no “resolution” of “opposites”? Critical discourse
has had a very dif¤cult time with such poetry: either it dismisses the new
work out of hand as simply too opaque, obscure, and disorganized to reward
any kind of sustained attention, or it is satis¤ed to talk around questions
of meaning and value, relating the poetic work in question to a particular
theory or an alternate discourse—say, from anthropology or ecology.
The work of English poet Tom Raworth is a case in point. Now in his six-
ties, Raworth has long been regarded as an important outsider poet, an ex-
perimentalist, with a following primarily in the United States, where he has
published dozens of small-press books, given readings, and held major resi-
dencies and visiting lectureships. In the United Kingdom there have been a
few respectful and serious essays on his work by such leading academics as
John Barrell and Colin MacCabe, both of whom have discussed the dissolu-
tion of lyric subjectivity in Raworth’s poetry from the perspective of post-
structuralist and cultural theory.^9 But even though the Carcanet Press has
now published Raworth’s Collected Poems (2003)—a volume of almost six
hundred pages—there remains, as I discovered when I was asked to review
the book for the Times Literary Supplement, almost no sustained discussion
Introduction xix