What to say about a poem: Wimsatt and explication

Below is a little paper I wrote for a class where we were discussing W.K. Wimsatt's "What to Say About a Poem," in his excellent collection Hateful Contraries. What I say about Wimsatt's notion of legitimacy should fit somewhat with what I have recently be saying about the function of close reading in the last few posts:

“What to Say About a Poem” begins by repeating its title, with a period (“What to say about a poem.” In Hateful Contraries, 215), as if to emphasize the particular oddness of the phrase: the way that it hovers between being a question, uttered perhaps almost in desperation (“What to say?!”), and a being a directive or prescriptive statement (“This is what to say…”). As if, in other words, saying something about a poem were a problem and at the same time an activity to which Wimsatt can confidently give some direction, can lend some advice as to the manner in which it should proceed. It is no mistake that these two tones, these two ways of articulating “What to say about a poem” coexist here, because I think it is clear that for Wimsatt it can only be understood when problem and prescription are in it together, when one is heard through the other, as implying the other. For Wimsatt, that is, one can only know what to say about a poem and the manner in which one should say it precisely by understanding how saying anything specific about a poem is essentially problematic, is what introduces the need of clarification or explication of the unclear or difficult into the experience of the poem as art. In other words, one can only know the way a remark on a poem or text should be directed—one can only know that this is what to say—insofar as this remark comes out of an experience that is never assured that it isn’t perhaps inferior to the uncomplicated enjoyment of art on the one hand, or a confident, scientific approach (proceeding in a technical, methodologically pure way) which could in fact say just about anything scientific it wanted to about the art since it merely translates whatever it wants to claim into technical terms. It is not that these other experiences are bad: they just don’t create a problem about what to say about a poem. What to say about a poem, in other words, will always be—like the structure of the phrase itself—a problem requiring clarification.
Thus Wimsatt, in the first paragraph of the essay, will show that interpreters must question whether they should have a solely scientific or “shop interest” in the text, as well as question why there is something to be said about it as an object and not as a mere thing to be consumed. He does this obliquely, of course, as if he were just introducing the topic of the essay by noting that “our professional preoccupation as teachers, scholars, critics, sometimes conceals from us the fact that our kind of interest in poems is after all a very special thing—a vocational or shop interest,” or that “poems, a cultivated person might suppose, are made to be read and enjoyed” (215). But remarks like these also situate the place of the true interpreter already as well as their activity or “what they do with [the poem]”—which, as he goes on to say “is the problem of the essay,” (215) the problem that is what to say about a poem. In other words, Wimsatt is already outlining the place of true interpretation as situation between two temptations, temptations of interpretation that the notion of true interpretation that he eventually develops—interpretation as explication or explicitation—will directly try and resist: the temptation to fall back into a sort of interpretation that just takes the text as something to be enjoyed for what it is, and therefore as something totally self-evident in its meaning, already explicit, and the temptation to criticize while having no relation to the text as something one also experiences, to reduce it to an object that has no other purpose in its world than to be interpreted by an unproblematic technical procedure—which again takes the text as self-evident in its meaning, as already explicit (it just means what the technical language of poetics says it means). Both of these temptations are ones of thinking of interpretation as something which can assuredly address the text, and not something that introduces a problem or difficulty into saying anything about the text.
This is why his Wimsatt’s question is so basic to begin with: why do anything more with the text than just experience it? “If I read a poem and enjoy it, why should I then proceed to dwell on it as an object about which something deliberate and elaborate has to be said…?” The answer is not just that the immediate experience of a poem or text is wrong and needs some critical or interpretive activity to unlock it (this would be merely substituting one unproblematic notion for another). The answer is that to just read and enjoy the poem presupposes an assured notion of what one can say about it: nothing much more than “oohs” and “aahs,” in this case. This assurance may be fine in this case if all one is out to do is enjoy the poem. But if one does want to say anything about it at all, one has to see that saying something about it will not be an assured effort: one will be confronted with the possibility that one will not know what one can legitimately claim regarding the text.
And this is a significant step in problematizing the experience of the text, because then it means that one is not just confronting some self-evident text (whether it is self-evident in being something to be enjoyed, or self-evident in only being the object of a technical critical vocabulary that will be able to completely decipher it). One is rather confronting a text that is not at all self-evident, that is not really meaningful if one just takes it explicitly. In other words, one is confronting a text that is implicitly meaningful, as Wimsatt will say. And this means it is meaningful in such a way that the process of interpretation will have to demonstrate the legitimacy of its claims without entirely knowing what constitutes this legitimacy beforehand. If what is said about a poem is said about something that is not presumed to be explicit, to be clearly visible, but which needs to be made visible precisely through this process of saying something, then one will not know whether what it ends up saying will be legitimized by what is made explicit. In other words, because one has to go beyond what is already explicit to what is not self-evident—because one has to give up what the experience of the text can see or feel about it, and on the other hand, what a specialized critical methodology can say about a text (which still takes the text as self-evident for criticism, even if what it says surpasses the self-evidence of experience)—because one has to get beyond all explicitness, one must actually create the legitimacy of what one then says (the terms by which it is to be considered correct or incorrect and the reasons and assumptions that made one go to the implicit in the first place). Only then can one conceivably have an something to say that is genuinely not legitimate or incorrect, because what will be made explicit about the implicit will not match up with the terms by which one went beyond the self-evident in the first place. In other words, only then will what one says also have to be articulated alongside the reasons why one says it; or only then will the reasons why one says something, the terms in which it thinks it is legitimate, not remain something that the critic takes as given—given either by the experience of the text or by alleged purity of one’s method.
Wimsatt calls this process explicitation or explication, and contrasts it with description, which remains at the level of what is already explicit about the text. It is the former (explicitation) that is not assured, and that constitutes the real beginning of genuine interpretive activity for him, while the latter (description) remains either with the pure enjoyment or consumption of the text or with the mere technical method that, in truth, can be applied to any text and does not say anything that one does not already know about it. To use a different formulation which Wimsatt develops in an earlier essay (“Explication as Criticism,” in The Verbal Icon, 235-253; 237), the task of interpretation is to move beyond explicating the explicit—which would still be description—and into explicating the implicit—which would be genuine explication or explicitation. If one reads Wimsatt quickly, explicitation really can be seen quite unproblematically as just the process of taking what is not self-evident about the poem as what one points out about it, as what one says about it. But a closer look shows that what is involved with this is also the adoption of a particular critical posture which sees its task as a problem and therefore as an ethical demand to make concrete the assumptions one is making about the legitimacy of anything that one will have to say. This is why description can remain useful and interesting, but ultimately does nothing more than outlines the possibilities for real interpretation: it helpfully directs attention to the surface of the text (“we hereby succeed in turning the attention of the class to the poem, to the surface,” 222), showing its parts and relations (224), but this only is useful in order to go beyond the surface (“they may begin to suspect the whole of this surface,” Wimsatt continues), to not take the text itself or one’s approach to it as self-evident. This is what explicitation or explication, the explication of the implicit, really entails for him.