Try this everyday test: get hold of someone and ask them if they read poetry habitually, especially poetry written from the last century to the present day. If the answer is a more or less embarrassed (or even defiantly uttered) âno, not reallyâ (which will be in most cases), then ask them why. The most likely complaint or excuse will run along the lines of âitâs too difficult, too complicated, it makes little sense to meâ. At this point, you may object that, as poetry appears to be a fundamentally elite genre, you too should be more selective in choosing your interviewees, and so look for someone highly educated. You find this person, she/he has various interests and is well read, and yet the answers you get are more or less the same.
You are not easily put off, so in our third scenario, you go to a poetry reading group. This scenario can be made real. While anecdotal evidence is not the soundest of proofs, I will run such a risk in an introduction. In 2014, I was a regular member of a Nottingham-based poetry reading group. We met once a month, during which time we had to read one collection by a contemporary poet. From our chats, I realised that some members were reading other collections in parallel, just for their own pleasure. These were strong poetry readers then. I recall this particular meeting during which, to my surprise, some members repeatedly resorted to the word difficult, which they mostly glossed as âhard to understandâ or âwhat does the poet mean?â
As I had been researching into poetic difficulty for some years already, I became even more persuaded that such a subject should not be the preserve of the specialist but may be relevant to a wider audience. I wish I had brought a recorder with me, but nonetheless in that meeting I diverted myself with mentally mapping their intuitions onto the stylistic and processing model that I was developing and that it is presented in this book. And two years later, in 2016, many of my students at Vilnius University referred to Ezra Pound , Marianne Moore and W. S. Graham as difficult solely based on their poems, that is, without having previously read any criticism on them. Had they, they would have realised they were not alone in their assessment.
What is suggested by this mixture of hypothetical scenarios and real-life anecdotes is that difficult (like its most direct rival obscure ) is one of those âpowerfully synthesising and summarising evaluative termsâ (Toolan 2014: 15) capable of condensing a range of effects that are clearly perceived if imprecisely verbalised. What they also suggest is that their typically negative connotation is not a given, but will probably (though not always) fade into a less judgmental attitude with more expert and/or less prejudiced readers. In Perloffâs words: âthe stumbling block [âŚ] is not so much obscurity as conventionâ (1991: 205). While prior extensive exposure to poetry may shift oneâs aesthetic reaction to difficulty from rejection to curiosity or even approval, hardly can the impact and lingering taste of difficulty be overstated: sensitivity to difficulty is not so easily silenced. That is perhaps why even professional critics every so often rely on this imprecise, unduly connoted, yet somehow apt term. The ubiquity of this usage will become compellingly clear throughout Chapter 2.
The derivational transition from difficult to difficulty is more insidious than it may appear at first glance, for it turns disparate localised attributions into a conceptual space where all such attributions coexist, in reality or as potential. This book is about difficulty in poetry: it details the linguistic conditions for its emergence, the cognitive mechanisms involved when facing difficult poems, the range of preferential readerly outcomes and some key aesthetic typologies arising from the dynamic interaction of the aforementioned factors. It is therefore interested in the essence of difficulty through and beyond its multifarious real-world manifestations. Difficulty is approached through a new model that, once consistently applied, will originate a theory of difficulty in the scientific sense of the word: a machine for testable predictions built around a coherent set of falsifiable hypotheses (Popper 1994 [1979]). Its aims are descriptive and explanatory, rather than normative and exegetic : they are less about what difficult poems supposedly mean than about how they mean differently. Nothing like this was previously available for difficulty, as shown throughout Chapter 2.
The book is divided into two parts. The first is titled âTheorising Difficulty in Poetryâ, it comprises Chapters 2â4, and it takes almost half of the bookâs length. Here, I review the received notions of difficulty (Chapter 2), propose a definition-driven interdisciplinary framework within which to locate this phenomenon (Chapter 3) and detail a new analytical model stemming from this framework and preliminary to the analyses proper (Chapter 4). The second part is titled âAnalysing Difficulty in Poetryâ and comprises Chapters 5â8. In this part, I present the data from poetry and from reader-response tests (Chapter 5) and in the three chapters that follow analyse different typologies of difficulty through some representative texts: from the converse of difficult, that is, the accessible poem (Chapter 6), to the difficult-obscure (Chapter 7) and the difficult-resistant and difficult-nonsensical poem (Chapter 8). The general conclusions (Chapter 9) contextualise the key analytical findings against the background of previous knowledge, showing how the model advances our understanding of poetic difficulty. In the paragraphs that follow a less cursory outline of each chapter is given.
Chapter 2 reviews previous approaches to difficulty and related notions (especially ambiguity and obscurity), identifying three main traditions: the typological, the reader oriented and the stylistic. While the merits of each approach are acknowledged, a much tighter integration is advocated so as to avoid their shortcomings: a top-down speculation that is over-reliant on the scholarsâ own intuitions (typological approach ); a generally dismissive attitude towards the text and an occasionally misleading idealisation of readers (reader oriented); a reluctance towards general explanations, with too context dependent a picture of how single linguistic features contribute to global aesthetic effects (stylistic). The second part of the chapter discusses more contingent , scattered remarks on difficulty, clustering them in side themes with a social or philosophical nature: the pluralism of difficulty, poets on their own difficulty, philosophical influences, elitism , intentionality , the representation problem , the meaningfulnessâmeaninglessness dilemma and the problematic difficultyâobscurity divide. Each approach and side theme is then re-examined in the General Conclusions, so the book has a circular structure .
Chapter 3 opens with a new definition of difficulty in poetry. This is both the point of arrival of the theoretical efforts of Chapter 2 and the guiding principle for the choice of the main frameworks (and of the disciplines within which they have been elaborated) on which the model will be based. First of all, I advocate an empirical and scientific method whereby difficulty is treated as a real-world phenomenon rather than as an ineffable quality. As the manifestation of the phenomenon (the experience of difficulty) is a strong function of a poemâs textuality, stylistics is the discipline best suited to investigate it. Within or around stylistics, foregrounding theory is used to filter out salient features that contribute to this effect, while systemic-functional-linguistics provides the required descriptive apparatus. As difficulty is articulated by readers, the cognitive impact of certain textual configurations is postulated through models of language processing and by appealing to psycholinguistic findings. These models are implemented with an interpretive stratum (significance) which is deemed central to poetry. Following structuralist scholars, significance is reinterpreted as the outcome of higher-order inferences that fulfil expectations of literary relevance. And speaking of relevance, Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995 [1986]) is also borne in mind insofar as it offers a framework to understand the precarious trade-off between the energy investment required by difficult poems and the promise of aesthetic fulfilment.
Chapter 4 is the core of the book: if I were forced to save only one chapter, it would be this one. This is because it minutely describes the model that subtitles the book, enabling other scholars to apply it consistently. In doing so, it brings stylistics as close as it can get to the scientific principle of replication. The skeleton of the model rests on an intuitive distinction between readerly indicators of difficulties (RIDs) and linguistic indicators of difficulties (LIDs). Within an experimental setting, these may be conceived of as the two global variables of difficulty. This distinction echoes the one between text features and effects in Dixon et al. (1993), with a crucial difference: specifying a single text effect (difficulty) allows one to significantl...