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What Is Ahistorical Reading?
Poetry has always been poetry. Sort of. Everything changes. In history, magic transformed into science. Alchemy became chemistry. Natural philosophy became geology and physics. Poetry, too, has changed. But it has not changed as radically as those other disciplines.
We can treat poetry as though it is one thing, and that it has always been the same thing. And that makes sense because poetry’s fundamental job of exploring and understanding what it means to be human has stayed pretty consistent. We don’t want to say that this is the only job poetry has ever had. As we’ll see in later chapters, poetry has had many jobs. But it has always also had this job. Maybe that’s because we human beings have always been more or less the same. Certainly there is at least part of us that has always been the same.
In the course of this term, we will spend some time following the changes in poetry over time. But in this chapter (and in most of the chapters we will consider this term), we want to ignore those differences and think of all poems as just poems. We’ll treat a poem by Shakespeare the same way we treat one by Adrienne Rich.
We will assume that, despite changes, there is an unchanging element in poetry that responds to whatever is unchanging in ourselves.
What is “timeless” in human beings is sometimes called “human nature,” and when human nature is mentioned, it has generally been considered our essence, and sometimes capturing human nature in words has been described as the goal of poetry (and in fact of all literature). It is natural in humans to fear death, for example, and to love, to fall in love, to hate, to seek justice, honor, dignity, power, and revenge; it is human nature to ask questions about existence and to seek answers. And all of these things are also subjects and purposes of poetry. Humans have presumably also always found comfort in meaning and in music. Poetry has provided these comforts too, always in response to these needs.
If in some ways people are always the same and poetry is always the same, then we don’t necessarily need to appeal to anything outside of a poem in order to understand it. We just need to understand the meaning of the words and of the sentences. Reading a poem without reference to when it was written or who wrote it means reading a poem ahistorically.
Students often find the idea of reading a poem ahistorically puzzling. Why wouldn’t you want to ask the poet what she meant to say when she wrote the poem? And why would you not want to look at the historical context in which a poem was written? If a poem is about slavery, wouldn’t you want to know if the poet was a slave?
While it’s true that knowing history and biography can be helpful in reading a poem, we can in fact understand most poems very well without any pre-knowledge of these things. Moreover, there are a number of reasons why seeking that knowledge may not be the best place to start.
- As the poet Paul Muldoon says, “The id