In “The Well Wrought Urn” — that well-known and well-wrought book of literary criticism — Cleanth Brooks described what he called “the heresy of paraphrase.” The main idea — that efforts at paraphrasing poetry into prose fail in ways that parallel attempts for prose do not — was not new. It has been generally agreed upon since Aristotle. This skeptical thesis was championed in the first half of the 20th century by the New Critics as well as by their guiding spirit, T.S. Eliot, who, when asked to interpret the line “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool of the day…” from his poem “Ash Wednesday,” responded, “It means ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool of the day.’ ”

Eliot’s implication was that repetition is the best we can hope to achieve in interpreting poetry.  Translators of Rimbaud likewise lament that because French is soft, melodious and fluid in cadence, English and other non-Romance languages are unsuitable for translation.  The poet E.E. Cummings went further, claiming that even the visual impact of the typography of his poems renders them unparaphraseable.

Above in an excerpt of an essay entitled Poetry, Medium and Message by Ernie Lepore which he wrote for the New York Times.

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Painting above by Guy Jamison Wood

Tags:artInterpretationlanguagelinguisticsphilosophyPoetryT-S- Elliot