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What is "close reading"?
English 219 is a course
that teaches the method of formal analysis ("close reading")
of poetry. We require it of all prospective English majors. The
method of close reading has a long association with Rutgers. English
219 
is a direct descendent of Humanities
6, a course at Harvard where Reuben Brower and his students perfected
"close reading" as a rigorous mode of literary interpretation.
Rutgers undergraduates who are interested in the story of how
Hum 6 migrated to Rutgers, where it became our English 219, should
read Richard Poirier's "Hum 6, or Reading before Theory"
in the Spring 1990 issue of Raritan Quarterly.
The close reading of poetry isn't something you can explain on a Web page, but I can give you a very rudimentary idea of what we do in English 219. One of the poems we read is Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress, which begins like this:
By the time we get to this poem, the students already know how to analyze syntax. For instance, they know that had we means "if we had," and that were means "would be": "if we had world enough and time (which, unfortunately, we don't), this coyness of yours wouldn't be such a crime.") They also know -- because they are used to using the OED -- that coyness means that speaker of the poem is trying to get the lady he is addressing to sleep with him, and that she has so far been refusing him. (Coyness means that she keeps saying "no" to his sexual advances.)
Part of close reading is seeing that all this happens "inside the world of the poem." For instance, even though this poem was written by a 17th-century poet named Andrew Marvell, Marvell has been lying in a grave in England for over three centuries now. We learn in 219 that it is the speaker of the poem -- the young man who is trying to get the lady to sleep with him -- that we're dealing with in our reading. He is "the voice speaking from the page" who dwells "inside" the poem and will be there for every new generation of actual readers like us.
In the same way, we learn that the "internal audience" of the poem is the lady addressed by the speaker in line two: she is about seventeen or eighteen years old, very beautiful, born into a wealthy or noble English family -- how you know all these things just by reading the language of the poem is one of the most exciting things that "close reading" teaches -- and she is already on terms of considerable intimacy with the speaker. (He wouldn't be talking to her like this if they had just met ten minutes ago.)
WCD with members of English 219, Spring 1999.
So the poem is partly about an attempt at seduction in a country setting. But pretty soon the poem stops being just an attempt at sexual seduction and becomes what is called a carpe diem lyric, a poem about trying to get as much as you can out of life when you are young and vibrant and able to live passionately, as opposed to later when you will be old and infirm and wrinkled and toothless and, a few short years after that, a lifeless corpse. (The speaker says to the lady: at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near. He says: yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity. He says: The grave's a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.)
This is why the poem is really in a way "philosophical" at the same time as it is about youth and love and passion. It asks the question whether, in a universe that is otherwise meaningless, the only meaning we can find must come from ourselves, from daring to live rather than simply exist. (This isn't a "doctrine" or a "message." Poetry doesn't have "messages." It's all part of the way the speaker sees the world, and the way he is trying to get the young woman he loves to see the world. That's what makes his language so powerful and so urgent.)
This is the sort of preliminary
analysis we undertake with every poem in English 219, to make
sure it makes sense as a complex speech act before going on to
any higher level of interpretation. I've found that students who
have always been afraid of poetry find that they can do "close
reading" easily and naturally, and that when they do poetry
stops being mysterious or difficult and becomes their own personal
possession.
English 219, Fall 2006
I teach English 219 from a reader -- available at Pequod copy -- that contains all the poems we read in the course, a detailed demonstration of how and why close reading is the key to literary analysis, sections on "How to Use the OED" and how to do your pensa (the analytic exercises on every poem that constitute the main work for the class), along with a sample student paper and explanations of my grading system. If I had to sum up my section of 219 in a few terms, I'd choose a passage from the introduction of the course reader:
As you'll see, the method is rigorous and demanding. You'll learn how to use the Oxford English Dictionary, and how to pay close attention to syntax -- the way the grammar of a poetic line assigns a specific meaning to each word -- and you'll discover the wonderful paradox of close reading: the "closer" you move in towards the language of the poem, the wider and more complex and exciting its universe becomes. It's sort of like looking at the night sky through a powerful telescope: the more you raise the power of magnification, the more stars and nebulae and galaxies appear, until you are looking out into an infinity that you didn't even know was there when you were looking with your naked eyes.
One caveat: if you sign up for my section of 219 you should NOT buy the books that are listed under my name at the Rutgers Bookstore. (I always ask them not to list those books for my class. The books always get listed anyway. I suspect this happens because the bookstore people are under tremendous pressure to get everyone's books out on the shelves in time and "special" requests like mind get lost in the shuffle. Anyway don't make the mistake of buying the books listed for my section: you'll just have to take them back the next day.)
I love teaching English 219 -- I regard it as the most important single course in the English major -- and I've been blessed with wonderful students for nearly 20 years now. But I have noticed that there are always a few "time slot" students in the class on the first day: that is, students who have signed up without realizing that we operate on principles just a bit different than other sections of the course. Since this version of 219 is different, I urgently suggest that anyone reading this prior to signing up seek out a student who has already taken the course with me. When you've heard in detail will be expected from you, then you'll know whether or not this 219 is for you. (And you won't wind up having to drop the course at the end of the second week, which is what very often happens to "time slot" students otherwise.)