THE ELUSIVENESS OF POETIC MEANING Peter Lamarque Abstract Various aspects of poetic meaning are discussed, centred on the relation of form and content. A C Bradley’s thesis of form-content identity, suitably reformulated, is defended against criticisms by Peter Kivy. It is argued that the unity of form-content is not discov- ered in poetry so much as demanded of it when poetry is read ‘as poetry’. A shift of emphasis from talking about ‘meaning’ in poetry to talking about ‘content’ is promoted, as is a more prominent role for ‘experience’ in characterising responses to poetry and its value. It is argued that the key to poetic meaning lies less in a theory of meaning, more in a theory of poetry, where what matters are modes of reading poetry. Content-identity in poetry is said to be ‘interest-relative’ such that no absolute answer, independent of the interests of the questioner, can determine when a poem and a paraphrase have the same content. Interpretation of poetry need not focus exclusively on meaning, but on ways in which the expe- rience of a poem can be heightened. My title ‘The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning’ can be construed in three ways: first, that the meaning of some poems is elusive, i.e. obscure or hard to grasp; second, that the very idea of ‘poetic meaning’ is elusive to critics and philosophers seeking a theory of poetry; and third, that poetic meaning has the peculiar feature of eluding adequate paraphrase. These construals are separate in that each could be true without the others (a poem might be obscure, for example, but nevertheless open to paraphrase, by an expert reader; and a satisfactory theory of poetic meaning might be hard to obtain without poetry being either obscure or unpara- phrasable). These kinds of elusiveness, then, might be separate but they are also related. The aim of the paper is to explore them and to relate them. I will come last to the issue of obscurity in poetry as that will fall out of what I have to say about the other kinds of elusiveness. My starting point, indeed the focus of much of what is to follow, is that old chestnut, the relation of form and content in poetry. It might be supposed that post-New Criticism, indeed post-Literary © 2009 The Author Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Ratio (new series) XXII 4 December 2009 0034–0006