The Strain of Experience

In consideration of the effect of poetic language upon the individual's experience one must realize that it is unavoidable to approach any experience without preconceived notions of the meaning and significance. It is commonly held that when engaged in such an encounter one bases these preconceptions upon an understanding of either innate faculties or previous knowledge, which would appropriately apply to this new experience. In the experience of reading poetry however, the poet attempts to utilize this significance encountered within the cognition of these words in order to focus the reader solely upon that significance of that object, and not their preconceptions of it.

This reorganization of preconceptions then places what William James would consider a strain on these “old opinions”. In his essay What Pragmatism Means William James explores this process wherein the individual encounter a new notion, which could potentially conflict with their previous preconceptions. James states that,“The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain... The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions”(James, 101). This process of constantly shifting opinions then could suggest a constant shift in the individual's conception of truth. In the instance of poetry though one can derive this process from any piece of poetry, which can lead to a completely subjective experience and interpretation of poetic language based upon an individual's preconceptions.

Through the experience of poetic language one can extrapolate a multitude of different meanings from a work of poetry, but through the use of this language the poet has the potential to direct the old opinions of the reader to focus upon a single instance in language without any preconceptions or symbolic meaning. In Wallace Stevens' poem “Anecdote of the Jar” one could potentially see a parallel between this encounter of preconceptions and poetic language, and the encounter between the the jar and the “slovenly wilderness”. As the poem develops a jar is placed within the wilderness, and process goes as followed:

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The Jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air

This jar seems to be the foreign element of poetic language, which is being met by the wilderness of the individual's preconceptions. The qualities of the jar seem familiar as round or possibly cylindrical, but at the same time it goes beyond one's normal conception of jar as the poet applies these unspecified and undefined characteristics of tallness and a “port in air”. This jar of poetic meaning then takes “dominion everywhere” over the wilderness of preconceptions and old opinions to become unique, as the poem concludes, “Like nothing else in Tennessee”.

Now my interpretation of this piece is by no means devoid of symbolic meaning, but the significance of this process illustrates the abandonment of preconceived notions in the experience of poetic language. This understanding serves to further illustrate this endless strain that occurs in the midst of an encounter within the preconceptions of an individual and the endlessly shifting meaning of poetic language.