Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading

In this classic study, Harvard professor Reuben Brower guides the reader from noticing the alluring details of a well-made poem, novel, or play to attending to the encompassing ways in which the writing achieves its greatness. Not only does Brower begin his book with a lyric, but he deliberately chooses a very short one indeed, as if to show how much can be said about the smallest of poetic ‘figures’ looked at closely. The poem is The Sick Rose , one of William Blake’s best-known songs of experience …Brower’s task is to show how the poem is ‘imaginatively organized,’ by which he means that, to read it, we must sense the ‘extraordinary interconnectedness among a relatively large number of different items of experience. – From the Foreword by William H Pritchard