“I find interesting the distinction anthropologists make between an emic and an etic point of view. Emic has to do with the perspective of a member of the society itself and etic is the point of view of an outsider seeing the society in his own terms.”
— Anne Carson
I first encountered these terms in a class on anthropology required for admission into the society of the learned. I am New Criticism years old, taught to regard the poem as a society unto itself, a community of words as isolated from the larger world as any Amazonian indigenous tribe.
That’s not how poetry or any artifact of language works. A common language is fundamental to us as social creatures. Without it we may run together but be no more social than a school of fish or a murmuration of birds, a communal mimicry grown exponentially large.
To try and isolate meaning in a poem as a specimen, a prepared glass slide, is like looking for the soul through a microscope, and just as prone to the quantum rules of physics once we enter the poem’s frame as observers. The only way to separate intent from an act, from what is meant and read by either the poet in the world or from our own place in the world, is to declare us innocent by reason of insanity.
Poetry is not an artifact; not the bell, the book or the candle but the spell spoken or recorded with a pen to conjure a rabbit from a hat, a demon, a world. It only acts upon the world because it convinces us to believe in its magic but that requires us to agree as a community on what is a rabbit, what is the world, what is magic. It requires a common language which itself requires a common experience of the world which we cannot exclude from our understanding of the poem.
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