[...] He differentiated between prose, where “there is generally a quite closely defined channel or corridor of sense-making,” and certain types of difficult poetry, where “this corridor of sense is much wider and more open, more like a network across the whole expanse of the text, with many loops and cross-links of semantic and referring activity which extend the boundaries of relevance, and of control by context, in many directions at once.” He said that when text is delinked and incoherent, when “extreme ambiguity displaces recognizable topic-focus” and references abruptly shift with no warning, “these features may begin to comprise a second-order strategy of pattern-making in a new way.” He compared this form of pattern-making to traditional rhyme forms — how a poem in which the words themselves do not link into a recognizable statement can be experienced as a unity through lines that end in rhyme. In the end the poetry forms a process of “pattern and pattern-violation generating their own tendencies of meaning — or perhaps we should call this ‘meaning,’ in some second-order sense.”

translating one of Prynne’s poems involves committing to particular definitions of words that are intentionally polysemic

[...] in the words of I. A. Richards, “As the finer parts of our emotional tradition relax in the expansion and dissolution of our communities, and as we discover how far out of our intellectual depth the flood-tide of science is carrying us — so far that not even the giants can still feel bottom — we shall increasingly need every strengthening discipline that can be devised.” Richards saw the study of poetry as such a strengthening discipline, and when I considered what might be elitist about Cambridge poetry it was the notion that they were keeping the flame of some greater truth alive against the perceived onslaught of popular culture. But to see the poets this way was to pit some concept of exclusive British culture practiced by wealthy dilettantes against more inclusive cultural practices. That would have been elitist, or at least haughty. But the poets were not doing that. What they were doing, together or as individuals, was merely a search, to try to use language in a way that did not remind us of someone trying to sell us something, that made words seem new, that gave us a way to describe the things we aspired to that did not echo the vocabulary that we could no longer trust. This did not feel elitist, just hopeless.