Perhaps the most famous theoretical treatise on ‘the reader’ is Roland Barthes’ essay, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), which ends with the triumphant declaration, ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’ (p. 1326). The previous think pieces have considered poetry as revolutionary spirit, as expression, and as linguistic construction – but in all these cases, who receives that spirit, that expression? Who ‘makes sense’ of that construction? For Barthes, ‘the reader’ steps forward: ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’ (p. 1325). Barthes’ essay is a classic piece of iconoclasm – his point that a text’s meaning does not reside in the author’s intention was not entirely original (Wimsatt and Beardsley had already disregarded ‘The Intentional Fallacy’), but his pugnacious approach extended the terms, made them political, ideological: specifically, he identifies the author as more than a historical person – he is ‘the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology’ (p. 1322). Despite this condemnatory tone, and Barthes’ larger project of ‘anti-theologically’ dismantling hermeneutics itself (broadly, the pursuit of ultimate meanings), this essay’s tipping up of the terms in fact unfolded in Barthes’ writing into pleasure – jouissance – a fantastic manifestation of the erotic pleasure to be had as a reader with the ‘play’ of meanings generated by a text. The implications of this for poetics is still an open field – but more generally, Barthes’ writing here falls in with broader shifts in social, academic and cultural interest in readers, both individually, and collectively as ‘audiences’, across the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. 

‘Reader response’ criticism is notably associated with the American theorist, Stanley Fish, who began his longstanding and influential work of asserting the reader as ‘creator’ of meaning in a radical reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost, a significantly canonical poem. Fish’s approach is doubly challenging – not only does he find its meaning in the reader’s response rather than the author’s intention or the poem’s form, but he also qualifies that by locating that meaning not in a final assessment that a reader might reach, but in the process they undertake in reading: the poems ‘are not meant to be solved but to be experienced (they signify), and that consequently any procedure that attempts to determine which of a number of readings is correct will necessarily fail’ (p. 1975). In this case, he finds the reader struggling with Milton’s writing, and thereby engaging the dynamic of the Fall that the poem relates. Fish’s emphasis on process typifies a key aspect of ‘reader response’ theory, which emphasizes reading and meaning as dynamic and energized (which doesn’t mean to say that it is relative or without rigour): as German theorist Wolfgang Iser wrote, ‘communication in literature, then, is a process […] a mutually restrictive and magnifying interaction between the explicit and the implicit, between revelation and concealment. What is concealed spurs the reader into action, but this action is also controlled by what is revealed; the explicit in its turn is transformed when the implicit has been brought to light’ (p. 1527). 

Vital to this process of dynamic reading as meaning making, however, is context: despite its apparent envisaging of the reader alone with the text, both struggling and joyful in the face of its linguistic dance, ‘reader response’ theory significantly developed so as to recognize that even an individual reading scene happens in a cultural context. Rather than focusing exclusively on individuals, such theory identifies and analyses what Fish calls ‘interpretive communities’ (p. 1988), which is to say how individual readers are formed – their values, their methods – within groups. From here, the individual encounter between reader and poem dramatically opens up to ‘the world’ – whether that be a reader’s individual, directly experienced ‘world’ of their locale – their domestic setting – or the dynamics of globalization, of race, class and religion. Once one recognizes poetic meaning as something forged by this kind of complex cultural conditioning, then there is no limit to how theory might be brought to bear on poetry, on poetics. 

In immediate terms of ‘audience’, what ‘counts’ as poetry shifts and expands in the light of these communities: one might think in terms of what Benedict Anderson calls ‘imagined communities’ (his theory that nationalism is facilitated by the spread and development – still ongoing – of print culture, i.e. by reading) or in what Raymond Williams calls ‘knowable communities’ (small scale groups formed through face-to-face interaction), but either way this means recognizing that ‘poetry’ might mean different things in different parts of a country, parts of the world or even by different groups who occupy the same space. The rise of ‘cultural studies’ as a theoretical movement (associated with British writers Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart and Williams, amongst others, but energetically developed and advanced by movements across the globe) puts the poetics I discussed above into lively question – radically reading horizontally across cultural formations, these theorists destabilize ‘poetry’ as a ‘high art’ category, bringing attention to the poetry of ballads, folksongs, protest songs, pop songs. It puts processes of poetry valuation under Marxist scrutiny too: where the previous think piece on ‘Defenses’ considers various individuals’ assertions of poetry’s compelling, significant nature, cultural materialists point to the influence of critical institutions in the establishment and perpetuation of poetry as valuable: the role of libraries, key publishers and publications (periodicals, journals, magazines, newspapers), and of universities, reading lists, poetry prizes and syllabuses. This broadening of the field to recognize diverse communities of readers also meant putting ‘standardized’ motifs of the Western poetic canon – the silent woman of the courtly love poem, the exoticised depiction of non-white culture, the natural world as ‘setting’ for human drama, even the cultural understanding of what counts as emotion or feeling – under significant pressure from feminist theory, race studies, postcolonial theory, queer theory, ecotheory and so on. Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983, revised later) gives an especially influential account of some strands of this.

Although phases of critical theory might seem to have threatened poetry by disrupting literary values, genres, and forms – seemingly challenging the notion of the ‘distinctly’ poetic – many of these theoretical pathways can be seen as enriching to debates around poetics. Poetry’s historical association with feeling and emotion engages with key aspects of cultural theory, such as Raymond Williams’ notion of ‘structures of feeling’ – social attitudes and values that elude a society’s dominant codes, the ‘residual’ beliefs and the ‘emergent’ tenets that qualify hegemonic power – with poetry offering powerful means to articulate collective and individual identity. Its relationship to the body, and its openness to ‘counter-rational’ meaning-making makes it notably available to theories that seek to question the ideological underpinning of social and political values, and even to the assumed privileging of human culture at all. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, falling in with the increasing interest in ‘affect theory’ (discussed in the ‘speaker’ think piece), poetry’s affective work in the world has received increasing attention, including by theorists such as Isobel Armstrong, for whom, following the theological and philosophical theorist Gillian Rose, the aesthetic (art, including poetry) works in ‘the broken middle’, meaning the complex ‘third point’ between the binaries (culture/nature; man/woman; body/mind; love/violence and so on) that have been dismantled, and yet still haunt, critical theory. To end, poetry is absolutely available to theory, but its association with expression, the body, sincerity, affect, disruption and play means it is also a challenge to theory, a provocation. In the words of Adrienne Rich, poetry persists ‘as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode’.