The process of critical analysis

Having identified the need for critical analysis, we must introduce the new question: How do we begin to analyze fantasy, poetry, and fantastic poetry? The exploration of the relationship between fantasy and poetry yields surprising results:

So it is in poetry that we first encounter permanent entry of the weird into standard literature. (H. P. Lovecraft qtd. in Hyles "Poetry" 2)

Hence he is called a poet, not he which writeth in measure (metre) only, but that feineth and formeth a fable, and writes things like the truth. (Ben Johnson, qtd. in Burton 136, emphasis added)

From fairy tales and myths, from buffoonery and jokes, from folklore (that is from knowledge about popular manners and customs, sayings and songs) and from poetic and colloquial linguistic usage. In all these directions we come upon the same symbolism. (Sigmund Freud qtd. in Easthope 15, emphasis added)

It is the very nature of poetry that makes it amenable to the fantastic, the marvelous, the macabre, and the grotesque. It is the poetic impulse to say things that cannot be said, to describe worlds that defy description, and to make commonplace the unique; all poetry, great or small, does this. Fantasy stems from that same basic impulse. (Hyles "Poetry" 8)

It becomes clear that fantasy and poetry are more closely related than has hitherto been acknowledged. They serve the same basic functions: Escape, Wish-Fulfillment, and Mythopoeia. They are motivated by the same basic impulses: the desire to create, the desire to provide pleasure, and the desire to communicate. For as long as man has existed, he has imagined worlds, creatures, and people different from those he experienced; and for as long as the poet has existed, he has been putting imagined ideas into verse. Fantasy and poetry have been intertwined from time immemorial. "It is not unreasonable, then, to conclude that the earliest attempts at poetry, the ritualistic, magical incantations of the poet as priest or prophet, are rooted in the fantastic" (Hyles "Poetry" 9). Therefore, it makes sense that we apply the techniques long standard to poetry, to fantastic poetry, and to fantasy itself as well. In addition, there are some issues and techniques that are specific to the analysis of fantasy, which must also be applied to fantastic poetry.

The first and most important point to make with regard to the analysis of fantasy is not to mistake it for or try to interpret it as allegory. The reason is made clear above, but I might here further quote from Ursula K. LeGuin, who in "Dreams Must Explain Themselves" says: "bah. Humbug. Any creation, primary or secondary, with any vitality to it, can 'really' be a dozen mutually exclusive things at once, before breakfast" (53). I would add that each of these dozen things may, if illuminated further, enhance the reader's pleasure in the work for their discovery. What then of Marx and Jung, of Freud and feminists? They are not without value for the examination of fantasy. "These approaches see fantastic literature as dragging into consciousness (in keeping with Freudian theory) things that have been suppressed or ignored. All of these also turn literature into a metaphor for something else, the mind or an historical process, and none is provable except in terms of its own presuppositions" (Malekin 19). That is all very well, but what can we say specifically about fantasy? In "The Child and the Shadow" LeGuin argues that most great fantasies are about a journey "inward and out again," to "self-knowledge, to adulthood, to the light" (65). It is in examining this journey that hidden meanings and values of fantastic poetry may be unlocked. Additionally, fantasy contains as one of its most important elements "Magic-but it is a magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific magician" (Tolkien Tree 101). That which is imbued with magic in fantasy is often the key to the examination of the journey. There are other themes and devices that are unique to fantasy, of course, but these two offer a path which may lead us through the forest of description, narration, and imagination to the truth about "what to believe or how to live in the reader's quotidian world" (Murphy forward xvi), and they are the two lights that I will use to guide my readings of Tolkien's poetry.