E. D. Hirsch’s Conception of Meaning VS Significance A Critical Study of Selected English Poems

Abstract

As an American educator, academic literary critic, and professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia, Eric Donald Hirsch Jr., (1928) distinguishes between meaning and significance in literary texts, particularly poems, proposing that readers should distinguish between the levels of meanings carried by the lines of any poem. The present paper sheds light on Hirsch’s critical efforts and achievements in this respect to help the students of English literature read, study and appreciate any literary text academically and critically rather than personally. This research paper also explicates the supposition that knowledge is relative and it has resulted in the intellectual sanction against dogmatic skepticism. Hirsch calls this “cognitive atheism” which is based on the idea that every reader sees the literary work from his own perspective. Thus, the meaning is stored in the author’s mind and is put in his literary work. What is behind the text/object is the reader’s vital concern. His task is based on the given literary approaches as tools of analysis. On this basis, Hirsch rejects the personal bases of appreciating the literary text. He tackles it in his notable book entitled The Aims of Interpretation (1976). The prominence of Hirsch lies in his remarkable efforts in the coinage of concepts and principles which have been considered as instrumental in shaping the literary theory. At last, this paper is an attempt to apply Hirsch’s views and techniques to analyze two poems: William Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper” (1807) and Philip Larkin’s “At Grass” (1950). Selecting such poems is not only due to their significance in English literature, in general, but also in the curriculum of departments of English literature to the third-year and fourth-year students respectively, in particular.