Norton Kelly Quotes

Kelly Barnhill lives in Minnesota with her husband and three children. Like The Witch’s Boy, her debut novel, The Mostly True Story of Jack, received four starred reviews. Her second book, Iron Hearted Violet, was a Parents’ Choice Gold Award winner and an André Norton Award finalist. Visit Kelly Barnhill online at kellybarnhill.wordpress.com and on Twitter: @kellybarnhill

One quality that may well differentiate stories, poems, and plays from other kinds of writing is that they help us move beyond and probe beneath abstractions by giving us concrete, vivid particulars. Rather than talking about things, they bring them to life for us by representing experience, and so they become an experience for us—one that engages our emotions, our imagination, and all of our senses, as well as our intellects. As the British poet and critic Matthew Arnold put it more than a century ago, "The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus.... who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakespeare... Wordsworth … Keats.

One quality that may well differentiate stories, poems, and plays from other kinds of writing is that they help us move beyond and probe beneath abstractions by giving us concrete, vivid particulars. Rather than talking about things, they bring them to life for us by representing experience, and so they become an experience for us—one that engages our emotions, our imagination, and all of our senses, as well as our intellects. As the British poet and critic Matthew Arnold put it more than a century ago, "The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited fac-ulty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus.... who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us partic-pate in their life; it is Shakespeare... Wordsworth … Keats.

What makes the literary way of reading different from pragmatic reading is, as scholar Louise Rosenblatt explains, that it does not focus "on what will remain... after the reading—the information to be acquired, the logical solution to a problem, the actions to be carried out," but rather on "what happens during... reading" The difference between pragmatic and literary reading, in other words, resembles the difference between a journey that is only about reaching a destination and one that is just as much about fully experiencing the ride.

More important, he shows us what literature means and why it matters by allowing us to share with him the subjective experience of reading and the complex sensations it inspires — the dizzying exhilaration of discovery; the sense of power, accomplishment, and pride that comes of achieving something difficult; the wonder we feel in those rare moments when a much-anticipated experience turns out to be even greater than we had imagined it would be.