"Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness"
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Hawthorne is quietly issuing a challenge disguised as etiquette: art isn’t a delivery service, and the reader who treats it like one is missing the point. The line sets an almost gatekeeping standard, but the snobbery has a purpose. He’s arguing for a particular kind of attention - one that completes the work rather than merely receives it. The “ought” isn’t just moralizing; it’s a manifesto for interpretation as collaboration.
The subtext is partly defensive. Hawthorne wrote in a culture that prized clear moral lessons and “improving” literature, while he trafficked in ambiguity, allegory, and psychological shadow. To say a poem’s “highest merit is suggestiveness” is to protect the value of what can’t be paraphrased. Suggestiveness becomes a shield against the demand for simple messages and a rebuke to critics who judge art by how cleanly it states its theme.
There’s also an early American anxiety here: a nation busy inventing itself, suspicious of ornament, wary of European aestheticism. Hawthorne smuggles in a romantic, almost symbolist claim that meaning is not a fixed deposit left by the artist but an atmosphere the work generates. He privileges the reader’s capacity for resonance - memory, guilt, desire, dread - the very inner materials his fiction exploits.
It works because it flips authorship into a provocation. The artist “actually expresses” less than what the work can ignite, and that gap is not failure but design. Art, for Hawthorne, is a controlled haunting: the more it implies, the longer it lives in you.
The subtext is partly defensive. Hawthorne wrote in a culture that prized clear moral lessons and “improving” literature, while he trafficked in ambiguity, allegory, and psychological shadow. To say a poem’s “highest merit is suggestiveness” is to protect the value of what can’t be paraphrased. Suggestiveness becomes a shield against the demand for simple messages and a rebuke to critics who judge art by how cleanly it states its theme.
There’s also an early American anxiety here: a nation busy inventing itself, suspicious of ornament, wary of European aestheticism. Hawthorne smuggles in a romantic, almost symbolist claim that meaning is not a fixed deposit left by the artist but an atmosphere the work generates. He privileges the reader’s capacity for resonance - memory, guilt, desire, dread - the very inner materials his fiction exploits.
It works because it flips authorship into a provocation. The artist “actually expresses” less than what the work can ignite, and that gap is not failure but design. Art, for Hawthorne, is a controlled haunting: the more it implies, the longer it lives in you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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