ABSTRACT
A successful interpretation requires both scholarship and criticism, each modifying the other, a minute and comprehensive factual accuracy interacting with stringent and distinguished evaluative criticism. In its ideal form, then, the interpretative procedure is necessarily one of considerable delicacy and complexity, the initial difficulty being that, whereas a professional interpreter simply translates (or provides an oral précis) from one language into another, a literary interpretation extends into the pre-linguistic and postlinguistic origins, meanings, implications and consequences of the artifact. At the oral stage, the author who is known to have composed aloud, as Wordsworth always did, or to have preferred to read or recite his poems to admiring friends as Keats, Tennyson and Swinburne did, calls for a more vocal reading than for those writers who compose in ‘inner speech’, in which the words on the page have only a semi-oral condition.
