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As I look back, it seems to me that two discoveries shaped my intellectual life and career. The first was the New Criticism. It was in a poetry study group led by the poet Cid Corman that I found I had a peculiar knack for this method of reading texts.
As I practiced it, the aim was to show how all the parts and aspects of a poem or story fit together into one organic unity. The method consisted in grouping details of the text into thematic clusters: images of disease in Hamlet, for example, or the different kinds of language and splits developed in that play. Then one grouped those clusters into larger themes: disease combined with images of rot or smell to make a larger theme of corruption; the interest in language contrasted with the discussions of action. Finally, I would bring all these themes together in a statement of a single unifying theme for the play, say, corruption as the failure to bring words and deeds together. Then one could go back down to the details of Hamlet. One could show how any given sentence related through one or more themes to the central core of the organic whole.
This was the so-called New Criticism and, I would say, European structuralism as well. No doubt I am over-simplifying structuralism, as is my fatal habit. Nevertheless, it seems to me that if you strip the philosophy off, what you are left with is this method of reading texts for an organic unity. The method in turn is called by philosophers holistic method, and it is a well-recognized method. You see it somewhat in the natural sciences, for example, astronomy or geology. The greatest geological discovery of this century, the theory of plate tectonics,