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 Master of Arts in English
(MAEG)

MEG-05
Literary Criticism and Theory

Block-4 New Criticism

Unit-1 I.A. Richards

Unit-2 T.S. Eliot

Unit-3 F.R. Leavis

Unit-4 John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks

Unit-5 W.K. Wimsatt

Unit-6 Conclusion
UNIT 1: I. A. RICHARDS

Structure

1.0 Objectives
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Positivist Criticism
1.3 I.A.Richards: His Life and Work
1.4 Principles of Literary Criticism
1.5 Richards on Language
1.6 Practical Criticism
1.7 The Achievement of Richards
1.8 Glossary
1.9 Questions
1.10 Reading List

1.0 OBJECTIVES

I.A.Richards and T.S.Eliot are considered the "fathers" of New Criticism. In this unit,
you will read and understand critical essays by Richards, and work towards an
assessment of his achievement as a critic.

1.1 INTRODUCTION

In his book The New Criticism (1941), John Crowe Ransom begins his chapter on
Richards by saying, "Discussion of The New Criticism must start with Mr Richards.
The New Criticism very nearly began with him." In terms of the influence he wielded,
I.A.Richards is generally considered the most important theoretician in the first half
of the twentieth century. We shall begin with a look at the positivist criticism he
rejected. After a brief note on his life and writings in general, we shall examine his
works, Principles of Literary Criticism and Practical Criticism. Next we shall discuss
his views on language. The next section will provide a summing up, highlighting his
achievements. The glossary will explain technical terms in detail. It is possible that
you might find some other words difficult to understand, but I am sure you can solve
this problem by using a good dictionary, such as the Concise Oxford Dictionary. It is
a good idea to have a personal copy, at home. (The ninth edition is priced at
Rs.425.00; you can get it at a discount at book fairs).

Please note that Richards, like T.S.Eliot or W.K.Wimsatt and many other New
Critics, often uses the term "poem" as a kind of shorthand for any artistic creation.
What they say about a "poet" generally applies to all literary artists.

1
1.2 POSITIVIST CRITICISM

Positivism stands for a philosophy first formulated in the work of the French
philosopher Auguste Comte, whose Cours de Philosophie Positive was published in
the period 1830-1842. The object of this philosophy was to extend to the humanities
the methods and principles of the natural sciences. The positivist philosopher was
concerned with perceptible facts rather than ideas, and how these facts arise, not why.
All knowledge not wholly founded on the evidence of the senses was dismissed as
idle speculation. Positivism in literary criticism is summed up by Taine's famous
slogan of "race, milieu, and moment". In the introductory chapter of his history of
English literature published in 1863, the French scholar Hippolyte Taine said that a
literary text should be regarded as the expression of the psychology of an individual,
which in its turn is the expression of the milieu and the period in which the individual
lived, and of the race to which he belonged. All human achievements can be
explained by reference to these causes. Literary criticism was devoted to the causal
explanation of texts in relation to these three factors. Critics paid attention to the
author's life, his immediate social and cultural environment, and any statements he
made about why he wrote. Research was directed towards the minute details of the
writer's life, and tracing sources. Critics were not interested in the features of the
literary text itself except from a philological and historical viewpoint. They
disregarded questions concerning the value or the distinctive properties of literature,
since these could not be dealt with in a factual or historical manner. Twentieth
century criticism reacts against this extrinsic approach to literature. Attention shifts
from the author to the text and the reader.

1.3 I.A.RICHARDS: HIS LIFE AND WORKS

I(vor) A(rmstrong) Richards (1893-1979) was educated at Clifton College, Bristol,

and Magdalene (pronounced Maudlin) College, Cambridge, where he studied
philosophy. In 1919 he started teaching at the newly created School of English at
Cambridge. In 1926, he was made a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. For
some time, he was teaching in China. In 1939 he moved to the United States of
America, and taught at Harvard, where he was University Professor Emeritus. He
published three volumes of poetry, but he is remembered primarily as a literary critic
and teacher, not as a poet. Richards was a scholar of semantics, and along with C.K.
Ogden, formulated Basic English. The Meaning of Meaning (1923) written with C.K.
Ogden, is an important contribution to linguistics. Principles of Literary Criticism
published in 1924, was followed by Science and Poetry (1926), Practical Criticism
(1929), and Coleridge on Imagination (1934). Richards believed that literary criticism
should be objective. He was fascinated by the newly developing science of
psychology, and wanted to evaluate art in tams of the state of mind induced by it. He
promoted a psychological theory of value. This theory has become outdated due to
later researches in psychology. But his comments on language, and on the practical

2
analysis of poetry, are still valid, and have had an enormous influence on Anglo-
American literary criticism in the twentieth century.

1.4 PRlNCIPLES OF LITERARY CRITICISM

In Principles of Literary Criticism, 1.A.Richards set out to establish a theoretical

framework for criticism which would free it from subjectivity and emotionalism. He
some isolated observations which could make profitable starting points for reflection.
But they provide no answer to the central question of criticism: "What is the value of
the arts, ..and what is their place in the system of human endeavours?" Richards
proposes a psychological theory of art; art is valuable because it helps to order our
impulses.

In the second chapter, "The Phantom Aesthetic State", he dismisses the concept of a
special aesthetic state. Modern aesthetics, starting with Kant, rests on the assumption
that there is a special kind of pleasure which is disinterested, universal, unintellectual
and not to be confused with the pleasures of sense or ordinary emotions. They
believed that art experience was a special kind of experience, in a class of its own, not
to be compared with the experiences of ordinary life. Richards feels that there is no
such special mode. The aesthetic experience is not a new or different kind of thing; it
is similar to ordinary experiences. Richards uses a very graphic analogy to explain
this point: "When we look at a picture, or read a poem, or listen to music, we are not
doing something quite unlike what we were doing on our way to the gallery or when
we dressed in the morning” (p. 10). He mentions ordinary activities like putting on
clothes or walking down to an art gallery, to emphasize his point that art experience is
not of a fundamentally different kind; art experience is more complex, and more
unified. Those who believe in a special aesthetic state would postulate a peculiar
unique value for it. Richards believes that aesthetic experiences are not sui generis,
that is, they do not merely have intrinsic value. It is possible to analyze art
experience, and examine its value in terms of ordinary life, because it is not a special
state cut off from ordinary life.

According to Richards, "The two pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest
are an account of value and an account of communication" (p. 18). Richards believes
that the human mind has developed because it is an instrument for communication.
The arts are "the supreme form of the communicative activity" (p.18). Of course, the
artist himself may not be conscious of this; he is not as a rule deliberately and
consciously engaged in a communicative endeavour" (p. 18). The artist is concerned
with getting the work "right", regardless of its communicative aspect. Whether it is a
poem or a play or a statue or a painting, the artist is wholly involved in making the
work embody his experience. He cannot stop to consider the communicative aspect. It
is always there at a subconscious level. The very process of getting the work "right"
involves endowing it with great communicative power; "efficacy for communication"
(p.19) is a main part of the "rightness". .

3
Criticism should not concern itself with the avowed or undeclared motives of the
artist. Richards believes that the mental processes of the poet are not a very profitable
field for investigation. It is dangerous to try to analyze the inner workings of the
artist's mind by the evidence of his artistic work. It is not possible to verify what went
on in the artist's mind, just as we cannot be sure what goes on in a dreamer's mind.
Very often, the most plausible explanations of the artist’s mental processes may be
quite wrong. To prove this point, Richards takes up Coleridge's famous poem, Kubla
Khan. I am sure you would be familiar with the poem, and may have heard that
Coleridge wrote it under the influence of opium. Critics like Graves have presented a
complex psychological explanation for the sources of the imagery in the poem.
Richards points out that the explanation is much simpler: Coleridge was influenced
by Milton. Richards examines lines 223-283 from Paradise Lost, Book IV. He quotes
many lines from Milton's poem to establish it as the source of the underground river,
the fountain, and the Abyssinian maid "singing of Mount Abora" of Coleridge's
poem. Richards brings up this example to show the difficulties of speculating about
the poet's mental processes; he feels that it would be a wrong application of
psychology.

Richards believes that the arts can improve the quality of our lives by communicating
valuable experiences. It is not easy to communicate complex experiences; Richards
believes that the arts provide the only way of doing so. "In the arts we find the record
in the only form in which these things can be recorded of the experiences which have
seemed worth having to the most sensitive and discriminating persons" (p.23). He
believes that "The arts are our storehouse of recorded values" (p.22). He gives a very
high place to the artist. "He is the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself'
(p.47)

Literary criticism should concern itself with value: Richards believes that "Art for
Art's sake" is wrong. He declares, "The critic is as closely occupied with the health of
the mind as the doctor with the health of the body" (p.25). He says that it is wrong to
consider value a transcendental idea. Metaphysical or ethical considerations should be
kept out of literary criticism. He proposes a psychological theory of value. Anything
is valuable which satisfies the impulses or appentencies, as he calls them. These
desires or aversions may be conscious, or they may operate at the subconscious level.
Appetencies include both conscious and unconscious desires because the more
important appetencies may be ones which are not consciously felt. So Richards
defines value thus: "Anything is valuable which will satisfy an appetency without
involving the frustration of some equal or more important appetency" (p.36). This
naturally raises the question, "Which are the important appetencies?" Richards
believes that the importance of an appetency can be gauged by the extent to which
other appetencies which will be disturbed by the thwarting of the impulse involved,
that is, the importance of an impulse can be judged by the way it involves other
impulses. If the impulses are properly organized, a maximum number can be
satisfied. He proposes a kind of psychological Benthamism: value lies in the number
and importance of impulses satisfied within the individual mind.

4
States of mind are valuable is so far as they involve coordination of activities as
opposed to curtailment of them. Richards says that the function of the arts is to
organize our impulses; the effect of art is "the resolution, inter-animation, and
balancing of impulses" (p. 113). In some respects, Richards's theory resembles
Aristotle's catharsis, which suggested that the function of tragedy was to restore
emotional balance. Later researches into psychology and neurology have shown that
the workings of the human brain and psyche are much more complex.

Richards has proposed a very simplistic process, and his psychological theories have
become outmoded with the passage of time. Moreover, it is difficult to accept the
high claims Richards makes for art as an ordering of the mind. In the words of Rene
Wellek, "If we think of the poets there is ample evidence that Richards's view of
poetry as an ordering of the mind and the making of a perfect human being is false:
there were madmen, suicides, scoundrels and many horribly unhappy and
disorganized men even among the great poets."

Richards was one of the first to indicate the importance of the response of the
audience. Beauty is "not inherent in physical objects, but a character of some of our
responses to objects". But he did not investigate this theme of subjectivity further:
critics of Reception Theory and Reader Response schools, like Hans Robert Jauss,
Wolfgang Iser, David Bleich and Stanley Fish have presented much more
sophisticated and far-reaching analyses of the response of the reader. The value of
Richards as a critic lies more in his theories of language and the methods of practical
criticism he proposed.

1.5 RICHARDS ON LANGUAGE

I have mentioned Richards's interest in semantics. His first book, The Foundation of
Aesthetics (1922) was co-authored with two friends of his undergraduate days,
C.K.Ogden and James Wood. He continued his collaboration with C.K.Ogden, the
inventor of Basic English. Their book, The Meaning of Meaning (1923) created new
technical terms for literary discussion; they drew attention to the "symbolic" use of
language in science and its "emotive" use in poetry.

Chapter Thirty-four of Principles of Literary Criticism is devoted to "The Two Uses

of Language". Richards observes that the terms we use to discuss poetry are
ambiguous and fail to record the correct distinctions. In this book, he has used words
like causes, characters and consequences when analyzing mental activity, in place of
thought, feeling, and will. Richards distinguishes between two kinds of causation for
"mental events". The first kind is represented by the stimuli affecting the mind
through the senses immediately, and also combining with what survives from
comparable stimuli in the past. The second kind of causation lies in the mind itself, its
needs and its receptiveness. In the scientific field, the impulse should be derived from
what is external. The scientific use of language thus relies on reference undistorted by
the receiving mind. By contrast there is an emotive use of language which is designed
to arouse emotions. Richards says, "A statement may be used for the sake of
5
reference, true or false, which it causes. This is the scientific use of language. But it
may also be used for the sake of the effects in emotion and attitude produced by the
reference . . . This is the emotive use of language. The distinction once clearly
grasped is simple. We may use words for the sake of the references they promote, or
we may use them for the sake of the attitudes and emotions which ensue" (p.211).
These two uses of languages are analogous to the denotative and connotative
functions of words; the scientific use should avoid ambiguity, it should have a fixed,
single meaning. But the emotive use encourages multiple meanings; various
connotations of the word are brought into play.

The scientific and emotive use have different criteria for success. For science, the
connections and relations of references to one another must be logical. The references
should not contradict one another. But a logical arrangement is not necessary for
emotive purposes. They can reject logic in favour of their own internal emotional
connection; as long as they have a coherent organization, it does not matter even if
they contradict each other. Richards goes on to illustrate his proposition by discussing
the way the word "truth" is used. In the scientific sense, a reference is true "when the
things to which it refers are actually together in the way it refers to them" (p.212). In
criticism, the most usual sense is of acceptability. Truth may also be used in the sense
of sincerity, when we are discussing art. In Science and Poetry, Richards uses the
term "pseudo-statement" for poetical statements. Truth in a scientific statement is a
matter of laboratory verification; "a pseudo-statement is 'true' if it suits and serves
some attitude or links together attitudes which on other grounds are desirable".

Richards uses the word "symbolistic" for the referential use of language, but there is a
difference between his views of language and Saussure's. You would learn about
Saussure in the next block, so it would be a good idea to come back to this unit after
you are acquainted with semiotics. Like Saussure's Cours, The Meaning of Meaning
starts with the proposition that there is an essential disjunction between language and
reality, that it is wrong to believe that "words are in some way parts of things" (to use
the words of Ogden and Richards in The Meaning of Meaning). From this common
starting point, their ideas develop in different directions. For Saussure, the meaning of
words does not depend in any way on their relationship with things, it is wholly
determined by the arbitrary and conventional structure of language. Ogden and
Richards, in contrast, stress that words are used to "point to" things, and that their
meaning does depend on the things they are used to point to, their referents. Language
may be different from reality, but it reflects it. Their position is thus an empiricist
one, in that it rests on the principle that knowledge is the product of experience..

Richards continues his discussion of language in Practical Criticism, when he

analyses the "Four Kinds of Meaning". All articulate speech can be regarded from
four points of view:

1. Sense -- the state of affairs or the items presented for consideration.

2. Feeling -- By feeling he means the whole range of emotional attitudes, desire,
pleasure etc. that the words evoke. Feeling does not enter into some types of
discourse -- mathematics, for example.
6
3. Tone: the attitude of the speaker to the audience.
4. Intention -- the speaker's conscious or unconscious intention, the effect he is
trying to promote.

1.6 PRACTICAL CRITICISM

Richards asked a sample audience in Cambridge to describe their responses to a set of

thirteen poems supplied without titles or the authors' names. The students were not
given any clue to the period in which the poems were written. The students were
encouraged to read the poems more than once, and given one week's time to write
down their comments. A selection of these comments, (which he calls "protocols")
forms the substance of the book, followed by an analysis of characteristic errors and
suggestions for educational reform. Richards says in his introduction that he had three
objectives: (1) to document "the contemporary state of culture", (2) to provide a new
technique for responding to poetry, and (3) to reform the teaching of literature. The
book Practical Criticism analyses the different mistakes of interpretation and
evaluation that Richards saw in these responses, and seeks to identify their causes. He
was concerned by the low level of critical competence that was revealed, for he had
chosen a set of educated Cambridge students. Let us look at the obstacles to proper
response that Richards catalogues: I am following the system of numbering by
alphabets used by Richards himself in Practical Criticism, (Routledge and Kegan
Paul, London, 1964, pp. 13- 17).

A. The difficulty of making out the plain sense of poetry -- a large number of readers
failed to understand it, both as a statement and as an expression.

B. The difficulties of sensuous apprehension -- many readers do not appreciate the

sound, the rhythm and movement of the text.

C. The problems of imagery, primarily visual imagery -- some readers have a poor
imaging capacity.

D. Mnemonic irrelevancies -- the reader remembers some personal experience which

is not relevant to the poem.

E. Stock Responses -- the reader may have fully prepared views and emotions, which
are simply triggered off by the poem, He does not respond to the poem in question
-- he already has a ready-made response.

F. Sentimentality -- the reader may be too emotional.

G. Inhibition -- the opposite extreme to sentimentality, the reader experiences less

emotion than he ought to.

H. Doctrinal Adhesions. Poetry may contain or imply certain beliefs about the world,
or at least seem to contain certain views. A clash between the reader's own views,
7
 and the views he finds expressed in the poetry, are a fertile source of erratic
judgement.

I. The effects of technical presuppositions. When some poem succeeds by using a

certain technique, we expect similar themes to be handled with the same
technique, and do not respond when a new or different technique is used. The
converse is also true -- if a technique has failed in one case, we jump to the
conclusion that the technique itself is useless. Many readers make this mistake of
confusing cause and effect.

J. General critical preconceptions. The reader may have preconceived notions about
the nature and value of poetry. Whether these preconceptions are conscious or
unconscious, they create an obstacle between the reader and the poem.

He felt that readers can, and should be, trained to have the proper response. The
decline in speech and the loose use of words lie at the root of the problem. Richards
suggests that the quality of communication between persons, and the level of
discussion, can be raised by a "conscious and deliberate effort to master language." A
student should learn how language works, which means studying "the kinds of
meaning that language handles, their connection with one another, their interferences"
(p.330).The student should not rest with studying the rules of syntax or grammar or
lexicography. Richards believed that when we remove the obstacles in the way of the
poet communicating with the reader, he will be open to the poet's mental condition
and can experience the poem properly. Richards was not bothered by problems of
interpretation, unlike the hermeneutical critics who are concerned with the subtle
problems of correctly understanding a text.

1.7 THE ACHIEVEMENT OF RICHARDS

Richards did not recommend unhistorical reading, isolated from the context. But his
emphasis on the text as an autonomous entity, and his example of a criticism that is
practical rather than pedantically historical, was enthusiastically taken up by the New
Critics. A Survey of Modernist Poetry, by Robert Graves and Laura Riding, published
in London in 1927, contained a detailed analysis of Shakespeare's 129th sonnet, "The
expense of spirit in a waste of shame". They demonstrated how several meanings may
be interwoven together within a single line of verse. This inspired Empson, a student
of Richards, and formed the model for a study of multiple meanings in his Seven
Types of Ambiguity (1930). William Empson (1906- 1984) defines ambiguity as "any
verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions" and
classifies it into seven types representing advancing stages of difficulty. In his next
book, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), interest shifts to the total meaning of whole
works; the close readings present here reveal the influence of Marx and Freud.
Empson's later essays, on Shakespeare, Milton and the novel, take due cognizance of
the context of the work. He had no hesitation in going against one of the tenets of
New Criticism, and declared (in 1955) that "A critic should have insight into the mind
of his author, and I don't approve of the attack on 'The Fallacy, of Intentionalism’."
8
Richards's own analysis of specific texts is in the organistic tradition of poetic theory
descending from Aristotle through the Germans to Coleridge. But his literary theory
was quite original: the radical rejection of aesthetics, the resolute reduction of the
work of art to a mental state, the denial of truth-value to poetry, and the defence of
poetry as emotive language ordering our mind and giving us equilibrium and mental
health. I.A.Richards was unusual in combining interest in reader response with
scientific aims, but he took a simple psychological view of the reader. Later critics
have investigated the role of the reader in much more sophisticated terms. The
Constance school of phenomenologists (Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss)
recognize that the reader's cultural and historical situation is a key factor in
responding to the text. Some features of Richards's theory, such as his materialistic
concept of poetic value, or his theory of communication, lack clarity and
sophistication. It remains unclear why a more complex organization of impulses
should be better than a less complex one and how a system of balances can be said to
contribute to the growth of the mind. Nor is it clear that poetry is communication of
specific emotional experiences of an author and that reading a poem enables us to
have an identical or very similar experience.

But many features of Richards's criticism have not become outdated. They have
become established parts of the Anglo-American critical tradition. These are his
empiricism and humanism, and his organicist insistence on close reading, on careful
attention to every detail of a text, on the principle that a literary text, like a living
organism, functions through the interaction of all its constituent parts. In Practical
Criticism, he carefully distinguished between the sense, feeling, tone and intention of
a text. The discussion of rhythm and metre in Principles of Literary Criticism clearly
showed that sound and meaning, metre and sense cannot be separated. .Content is not
something that can be discussed in isolation from the expression. In the words of R,n,
Wellek, "The stimulus that Richards gave to English and American criticism
(particularly Empson and Cleanth Brooks) by turning it resolutely to the question of
language, its meaning and function in poetry, will always insure his position in any
history of modern criticism."

1.8 GLOSSARY

Basic English: A simplified form of English, with a limited vocabulary of about 850
words, intended for international communication.

Bentham: Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a leading British economist. His theory
was called Utilitarianism. He believed that "the greatest happiness of the greatest
number is the foundation of morals and legislation."

Croce: Benedetto Croce (1862-1950) is a leading Italian critic. His most important
book, Aesthetica (1902) propounds a theory of art as intuition which is at the same
time expression. Art for Croce is not a physical fact, but purely a matter of the mind.
There is no distinction between form and content. Croce is not a defender of “art for
9
art’s sake", he believes that art does play a role in society. Croce’s aesthetics has no
place for rhetorical categories, for style, for symbol, for genres, literary history,
psychology, biography, sociology, philosophical interpretation, or stylistics, even for
distinction among the arts

Idealism: in philosophy, the doctrine that considers thought or the idea as the ground
of knowledge or existence; the objects of knowledge are considered to be in some
way dependent on the activity of the mind.

Privileging: to privilege (transitive verb) is to invest something with special

advantages or rights, consider it worthy of special attention.

1.9 QUESTIONS

1. Write a note on communication, and its importance for the artist.

2. Comment on Richards' theory of value.
3. What are the two uses of language? What influence did this theory of Richards
have on other critics?
4. Present an evaluation of 1.A.Richards as a critic.
5. Write a note on Practical Criticism.

1.10 READING LIST

Part I

Richards, I.A. Principles of Literary Criticism. London, 1924. Indian paperback

edition Universal Book Stall, 5, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110001.

----- Practical Criticism. London, 1929. Indian paperback edition Universal I.A.
Richards Book Stall, 5, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 1 10001.

----- Coleridge on Imagination. London, 1934.

----- Science and Poetry. London, 1930.

Part II

Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London, 1930.

Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. New York: New Directions, 1941.

Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950 Vo1.V. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986, pp.

10
UNIT 2 T.S. ELIOT

Structure

2.0 Objectives
2.1 Introduction
2.2 "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
2.3 "The Function of Criticism"
2.4 "The Dissociation of Sensibility" and "The Objective Correlative"
2.5 The Achievement of T.S. Eliot as a Critic
2.6 Let Us Sum Up
2.7 Glossary
2.8 Questions
2.9 Reading List

2.0 OBJECTIVES

In this unit, we will discuss "Tradition and the Individual Talent", the most influential
essay Eliot wrote, and "The Function of Criticism" where he talks about the tools of
the critic. We shall also acquaint ourselves with some critical catchwords he coined-
"The Dissociation of Sensibility" and "The Objective Correlative". Our aim will be to
evaluate his achievement as a critic, and try to gauge his influence on later critics.

2.1 INTRODUCTION

Thomas Steams Eliot (1888-1965) is probably the best known and most influential
English poet of the twentieth century. His work as a critic is equally significant. He
was born in St Louis, Missouri; his parents belonged to New England, from a section
of society which has been called WASP: White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, that is, part
of the mainstream of society which colonized the eastern coast of America. He joined
Harvard University in 1906, obtained his M.A.in 1911, and started work on a doctoral
thesis on the philosophy of F.H.Bradley. In 1912 he was appointed an assistant at
Harvard, but he was already under the influence of the symbolists, and had started
writing poems in the manner of Jules Laforgue. He spent one year (1910-11) in Paris,
and in 1914 he joined Merton College, Oxford. He settled in London, and became a
member of the Anglican Church and a British citizen in 1927, preferring to renounce
his American heritage. He left academic pursuits to earn a living, working first in a
bank, later as an editor with the publishing firm of Faber and Faber. In 1922 he
founded The Criterion, a cultural quarterly, and The Waste Land was published in the
inaugural issue. In 1924 he published Homage to John Dryden, which contained
studies of Dryden and the metaphysical poets. This was followed by For Lancelot

11
Andrews: Essays on Style and Order (1928) in which he .announced himself to be
"classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion." His major
books of criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism (1933), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949) and On Poetry
and Poets (1957). I am sure you are already familiar with his achievements as a poet
and dramatist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

T.S.Eliot's critical output was quite diverse; he wrote theoretical pieces as well as
studies of particular authors. In "To Criticize the Critic", a lecture delivered at Leeds
University in 1961, Eliot divided his prose writings into three periods. During the
first, he was writing for journals like The Egoist; the main influences on him were
Ezra Pound, and Eliot's teacher Irving Babbitt, who had introduced him to the
philosophy of Humanism at Harvard. The second period, roughly from 1918 to 1930,
was primarily one of regular contributions to the Athenaeum and the Times Literary
Supplement; the third period was one of lectures and addresses, after Eliot had
established himself as the leading poet of the age. As he grew older, he produced a lot
of social and religious criticism; books like The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)
shed light on his literary criticism and poetry. The later writings reveal a certain
tiredness, a refusal to take his role as poet-critic seriously. He often suggested in his
later lectures that he ought not to be taken too seriously. His second lecture on
Milton, delivered in 1947, contradicts his first one, delivered in 1936, which declared
that "Milton's poetry could only be an influence for the worse, upon any poet
whatsoever" and accused Milton of "having done damage to the English language
from which it has not wholly recovered". His convoluted style of qualification and
reservations grows more complex over the years. In the words of George Watson, (he
is commenting on Eliot's two lectures on Milton), "Argument advances crabwise."
His first book, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920), containing
seminal essays like "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet", is central to
his achievement as a critic. It is this early work which influenced the New Critics.

2.2 "TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT"

"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) clearly expresses Eliot's concepts about
poetry and the importance of tradition. Eliot emphasizes the need for critical thinking
--"criticism is as inevitable as breathing". He feels that it is unfortunate that the word
"tradition" is mentioned only with pejorative implications, as when we call some poet
"too traditional." He questions the habit of praising a poet primarily for those
elements in his work which are more individual and differentiate him from others.
According to T.S.Eliot, even the most "individual" parts of a poet's work may be
those which are most alive with the influence of his poetic ancestors. Eliot stresses
the objective and intellectual element. The whole of past literature will be "in the
bones" of the poet with the true historical sense, " a feeling that the whole of the
literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own
country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order." No poet
has his complete meaning alone. For proper evaluation, you must set a poet, for
contrast and comparison, among the dead poets. Eliot envisages a dynamic
12
relationship between past and present writers. "The existing monuments form an ideal
order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really
new) work of art among them." An artist can be judged only by the standards of the
past; this does not mean the standards of dead critics. It means a judgement when two
things, the old and the new, are measured by each other. To some extent, this
resembles Matthew Arnold's "touchstone”; the "ideal order" formed by the "existing
monuments" provide the standard, a land of touchstone, for evaluation. As with
Arnold's touchstones, Eliot's ideal order is subjective and in need of modification
from time to time.

Eliot lays stress on the artist knowing "the mind of Europe -- the mind of his own
country--a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own
private mind". But he does not mean pedantic knowledge, he means a consciousness
of the past, and some persons have a greater sensitivity to this historical awareness.
As Eliot states, with epigrammatic brevity, "Some can absorb knowledge, the more
tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch
than most men could from the whole British Museum." Throughout Eliot's poetry and
criticism, we find this emphasis on the artist surrendering himself to some larger
authority. His later political and religious writings too valorized authority. It is
interesting that Eliot always worked within his own cultural space: religion meant
Christianity, while literature, culture and history meant exclusively European
literature, culture or history. Tradition, for Eliot, means an awareness of the history of
Europe, not as dead facts but as all ever-changing yet changeless presence, constantly
interacting subconsciously with the individual poet.

He wants the poet to merge his personality with the tradition. "The progress of the
artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." He suggests
the analogy of the catalyst in a scientific laboratory for this process of
depersonalization. The mind of the poet is a medium in which experiences can enter
into new combinations. When oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence
of a filament of platinum, they form sulphuric acid. This combination takes place
only in the presence of platinum, which is the catalyst. But the sulphuric acid shows
no trace of platinum, which remains unaffected. The catalyst facilitates the chemical
change, but does not participate in it, and remains unchanged. Eliot compares the
mind of the poet to the shred of platinum, which will "digest and transmute the
passions which are its material". Eliot shifts the critical focus from the poet to the
poetry, and declares, "Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not
upon the poet but upon the poetry." Eliot sees the poet's mind as "a receptacle for
seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until
all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together." He
says that concepts like "sublimity", "greatness" or "intensity" of emotion are
irrelevant. It is not the greatness of the emotion that matters, but the intensity of the
artistic process, the pressure under which the artistic fusion takes place, that is
important. In this way he rejects the Romantic emphasis on 'genius' and the
exceptional mind.

13
Eliot refutes the idea that poetry is the expression of the personality of the poet.
Experiences important for the man may have no place in his poems, and vice-versa.
The emotions occasioned by events in the personal life of the poet are not important.
What matters is the emotion transmuted into poetry, the feelings expressed in the
poetry. "Emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those
familiar to him". Eliot says that Wordsworth's formula is wrong. (I am sure you
would remember Wordsworth's comments on poetry in the Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling: it takes its origins
from emotion recollected in tranquility.") For Eliot, poetry is not recollection of
feeling, "it is a new thing resulting from the concentration of a very great number of
experiences . . . it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of
deliberation." Eliot believes that "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an
escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from
personality." For him, the emotion of art is impersonal, and the artist can achieve this
impersonality only by cultivating the historical sense, by being conscious of the
tradition.

It is now generally believed that Eliot's idea of tradition is rather narrow in two
respects. First, he's talking of simply the poetic tradition and neglects the fact that
even the poetic tradition is a complex amalgam of written and oral poetry and the
elements that go into them. It was only in later writings that he realised the fact that in
the making of verse many elements are involved. In his writings on poetic drama he
gives evidence of having broadened his scope.

Second, Eliot is neglecting other traditions that go into social formations. When he
later wrote 'Religion and Literature', he gives more scope to non-poetic elements of
tradition. On these considerations one can say that he develops his ideas on tradition
throughout his literary career - right up to the time he wrote 'Notes Towards a
Definition of Culture' in which tradition is more expansive than in his earlier writings.

2.3 "THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM"

Early in his career, Eliot had declared, "The poet critic is criticizing poetry in order to
create poetry" ("The Perfect Critic", 1920). Eliot's criticism was subsidiary to his
creative writing. We can consider him Dryden's successor because his critical work
serves the purpose of introducing and justifying his own practice as a poet and
playwright. He also shared Dryden's classical leanings. In "The Function of
Criticism" (1928, Eliot unambiguously states his views on criticism, and on the
methodology it should adopt.

He begins the essay by repeating his views on tradition expressed in "Tradition and
the Individual Talent". That essay postulated a certain order of literary masterpieces
which constituted tradition. It is only in relation to this tradition that individual artists
have their significance. He says that criticism too requires the same sacrifice of the
ego.

14
He defines criticism as "the commentation and exposition of works of art by means
of written words." Criticism, unlike literature, is not an autotelic activity, it is
dependent on literature. The purpose of criticism is "the elucidation of works of art
and the correction of taste." Commenting on the prevailing state of criticism, Eliot
bemoans the fact that criticism, "far from being a simple and orderly field of
beneficent activity" is a field where critics excel in opposing each other. For Eliot,
criticism should be marked by "cooperative labour." "The critic . . . should endeavour
to discipline his personal prejudices and cranks ... and compose his differences with
as many of his fellows as possible, in the common pursuit of true judgement." In the
New Critics in America, we find a demonstration of this co-operative venture. And
much of Leavis's criticism is expressed in terms of friendly debate, as if he were
discussing the work with a colleague, and trying to reach a consensus. A collection of
his essays has the very apt title, The Common Pursuit; the title pays a graceful
compliment to Eliot's theory of criticism, and also demonstrates the use of this
collaborative method.

Eliot refutes a fellow critic Middleton Murray's suggestion that progress is possible
by following the "Inner Voice". He believes that following the "Inner Voice" is only
an excuse for "doing as one likes." He feels that Matthew Arnold is among those who
value "tradition and the accumulated wisdom of time." According to Eliot, Arnold
distinguishes too sharply between the "creative" and "critical", he overlooks the
importance of criticism in the work of creativity. Eliot believes that "the larger part of
the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour: the labour of
sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as
much critical as creative." He says "some creative writers are superior to others solely
because their critical faculty is superior." He believes that the criticism employed by a
good writer on his own work "is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism." The
vast amount of critical labour may not be apparent, it may have "flashed in the very
heat of creation." Just because it is not obvious, and we have no way of knowing what
goes on in the mind of the creative artist, we should not assume that this critical
activity is absent. Here Eliot is presenting his concept of artistic: activity; in
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" , he had talked about "impersonality" and
criticized Wordsworth's concept of poetry as a "spontaneous overflow". Here Eliot
attacks the idea that "the great artist is an unconscious artist". Art does not arise just
from inspiration; a lot of effort has to go into perfecting it, "expunging, correcting,
testing",

According to Eliot, "The critical activity finds its highest, its true fulfilment in a kind
of union with creation in the labour of the artist." It follows that creative artists would
be the best critics: He admits that at one time he believed that "the only critics worth
reading are the critics who practised and practised well, the art of which they wrote."
He says that what gives the practitioner's criticism its special force is his "highly
developed sense of fact," The best critics can make nebulous feelings into something
"precise, tractable, under control."

15
Eliot then considers the importance of interpretation. A critic may feel that he has the
true understanding of a work, but there is no way of confirming this interpretation.
Eliot feels that such interpretations are of no use; far more useful would be to put the
reader in possession of facts about the work to enable him to respond to it fully.
"Interpretation is only legitimate when it is not interpretation at all, but merely putting
the reader in possession of facts which he would otherwise have missed."

Eliot has already said that criticism is a common pursuit. Now he tells us how to go
about it. "Comparison and analysis, I have said before, and Remy de Gourmont has
said before me, are the chief tools of the critic." But one must know what to compare
arid what to analyze, we should not reduce it to a mechanical exercise, counting the
"number of times giraffes are mentioned in the English novel." He is against
interpreters who can find things in the poem which are not there. He uses the
metaphor of medical dissection to emphasize his point: "Comparison and analysis
need only the cadavers on the table; but interpretation is always producing parts of the
body from its pockets, and fixing them in place." The text is compared to the dead
body on the operation table; when an interpreter puts ideas of his own making into the
reading of the poem, he is compared to a doctor bringing in parts from outside when
conducting a post mortem. Eliot feels that anything which produces "a fact even of
the lowest order about a work of art" is better. With a trace of wit, he states, "We
assume, of course, that we are masters and not servants of facts, and that we know
that the discovery of Shakespeare's laundry bills would not be of much use to us." But
he adds that we should reserve judgement on the futility of research, it is possible that
some genius may appear in the future who would make good use of even trivial facts.
He feels that "facts cannot corrupt taste", but impressionistic criticism, expressing
opinion or fancy (he suggests Coleridge's comments on Hamlet as an example) can
be harmful. He ends the essay by warning us against an ever present danger of
criticism: "the multiplication of critical books and essays may create . . a vicious taste
for reading about works of art instead of reading the works themselves, it may supply
opinion instead of educating taste."

Eliot anchors criticism squarely in the text and is wary of opinionated views. In this
respect Eliot echoes some contemporary theorists who believe that a text is animated
by the reader and the critic only facilitates the exercise.

2.4 "THE DISSOCIATION OF SENSIBILITY" AND "THE

OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE"

In "The Frontiers of Criticism", a lecture delivered at the University of Minnesota in

1956, T.S.Eliot referred to "a few notorious phrases which have had a truly
embarrassing success in the world" (On Poetry and Poets: 106). He had in mind "the
dissociation of sensibility" and "the objective correlative". These phrases occur in the
essays on the Metaphysical poets and Hamlet respectively, but the concepts can be
found in some other essays too. Students should read some other essays of Eliot; do
not confine yourself to the material provided in the reader. Most of the essays
collected in On Poetry and Poets are quite interesting. The book provides a cross-
16
section of his work over the years, and we can see the slight changes in Eliot's critical
stance over four decades. The two essays on Milton (the first one written in 1936, the
second in 1947) reveal how his work has become more conventional over the years,
he is no longer an iconoclast. The essay on "Johnson as Critic and Poet" (1944) would
be a good ad to your study of the critical work of Dr Johnson. Of the essays in the
first section of the book (I hope you will read "What is a Classic?", "Poetry and
Drama" and "Three Voices of Poetry") the most interesting is "The Frontiers of
Criticism". Eliot provides a fine overview of his own achievement as a critic, and a
survey of literary criticism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Eliot's essay, "The Metaphysical Poets", was occasioned by H.J.C.Grierson’s

anthology, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century. Eliot begins
by pointing out that it is "extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry." There
are marked individual differences among the poets of the period: Donne (and Marvell
and Bishop King after him) have a late Elizabethan quality, reminiscent of Chapman.
The courtly poetry is in the tradition of Ben Johnson, while the devotional verse of
Herbert, Vaughan and Crashaw represents a third strain. One of the devices
characteristic of Metaphysical poetry was the "elaboration of a figure of speech to the
farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it." Eliot examines such a Metaphysical
conceit from a poem by Donne, but observes that a similar telescoping of images can
be found in Shakespeare and later playwrights like Middleton, Webster and Tourneur.

In his search for something which would define the metaphysical school of poetry,
Eliot turns to Samuel Johnson. Dr Johnson, who first called them "metaphysical
poets" in his life of Cowley, criticized their poetry because "the most heterogeneous
ideas are yoked by violence together." He implied that the ideas are yoked together, it
is not true meeting or union. Eliot defends the metaphysical poets by pointing out that
"a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the
poet's mind is omnipresent in poetry." He gives an example of such a contrast of ideas
by quoting a few lines from Johnson's own poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes. He
then looks at the poem "Exequy" by Lord Herbert, which is considered
"metaphysical", but cannot find anything which fits Johnson's observation.

Eliot now tries a different approach; he assumes that the metaphysical poets were in
the mainstream of English poetry, and their poetry was distinguished by a valuable
quality "which subsequently disappeared, but ought not to have disappeared." Eliot
says that these poets possessed a unified sensibility. Poets up to the seventeenth
century thought and felt and saw together but then a fatal split occurred. After the
triumph of scientific rationalism, poets only thought (as they did in the eighteenth
century). In the Romantic period, they only felt. In the later nineteenth century there
seems to be, according to Eliot, a return to thinking, or rather a confusion (and not
fusion) of thought and feeling which Eliot disparagingly calls "rumination". The later
Elizabethan and early Jacobean dramatists were men "who incorporated their
erudition into their sensibility; their mode of feeling was directly and freshly altered
by their reading and thought. In Chapman especially there is a direct sensuous
apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling, which is exactly what
we find in Donne." He compares passages by Chapman and Lord Herbert of
17
Cherbury with poetry written by Victorians like Tennyson and Browning, and finds a
basic difference in sensibility. "It is the difference between the intellectual poet and
the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets and they think; but they do not
feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an
experience; it modifies his sensibility."

According to Eliot, "the poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the
sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any land of
experience. In the seventeenth century, a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which
we have never recovered." The language became more refined, but the feeling
became more crude in later poets. Eliot suggested at first that this split was
"aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton
and Dryden." But later he recognized that the process was much more complex. In his
second essay on Milton, Eliot said that "to lay the burden on the shoulders of Milton
and Dryden was a mistake." The split could not be accounted for in purely literary
terms, "We must seek the causes in Europe and not in England alone." But he
continued to believe in this theory of dissociation of sensibility, and speculates on the
difference it would have made to the course of English poetry if ''the current of poetry
descended in a direct line from them." He feels that we would have had poets like the
metaphysicals, who are "more mature". The trouble with English poetry is that the
"greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and Dryden, triumphed with a
dazzling disregard of the soul." Critics say that we should "look into our hearts and
write." But Eliot feels that easy emotionalism is not the answer, the heart alone will
not do, "One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive
tracts."

Eliot feels that it is wrong to look at Donne and his school as "witty", “quaint”, or
"obscure", or think of them as "metaphysical". The modern poet can learn from them
for they were the mainstream of English poetry. "Our civilization comprehends great
variety and complexity" and the poet must become more comprehensive, more
allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his
meaning. He shows how French symbolist poets such as Laforgue have turned to
devices which resemble the Metaphysical conceit.

Eliot's essay played an important role in rehabilitating the Metaphysical Poets. Many
contemporary critics, like F.R.Leavis, agreed with his theory of the "dissociation of
sensibility." Cleanth Brooks suggested that Hobbes was responsible for this
dissociation, while L.C.Knights suggests that we should go further back in time, it is
there in Bacon. According to Frank Kermode, we find a dissociation however far
back we look; he doubts whether such a split ever occurred. He expresses his
objection to Eliot's theory in a very persuasive manner in his essay "Dissociation of
Sensibility: Modern Symbolist Readings of Literary History". A golden age of unified
sensibility never existed. Not only in England, in other literatures too we find this
nostalgia for a golden past. Eliot suggests that this dissociation happened round about
the time of the English civil war. But Kermode finds that "However far back one
goes, one seems to find the symptoms of dissociation -- there is little historical

18
propriety in treating it as a seventeenth century event." Kermode feels that this theory
was invented only to give weight to the Imagist theory of aesthetics.

The phrase "objective correlative" was first used by T.S. Eliot in his essay on Hamlet.
The phrase occurs, with a very different meaning, in the American aesthetician
Washington Allston's Lectures on Art (1850). But Eliot owes nothing to Allston – he
was not even aware that the phrase had been used. Eliot was probably influenced by
George Santayana's use of "correlative objects". According to Eliot, "the only way of
expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other
words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of
that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in
sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." He gives
examples of this "exact equivalence" from Shakespeare's successful plays, such as
Macbeth: "you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep
has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory
impressions." Hamlet was a failure because Shakespeare had been unable to find a
proper chain of events or set of words to evoke the emotions. Eliot says that in Lady
Macbeth's sleepwalking scene, and in the speech that Macbeth makes when he hears
of his wife's death, the words are completely adequate to the state of mind, whereas in
Hamlet the prince is "dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in
excess of the facts as they appear."

Before Eliot, Ezra Pound and T.E. Hulme too approached the problem of artistic
representation in a similar way. Pound said that "poetry provides equations, like
mathematics, but equations for emotions." T.E. Hulme (1883- 1917) said in his
"Lecture on Modern Poetry": "The poet is moved by a certain landscape, he selects
from that certain images which, put into juxtaposition in separate lines, serve to
suggest and evoke the state he feels." In Eliot's account, the artist presents the
"formula" of a particular emotion. There is an "exact equivalence" between an object
or situation and the emotion it is supposed to evoke.

Eliot was concerned with the problems of artistic expression. He refers to the
Metaphysical Poets struggling "to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and
feeling." "Tradition and the Individual Talent" had declared that artistic expression
was not a simple matter of presenting the artist's emotions. He talked of a "continual
self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." The poet has to "transmute his
personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal
and impersonal", and this can be done only by finding an objective correlative.

Whatever may be Eliot's justification, the fact is that Eliot wanted to escape from
direct expression of emotion--this is in keeping with his anti-romantic objective. But
it is difficult in practice to find equivalence, if that were possible. Language would
lose its suggestiveness, its power to evoke not only the feelings intended by the poet
but other feelings which inhere in language as a social medium of communication.

2.5 THE ACHIEVEMENT OF T.S.ELIOT AS A CRITIC

19
Eliot's influence as a poet and critic has done a lot to establish a climate favorable to
objective criticism, eschewing the nebulous impressionism of the preceding age. His
best critical writing analyzes and clarifies the theoretical and technical problems
which had a bearing on his writing of poetry. He made an important contribution to
ideas concerning the integrity of poetry, the process of poetic composition, the
importance of tradition to the maturing of the individual talent, the relation of the past
and the present, and the fusion of feeling and thought. Eliot as a critic can be
considered a successor of Matthew hold, because he assumed the role of a guardian of
culture; like Arnold, he laid stress on impartiality, and proper evaluation of a poet.
And like Arnold, he became a legislator of literary culture, as his later writings
testify.

The earlier Eliot staunchly defended the autonomy of art, arguing against linking up
art and religion or art and morality. But later he started believing in the importance of
the poet's beliefs. R,n, Wellek points out that Eliot "advocated a double standard of
criticism: artistic on the one hand and moral-philosophical-theological on the other."
Eliot declared (in Essays Ancient and Modern, 1936) "In an age like our own . . . it is
the more necessary . . . to scrutinize works of imagination, with explicit ethical and
theological standards. The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined solely by
literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be
determined only by literary standards."

Many fellow critics have expressed their dissatisfaction with Eliot's criticism, in spite
of its great influence. Yvor Winters categorically states, "Eliot is a theorist who has
repeatedly contradicted himself on every important issue that he has touched…many
of them [the contradictions] occur within the same book or even within the same
essay." F.R.Leavis grants Eliot's eminence as a poet, but feels that his criticism falls
short of the "consciousness that one thinks of as necessary to the great creative
writer." According to Leavis, "some of the ideas, attitudes, and valuations put into
currency by Eliot were arbitrary." He says that "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
is "notable for its ambiguities, its logical inconsequence, its pseudo-precisions, its
fallaciousness, and the aplomb of its equivocations and its specious cogency" (pp.
178-79). He attacks the "falseness" of Eliot's doctrine of impersonality, and says that
it is designed to eliminate the conception of the artist as an individual distinguished
by his openness to life.

Lack of clarity is another common charge. W.K.Wimsatt says of "Tradition and the
Individual Talent":

This celebrated early essay, despite its forceful suggestiveness, the

smoothness and fullness of its definition of the poet's impersonality was a
highly ambiguous statement. Therein, no doubt, consisted something of its
pregnancy. In this essay as poet and critic Eliot is saying two things about
three ideas (man, poet and poem) and saying them simultaneously. He is
saying that a poet ought to depersonalize his raw experience, transcend the
immediacy of the suffering man. At the same time, he is saying that the reader
20
 ought to read the poem impersonally, as an achieved expression, not
personally, with attendant inquiries into the sufferings, the motives of the man
behind the poem. The idea 'poet' as Eliot employs it in this essay is sometimes
the antithesis of 'man' and sometimes the antithesis of 'poem'.
(p.118)

The attempt to minimize the role of the poet's personality leads to confusion, as two
views of the mind emerge from this essay. The mind is presented as an agent of
change, it is an active force which transmutes experience, Eliot refers to "the mind
which creates". But it is also referred to as a catalyst, which facilitates change without
itself changing. His further statement only confuses the issue further, when he says,
"the more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who
suffers and the mind which creates."

In many places there is a gap between his theoretical formulations and his practical
criticism. He insisted that critics should not indulge in interpretation or judgement:
"The critic must not coerce, and he must not make judgements of worse or better"
(The Sacred Wood, p.10). But his best essays, whether on the metaphysical poets,
Marvell or Milton, make clear value judgements. Even the concept of a tradition
implies an hierarchy, for it is the best works which make up the tradition that Eliot
considers so important,

2.6 LET US SUM UP

T.S.Eliot’s critical pronouncements stimulated a revaluation of various literary

reputations. He brought about the re-appraisal of metaphysical poetry and sixteenth
and seventeenth century drama. His successful practice as a poet gave special weight
to his pronouncement as a critic. His later prose writing gives more attention to
society and culture, and the literary essays and lectures of the later part of his life tend
to be more conventional than his early work. "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
presents a view of the great artist as part of tradition. Eliot refutes the concept of
poetry as an expression of emotion, and lays stress on its impersonality. He used the
phrase "the objective correlative'' to describe how emotion can be represented in
literature."The Metaphysical Poets" presented the concept of a "dissociation of
sensibility and declared that "poets in our civilization . . . must be difficult"; these
comments shed as much light on Eliot's own poetry as on the process of literary
creation. His essay, "The Function of Criticism", discusses the tools, like "comparison
and analysis" which have been used by most New Critics in their analysis of literary
texts.
I
2.7 GLOSSARY

autotelic: having or being a purpose in itself, not dependent on other things for its
intention or usefulness.

21
Bacon: Francis Bacon (1561- 1626), Elizabethan man of letters. His Essays and The
Advancement of Learning are good examples of early English prose.

catalyst: in chemistry, a substance that without itself undergoing any change, starts a
reaction or increases the rate of a reaction; metaphorically, a person or thing that
causes change.

epigrammatic: having the quality of an epigram, a short witty poem, proverb or

expression.

Hobbes: Thomas Hobbes (1588- 1679), author of Leviathan, one of the earliest books
of political economy.

iconoclast: literally, a person who breaks religious images used in worship. Now the
word is more commonly used for its metaphorical meaning, a person who attacks
cherished beliefs or established reputations.

Plutarch: The Greek historian Plutarch (c. 46-114 A.D.) wrote about important
Greeks and Romans in his Parallel Lives. He started with contemporary historical
figures like Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony, and went back to mythical figures like
Theseus, in ancient Athens, and Romulus, founder of Rome. Shakespeare's Roman
plays were inspired by his reading of Plutarch's Lives, translated into English by
North.

valorized: to valorize is to raise the value of something, to invest it with special

significance.

2.8 QUESTIONS

1. How far do you agree with Eliot's view that poetry is not an expression of
personality but an escape from personality?

2. Discuss Eliot's view of the relationship between the individual poet and the
tradition.

3. Write a short note on Eliot's concept of history.

4. What is Eliot's definition of criticism? What guidelines does he give for the
practice of criticism?

5. Does Eliot's critical practice conform to the guidelines he has given for the critic?

6. Write short notes on

(a) dissociation of sensibility
(b) objective correlative.

22
 7. Write a critical commentary on Eliot's essay, "The Metaphysical Poets."

2.9 READING LIST

Part I

Eliot, T.S. "The Function of Criticism”*

----- Excerpt from "Hamlet"*
-----" Tradition and the Individual Talent”*
-----"The Metaphysical Poets”*
----- On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber, 1957.
----- Selected Essays. 1932. London: Faber, 1950.

Part II

F.R.Leavis. "T.S.Eliot as Critic", Anna Karenina and Other Essays, London: Chatto
& Windus, 1967, pp.177-189.

Clarke, Graham, ed. T.S.Eliot: Critical Assessments Volume IV: The Criticism and
General Essays. London: Christopher Helm, 1990. The following essays:
"T.S.Eliot or the Illusion f Reaction" Yvor Winter.
"T.S.Eliot and Tradition in Criticism" Stanley Edgar Hyman.
"T.S.Eliot” Raymond Williams.

Kermode, Frank. "Dissociation of Sensibility: Modern Symbolist Readings of

Literary History" from The Romantic Image (1957). Reprinted in Literary Criticism:
A Reading. Ed. B.Das and J.M.Mohanty. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985,
pp.369- 392..

Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950 Vo1.V. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986, pp. 176-220.

Wimsatt, W.K. "Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited." Reprinted in On Literary Intention:

Critical Essays. Ed. David Newton-de Molina. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1976.

23
UNIT 3 F.R. LEAVIS

Structure

3.0 Objectives
3.1 Introduction
3.2 "Introduction" from Revaluation
3.3 "Literary Criticism and Philosophy"
3.4 A Representative Essay: "Milton"
3.5 The Achievement of F.R.Leavis
3.6 Glossary
3.7 Questions
3.8 Reading List

3.0 OBJECTIVES

In this unit, we shall acquaint ourselves with the literary criticism of F.R.Leavis. Our
aim will be to evaluate his achievement as a critic, and consider to what extent he can
be said to belong to the school of New Critics.

3.1 INTRODUCTION

Frank Raymond Leavis (1895-1978) was born at Cambridge, where he spent most of
his life. He was educated at Perse School, and had just won a scholarship to study
history at Emmanuel College when the First World War broke out. He worked as a
stretcher bearer on the battlefields of France, and resumed his academic career in
1919. In his second year at Cambridge University, he moved from history to the
newly introduced subject of English. He submitted his Ph.D. in 1924, and started
working as a lecturer at Cambridge. He became Fellow at Downing College,
Cambridge, in 1937, and was University Reader in English from 1959 to 1962. He
started the literary quarterly Scrutiny in 1932, and edited it till it ceased publication in
1953. He wrote widely on literature as well as popular culture: publications include
Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930), New Bearings in English Poetry
(1932), Revaluation (1936), The Great Traditi0n:George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph
Conrad (1948), D.H.Lawrence: Novelist (1955), Dickens the Novelist (1970, written
in collaboration with his wife Q.D.Leavis) and The Living Principle: "English" as a
Discipline of Thought (1975). Nor Shall My Sword, 1970.

He was above all a teacher, and preached and practised an approach to literature
which advocated close attention to the text: sharp discrimination in evaluating the text
was all important to him. He taught literature with a missionary zeal: he felt that the
study of literature was the only thing that could save us from the dehumanisation
24
inherent in the impersonal civilization of the technological age. He always insisted
that "Literature matters because life matters." His enthusiasm drew many students to
him, and his "disciples" can be found in English faculties throughout the
Commonwealth. His widespread influence on English studies in the second and third
quarters of the twentieth century is not due to his hooks alone: his classroom lectures
and Scrutiny played an equally important role.

Leavis's early books, on the English poetic tradition, clearly show the influence of
T.S.Eliot. New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) dismissed the popular acclaim
accorded to Victorian and Georgian poets. He follows Eliot in finding in the
Metaphysical poets the qualities needed in modern poetry, and values Hopkins,
T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound. Leavis's concern with "concrete realization" and his
emphasis on a writer's using the full resources of the English language is obvious
even in this early book, in the terms in which he praises Hopkins. In his later work,
Leavis repeatedly attacked Eliot's criticism, especially the theory of impersonality
proposed in "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Leavis was "a man of strong
convictions, and even resentments, of harsh polemical manners, who did not practice
diplomacy" (Wellek, p.241). He made many enemies, especially in the literary
establishment at Cambridge, and they responded by trying to marginalize him. But we
need not concern ourselves with such details of his personal life and career; in this
unit we shall examine his writing to try and understand how he became, with Eliot,
the most influential critic of the age. His criticism of fiction owes nothing to
T.S.Eliot.

His books on English fiction represent the most original part of his contribution. He
recognized that the novel deserved the kind of critical attention to detail which had
been given only to poetry or drama. The Great Tradition demonstrated that novels
can, and should be, analysed in terms of the words on the page. He declared:

A novel, like a poem, is made of words; there is nothing else one can
point to. We talk of a novelist as "creating characters", but the process
of "creation" is one of putting words together. We discuss the quality
of his "vision", but the only critical judgements we can attach directly
to observable parts of his work concern particular arrangements of
words -- the quality of the response they evoke. Criticism, that is,
must be in the first place (and never cease being) a matter of
sensibility, of responding sensitively and with precise discrimination
to the words on the page. But it must, of course, go on to deal with
larger effects.

Leavis hardly ever theorized. Stray thoughts on his critical method can be found
scattered through his empirical work. The above piece, though it was written in the
context of the study of novels, describes the method he uses in the study of a lyric, a
long poem, or a play by Shakespeare. He never talks of "vision" without particular
reference to the "particular arrangements of words." For him, literary criticism is
primarily a question of "responding sensitively and with precise discrimination to the
words on the page."
25
The introduction he wrote to Revaluation is one of the few occasions, when he has
discussed his methodology. The correspondence with R,n, Wellek (published in
Scrutiny and reprinted in The Common Pursuit) is another rare instance. Let us
examine these two pieces of writing. Then we shall read a chapter from Revaluation,
to get a taste of Leavis's typical aggressive mode of criticism, designed to provoke
controversy and debate.

3.2 "INTRODUCTION" FROM REVALUATION

In his introduction, Leavis tells us that the book was written as a companion piece to
New Bearings in English Poetry, published four years earlier. That book described
contemporary poetry. Revaluation is its complement, an account of the past of
English poetry, for a "full perspective" can be provided only if the present is
correlated with the past. Leavis says that it is "the business of the critic" to see the
poetry of the present as the continuation and development of the past. The poetry of
the past is alive only in terms of its relevance to us, the present day readers. He plans
to present the main lines of development of English poetry, from Shakespeare to
Keats. Any worthwhile criticism has to be from a clearly defined point of view.
Leavis's perspective, naturally, will be of a person living in the present, though he
will try to make it "as little merely individual" as possible. Needless to say, in the last
report, he becomes very personal in his judgements and valorizes these judgements as
beyond dispute.

He next takes up the question of method. "No treatment of poetry is worth much that
does not keep very close to the concrete." The critic should work in terms of
"particular analysis--analysis of poems or passages, and to say nothing that cannot be
related immediately to judgements about predicable texts." This is the method he has
used in all his criticism. Even studies of long novels like Middlemarch are
distinguished by the way he never strays from the text. Every critical study by Leavis
is full of quotations: he never makes a general statement unsupported by lines from
the text. Ian MacKillop compares his technique to that of a lecturer who illustrates his
talk with visuals: projected slides, and now transparencies or graphics. In
Revaluation, for instance, he can make evaluative comparisons by juxtaposing one
extract with another. For instance, the drawbacks of Shelley's play the Cenci are fully
demonstrated when he places extracts from Shelley side by side with the
Shakespearean passages which inspired them. The method makes for a very lively
presentation, full of wit and humour.

He proposes to discuss tradition not as an abstract concept but in terms of the

concrete. Just as he evaluates an individual poet in terms of representative pieces of
his work, "one deals with tradition in terms of representative poets". He then briefly
justifies his choice of poets, and the pages he devotes to them. He has devoted a
chapter to "The Line of Wit" rather than to Donne because he has received a lot of
attention as the most important of the Metaphysical poets (Leavis must have been
thinking of critical studies by T.S.Eliot, H.J.C.Grierson and Helen Gardner). Dryden,
26
a relatively simple poet, has received more attention than he deserves, but the range
of Pope's poetry has not received its due, so he has a chapter on Pope. There is no
chapter on Shakespeare, because Leavis feels that "Shakespeare is too large a fact to
be dealt with in that way." But the book is full of recurrent references to him. There is
no chapter on Spenser because his place in the tradition is clear; his influence is
brought out through incidental references to him in the chapters on Milton and Keats.
There are individual chapters on Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, but none on the
Victorians, because "they do not lend themselves readily to the critical method of this
book." Leavis feels that the defect is not in the method but in their poetry," their verse
doesn't offer, characteristically, any very interesting local life for inspection."

Every chapter in Revaluation has many "Notes"; these appendices help to clarify
points raised in the main essay. Thus many poets not treated in detail in the chapter
(Blake, Byron and his satire, Coleridge etc.) are the objects of very interesting
comments in the notes, which are sometimes small chapters in themselves.

Leavis ends the "Introduction" with his concept of how a critic should function. His
duty is “to perceive for himself, to make the finest and sharpest relevant
discriminations, and to state his feelings as responsibly, clearly and forcibly as
possible." Leavis's own work is marked by force and clarity. He believes that even if
the critic is wrong in his valuation, he has served the business of criticism, because he
is open to correction, he has profitably participated in the debate. Criticism is "the
profitable discussion of literature." He stresses the importance of collaboration.

3.3 LITERARY CRITICISM AND PHILOSOPHY

The essay "Literary Criticism and Philosophy", first published in Scrutiny in 1937,
was a response to R,n, Wellek's suggestion that Leavis should spell out the theoretical
basis of his criticism. After reviewing Revaluation, the eminent critic and literary
historian Wellek wrote:

Allow me to sketch your ideal of poetry, your "norm" with which you
measure every poet: your poetry must be in serious relation to
actuality, it must have a firm grasp on the actual, of the object, it must
be in relation to life, it must not be cut off from direct vulgar living, it
should be normally human, testify to spiritual health and sanity, it
should not be personal in the sense of indulging in personal dreams
and fantasies, there should be no emotion for its own sake in it. . .but
a sharp, concrete realization, a sensuous particularity. The language
of your poetry must not be cut off from speech, should not flatter the
singing voice, should not be merely mellifluous. . . . I would ask you
to defend this position more abstractly.
(Scrutiny 5, March 1937)

Wellek has provided a good summary of Leavis's assumption derived from his critical
practice. In his reply, Leavis expresses his views on the discipline of literary
27
criticism, and pleads that by making precise discriminations, he has advanced theory,
"even if I haven't done the theorizing." Leavis says that literary criticism is a "distinct
and separate discipline", quite different from philosophy and its abstract speculations.
The reading demanded by poetry is of a different kind from that demanded by
philosophy. The critic is the ideal reader of poetry. The critic is (of course) concerned
with evaluation, but judgement is not a question of applying an external "norm". The
critic's aim should be to realize as completely and sensitively as possible the
experience that is given in the words. "The business of the literary critic is to attain a
peculiar completeness of response". A critic should observe a strict relevance in
developing this response into commentary, and guard against premature generalizing.

Leavis defends his practice by pointing out that his critical assumptions are implicit in
his work. "If I avoided such generalities, it was because they seemed too clumsy to be
of any use. I thought I had provided something better." He feels that the best way of
presenting theoretical principles is to show them at work in practical criticism. He
believes in working in terms of "concrete judgements and particular analyses". Leavis
thinks of criticism as a cooperative effort, in terms of discussing the text with fellow
critics. His method to quote him, is "This--doesn't it?--bears such a relation to that;
this kind of thing--don't you find it so--wears better than that' etc."

To reduce his principles to abstract statements would be to take away their precision,
and make them "clumsy and inadequate". Leavis wrote that he believes in
demonstrating his critical principles, not in stating them: "I do not argue in general
terms that there should be 'no emotion for its own sake, no afflatus, no mere generous
emotionality, no luxury in pain and joy'; but by choice, arrangement and analysis of
concrete examples I give those phrases a precision of meaning they couldn't have got
in any other way. There is, I hope, a chance that I may in this way have advanced
theory, even if I haven't done the theorizing."

Yet in his own way, Leavis does offer a 'theory' even though it is not conceptualized.
The assumptions which guide his judgement of poets and novelists are the nearest to a
framework even if they cannot be abstracted into a philosophical theory.

3.4 A REPRESENTATIVE ESSAY: "MILTON"

Leavis looked upon criticism as "the common pursuit of true judgement" . . . a place
for quiet cooperative labour" (in the words of T.S.Eliot). Many of his essays begin
with a discussion of other critics' views: he either corroborates or violently disagrees.
The second chapter of Revaluation, "Milton's Verse”, begins with quoting Eliot,
Middleton Murry and Alan Tate. Leavis supports Eliot's denunciation of Milton, and
takes issue with Tate who believes that if we do not like Milton, it is because we are
prejudiced against his mythology. Leavis maintains that his dislike of Milton is based
purely on his antipathy to his verse, Milton's beliefs have nothing to do with it. He
criticizes the monotony of Milton's verse: "reading Paradise Lost is a matter of
resisting, of standing up against, the verse movement, of subduing it into something
tolerably like sensitiveness, and in the end our resistance is worn down; we surrender
28
at last to the inescapable monotony of the ritual." And Leavis immediately quotes a
passage from the text. He analyses some lines from the, end of Book I, and
demonstrates how "the usual pattern of Milton's verse has here an unusual expressive
function", quite different from the usual movement, which is just a ritual. The verse
movement in the rest of the poem does not contribute to the meaning, it is a fixed,
repetitive movement.

Eliot had used the word "magniloquence" for Milton's verse, and Leavis develops this
charge by means of suitable illustrations. When we call verse magniloquent we mean
that it indulges in outward show, it is not doing what it purports to do, it is hollow. It
suffers from "a certain sensuous poverty". He takes a passage by Milton himself,
from his masque Comus, marked by sensuous richness. Leavis picks out lines and
phrases to demonstrate the "Shakespearean life" of the passage, created by
telescoping diverse associations. "The texture of actual sounds, the run of vowels and
consonants" plays an essential part in the effect of the passage, but this verbal music
should "not be analysed in abstraction from the meaning." The total effect is that the
reader is aware of a tissue of feelings and perceptions, the words withdraw
themselves from our attention. Milton's use of words is quite different in Paradise
Lost, where Milton's seems to be "focusing rather upon words than upon perceptions."
The medium itself calls for attention. Milton "exhibits a feeling for words rather than
a capacity for feeling through words."

Leavis ascribes the failure of Milton's verse to its remoteness "from any English that
was ever spoken." According to Leavis, subtlety of movement in English verse
depends upon the play of natural idiomatic speech against the verse structure. No
such play is possible in Paradise Lost, because, unlike Shakespeare, idiomatic speech
is completely absent. Milton does not bother about "the intrinsic nature of English",
he had renounced the English language, and wrote it as if it were Latin. Leavis
consistently lays stress on using the full resources of the English language; he places
a high value on the poetry of Hopkins (in New Bearings and other articles) because he
exploits the native resources of the language.

Milton belongs to the tradition of Spenser. They use a diction remote from speech,
dominated by a concern for mellifluousness. There is no pressure behind the words.
Leavis repeatedly contrasts this usage with the Shakespearean use of English, "in the
essential spirit of the language", making full use of its "characteristic resources."
Donne and the Metaphysical poets, and later Keats, belong to this tradition. And
Leavis clarifies his assertion by quoting passages from Donne and Milton.

He ends the essay by asserting Shakespeare's incomparable superiority. He quotes

G.Wilson Knight, the eminent Shakespearean critic, who looked upon a play as an
extended metaphor. He praises the structural unity of Shakespeare's plays, and
condemns critics who praise the "architectonic" power of Paradise Lost. With a touch
of wit, Leavis says that the only architectural analogy he can find for Milton is with
bricklaying. Laying bricks is a purely repetitive activity, where the semi-skilled
labourer mechanically puts down line after line of bricks. Leavis suggests that
Milton's verse is equally monotonous and mechanical.
29
3.5 THE ACHIEVEMENT OF F.R.LEAVIS

Leavis is in the "great tradition" of English literary criticism, which can be traced
from Dryden, Pope, Dr Johnson, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold, He is especially
close to Dr Johnson in laying stress on the moral value of a work of literature. He
lives up to Arnold's ideal of objectivity, comprehending the work "as in itself it really
is." New Bearings and Revaluation have rewritten the history of English poetry from
a quasi-new critical perspective. His criticism of fiction was a pioneering attempt to
win for fiction the kind of verbal analysis which earlier critics had reserved for
poetry, he never talked vaguely about characters or structures. No matter what the
genre, Leavis always supports his arguments with quotations from the text. This
facilitates critical debate: even when we disagree with his valuations (as in his
glorification of all aspects of the writings of D.H.Lawrence), his approach serves to
draw attention to the text, and enhance our response to it.

Leavis was always wary of theorizing. He constantly emphasized his lack of interest
in abstract principles, and recommended a purely empirical textual approach to
literary criticism. Ideological critics like Eagleton have pointed out that disowning
ideology is itself a kind of ideology. As Catherine Belsey says "There is no practice
without theory, however much that theory is suppressed, unformulated or perceived
as "obvious"' (p.4). According to her, Leavis believed in expressive realism, the
practice of reading that the New Critics attacked. Expressive realism is the theory that
literature reflects the reality of experience as it is perceived by one (especially gifted)
individual, who expresses it in a discourse which enables other individuals to
recognize it as true. In the article "Henry James and the Function of Criticism"
(reprinted in The Common Pursuit), for instance, Leavis grounds his discussion of
what he finds most valuable in James's work on unquestioned expressive-realist
presuppositions. The novels he most admires are praised for "the vivid concreteness
of the rendering of this world of individual centres of consciousness we live in"
(p.231). There is a marked tendency to blame the personal failings of Henry James for
the inadequacies in his work.

Catherine Belsey has pointed out a majorfailing: "In Leavis's criticism in general
there is a recurring slide from text to author which manifests itself in a characteristic
way of formulating his observations" (p.12). A weakness of the chapter on Shelley in
Revaluation is the way he slips into condemning the personality of Shelley, from
analysing the poetry. Leavis did not believe in the rigid separation of artist and work
advocated by Eliot; he believed that masterpieces drew their moral intensity from the
artist's openness to life. He says of the great novelists in the opening chapter of The
Great Tradition: "They are all distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind
of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity" (p. 17).

Raman Selden prefers to categorize Leavis as a "moral critic", rather than among the
New Critics. He has pointed out that Leavis's form of close reading differs from the
American New Criticism's methods in its stress on "sensibility". The New Critics
30
were committed to an "objective" form of textual analysis. Moral criticism is the most
natural of critical practices, and the least explicit theoretically. Its concepts and values
are implicitly connected with human experience. Leavis assumes that their validity is
self evident, and does not care to examine concepts like "maturity", "seriousness",
"wholeness", "authenticity", "sincerity" or "life". His criticism rests on intuitive
values grounded in social commitment to concrete actualities of living. Values are
intuitive and felt, never discussed in the abstract. Concreteness is a major value in
criticism and in literature. He believes that literary texts are not reducible to abstract
summary or to generalized statement. (The American New Critics also laid stress on
this view.) The tragic quality of a Shakespeare play is something inseparable from the
poetic language of the play: it is "enacted".

C.D.Narasimhaiah, a self-confessed admirer of Leavis, has pointed out a major

drawback in his work, his insularity:

While his main approach to literature is that of a collaborator, of the Indian

sahrdaya, there are some significant gaps in Leavis's critical positions, that
is, for an Indian who believes in the validity of his own tradition--the gap
is not one of sensibility or self-contradictions or modes of approach to a
work of art. No critic of standing in our times or before has made fewer
mistakes than Leavis in these respects and when it came to demonstrating
the value of a work of art by his incisive analysis, Leavis is still
unsurpassed. Where correctives are needed, for the Indian reader at least, is
in the Englishness of his outlook, an Englishness which took the form of:
"Such prepotency as this country may hope for in the English-speaking
world of the future must lie in the cultural field and that it should exert
such a prepotency - as focus of the inner life of cultural tradition is very
much to be desired" (Education and the University, 1943). Now the
dangers of such self-glorification in matters of culture should be obvious to
Leavis himself, in retrospect. It is amazing that Leavis who did so much to
teach the sharpest and subtlest kinds of discrimination in reading should
not have contributed vigorously to breaking the insularity of the
Englishman, and that he who did so much to advance the Arnoldian
function of criticism should have in practice minimized the importance of
the international perspective in the study of literature. (pp.76- 77)

And yet one is not surprised in the kind of interest--it is a major interest—
he took in Conrad and Henry James. Conrad is a Pole but to Dr Leavis the
secret of the strength of Conrad is in the British Merchant Navy which
made him the great novelist that he is. Similarly James: his interest in
James is an interest in the English scene--that James was after all a
naturalized Englishman and as a novelist he is in the line of Jane Austen
and George Eliot who constitute for Leavis a major part of the Great
tradition. And yet the "Great Tradition'' took singularly little notice of the
greatness of Melville or Faulkner, the incomparably greater Dostoevsky
and Tolstoy. His admirers would like to think his recent essay on Anna
Karenina is an effort at making some amends in that direction." (p.78).
31
The narrow range of Leavis's sympathies are obvious even without any reference to
the Indian viewpoint. He values only realist art, of the kind we find in Shakespeare or
the nineteenth century novel. One may liken him to Lukacs who also had a puritanical
disregard for everything non-realistic. He is hostile to modernism or verbal
experimentation: he has a low opinion of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but exalts
D.H.Lawrence as the greatest novelist and literary critic of the century. He also
ignores literatures of other countries, the only exception being the essay on Anna
Karenina and a late interest in Eugene Montale. He may have had genuine scruples
about analysing texts in translation, but he is silent about literature written in English
in Australia, Canada, Africa, the Caribbean or India. His stray comments on
American literature fail to do justice to great novelists like Melville or Mark Twain.
He ignored the discipline of comparative literary studies. This is a charge that can be
brought against the New Critics in general: poetry was their first concern, which
might be the cause of their preoccupation with texts in English.

In spite of his insularity, Leavis has had a lasting effect on English literary criticism.
His recourse to practical criticism rather than theory has had wide-ranging
pedagogical significance. His demonstration of the actual organization of the poem
and the way language created what it conveyed in the poem shows the new critics’
theory at work. He insistently pointed to the poem as an object in front of us, rather
than other things which had figured prominently in literary criticism, such as the
biography of the poet, the background material, the ethos, the message, or the
philosophy related to the work. Leavis established the importance of the intrinsic,
rather than the extrinsic study of literature.

3.6 GLOSSARY

architectonic: relating to architecture, construction.

insularity: literally, quality of belonging to an island; the attitude of a person who is

narrow minded, cut off from others, not caring about the culture of other countries.

magniloquent: speaking in a grand and pompous style, meant to produce an effect;

bombastic, inflated speech.

prepotency: abstract noun from prepotent, greater than others in power and
influence.

3.7 QUESTIONS

1. Attempt an appraisal of F.R. Leavis's achievement as a literary critic.

2. How far do you agree with the opinion that Leaves's values are moral rather than
aesthetic?
3. Write a note on Leavis's critical method.

32
4. Do you think Leavis's critical practice was influenced by T.S.Eliot?
5. Rene Wellek says, "Revaluation can be described as an application of Eliot's
methods and insights to the history of English poetry." How far do you agree with
this view?
6. "Leavis was primarily an iconoclast." Discuss.
7. Is Leavis a puritanical moral critic? Give reasons for your answer.

3.8 READING LIST

Part I
Leavis, F.R. New Bearings in English Poetry. London, 1932.
----- Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry. London', 1936.
----- The Common Pursuit. 1952. London: Chatto & Windus, 1962.
-----The Great Tradition. London, 1948.
----- "T.S.Eliot as Critic", Anna Karenina and Other Essays, London: Chatto &
Windus, 1967, pp.177-189.

Part II
Bilan, R.P. The Literary Criticism of F.R.Leavis. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979.

Casey, John. "Object, Feeling and Judgement: F.R.Leavis ". The Language of
Criticism. London: Methuen, 1960.

MacKillop, Ian. F.R.Leavis: A Life in Criticism. London: Allen Lane, 1995.

Narasimhaiah, C.D. "Search for Values in Literary Criticism" in Moving Frontiers of

English Studies in India. New Delhi: S.Chand, 1977.

Samson, Anne. F.R.Leavis. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.

Walsh, William. F.R.Leavis. London: Chatto & Windus, 1980.

Wellek, Rene. "F.R.Leavis and the Scrutiny Group." A History of Modern Criticism
1750-1950 Vo1.V. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986, pp.239-264.

33
UNIT 4 JOHN CROWE RANSOM AND CLEANTH
BROOKS

Structure

4.0 Objectives
4.1 John Crowe Ransom: 'Introduction
4.2 "Criticism Inc."
4.3 Other Essays by J.C.Ransom
4.4 The Achievement of J.C.Ransom
4.5 Cleanth Brooks: Introduction
4.6 "Irony as a Principle of Structure"
4.7 Other Essays by Cleanth Brooks
4.8 The Achievement of Cleanth Brooks
4.9 Glossary
4.10 Questions
4.11 Reading List

4.0 OBJECTIVES

In this unit, we shall examine the contribution of John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth
Brooks to literary criticism. We shall make a detailed study of one important essay by
each of them. Though they had a lot in common, there is some difference in their
critical approaches, as we shall see.

4.1 JOHN CROWE RANSON: INTRODUCTION

John Crowe Ransom (1888- 1974) was born in Pulaski, and received his bachelor's
degree from Vanderbilt University in 1909. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Christ
Church College, Oxford, and took a degree there in 1913. After service in the First
World War he returned to Vanderbilt University, where he taught till 1937. He was a
leading member of the group of writers known as the Southern Agrarians or Fugitives
(after a poetry magazine The Fugitive co-founded by Ransom and Allen Tate). This
group, which included Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate and Robert Pm Warren, is
identified with the rise of New Criticism in America. They shared religious, political
and cultural convictions of a conservative character, with a special allegiance to the
American South. Many leading poets of the period, such as Allen Tate, Donald
Davidson, Robert Perm Warren and Randall Jarrell considered him their mentor. He
made his mark as a poet, though he was not very prolific. He shared T.S.Eliot's anti-

34
romantic, neo-classical stance. Ransom's organic theory of poetry is well illustrated
by his own practice as a poet.

As critic, poet, teacher and editor, Ransom was widely respected and influential. In
1937 he moved to Kenyon College, Ohio. He was the founder-editor of the Kenyon
Review, one of the most successful literary quarterlies of the time, which played an
important role in disseminating the ideas of the New Critics. His first important book,
The World's Body (1938) saw poetry as taking on some of the tasks performed by
religion in the previous ages. He believed that poetry embodied the world by
summoning creation in all its variegated detail and natural organic form. The New
Criticism (1941) does not discuss contemporary criticism in general, Ransom writes
about three critics: I.A.Richards, T.S.Eliot and Yvor Winters.

4.2 "CRITICISM INC"

"Criticism Inc." which was first published in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1937
makes a strong plea for the development of literary criticism as a distinct discipline in
universities. It expresses the New Critics' concept of what criticism should be—a
collaborative effort in the elucidation and evaluation of literary texts, including
contemporary works. He attacks other rival approaches: historical scholarship,
impressionistic, emotional appreciation, and the various kinds of criticism which
focus on the abstracted content of a work of literature instead of the work itself.

The essay begins by reviewing the current state of criticism: "critics nearly always
have been amateurs", they feel that no special training is needed to be a literary critic.
According to Ransom, the critic needs the kind of competence that three different
people possess: the artist, the philosopher, and the university teacher of English. But
each profession has its drawbacks. The artist's evaluation is intuitive, he cannot
explain it to others; however, practitioners often make the best critics as T.S. Eliot
also believed in his later writings , because they have a good command of the
language. The philosopher knows the function of the fine arts, but his theory is too
general-he cannot appreciate the technical effects. He has no intimate knowledge of
particular works of art, and his generalizations are drawn not from observation and
study, but from other generalizations. The professors should take charge of critical
activity, but they are not critical enough. They are learned men who are ready to
spend a lifetime in compiling the data of literature, but they avoid making literary
judgement. Ransom insists that it is the duty of the university professors to set up
proper standards of criticism. Criticism should be developed by the systematic effort
of learned persons, and the proper place for this is the university. (When we read this,
we should keep in mind the fact that most universities in England and America did
not offer English studies as a discipline till the second quarter of the twentieth
century. Cambridge University offered courses in classical languages, in the history
of the English language and Old English, but the school of English was established
only after the First World War. In the nineteen-thirties, American universities would
offer courses in literary history, but nothing in criticism or twentieth century
literature.)
35
Though Ransom suggests that criticism should be made scientific, he does not mean
that it can ever be an exact science. What he means is that it should be systematic,
and professionals should take charge of it. Hence the title of the essay: he wants
criticism to be established as a profession, "what we need is 'Criticism Inc."', he says.
In India, when serious entrepreneurs establish a company, they engage professionals
to run it, and it is called "Ltd." (short for "Limited"). In America, the preferred term is
"Inc.", an abbreviation for "Incorporated", which is added to the name of a company.
For example, you have "The New India Assurance Company Ltd." or "Sun
Microsystems Inc."

He gives due credit to R.S.Crane, Professor at the University of Chicago, (who led a
group called the "Chicago Critics"); he was the first of the professors to advocate the
study of criticism as an academic discipline. In his influential article, "History versus
Criticism in the University Study of Literature" (first published in 1935): Crane said
that the emphasis must be shifted to the critical from the historical in literary studies.

Ransom attacks other contemporary schools. The Humanists (Irving Babbitt,

W.C.Brownell and Paul Elmer More, among others) had adopted an approach
different from historical scholarship; but they failed to provide objective criticism,
they were engaged in advocating a certain moral system. For Ransom, "Criticism is
the attempt to define and enjoy the aesthetic or characteristic values of literature", but
the preoccupations of Irving Babbitt are ethical, not literary. Another diversion from
objective evaluation of literature is provided by the Leftists or Proletarians; these
Marxist critics want literature to "serve the cause of loving-comradeship", they are
not interested in literary values, the last a judgement only vulgar Marxists and not
genuine Marxist critics would endorse.

He advocates an autonomous school of English studies; it should not be a branch of

the department of history, or of the department of ethics. It is wrong to think that just
anybody, without specific training, can be a critic. He gives examples from other
fields: in economics, chemistry, sociology, theology or architecture, criticism of the
performance is in the hands of men who have had formal training in its theory and
technique. Literary criticism, too, should be a specialized discipline.

In the third section of the essay, he considers what the duties of a critic should be.
Departments of English have to communicate the understanding of literature, but
professors should not content themselves with just reading the text well, hoping that
the students will somehow learn to appreciate it. A teacher who stops with exposing
students to the text is compared to the curator of a museum, who shows works of art
to an audience. He is not an instructor. Historical scholarship is important; but it is
not the end, it is only instrumental. Like linguistic study, historical study is a
necessary aid, it is indispensable for a true understanding of the text. "We can never
have too much of it" declares Ransom, "if the critical intelligence functions, and has
the authority to direct it."

36
In Section IV, Ransom sets out to define criticism. He proceeds by explaining "what
criticism is not". He begins by excluding book reviews, and (following Crane,) works
of historical scholarship and Neo-Humanism. He presents a list of six items which he
considers to be not literary criticism:

1. Personal registration. Describing the effect of the work of art on the reader cannot
be considered literary criticism. Criticism should be concerned with describing
"the nature of the object rather than its effects on the subject". This is a point
developed fully by Wimsatt and Beardsley in "The Affective Fallacy". To say that
the reader is moved to tears is not an analysis of the text. Ransom says that even
Aristotle succumbed to this fallacy in his theory of "catharsis", though other parts
of the Poetics present fine objective criticism of tragedy. Judging by effects
denies the autonomy of the work. A text is something which exists for its own
sake. Ransom warns us against using words loosely. We should not ascribe
qualities to the object which actually apply to the subjective effect: moving,
exciting, entertaining, pitiful etc.

2. Synopsis and paraphrase. It may be necessary to discuss the content of a work

when analysing it, but we must always keep in mind that the story or the plot is an
abstract, the true content of a work cannot be isolated from it. Discussing the
synopsis of a novel or the prose paraphrase of a poem does not amount to literary
criticism.

3. Historical studies. Understanding the general literary background, the author's

biography, autobiographical evidence, bibliographical items, and knowledge of
the literary originals can all be useful aids to literary criticism, but they do not
constitute it.

4. Linguistic studies. Studies concerned with meaning of words and idioms ensure
that criticism is based on proper understanding of the text. But linguistic studies
alone cannot produce a critic.

5. Moral studies. Individual readers will apply their own moral standards; it may be
the Christian ethic, it may be Aristotelian, or Marxist. But the moral content
should not be taken as the whole content of the work. Criticism is concerned with
the whole content.

6. Any other special studies. Various departments can find relevant material in
literature: works can be written from the point of view of sociology, geography,
law etc. Discussions of Milton's geography, or Shakespeare's understanding of the
law, do not constitute literary criticism. It can be considered literary criticism only
when the critic discusses the creative writer's literary assimilation of material
pertaining to other disciplines, he can analyse how Milton's or Shakespeare's
knowledge of geography or law has become part of his poetry.

In Section V of his essay, Ransom discusses the critical act. He believes that book
reviewing cannot be an act of purely literary criticism, because the reviewer has the
37
responsibility of presentation and interpretation as well as criticism. Criticism is an
important part of book reviewing, but it involves other things as well, such as telling
the reader about the book itself (presentation) and discussing the main themes of the
book ("explication").

Studies in technique are an important mode of literary criticism. Thus a critic of

poetry would discuss the devices such as metre, inversion, tropes, inventions etc.
which differentiate it from ordinary prose. The good critic is not content with just
listing the separate devices, he discusses their function. The critic should regard the
poem as a metaphysical manoeuvre - Ransom has written elsewhere about his concept
of poetry, and we shall read excerpts from his essay on poetry in the next section
(4.5). The poet presents a total poetic or individual object which tends to be
universalized. The critic has to identify the logical object or universal, and the dense
technical structure in which it is enmeshed. According to Ransom, there are two
aspects to a poem: "the prose core", the universalized object, and the "differentia,
residue or tissue which keeps the object poetical or entire." In a later essay, "Criticism
as Pure Speculation", he uses the terms "structure" and "texture" for the same
concepts. He feels that this two-fold construction is true of other forms of literature,
such as fiction, as also the non-literary arts (like painting, sculpture, music etc).

4.3 OTHER ESSAYS BY J.C.RANSOM

Some other essays that Ransom wrote were quite influential. In this sub-unit, we shall
take a brief look at two of them, "Poetry: A Note on Ontology" and "Criticism as Pure
Speculation".

"Poetry: A Note on Ontology" is an important chapter in The World's Body (1938).

In it, he expresses his concept of poetry. He says that poetry can be divided into three
major types, physical poetry, Platonic poetry and metaphysical poetry. Physical
poetry deals with things. The Imagists wrote physical poetry, and attempted to present
“things in their thinginess". Ransom uses the German word Dinglichkeit for
"thinginess". Platonic poetry is the poetry of ideas. No poetry can be purely of one
type; physical poetry tends to employ ideas, while Platonic poetry dips heavily into
the physical. In the third section of this essay (included in your Reader), Ransom
talks of the relationship between science and poetry. Science gratifies a practical or
rational impulse, while art gratifies a perceptual impulse. The poet develops many
techniques for attaining his purpose; Ransom mentions three of them, metre, fiction
and tropes. Metre impresses us as a way of regulating the material. The second
device, which Ransom calls fiction, is the poet's consciousness that art is different
from the life of action. Art sets out to create an "aesthetic distance" between the
object and the subject. The "reality" or "authenticity" of art is different from scientific
reality, it is one degree removed from actuality. The third device is tropes. There are
various other devices used by the poet, but Ransom wishes to concentrate on figures
of speech. He considers metaphor the most important figure of speech, and he
believes that the third kind of poetry, metaphysical poetry, was created by developing
the use of metaphor. Here it is useful to mention that tropes in Ransom do not acquire
38
the same semantic baggage as they do in contemporary critical theory, particularly in
de Man.

Dr Johnson popularized the term "Metaphysical Poetry", but he probably took the
term from Pope, and Dryden, who said of Donne that "He affects the metaphysics, not
only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign."
Ransom points out that in Dryden's time, metaphysical meant "supernatural,
miraculous". In describing d eta physical Poetry, Ransom endorses Eliot's theory of
the "dissocistion of sensibility". He says that Dryden and Milton were the poorer for
repudiating this miraculism. His admirer Cowley initially used metaphysical conceits,
and later repudiated them and even wrote an ode in extravagant praise of "Mr Hobs".
Ransom believes that Hobbes, and Bacon before him, were responsible for the
suppression of the spirit of miraculism. The name stood for common sense and
naturalism, the monopoly of the scientific spirit over the mind.

Metaphysical poetry is the most original and exciting period of English poetry.
Ransom goes on to present an original analysis of the poems of the period. According
to him, metaphysical effects may be large scale, or small scale. If Donne and Cowley
illustrate the small scale effects, the use of conceits, Milton exhibits large scale,
scriptural miraculism. Ransom stands apart from Eliot and Leavis in praising Milton's
Paradise Lost, but he agrees with them about the degeneration of sensibility in the
romantic and Victorian ages. The nineteenth century was half-heartedly metaphorical,
it was the age of the simile, not the metaphor. The seventeenth century was pithy and
original in its poetic utterances, the nineteenth was verbose and predictable. Ransom
quotes from poems to justify his stand.

In a later essay, "Criticism as Pure Speculation" (1941), Ransom proposed his most
widely known idea, the dichotomy of structure and texture. He said, "A poem is a
logical structure having a local texture." By "logical structure" Ransom means the
logical, rational argument, while "texture" is the presentation of the qualitative
density of the world. The structure is the story or object or situation, which gives us
the "argument" of the poem. The texture is the "thingness" of the things by which it is
particularized. This dichotomy is a bit like the old form-content duality, though
Ransom always insisted that "the texture is ubiquitous" meaning that it is the felt
quality of the experience described. Metaphor is the main element in poetry, as we
have seen in the terms in which he praises the Metaphysical Poets in the essay
"Poetry". He said, "Texture is the thing that particularly qualifies a discourse as being
poetic". He rejects organicism in poetry; he believes that "a poem is much more like a
Christmas tree than an organism." In "Criticism as Pure Speculation", he says that a
poem is like a house with the paint, paper and tapestry compared to the texture, and
the roof and beams to the structure:

Apparently, it had a plan or a central frame of logic, but it also had a

huge wealth of local detail which sometimes fitted the plan rationally,
or served it, and sometimes subsisted comfortably under it

39
4.4 THE ACHIEVEMENT OF J.C. RANSOM

John Crowe Ransom can be considered the father of New Criticism in America not
just for his books, The World's Body and The New Criticism, but because of his
influence as a teacher and poet. Leading critics like Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks
were his students at Vanderbilt University. As founder of the School of Letters at
Kenyon College in Ohio, he invited leading critics of the day to conduct classes each
summer in the theoretical and practical criticism of literature; he did a lot to make
literary criticism an accepted academic discipline. Under his editorship from 1939 to
1959, the Kenyon Review became a leading forum for New Critics.

Ransom was not only the leader of the group of critics, he was also its outstanding
theoretician. His concern with poetic structure and texture, with its corollary of close
textual reading, and his pre-occupation with the autonomy of art, have been the
central concerns of the New Critics. His "structure-texture" theory of poetry ("A
poem is a logical structure having a local structure") reappears in a slightly different
form in Cleanth Brooks' concept of paradox and irony, or Allen Tate's theory of
tension. As is natural for a poet critic, he wrote in defense of his own poetic craft; his
own poems were born of a balancing of sound and meaning, the tension between
sound and sense. He recognized the binary nature of art, the complex relationship
between theme and style, and rejected the organicist concept of style as meaning. He
used the word "ontology" in a new sense. Ontology deals with the general formal
categories or characteristics, a concern which is almost opposite to Ransom's concern
with the qualitative aspects of the world. Ransom calls a knowledge of the world of
things (things include not only inanimate objects but also precious objects of our
affection like father and mother, nation, church, God, even one's own house). Ransom
uses "ontology" as a synonym for any concern with actual reality. The function of
poetry is to celebrate the concrete, it is concerned with "investing with body". He
plays down the personality of the poet. He sharply differed from I.A.Richards in
having no use for affective theories. The New Critics were never unanimous in their
approach, and Ransom has differences with Cleanth Brooks too. Though he praised
Brooks as "the most expert living reader or interpreter of difficult verse" (in the
second issue of Kenyon Review published in 1940), Ransom disagrees with his
preoccupation with paradox, wit and irony. "Opposites can never be said to be
resolved or reconciled merely because they have got into the same poem" (The New
Critics, p.95).

4.5 CLEANTH BROOKS: INTRODUCTION

Cleanth Brooks (1906-) was born in Murray, Kentucky. He studied at Vanderbilt

University (he was a student of Ransom), Tulane University, and as a Rhodes Scholar
at Oxford University. He was a leading member of the Fugitives (also called the
Southern Agrarians). The Southern Review, edited from 193 5 to 1942 by Brooks and
Robert Penn Warren, was the principal critical organ of this group. He was professor

40
of English at Louisiana State University, and later at Yale. From 1964 to 1966 he was
cultural attache, at the American embassy in London.

His best known work is the collection of critical essays, The Well- Wrought Urn:
Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947). An earlier book, Modern Poetry and the
Tradition (1939) presented a revised history of English poetry; it resembles
Revaluation (1936) by F.R.Leavis in emphasizing the tradition of wit in seventeenth
century English poetry. Brooks has written with distinction on fiction also; William
Faulkner: the Yoknapatawpha Country (1963) is the best of his later work.
Understanding Poetry (1938) edited in collaboration with Robert Penn Warren, has
had a profound influence on the teaching of poetry, as it was adopted as a textbook in
many American universities. The work, a critical anthology, contains some of the best
practical criticism of individual poems that the New Critics have produced. Along
with Understanding Fiction (1943), it introduced their methodology to a whole
generation of American students of literature. Literary Criticism: a Short History
(1957) was written in collaboration with W.K.Wimsatt; it has become indispensable
to students as a concise guide to literary criticism in the West from the beginnings to
the nineteen-fifties. (We shall study some important essays by Wimsatt in Unit 5).

4.6 "IRONY AS A PRINCIPLE OF STRUCTURE"

In 1948, Brooks published an article, "Irony and Ironic Poetry". "Irony as a Principle
of Structure" is an expanded version, published in 1951. By then, New Critical
methods had found acceptance. This article is representative of his approach; like
Leavis, Brooks never indulges in generalities, but works only through concrete
examples. His theoretical essays are full of perceptive close readings of a variety of
texts, though his partiality for Metaphysical poetry is obvious.

Brooks begins his essay on irony by laying stress on the importance of metaphor. He
says that the poet can reach the universal only through the particular. The poet does
not begin with an abstract theme; the only valid method is to start with individual
details, and then work towards general meaning. He seems to echo Blake's stance,
that the artist works through "minute particularities". Brooks uses a memorable
simile, that of a kite flying. The long tail of the kite, though it adds to the weight of
the kite, gives it stability and direction. He compares the kite to the universal
meaning, and the tail to the particular details which weigh it down. Just as the kite's
flight would be without direction without the tail, the poet can say things only
through metaphor. Direct statement leads to abstraction, and "takes us out of poetry
altogether".

Brooks believes in "a principle of indirection". The statements and images in a poem
are in an organic relationship, with one part qualifying and adding meaning to the
other. The elements in a poem are the different parts of a plant, such as the roots, the
stalk and the leaves which produce a beautiful flower. The elements are not separate
beautiful things, like the flowers in a bouquet. You can make a bouquet by placing
together different beautiful flowers, side by side. But a finished poem is the flower
41
itself, produced by the interaction of different elements. Another simile he uses is that
of drama; "the poem is like a little drama". The total effect of a drama is the result of
the combination of the different elements in it -- the different characters, lines,
dramatic movements on the stage etc. Just as there are no superfluous actors in a good
play, a good poem has no unnecessary lines.

Context is the most important thing in determining meaning. When we take a close
look at memorable lines of verse, we realize that they draw their poetic quality from
the context. Brooks refers to Shakespeare's "Ripeness is all". These famous lines from
the play King Lear get their full meaning only when we read them in the context of
the play, as an expression of the wisdom Lear acquires through suffering. He takes
another example from the same play, the line "Never, never, never, never, never" to
show how context can load even ordinary phrases with meaning. He generalizes and
declares that the part "is always modified by the pressure of the context."

In the ordinary sense of the word, we refer to a statement as "ironical" when it is

obviously modified by the context. He quotes a simple example of sarcasm, the
statement "this is a fine state of affairs" when we mean just the opposite. But irony
can take forms other than sarcasm. He gives the example of some lines from Gray's
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard which use rhetorical questions. (A rhetorical
question is one to which the answer is obvious, instead of stating it, the writer phrases
it as a question.) Even in its conventionally recognized forms, irony has a wide
variety, such as tragic irony, self-irony, playful irony, mocking irony, or gentle irony.

Brooks feels that there can be no statement which does not employ irony, if we use
irony to mean the modifying force of the context. Perhaps only statements of a
science (like mathematics, "Two plus two equals four" or the Pythagoras Theorem
(about the properties of a right-angled triangle) are unqualified by any context, they
are true no matter where they occur. These statements are abstract, they possess only
denotations. But connotations and multiple meanings are important in poetry. So
Brooks declares, "poems never contain abstract statements." Any statements made in
a poem should be read as if it were a speech in a drama, the context is all important.
The importance of the context is a very important aspect of poetry. Brooks presents
an analysis of Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" to show how the poetic "truth"
of the statement in it (that the world "hath really neither joy nor love nor light . . .")
should be considered only in terms of the context, who the dramatic speaker is, whom
he is addressing, and the circumstances in which he makes the statement. We should
see "whether the statement grows properly out of a context."

The best poems are ironical, in the sense that they are able to fuse the discordant
elements in them. They approach Richards' "poetry of synthesis". The stability of
such poems is like the stability of an arch. In architecture, the very force of gravity
which pulls stones to the ground is used to support the stones in an arch. The structure
of the ironical poem is one of thrust and counterthrust.

Brooks analyzes many poems to illustrate his view. Well known poems like Marvell's
"To His Coy Mistress" or Walter Raleigh's "Nymph's Reply" (written in answer to
42
Marlowe's famous "Come Live with Me and Be My Love") contain obvious ironies.
According to Brooks, even simple poems like the Elizabethan lyric have this
structure, and make full use of "irony"; words acquire their meaning only because of
the context, every part of the poem is modified by other parts. He presents a fine
analysis of Shakespeare's song "Who is Silvia" (from the play The Two Gentlemen of
Verona) in support of his stance.

According to Brooks, all good poems contain ironic complexity. A poem by

Shakespeare may not be a convincing example, because he was a contemporary of the
metaphysical poets. So Brooks chooses examples from another period, and analyzes
two of the Lucy poems of Wordsworth. In the poem which begins, "She dwelt among
the untrodden ways", Brooks draws our attention to the images of the violet and the
star. Wordsworth is content with simply placing Lucy, the violet and the star side by
side, he does not develop the contrast as Donne would have. But the contrast, with its
potential irony, is present in the poem. The critic says that there can be no "Act of
Uniformity" in the world of poetry, yet all poets, to a greater or lesser degree, take
recourse to irony. He presents a close reading of another Lucy poem, "A slumber did
my spirits seal" to show how all good poems have a dynamic structure of thrust and
counterthrust. Each part of a poem modifies and is modified by the whole. He says
that people may object to his finding ironical possibilities in Wordsworth, because his
poetry is supposed to be "simple" and "spontaneous". Brooks points out that
"spontaneous" applies to the way he may have composed his poems. Such a theory
should not be allowed to intrude into our reading of the poem. "A theory as to how a
poem is written is being allowed to dictate to us how the poem is to be read." His
objections tie up with what has come to be known as the "intentional fallacy"
(examined in the next unit).

According to Brooks, irony, "taken as the acknowledgement of the pressures of

context", is to be found in every period and even in simple lyrical poetry. Irony is
especially important in the modern age, when the public has been corrupted by
Hollywood films and pulp fiction. He takes up a poem by Randall Jarrell (a modern
American poet) to prove his point. The basic theme of the poem "Eighth Air Force" is
the goodness of man, and the guilt felt by the airmen, can they be considered
murderers? The question is not of our personal beliefs, whether we believe in the
innate goodness of men. The poem should dramatize the situation so accurately that
we can participate in the poetic experience. Poetry does not confront us with abstract
themes, but with "many-sided, three-dimensional" experiences. Even the resistance to
abstraction plays a part in the poetic process. And Brooks goes back to the metaphor
of the kite, with which he started the essay. A kite, skillfully controlled, rises up
against the thrust of the wind.

4.7 OTHER ESSAYS BY CLEANTH BROOKS

In many other essays, Brooks has discussed the importance of the indirect method for
poetry. "The Language of Paradox" (first published in 1942, subsequently as the first
chapter of The Well- Wrought Urn (1947), thinks of literary language as conveying a
43
special kind of meaning or knowledge, different from that of science, which is one-
dimensional and unambiguous. He says, "Paradox is the language appropriate and
inevitable to poetry. It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every
trace of paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in
terms of paradox." After examining a sonnet by Wordsworth and Gray's Elegy, he
presents a close reading of "The Canonization" by John Donne, his favourite poet.

Another important article by Brooks is "The Formalist Critic" (excerpts have been
included in your Reader). He presents the basic assumptions of the New Critics,
"Literary criticism is a description and evaluation of its object". It concerns itself with
the work of art itself. In reply to those who argue that the work should not be isolated
from the author's life or the readers and their response, he replies that biography and
history may be interesting, but "they should not be confused with an account of the
work. Such studies describe the process of composition, not the structure of the thing
composed, and they may be performed quite as validly for the poor work as the good
one. They may be validly performed for any kind of experience -- non-literary as well
as literary". Brooks implies that it is the duty of the critic to be concerned with value
judgements; he should examine the value of a literary work, and whether a work is
literary or non-literary.

He observes that the formalist critic (by which he means the New Critic) makes two
assumptions: (1) the author's intention as realized is the "intonation" that counts. And
(2) the formalist critic assumes an ideal reader, that is, instead of focusing on a range
of possible readings, he attempts to find a central point of reference from which he
can focus on the work itself. In answer to the objection that there is no ideal reader,
Cleanth Brooks grants that "there is no ideal reader, of course." But he defends the
New Critic by saying that it is "a defensible strategy" adopted by all critics for the
purpose of focusing on the poem instead of his own reactions. Laying stress on the
reader means that "we move from literary criticism into socio-psychology". He sums
up their avoidance of the intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy in these words:
"The reduction of a work of literature to its causes does not constitute literary
criticism, nor does an estimate of its effects".

"The Heresy of Paraphrase" is another of his famous essays. He lays stress on the
specificity and verbal density of poetry. Poetic language cannot be translated into
prose statements. The meaning of a poem cannot be reduced to anything outside the
poem, whether it is an experience, an idea or an intention. To take the example of
“Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats: it cannot be reduced to statements about life
and death. If we try to consider the theme in isolation from the poem, we remove all
the poetic texture which makes the poem what it is. The poetic texture does not
simply ornament the prose core of meaning, it conveys the poet's realization of a
complex human response to life. Content and form are inseparable. To paraphrase a
poem is not literary criticism. In "The Heresy of Paraphrase" he lays stress on irony
and the organic structure of a poem, and uses the same metaphor as in "Irony as
Structure", and says, "The essential structure of a poem resembles that of architecture
or painting." His close reading of Marvell's "Horatian Ode" shows that the New
Critics did not ignore historical considerations. He recognizes that the critic must
44
know the linguistic context and how what words meant at a particular period, and
some knowledge of history is essential to understand a poem concerned with
historical figures such as Cromwell and Charles I. But even in such a poem the most
important thing is the poetic organization, which accommodates paradox, irony and
ambiguity.

4.8 THE ACHIEVEMENT OF CLEANTH BROOKS

Cleanth Brooks is best known for his brilliant and sensitive close readings of the text
presented in books like The Well- Wrought Urn and Modern Poetry and the
Tradition. His comments as a theoretician are always supported by close readings, in
a style reminiscent of Leavis. He believes in the unity of a poem not as something
mechanical, but as something organic, with each part modifying and being modified
by the whole. He is very conscious of the creative tension inherent in a work of art,
and talks of paradox, ambiguity and irony. According to him, "The work of art is a
pattern of resolutions, and balances and harmonizations." He believes that poetry
gives knowledge, but it is a special kind of knowledge, not that of science. Scientific
statements do not derive their meaning from the context, a statement like "Two plus
two is equal to four" is an abstract statement which has the same meaning in every
context. All good poems employ irony, which Brooks defines as "a general term for
the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the
context". In his critical practice, he examines the interaction not only of words but of
motifs, themes, metaphors and symbols.

He wants a poem to be judged in its totality as a poem: it is wrong to equate a poem

with its prose meaning, its paraphrase. Poetry is not an abstract statement about
experience, it is itself an experience. In The Well- Wrought Urn, he has shown that his
concept of poetry as irony applies not just to Donne and the Metaphysical Poets, but
to the most diverse poets: Shakespeare, Milton, Herrick, Pope, Gray, Wordsworth,
Keats, Tennyson and Yeats. He was generally in agreement with other New Critics
like Ransom, Wimsatt and Allen Tate, and spoke for all of them in "The Formalist
Critic". Brooks shares Eliot's critical doctrines: the impersonal theory of art, the
dissociation of sensibility (which Brooks blames on Hobbes) and the view of
tradition.

The achievement of Brooks as a critic of fiction and criticism also deserve mention.
He is the author of two well researched books on Faulkner. He wrote extensively on
other critics, in essays and articles and in Literary Criticism A Short History.
According to Rene Wellek, to whom it is dedicated, Brooks wrote the last section,
devoted to twentieth century criticism, in this collaborative effort. The rest of the
book was primarily Wimsatt’s contribution. In his comments on other critics, ranging
from A.C.Bradley to Northrop Frye, Brooks is eminently fair-minded and text-
oriented. He faithfully presents their views, even though he differs from them.

45
4.9 GLOSSARY

Act of Uniformity: In seventeenth century England, there was a law by which all
worshippers had to follow the same prayers and rituals in church.

American South: The southern states of the U.S.A, also called the Confederate
States. In 1860, the American Civil War started because they broke away from the
union. They were unhappy with Resident Lincoln's move to abolish slavery, because
their economy was dependent on slave labour. The novelist William Faulkner is the
most famous writer from the American South.

Idiosyncratic: highly individualized, eccentric. Having a very personal, peculiar

view of things.

laryngeal: pertaining to the larynx, the upper part of the windpipe, the throat. By
"visceral or laryngeal reaction" Ransom means physical sensations, such as a feeling
at the bottom of one's stomach, a thrill down the spine or a lump in the throat.

ontology: the science that treats of the principle of pure being; that part of
metaphysics which deals with the nature and essence of things.

trope: a figure of speech, in which a word or expression is used in other than its
literary meaning. Nowadays we use it in the sense of an over-arching, inclusive
metaphor.

4.10 QUESTIONS

1. Discuss the contribution of either Ransom or Cleanth Brooks to literary theory

and practice.

2. Do you agree with the view that all the American New Critics were influenced by
Ransom?

3. What does Ransom mean when he advocates "Criticism Inc."?

4. Discuss the ideas expressed by Cleanth Brooks in his essay "Irony as a Principle
of Structure".

5. Do you agree that "The Formalist Critic" by Cleanth Brooks is a kind of

manifesto of the New Critics?

46
4.11 READING LIST

Part I

Brooks, Cleanth. "The Heresy of Paraphrase", "The Language of Paradox" in The

Well- Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Reynal and
Hitchcock, 1947.

----- *"The Formalist Reader", Kenyon Review, No. 13 (1951) pp.72-81.

----- *"Irony as a Principle of Structure" in Literary Opinion in America ed Morton D.

Zabel

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Pen- Warren, eds. Understanding Poetry. New York:
Henry Holt and Co., 1938.
----- eds. Understanding Fiction. Henry Holt and Co., 1943.

Cleanth Brooks and William K. Wimsatt Jr. : Literary Criticism: A ,Short History.
1957. Reprint: New Delhi: Oxford and I.B.H. Publishing Co., 1970.

Ransom, John Crowe. "Criticism as Pure Speculation". In The Intent of the Critic, ed.
D.A.Stauffer. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941.
----- The New Criticism. New York: New Directions, 1941.
----- *"Criticism Inc.", and *"Poetry: A Note on Ontology", The World's Body. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938.

Part II

Kohli, R.K. "John Crowe Ransom's Defence of Poetry". Indian Response to

American Literature ed C.D.Narasimhaiah (New Delhi: USEFI, 1967), pp.271-293.

47
UNIT 5 W.K. WIMSATT

Structure

5.0 Objectives
5.1 Introduction
5.2 "The Intentional Fallacy"
5.3 "The Affective Fallacy"
5.4 The Achievement of W.K.Wimsatt
5.5 Let Us Sum Up
5.6 Glossary
5.7 Questions
5.8 Reading List

5.0 OBJECTIVES

In this unit, we shall read two important essays written by Wimsatt in collaboration
with his friend Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy"
These essays sum up one of the basic tenets of the New Critics regarding the
objectivity of critical activity. Because they touch upon many other aspects of literary
criticism, such as the question of meaning and interpretation, and the role of the
reader, they initiated a debate which continued well into the 1970's. We shall also
discuss the relationship between the New Critics and contemporary literary theory,
when we talk about the achievement of Wimsatt.

5.1 INTRODUCTION

William K Vimsatt (1907-1975) was professor of English at Yale, where he had been
teaching since 1939. He was an authority on eighteenth century English literature: his
first important book, The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson, was published in 1941. The
Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954) and Hateful Contraries: Studies
in Literature and Criticism (1965) bring together some of the articles which first
appeared in journals. The Portraits of Alexander Pope (1965) collects the known
portraits of Pope, and examines the complex relationship between the poet and his
painters. Literary Criticism: a Short History (1 957) was written in collaboration with
Cleanth Brooks (whom we discussed in Unit 4). It has become indispensable to
students as a concise guide to literary criticism in the West.

The two essays, "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy", were written
in collaboration with Monroe C. Beardsley. Beardsley (b.1915) has taught philosophy
and aesthetics at Yale University, Mount Holyoke College, Swarthmore College and

48
Temple University His publications include Aesthetic Problems in the Philosophy of
Criticism (1958) and Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present (1966).

5.2 THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY

Artistic intention, we mean the design or plan in the artist's mind. Critics and poets
from Longinus to Wordsworth and Coleridge, and even early twentieth century critics
like Benedetto Croce believed that in order to judge the poet's performance, we must
know what he intended. They feel that we must evaluate the work of art by seeing
whether the artist achieved his intention. This school of thought has been challenged
by the New Critics, who argued that the artistic intentions of the creator are not
relevant when judging a work of art. The New Critics' standpoint has been expressed
forcefully by Wimsatt and Beardsley.

In an article on "Intention" written for an encyclopedia of literary criticism, The

Dictionary of World Literature edited by Joseph T.Shipley (New York, 1942),
Wimsatt and Beardsley had argued that "the design or intention of the author is
neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of
literary art." The essay, "The Intentional Fallacy", (first published in 1946 in The
Sewanee Review), works out the full implications of this statement. The critic's view
of authorial intention has an effect on every aspect of literary criticism. By intention
is meant "the design or plan in the author's mind", and the author's "attitude towards
his work, the way he felt, what made him write."

Let us first understand what they say in the essay. They begin with a series of
propositions which they think are axiomatic. There are five points, of varying length;
I shall follow the numbering they use:

1. Wimsatt admits that a poem does not come into existence by accident or by itself.
The words are written by the poet, his intentions have brought the poem into
being, they can be considered the cause of the poem; but the intention cannot be
the standard by which the critic judges the poem.

2. Moreover, there are practical difficulties in the critic determining the poet's
intentions. "How is he to find out what the poet tried to do?" The poem is the only
evidence before us. If the poet succeeded in doing it, the poem itself shows what
he was trying to do. If the poet did not succeed, it is absurd for the critic to look
outside the poem for an intention which is not effective in the poem. The critic
should not go to other sources to find out what the writer wanted to say.

3. Wimsatt and Beardsley make a categorical declaration of the New Critic's stance
on literary appreciation: they give a great deal of importance to judgement. As
they put it, "Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands
that it work. Just as we do not enquire about the intention of it cook, what kind of
pudding he had in mind, it is irrelevant to enquire into what kind of poem the
author wanted to write. It is only because an artifact works that we can infer the
49
 intention of its creator. "A poem should not mean but be" wrote the poet
Archibald MacLeish, as the concluding lines of his poem 'Ars Poetica’ (The Art
of Poetry) published in 1926. A poem simply is, there is no point in asking what
part is intended or meant. Poetry is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning
is handled all at once: a multiplicity of meanings at different levels can be
presented in a poem, and poetry succeeds primarily because it excludes all
irrelevant material. In this respect, artistic creation differs from practical
messages, which have just one meaning; Ordinary discourse is different from
poetry; it is more abstract, and is successful only if we correctly infer its intention.

4. A poem can be about a state of mind or a personality rather than a physical object
like an apple. But this personality, these thoughts and attitudes belong to the
character, "the dramatic speaker", not to the author.

5. An author may improve his work by revision. But we cannot say that he has
achieved his intention better, because he has written a better poem; his former
intention was expressed in the earlier version..The revised version would be
expressing a different intention, for we cannot look for the intention as something
outside the poem.

They quote Professor Stoll of the "intentionalist school" who says that the critic
should not explore his own consciousness; he should determine the author's meaning
or intention, for "the poem is not the critic's own". The New Critics retort by pointing
out that a poem is not the critic's own and not the author's: "The poem belongs to the
public". It is an autonomous unit; "it is detached from the author at birth". Once he
has published a poem, it no longer belongs exclusively to the author, he can no longer
control it.

Wimsatt and Beardsley go on to consider the views of other critics and reviewers,
such as Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. In his review of the article on "Intention" (which
appeared in The Dictionary of World Literature) he said that there are two kinds of
enquiry about a work of art: (1) whether the artist achieved his intentions (2) whether
the work is worth preserving. According to him, the first is artistic criticism, while the
second is not criticism of a work of art as a work of art, it is moral criticism. But
Wimsatt and Beardsley reject his stance; they point out that no moral considerations
are involved in judging the value of art, "objective criticism of works of art as such is
the only method of judging.

"The Intentional Fallacy" started a profound debate on various aspects of literary

criticism, including meaning and interpretation. The most important of these articles,
by critics like E.D.Hirsch, Morse Peckham, Graham Hough id George Watson have
been reprinted in the book, On Literary Intention edited by David Newton de Molina.
The book also contains Wimsatt's own reply to the ongoing debate, "Genesis: A
Fallacy Revisited", which was first published in the book The Discipline of Criticism:
Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation and History edited by Peter Demetz,
Thomas Greene and Lowry Nelson (Yale University Press, 1968). Wimsatt clarifies
some points of his first essay; Beardsley believes that any work which successfully
50
achieves what it set out to do can be considered skillful; but the term applies to the
artist himself, not the work. A murderer who successfully plans and executes a
murder can be considered "skillful".

To discuss the problems of adducing the intentions of the author from outside
sources, he takes the case of the poem "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe wrote a
long article, "The Philosophy of Composition", explaining why he chose that
particular theme and form. But it would be wrong to consider "The Raven" a good
poem simply because it fulfills his stated objectives. Once we look outside the poem
for its intention, there can be no end to our search. In Poe's own case, the essay was
written after he had published the popular poem, it cannot be a valid guide to his
intention because it is "an ex post facto invention and a tongue-in-cheek tour de
force".

In the second section of "The Intentional Fallacy", the critics show that it is part of
the romantic tendency to consider poetry as an expression of the poet's soul. Longinus
defines sublimity as "the echo of a great soul." In the nineteenth century, Goethe
expressed the intentionalist stance with great clarity, when he asks, "What did the
author set out to do? ..how far did he succeed in carrying it out?" Croce, too, lays
stress on seeing a work of art "as its author saw it in the moment of production." The
third section is devoted to the testimony of poets. Wimsatt and Beardsley admit that
they might have much useful advice for the budding poet, but the ''judgment of poems
is different from the art of producing them." Poets do not occupy a privileged position
when it comes to judging poetry: Socrates observes that poets themselves cannot talk
well about poetry, others have "talked better" about the meaning of difficult passages
written by diverse poets.

Section IV cautions against confusing personal studies (literary biography) with

poetic studies. It discusses the use of evidence for understanding the meaning of a
poem. Evidence can be of three types :

(1) Internal evidence for understanding a poem is knowledge which is in the public
sphere: knowledge discovered through the semantics (the meaning of the words)
and the syntax (the order of the words) of a poem.

(2) External evidence is private, and not part of the poem. It consists of revelations, in
journals or letters or reported conversations, about how or why the poet wrote the
poem.

(3) An intermediate kind of evidence about the character of the author or about
private or semi-private meanings attached to words or topics by an author or the
coterie of which he is a member.

They believe that the critic should use only the first type. But they do not completely
rule out the third type. In some cases, "the use of biographical evidence need no
involve intention, because while it may be evidence of what the author intended, it
may also be evidence of the meaning of his words and the dramatic character of his
51
utterance." They believe that "the meaning of words is the history of words, and the
biography of an author, his use of a word, and the associations which the word had
for him, are part of the word's history and meaning." They add in a footnote that if we
are free of the intentionalist bias, the history of words after a poem is written can
contribute meanings relevant to the original pattern. To illustrate their stand, they cite
explications of Coleridge and John Dome. John Livingston Lowes' Road to Xanadu
(1926) uses the second and third types of evidence; as a consequence, Lowes's
explication throws attention on the poet Coleridge rather than on the poem "Kubla
Khan". The critique of Donne's poem is so involved with the new astronomy of his
time and its effect on Dome's theological beliefs that it distorts the poem. In the later
essay, "Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited" he gives the example of Blake's poem,
"London", where the poet's private meaning, as inferred from external evidence,
clashes with the public material of his poem. If we give more weight to private
meaning, as E.D.Hirsh does, our reading of the poem suffers.

The last section of the essay looks at the question of "allusiveness" in Eliot’s poetry,
where a false judgment is likely to involve the intentional fallacy. The allusions work
best when we know them, but they work to a great extent even when we do not know
them. This is because of their suggestive power. But intentionalists would insist on
reading the notes (provided by Eliot himself), and then judging the poems in the light
of these notes. Wimsatt believes that notes should be used only as a crutch to
understanding. In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", there is the line, "I have
heard the mermaids singing, each to each", and we wonder whether it is an allusion to
Donne's line, “Teach me to hear mermaids singing" (from his song "Go and Catch a
Falling Star"). Wimsatt declares that there are two ways of solving the problem:

(1) the way of poetic analysis and exegesis, which enquires whether it makes any
sense if Eliot-Prufrock is thinking about Donne. This is the true and objective way
of criticism.

(2) the way of biographical or genetic enquiry, where the critic in the spirit of a man
who would settle a bet, writes to Eliot (who was still alive) asking him if he had
Donne in mind. Eliot's answer (if he cared to answer) would have nothing' to do
with the poem itself, for it is not a critical enquiry.

Wimsatt and Beardsley insist on the objective reality of the poem. A work of art
emerges from the private, intentionalistic realm of its maker's mind and personality,
but after emerging, it enters a public and objective realm. It claims attention from an
audience, and invites discussions about its meaning and value. The author is likely to
be a good guide for interpreting its meaning, but he cannot be an infallible guide. As a
commentator on his own works he enjoys no prescriptive, or creative, rights. As an
example, they take the case of the poem "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock": Eliot
is not an oracle to be consulted.

"Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited" makes some important clarifications. Wimsatt says

that their statement should have read: "The design or intention of the author is neither
available nor desirable as a standard for judging either the meaning or the value of a
52
work of literary art." Their argument against interpretation based on a poet's
"intention" does not refer to intention as found in, or inferred from, the work itself.
Their stand is supported by the critical practice of F.R.Leavis, who declared that
intentions are relevant only in so far as they are realized in a work of art. Such an
analysis can extend to conflicts of intention found in a given work. An example is
Blake's comment that "Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it". This is an
argument which can be carried on within the poem itself, without appealing to.
Milton's own rebellious personality.

T.S.Eliot and F.R.Leavis, two leading critics of the time, supported Wimsatt's stand.
Eliot's statement in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that "Honest criticism and
sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry" is an
indirect attack on Intentionalism. In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism he is
more direct, when he says, "I prefer not to define, or to test poetry by means of
speculations about its origins; you cannot find a sure test of poetry, a test by which
you may distinguish between poetry and mere good verse, by referring to its putative
antecedents in the mind of the poet." F.R.Leavis takes an uncompromising stance
regarding the importance of the social context of a poem. In the article, "The
Responsible Critic" (first published in 1953 in Scrutiny Vol. 19) he attacks
F.W.Bateson's suggestion that we must fully understand the "complex of religious,
political and economic factors that can be called the social context" to achieve a
correct reading of a poem. Leavis declares, "It will not, I think, be supposed that I
should like to insulate literature for study, in some pure realm of 'literary values'
(whatever they might be. But on the one hand it is plain to me that no poem we have
any chance of being able to read as a poem requires anything approaching the
inordinate apparatus of contextual aids to interpretation that Mr Bates sees himself
deploying. On the other hand it is equally plain to me that it is to creative literature,
read as creative literature, that we must look for our main insights into those
characteristics of the social context that matter most to the critic."

Newer schools of literary criticism have objected to this stance. One of the most
cogent refutations has been provided in E.D.Hirsch, who regrets the "heavy and
largely victorious assault on the sensible belief that a text means what its author
means." In essays like "In Defence of the Author", "Objective Interpretation" and
"Three Dimensions of Hermeneutics", he refutes Wimsatt on hermeneutical grounds.
Interpretation is a necessary part of evaluation, and we cannot understand a poem's
meaning without understanding his intention. Hermeneutics has established that there
can be more than one interpretation of a text, and Hirsch says that the most valid
meaning is that of the author. The original meaning is the best meaning. "Unless there
is a powerful overriding value in disregarding an author's intention (i.e. original
meaning), we who interpret as a vocation should not disregard it" he asserts in his
essay "Three Dimensions of Hermeneutics". He disagrees with Wimsatt's assertion
that "poetry differs from practical messages." In "The Intentional Fallacy" Wimsatt
wrote that "poetry differs from practical messages, which are successful if and only if
we correctly infer the intention." Hirsch feels that "No literary theorist from Coleridge
to the present has succeeded in formulating a viable distinction between the nature of
ordinary written speech and the nature of literary written speech. . . there is no viable
53
distinction between 'literature' and other classifications of written speech, the ethics of
language hold good in all uses of language, oral and written, in poetry as well as in
philosophy. All are ethically governed by the intentions of the author."

5.3 “THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY"

"The Affective Fallacy", first published in 1949, presents a theoretical formulation of

another aspect of the New Critics' attempt to objectively focus on the work itself they
feel that the critic should not be concerned with the emotional effect of the work on
the reader. The affective fallacy, like the intentional fallacy, is another obstacle to
objective criticism. The intentional fallacy represented a confusion between the poem
and its origin, the mistaken attempt to judge a poem by its causes. The affective
fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results. The intentional fallacy tried to
derive its standards of judgment from the poet; the affective fallacy tries to derive its
standards from the psychological effects of the poem, and ends in impressionism and
relativism. The outcome of both fallacies is that attention is deflected from the poem
itself. The essay briefly discusses the history of such criticism, beginning with the
question of meaning.

In the "The Affective Fallacy", the authors disagree with the theories of I.A.Richards.
Richards in Principles of Literary Criticism, and The Meaning of Meaning makes a
clear distinction between the emotive and referential uses of language. In Practical
Criticism, he had proposed "four kinds of meaning", and his semantic researches were
taken up by Chase, Hayakawa, C.L.Stevenson and others. Wimsatt ad Beardsley point
out that Richards uses the term "meaning' loosely. The term meaning has been
traditionally assigned to the cognitive or descriptive function of language, and it
would have been better if Richards had employed some other term such as "import".
When Richards mentions "feeling' as one of the kinds of meaning, and mentions
words like "liberty', "pleasant" 'beautiful" or "ugly", he neglects the descriptive
meaning of the words, he is concerned only with the emotive response which these
words may evoke in a listener. Richards and his followers are guilty of not realizing
the difference between the "grounds of emotion and emotion themselves".

Semantic writings also tend to ignore other facts: (1) a large area of emotive import
depends directly upon descriptive meaning and (2) a great deal of emotive import
which does not depend directly on descriptive meaning depends on descriptive
suggestion. After discussing various semantic experts's views on meaning, they
conclude that none of them has offered conclusive evidence "that what a word does to
a person is to be ascribed to anything except what it means, or if this connection is not
apparent, at the most, by what it suggests. The kind of emotive meaning propounded
by these semanticists leads to one kind of affective relativism in poetics, the personal.
If emotional response is independent of the cognitive quality of the context, a reader
can feel either "hot" or "cold", report either "good" or "bad" on reading either
"liberty" or "licence", either an ode by Keats or a limerick. Similarly anthropologists
can encourage another type of affective relativism, the cultural or historical, by
advocating the measurement of poetic value by the degree of feeling felt by the
54
readers of a given era. Just as intentionalistic poetics was encouraged by historians
and biographers, the affective fallacy will be encouraged by historians who will be
interested in whatever can be discovered about the personal responses of
Shakespeare's audience.

In the third part of the essay, Wimsatt and Beardsley deal with the history of affective
theory. Plato's comments, and Aristotle's counter-theory of catharsis, are an early
instance of emotive criticism. Longinus and his followers in th6'eighteenth century,
Tolstoy and his infection theory, Saintsbury and his "Grand Style", and now I.A.
Richards and Max Eastman all believe that poetry should be judged by the emotional
effect it has on the reader. Affective criticism can even have a physiological form: the
emotional effect of the poem can be manifested by physical symptoms of the reader,
such as the bristling of the skin or a shiver down the spine.

In the fourth section, the authors have shown how the affective theory has produced
very little practical criticism. Longinus, the author of "On the Sublime" is least
convincing when he tries to link up passion and sublimity with hyperbole in speech.
We still do not have a clear account of Aristotle's concept of catharsis, critics are still
debating whether the term applies to the thing purged or the object purified. The
critical practice of I.A.Richards in Practical Criticism has little to do with his
affective theory of synaesthesis. The purely affective report is either too physiological
or it is too vague.

Richards has anticipated some of the problems of affective criticism by saying that it
is not intensity of emotion that characterizes poetry, but the subtle quality of patterned
emotion. We have psychological theories of aesthetic distance, detachment or
disinterestedness. Criticism on these principles tends towards objectivity. Richards'
theory of balanced emotions has contributed much to recent schools of cognitive
analysis, or paradox ambiguity, irony and symbol. The emotive and cognitive forms
of criticism need not be very far from each other. If the affective critic ventures to
state with precision what a line of poetry does, it will be a description of what the
meaning of the line is. The more specific the account of the emotions induced by a
poem, the more nearly it will be an account of the reasons for emotion, the poem
itself. It will supply the kind of information which will enable readers to respond to
the poem better, and the critic can fulfill his role as teacher or explicator.

"The Affective Fallacy" attacks the vague emoting about poetry, or Richards'
"balancing of impulses". Poetry relates more to knowledge than to emotion. Wimsatt
is suspicious of terms like the sublime, or rapture (derived from Longinus) or "the
grand style." and insists that "a poetry of pure emotion is an illusion" (Section V). He
declares that the important thing is the poet itself, not its cause ("intention") or its
effect.

In these two famous essays, he pays no attention to the question of audience. But his
critical practice was quite conscious of it, in his essays on comedy or on Pope. In the
"Introduction" to The Verbal Icon he writes: There are certain poems in which a
particular dramatic listener (poems of a lover to his mistress, for instance) has a great
55
deal to do with determining a certain kind of style, a certain kind of structure, a
certain kind of metaphor. Other poems we may conceive as poems for a sex, a caste, a
party. The Rape of the Lock is addressed, immediately, to a more squeamish audience
than The Dunciad" (p.xv). Wimsatt internalizes both the dramatic audience and the
speaker of a poem: "Both speaker and dramatic audience are assimilated into the
implicit structure of the poet's meaning. . . . at the fully cognitive level of appreciation
we unite in our own minds both speaker and audience" (p.xvi). Wimsatt seems to
anticipate the "fusion of horizons" propounded by the German school of reception
theory. But he never advocated judging a poem in terms of the response of a specific
audience. He said that a critic ought to have in mind not just any response of a
contemporary reader, or the average response, or even the response of any elite group,
but in a more generally human sense an 'ideal response'.

5.4 THE ACHIEVEMENT OF W.K.WIMSATT

Wimsatt's importance as a critic is not restricted to two important theoretical

concepts. His essays on criticism and poetry, and his empirical work on eighteenth
century writing is equally important. With Cleanth Brooks, he is the author of
Literary Criticism: A Short History. First published in 1957, it traces literary criticism
in the west from Greek antiquity to the nineteen-fifties. This history pays due
attention to literary criticism in languages other than English: to Italian (Vico and
Croce), German (Schlegel, Schiller, Goethe, Hegel, Kant etc,), Russian (Tolstoy) and
French (Taine) criticism.

Wimsatt is concerned primarily with the meaning of the poem: both the fallacies he
criticises are attempts to judge a poem by something other than the poem, either its
cause or its effect. His essays analysed devices like metre, euphony and rhyme,
elements of style, and their relationship with meaning. He defended the unity of form
and content, and like Brooks, thought of poetry as a harmonization of opposites. He
was greatly concerned with the relation of poetry to reality. He used the term "verbal
icon" for poetry. Poetry both represents and interprets reality, and the concept of the
icon as a bridge between literature and reality; he discussed these ideas in articles
about metaphor, symbol and the problems of artistic representation.

Wimsatt successfully defended the New Critics against attacks by the Chicago
School. The Chicago School was a group of critics led by R.S.Crane, and included
Elder Olson, Norman Maclean, and R.W.Keast. Under the inspiration of Richard
McKeon, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, they developed a
theory which has come to be called Neo-Aristotelianism. They believed in rigid
distinctions of genre, and the importance of literary history. The Chicago critics and
other New Critics had one goal in common: both laid stress on studying literature and
criticism in universities. But the Neo-Aristotelians produced very little practical
criticism: "The Plot of Tom Jones" by R.S.Crane is one of the few essays which is
still read. Attacks on the New Critics seemed to be a major part of their agenda:
articles on I.A.Richards (R.S.Crane), Cleanth Brooks (R.S.Crane), William Empson
(Elder Olson), Robert Penn Warren (Elder Orson) and Robert Heilman (W.R.Keast)
56
argued that modern critical theory has gone astray since it deserted the teaching of
Aristotle. Their charges against the New Critics had some basis: Richards is guilty of
psychologism, Cleanth Brooks' concept of poetry as irony is too narrow, Empson is
simply juggling with his types of ambiguity, while R.P.Warren presses the symbolism
of the Ancient Mariner beyond reasonable limits. The Chicago critics were quite
oblivious of the drawbacks in their own theory while they launched a wholesale
attack on the New Critics. In essays like "The Chicago Critics: The Fallacy of the
Neoclassic Species", Wimsatt provided a valid defence the New Critics, while clearly
revealing the weaknesses of the Chicago critics.

5.5 LET US SUM UP

The two essays by Wimsatt and Beardsley first published in 1946 and 1949 in the
Sewanee Review are clear expositions of the New Critics' theoretical stance: their
exclusive emphasis on the text. In "The Intentional Fallacy" they insist that no poem
can be judged by reference to the poet's intentions. It is what is "internal", what can
be discovered from the text of a poem, that is public; everything that is "external" and
"not part of the work as a linguistic fact" is private and idiosyncratic. The elaborate
investigation into Coleridge's life and readings made by John Livingston Lowes in his
book Road to Xanadu may be interesting in its own right, but it is not valid evidence
for judging the poem "Kubla Khan". Poetry should not be judged as a simple
expression of the poet's feelings or his aims and intentions as gathered from diaries,
biographies etc. Historical study is helpful only in so far as it helps us understand the
meanings of the words on the page.

"The Affective Fallacy" is an attack on the attempt to judge a poem by the effect it
has on the reader. The school of semantic criticism that arose from the work of
I.A.Richards believed in the distinction between the referential and emotive use of
language. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that this is an oversimplification, even
emotional response is based on the cognitive meaning of the word. Poetry is an
independent object with distinctive features of its own. To try to judge it by the effect
it has on the reader will lead to limitless relativism, for the response can vary from
one reader to another and from one reading to another. The critic should base his
judgement on the meaning or "cognitive structure" of the poem, the objective
constituent of the text. Wimsatt's theoretical explication is well illustrated by his
practical criticism, his studies of eighteenth century writers like Samuel Johnson and
Pope. His work is notable for its clarity and force.

5.6 GLOSSARY

intentionalist: a person who believes that it is the duty of the critic to determine and
understand the author's intention. Artistic creation should be judged in terms of how
successful the artist is in achieving his intention.

57
autonomous: independent, self governed, not needing reference to any outside
authority.

cognitive: pertaining to cognition, the act or faculty of knowing or perceiving, as

distinct from emotion.

epistemological: relating to epistemology, the theory of knowledge, especially with

regard to its methods and validation.

ex post facto: action with retrospective effect, based on events which happen later.

tongue-in-cheek: with ironical intent, not direct or sincere.

tour de force: an impressive demonstration of skill or strength.

5.7 QUESTIONS

1. What do you understand by "The Intentional Fallacy"?

2. How does Wimsatt and Beardsley's concept of poetry differ from that of
I.A.Richards?

3. Give an estimate of Wimsatt as a critic.

4. Comment on Wimsatt as the theoretical spokesman for the New Critics. On what
grounds does he defend them?

5.8 READING LIST

Part I
*Wimsatt, W.K. and Monroe C. Beardsley. "The Affective Fallacy".
*----- "The Intentional Fallacy"

Wimsatt, W.K. "Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited." in The Discipline of Criticism: Essays

in Literary Theory, Interpretation and History ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene and
Lowry Nelson. Yale University Press, 1968.

----- The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. 1954. London: Methuen,
1970; includes reprint of "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy".

Part II

*Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent."

----- The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.

58
Hirsch, E.D. "In Defence of the Author", from Validity in Interpretation Yale
University Press, 1967.

----- "Objective Interpretation" PMLA Vol.LXXV, No.4 Pt. 1, September 1960,

pp.463-79.
----- "Three Dimensions of Hermeneutics" New Literary History Vol.111, No.2
Winter 1972, pp.245-1.

Leavis, F.R. "The Responsible Critic". Scrutiny. Vol. 19, 1953.

Lewis, C.S. and E.M.W.Tillyard. The Personal Heresy: A Controversy. London:

Oxford University Press, 1939.

Newton-de Molina, David, ed. On Literary Intention: Critical Essays. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 1976.

Wellek, Rene. A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1986. Vol.VI, pp.281-292.

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UNIT 6 CONCLUSION

Structure

6.0 Objectives
6.1 Other New Critics
6.2 Later Schools of Criticism
6.3 The Achievement of the New Critics
6.4 Questions
6.5 Reading List

6.0 OBJECTIVES

In this unit, we shall attempt a general appraisal of the New Critics. You have studied
the work of Richards, Eliot, Leavis, Ransom, Brooks, and Wimsatt. We shall take a
look at other critics of the period who contributed to this movement: Allen Tate,
R.P.Blackmur, Kenneth Burke and Yvor Winters. After comparing New Criticism
with other schools of criticism like Russian Formalism and structuralism, we shall
sum up the achievement of the New Critics.

6.1 OTHER NEW CRITICS

You have familiarized yourself with the writings of Ransom, Brooks, and Wimsatt in
America and the Scrutiny group in England. There are a number of other critics who
played an important part in the movement in America. Under the influence of
T.S.Eliot (The Sacred Wood was published in 1920) and Richards' Principles of
Literary Criticism (1924), poet-critics-like Allen Tate, R.P.Blackmur, Robert Penn
Warren and Yvor Winters wrote articles and books with a new approach to literary
criticism.

Allen Tate (1879-1979) was born in Winchester, Kentucky. He was educated at

Vanderbilt University, where he joined John Crowe Ransom's literary discussion
group, and co-founded and edited its journal, The Fugitive, a poetry magazine which
published nineteen issues between 1922 and 1925. He made his name as a poet with
Mr Pope and Other Poems (1928), and Three Poems (1930), and was poet in
residence at Princeton in the early nineteen-forties. He continued to publish volumes
of poetry, such as Poems (1960) and The Swimmers (1970). He started teaching in
Tennessee in 1934, and published his first book of criticism, Reactionary Essays on
Poetry and Ideas in 1936. From 1951 he was professor of English at the University of
Minnesota. He was editor of the Sewanee Review from 1944 to 1946. Reason in
Madness (1941) and On the Limits of Poetry (1948) established his reputation as a
critic.

60
His criticism reveals the influence of T.S.Eliot. In one of his early letters, he refers to
him as "a greater critic than poet" whom he considers "the most intelligent man
alive". Eliot said that poetry was impersonal, Tate declares that poetry is not a vehicle
for imprecise feeling but an autonomous structure, an objective frame for tension
between themes. A poem has its own integrity, it is a whole in which the parts
corroborate and modify each other. He says that a poem is not a statement like a
sermon. Poetry is removed from the "domain of practicality", "it is neither true nor
false: it is an object that exists." Yet he believed in the social relevance of poetry.
According to Tate, it provides "special, unique and complete knowledge." Tate
always said that he owed a lot to John Crowe Ransom. Like Ransom, who said that
poetry provides "the world's body", the particularity of the real world in contrast to
the abstractions of science, Tate believed that the "knowledge" provided by poetry
was superior to that found in science or historical documents. His "knowledge"
denoted a kind of union of intellect and feeling, like Eliot's "unified sensibility". He
said that poetry was "tension", a term he formed by "lopping the prefixes off the
logical terms extension and intension". "Good poetry is a unity of all the meanings
from the furthest extremes of extension and intension."

Like the other New Critics, Tate rejected the genetic bias, and laid stress on the poem
as an independent object: "What is the poem after it is written? That is the question.
Not where it came from and why." In a witty early lecture, "Miss Emily and the
Bibliographer" he attacks scholars who trace influences or apply psychology,
economics or sociology to give their literary criticism a scientific air. He said that
they avoided "the moral obligation to judge." Tate's theoretical pronouncements are
generally backed by analyses of texts. His empirical work recognizes the importance
of a poem's cultural and biographical context.

Yvor Winters (1900-1968) took an M.A. in Romance languages from the University
of Colorado, and taught French and Spanish at the University of Idaho. In 1927 he
enrolled as a doctoral student at Stanford University, California, where he later took
up teaching. He became professor of English in 1949. He was a poet whose career
falls into two distinct phases. His early poems, The Immobile Wind (1921), The
Magpie's Shadow (1922) and The Bare Hills (1927) were written in free verse, under
the influence of the Imagists. But in the early nineteen-thirties Winters rejected
modernist innovations, and turned to the conventional prosody found in Dryden and
Pope. He published many volumes of neoclassical poetry, and defended his revised
poetic practice in his essays. His critical output was not large; Primitivism and
Decadence (1937), Maule's Curse (1938) and The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943) were
short books later published in a single volume, under the title In Defence of Reason
(1947). Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Form of the Short
Poem in English (1967) presents a highly idiosyncratic view of English and American
poetry.

Winters believed that poetry is "a statement in words about a human experience." He
believed that poetry should be a clear statement, using traditional metres, since they
alone could exploit the full emotional potential of language to convey feeling

61
informed by understanding, He rejects all emotionalism or mysticism. The language
should be charged with emotion adequate to the idea.

Winters shares the New Critics' concern with value judgments, but insists that ethics
is important: "ethical interest is the only poetic interest, for the reason that all poetry
deals with one kind or another of human experience and is valuable in proportion to
the justice with which it evaluates that experience." Winters believes that the primary
function of criticism is evaluation. Even within the canon, the critic should lay down
rankings. Winters himself was notorious for his value judgements: he ranked Robert
Bridges above T.S.Eliot, and Edith Wharton above Henry James. Perhaps he was
deliberately provocative: even those who did not agree with him found his forthright
criticism quite stimulating.

Richard Palmer Blackmur (1904-1965) was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. He

had no formal academic education: he worked in a bookshop, instead of going to
university. From 1928 to 1940 he was a free-lance literary critic and poet. Then Allen
Tate, who admired his "vigorous, tough-minded criticism" appointed him to assist in
the newly established course on creative writing at Princeton. He remained at
Princeton for the rest of his life: first as resident fellow, then as Professor from 1948.
He earned a reputation as a poet with volumes like From Jordan's Delight (1937),
The Second World (1942) and The Good European and Other Poems (1947).

His first books of literary essays, The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation
(1935) and The Expense of Greatness (1940) advocate a "technical approach", and
provide brilliant analyses of many modern poets like Yeats, Wallace Stevens and
e.e.cummings. He admired T.S.Eliot, as critic and poet, and wrote widely on his
poetry. The best of his critical essays appear in Language as Gesture (1952) and The
Lion and the Honeycomb (1955). He was one of the few New Critics to analyse
fiction: he wrote on English novelists like Henry James and D.H.Lawrence, as well as
on European and American novelists, but his critical studies are not as well argued
and convincing as those of Leavis. He believed, especially as he grew older, that
criticism has a strictly limited use: its function is to remove obstacles between text
and reader. He felt that "no amount of linguistic analysis can explain the feeling or
existence of a poem". He shares the New Critics' belief in the autonomy of the text.
He declared, "Criticism must be concerned, first and last--whatever comes between--
with the poem as it is read and as what it represents is felt." He rejects extrinsic
methods of criticism based on biography, psychology, history or Marxism. He valued
impersonality, objectivity and concreteness. This insistence on impersonality
(probably inspired by Eliot) made him place a very low value on Emily Dickinson's
poetry.

His most famous essay of theoretical formulation is "Language as Gesture".

Blackmur say, "Gesture in language is the outward and dramatic play of inward and
imaged meaning" (p.6). He says that meaning is born out of the complex
interrelationship between words: by making his written words sound in the inward ear
of his reader, and so play upon each other by concert and opposition and pattern that
they not only drag after them the gestures of life but produce a new gesture of their
62
own." (p.13). "The soul of a composition is in the dhvani" says the opening section of
Dhvanyaloka, and Blackmur's concept of gesture closely parallels the Sanskrit
concept of dhvani (suggestion). Blackmur uses the term "gesture" very broadly to
include rhythm and cadence and all the devices such as symbols "which we use to
express meaningfulness in a permanent way which cannot be expressed in direct
words ok formulas of words with any completeness." (p. 16)

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1988) was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. Like Cleanth
Brooks, he was a student of John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt University. He wrote a
number of novels and two volumes of short stories, but his claim to literary fame lies
primarily with his poetry. His later poems are marked by a brooding violence, and
there is a sense of guilt akin to that expressed in Faulkner's fiction. For him, criticism
was secondary to his creative writing. With Cleanth Brooks, he started teaching at
Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge; together they founded and edited The
Southern Review in 1935 till it ceased publication in 1942. They collaborated in a
series of anthologies for American college students: Understanding Poetry (1938),
Understanding Fiction (1943) and Modern Rhetoric (1949). He was interested
primarily in teaching, and told an interviewer, in 1972, that criticism "is an extension
of teaching, even conversation."

Like Leavis, Warren tended to stay away from theory. He does not believe in a fixed,
methodology, and repeatedly emphasized that the New Critics had no consistent
doctrine. His main contribution to criticism was his empirical work. In addition to
criticism of poetry, He has written studies of novelists like Faulkner (whom he
admired), Henry James, Melville, Hemingway, and Conrad, Two early essays on
poetry have attracted a lot of attention and provoked debate: a theoretical essay, and a
study of Coleridge. "Pure and Impure Poetry" (1942) is a paradoxical study of
"impure poetry". (George Moore and his group in London had published an
anthology of poems called Pure Poetry). Warren said that poetry should be neither
effusion of sentiment nor propaganda for an ideology. He pleaded for a kind of
inclusive poetry which would make use of irony and juxtapose contrasting moods: he
employs close reading of Landor's "Rose Aylmer" and Shakespeare's Romeo and
Juliet to illustrate his point. "A Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in
Reading" is a detailed study of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge. He
rightly rejects psychoanalytical and biographical readings, and presents a fine
analysis of the main action of the poem. But his argument that "imagination" is the
theme of the poem, and that the sun and the moon are image clusters, is not equally
convincing.

6.2 OTHER SCHOOLS OF CRITICISM

New Criticism developed independently of the Russian Formalist or the Prague and
Paris structuralist theories. It is possible that the New Critics did not know about
these theories: Literary Criticism: A Short History by Wimsatt and Brooks, published
in 1957, does not mention the Formalists or Structuralists, though it deals with
Northrop Frye and myth criticism. There are some affinities between the New Critics
63
and the Formalists, though the differences are equally important. Both rejected
positivist literary scholarship and called for a renewed attention to literature as
literature, and insisted on the difference between literature and other kinds of
statements. They emphasized structure and interrelatedness, and looked at the text as
an object independent of its author or the historical context.

The New Critics came very close to the Russian Formalists and the Prague School in
the importance they give to the objective character of criticism, and the distinction of
the text from the author ("intentional fallacy") or the reader ("affective fallacy"). Both
schools emphasize the concept of structure and interrelatedness. But the New Critics'
idea of structure was different from the Prague school, for whom the concept of
structure included all the different levels of the text not just its meaning. The New
Critics were not interested in the ideas of difference, defamiliarization or deviance
which were important to the Formalists and structuralists. Nor are they interested in
the business of 'foregrounding' and 'deformation' that the Prague School make so
much of. The New Critics pay little attention to the form of a poem. They do pay
attention to meter and stanzaic forms, and Winter has an essay on "The Audible
Reading of Poetry". But the New Critics reject the distinction between form and
content. They believe in the organicity of poetry. In practice, there are some
differences: Ransom's distinction between structure and texture roughly corresponds
to the old dichotomy of content and form. But the New Critics never concentrated on
the form, they were overwhelmingly concerned with the meaning of a work of art, the
tone, the feelings, and the implied world view conveyed. For them, the technical
devices too were part of this overall meaning.

"The Intentional Fallacy" insisted that the author's intentions were not important. This
did not lead to the disappearance of the author from literary study, the New Critics
simply shifted the author from the outside to the inside of the text. Instead of an
author based on biography, history and psychology, we had an author based on the
words on the page. The Formalists went much further in abolishing the author. In the
words of Osip Brik, "There are no poets or literary figures, there is poetry and
literature". The New Critics were concerned with meaning and the vision expressed in
the words on the page, but the Formalists were not interested in vision or authorial
meaning. For them, the author is nothing more than a craftsman, the means whereby
literature is brought into being. The vision of the author, or his real or imaginative
experiences transmuted into art, do not enter into Russian Formalism.

The New Critics attitude to meaning and language differs from that of Saussure and
his school. They recognized the importance of convention and culture in fixing the
meaning of a word, but they never believed that the meaning of words is purely
conventional. For them, art and language always pointed to reality. So they did not
believe, as the structuralists do, that literature is a closed system, or that language is a
prison house that shuts us away from reality. The structuralists have some affinities
with the New Critics in their concern for a detailed analysis of the text. But there is a
major difference: the structuralists do not believe in judgement or ranking, nor do
they believe in language as an autonomous entity.

64
In one respect, Eliot anticipates later schools, in recognizing the importance of the
reader. Eliot's skepticism about interpretation implies a concept of the meaning of a
work of art as something indeterminate. He said, "A poem may appear to mean
different things to different readers, and all of these meanings may be different from
what the author thought he meant. . . The reader's interpretation may differ from the
author's and be equally valid-it may even be better" (Of Poets and Poetry, p.30). He
believes that a work of art is an artifact in the public sphere, detached from the author,
and the author's intentions are irrelevant, as the New Critics insist. But the suggestion
that meaning may be something dependent on the reader is the central concept of the
schools of reader-oriented theories. The hermeneuticians have fully investigated the
difficulties of interpretation.

6.3 THE ACHIEVEMENT OF THE NEW CRITICS

In his essay, "The Frontiers of Criticism", T.S.Eliot gives a good account of the
diversity and unity of New Criticism:

The term "The New Criticism" is often employed by people without realizing
what a variety it comprehends; but its currency does, I think, recognize the
fact that the more distinguished critics of today, however widely they differ
from each other, all differ in some significant way from the critics of a
previous generation.

In their protest against Romantic, impressionistic and positivist criticism, the New
Critics shared some basic assumptions. They all believed that a literary work was
primarily a linguistic artifact, a verbal structure. It was a mode of communication
between the artist and the reader. The primary function of the critic, they believed, is
to understand and judge the poem, unaffected by the intentional fallacy or the
affective fallacy. They believed in the supremacy and autonomy of the words on the
page, the text. They believed that a work of art has an independent existence, but art
is not divorced from life, they did not subscribe to the beliefs of the "Art for Art's
sake school". Most of the New Critics were concerned with man and civilization,
though their interpretation of "value" is not identical. For them, the exploration of
literature was an exploration of life: whether it is Eliot in The Use of Poetry and the
Use of Criticism, Leavis in The Common Pursuit, J.C.Ransom in The World's Body,
I.A.Richards in Principles of Literary Criticism, Allan Tate in On the Limits of
Poetry, or R.P.Blackmur in Language as Gesture, they all agreed with Leavis's
formulation that "Literature matters because life matters." The American and English
critics shared an acceptance of the tenets of Matthew Arnold's essay, e Function of
Criticism at the Present Time" (1864). Arnold considered the study of literature a
great civilizing force, a substitute for religion in the approaching age when people
were losing faith in religion. Arnold said that literary study should be "disinterested",
it should encourage the "free play of the mind". The function of criticism is to see
"the object as in itself it really is."

65
They were concerned with the ontology of poetry, and looked at it as an organism.
They might have been influenced by the scientific temper of the early twentieth
century in finding a biological metaphor, but the debt to Coleridge is significant.
Coleridge propounded the theory of the "esemplastic power" of the imagination,
which has the creative capacity to reconcile opposites. They were all concerned with
the structure of the work of literature as part of its total meaning, for they do not
accept any dichotomy between content and form. Cleanth Brooks expresses this
concept clearly when he talks about the "heresy of paraphrase": the paraphrasable
content of a poem cannot be equated with its meaning. He objects to reducing a work
of art to a statement of abstract propositions, or to a moral message, or to any
verifiable truth.

For Richards, meaning grew out of the interplay of sense, feeling, tone and attitude.
Ransom conceives of the structure of a poem as incorporating its logical or prose
content and its local texture. Tate finds the significance of a poem in the complex
relationship between the extension (the denotative sense) and "intention" (the
connotative sense or emotive charge). Brooks and Robert Penn Warren regard wit and
irony as principles of structure. In his book, The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks takes
representative poems of different ages as illustrations of the operation of paradox.
Empson values ambiguity as a device which adds to the complexity and density of the
meaning of a poem.

The New Critics considered judgement a very important element of literary criticism.
Through textual analysis, these critics have illuminated and judged literary works,
and discussed the established canon. Allen Tate, for instance, declared that criticism
involved "the moral obligation to judge." Yvor Winter argues that literary history
involves value judgements:"Every writer that the scholar studies comes to him as a
result of a critical judgement". They judged literature from a new perspective. This
has resulted in a process of revaluation. The Metaphysical poets have gained in
reputation, while Milton, Spenser, Shelley and the Victorian poets like Tennyson
have been revalued downward. Shakespeare has profited from the approach of the
New Critics, and has confirmed his place as the pre-eminent poet and dramatist.

The American New Critics and Leavis had much in common, though there were
differences. Both had been influenced by T.S.Eliot’s poetry and critical formulations.
They believed that content and form cannot be separated, and viewed modern
technological society in negative terms. They looked back to a more unified society
(Leavis's "organic society") which supposedly existed in the past. They share a
common emphasis on practical engagement with literary texts. But there is a
difference in their methods of close reading. Leavis refused to make any distinction
between formal and moral values. He always talked in terms of "completeness of
possession" of the text.

The technique of the New Critics is most suitable for the classroom, and continues to
dominate the academic teaching of literature in the English speaking world. Eliot
gives a witty description of this methodology, which he calls "the lemon-squeezer
school of criticism":
66
 The method is to take a poem . . . . without reference to the author or to his
other work, analyse it stanza by stanza and line by line, and extract, squeeze,
tease, press every drop of meaning out of it that one can. It might be called the
lemon-squeezer school of criticism...

There are a few inherent drawbacks in the methodology of the New Critics. It is not
very conducive to the study of fiction. The New Critics have produced many brilliant
critical essays on poetry, but fiction studies lag behind. The exception is Leavis,
whose criticism of fiction is as good as, if not better than, his studies of poetry.

The New Critics pay insufficient attention to the problems of interpretations and
audience response. They assume that a literary work has just one meaning for all
time. As Eliot puts it:

The first danger is that of assuming that there must be just one interpretation of the
poem as a whole, that must be right. . . the meaning of the poem as a whole is not
exhausted by any explanation, for the meaning is what the poem means to different
sensitive readers.

Critics of the school of interpretation (hermeneutics) and "Reader Oriented Theories"

have analysed these problems with great subtlety.

As was the case with Romantic literary theory or Positivism, a reaction set in against
New Criticism; after holding sway for more than four decades, it has been displaced
by approaches like structuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, new historicism and
audience-oriented criticism which lay stress on linguistics, the context or the reader
rather than on the text itself in isolation. Yet the New Critics cannot be considered
outmoded. Their work still has considerable validity, for their theories reflect the
feelings of many common readers: theories like formalism and structuralism tend to
be elitist. While they emphasized the special qualities of literature, the New Critics
insisted on the links between literature and the real world. New Criticism is
humanistic and empiricist, and provides useful tools for the practical criticism of
literature. It constitutes the English-speaking world's major contribution to modern
literary theory.

6.4 QUESTIONS

1. Write about any two American New Critics, and their contribution to literary
theory and practice.
2. Give an estimate of the achievement of New Criticism.
3. Do you agree with the view that the New Critics do not form a coherent school of
criticism?

67
6.5 READING LIST

Part I
Blackmur, R.P. Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace
and Co., 1952. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954.
-----The Lion and the Honeycomb. 1955.
Tate, Allen. Collected Essays. Denver, Colorado, 1959.
----- On the Limits of Poetry, 1948.
----- Reason in Madness. 1941.

Part II
Hyman, Stanley Edgar : The Arnold Vision, 1957, New York: Vintage Books, 1957.
Graff, Gerald: Literature Against Itself Chicago University Press, 1982.

Warren, Robert Penn. "A Poem of Pure Imagination: An Experiment in Reading",

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946. Reprinted
in Selected Essays, 1958.

----- "Pure and Impure Poetry", Kenyon Review Vo1.V (1943), pp.228-54.
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, eds. Understanding Poetry. New York:
Henry Holt and Co., 1938.
----- eds. Understanding Fiction. Henry Holt and Co., 1943.

Winters, Yvor. In Defence of Reason. Denver, Colorado: Swallow Press and W.

Morrow and Co., 1947.
----- Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historich1 Essays on the Form of the Short
Poem in English (1967)

Part III

Das,B. "The Achievement of New Criticism". Indian Response to American

Literature ed C.D.Narasimhaiah (New Delhi: USEFI, 1967), pp.309-334.

Spears, Monroe K. "The Criticism of Allen Tate" Sewanee Review No. 57 (1949)
pp.317-334.

Subramanyam, N.S. "Richard Blackmur's concept of 'Gesture': Possible Indian

Analogies". Indian Response to American Literature ed C.D.Narsimhaiah, pp.295-
307.

68