The New Criticism, like old Marley, is dead as a door-nail. A number of
imposing monuments left over from its heyday in the early
to mid-twentieth century remain—books with titles like The
Well-Wrought Urn, The World’s Body, The Sacred Wood,
Seven Types of Ambiguity, The Expense of Greatness, The Forlorn Demon,
Primitivism and Decadence—but they are seldom visited.
One can wander Stanford University’s cloistered walks, for
example, and imagine Yvor Winters crossing the quad (whaling
harpoon in hand!) for his lecture on Moby-Dick, but ask an
undergrad about Winters and you get a fish-eyed stare. It’s
the same, I imagine, at Cleanth Brooks’s Yale or Allen
Tate’s Princeton. The poet-critics who crafted these
works—Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, T. S. Eliot, William
Empson, R. P. Blackmur, Tate, and Winters—have long passed
out of fashion. Who now reads William K. Wimsatt’s Verbal
Icon or anything by Kenneth Burke?
Their well-wrought urns show no signs of tribute (though
they are still occasionally vandalized by literary
malcontents).

This neglect is not a recent development. In 1986, René
Wellek began his clarifying and sympathetic survey of the
New Criticism, from A History of Modern Criticism,
1750–1950, in a minor key: “Today the New Criticism is
considered not only superseded, obsolete, and dead, but
somehow mistaken and wrong.” Thirty years later, not much
has changed, or, if anything, things are worse: the New
Critics are less read and more misunderstood than ever. As
the Irish critic Rónán McDonald confirms with his new book
The Death of the Critic (Continuum), “These critics are
still paraded before each generation of university students
as ideologically befuddled, or reactionary bogeymen.”

Today’s trendier academics instinctively look askance at the New
Critics. Instead of applying the touchstones of politics and
sociology to works of art, the New Critics sought to describe
the fine-grained aesthetic qualities of poems, a pursuit
seen by theorists as woefully passé. Truth be told,
the New Critics never had it very good in the academy. Even
in their own day, their colleagues in fusty
mid-century English departments felt that “criticism” was
not a legitimate academic pursuit and that “anybody could do
that.” As McDonald explains, the New Critics were shunned
both coming and going:

Close reading of
poetry, however brilliant, did not seem quite so serious a
business [in the 1950s] as doing “proper” research in an archive. If in
the 1980s the frosty stares were between the theorists and
the traditionalists, the black polo necks against the tweed
jackets, in the 1950s it was the critics against the
scholars.

For their insufficient interest in the poet’s biographical details
and the “undecidable” nature of texts,
the New Critics were branded (take your pick!):
reactionary, formalist, traditional, scientific, absolutist.
This last particularly rankles in the
post-structuralist academy, since the notion that one poem might be judged better
than another sets theorists’ teeth on edge. (Where the New
Critics have consistently done well, of course, is with the general
reader.)

The poet and critic William Logan, a regular contributor to
these pages, handily skewers the hypocrisy of literary theory
in his foreword to
Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, edited by
Garrick Davis: “In classrooms of theory, all readings are
tolerated, except the wrong ones—the morally absolute
masquerades here as the morally relative and manages to be
high-minded about it, too.” Kafka, he adds, “would have
smiled in recognition.”
In the subtitle to his winning selection of
essays,
Davis
throws down the gauntlet with that word best. Anyone who
has sat around a
seminar table with students of literary theory knows this can be a
provocative term.

Here is just one example: I knew
a professor who used to like to assign students to pick
the best of Spenser’s “Amoretti.” A harmless
enough activity, you might think, but in the era of
French theory it could fairly cause a riot. In one lecture
class, the professor was hounded by a student who would stand up every
time a literary judgment was made and yell out
“Essentialist!” While it is difficult to imagine that
assignment going over well with would-be deconstructionists or New
Historicists, it is no surprise that young poets, for
whom aesthetic choices are their stock in trade, flocked
to his classroom.

For the poet-critic Allen Tate, the failure to judge, to
discriminate better from best, was tantamount to a moral
failure. “The moral nature affirms itself in judgment, and
we cannot or will not judge,” he lamented. For Tate, the
“moral intelligence” (Winter’s phrase) enters into poetry
“not as moral abstractions but as
form, coherence of image and metaphor, control of tone and
of rhythm, the union of these features. So the moral
obligation to judge compels us to make not a moral but a
total judgement.” Needless to say, this sort of talk can
still raise eyebrows in academe.

There is, however, one place where, for better
or worse, the New Criticism maintains a toehold,
and
on this both Logan
and McDonald agree—in creative writing
classes. I’m not so sure. Many “creative
writers” seem to be churning out the kinds of
poems that the New Critics would have loathed, both
technically and in their weakness for
cultural politics. But Logan
is
right that if the mechanics of poetry have a shot
anywhere then, generally speaking, it’s with poets, not
literary theorists.
It’s a poet’s job (at least it ought to be) to know how poems work, prosodically,
rhetorically, rhythmically.
For the poets of the New Criticism, Wellek explains,
there is no “distinction of form and content: they believe in
the organicity of poetry and,
in practice, constantly
examine attitudes, tones, tensions, irony, and
paradox… .” Getting under the hood was what the New Critics
did best, and in this regard they still have much
to offer both poets and readers.

When the New Critics are dismissed, they tend to be
dismissed en masse, which is odd considering how
frequently and how widely they disagreed. Most of them were uncomfortable with
the very label, coined by John Crowe Ransom in The New
Criticism (1941). As their essays reveal, they could be a
fractious bunch. In fact, what we now think of as the New Criticism is no
single universally held guiding principle (though there were certain basic
commonalities), but, rather, the myriad flashes of brilliant
insight thrown off like sparks by their constant
quarreling. None of them missed a chance to counter or
revise another’s assertions.
It is hard to imagine anything quite like it today:
eminent critics duking it out in public—not posturing or
grandstanding, but carrying on a riveting exchange of
ideas in journals like The Kenyon Review and The Sewanee
Review. Whole essays and parts of books were devoted to their
back-and-forth. They also unsparingly reviewed each other’s
poems: as Winters wrote of Tate, for example, he is “a poet
who has promised a great deal throughout his career but has
never produced it… .” They were nothing if not critical.

The New Criticism came about in part as a way to account for
and interpret the obscurity in modern poetry, and also
as a reconsideration and rehabilitation of Donne and
the Metaphysicals.
Brooks, Tate, Winters & Co. grappled
with Eliot’s Waste Land and charted the poem’s tributary
streams back through the nineteenth century to
Baudelaire and forward, though Laforgue, Mallarmé, and
Valéry, to Crane and Stevens. Before modernism, poetry had
largely (with a few significant exceptions) followed the
shapes of rational discourse; after the Symbolists and surrealists
came the Savage God. It was at this intersection—between
the rational arguments of Renaissance poetry and
the associative, Symbolist tendencies of
modern poetry—that the New Critics pitched camp.

In his dense and brilliant
essay,
“Tension in Poetry,” Allen Tate
identifies the rational-emotive scale along which these two
kinds of poems may be found:

The metaphysical poet as a rationalist begins at or near the
extensive or denotating end of the line; the romantic or
Symbolist poet at the other, intensive end; and each by a
straining feat of the imagination tries to push
his meanings as far as he can towards the opposite end, so
as to occupy the entire scale.

This opposition between reason and emotion is
restated throughout the New Criticism. In the last chapter of
Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), the English poet-critic
William Empson finds the same dichotomy expressed in this passage
from the 1927 edition of Oxford Poetry: there is a
“logical conflict, between the denotary [sic] and the
connotatory [sic] sense of words; between, that is to say,
an asceticism tending to kill language by stripping words of
all association and a hedonism tending to kill language by
dissipating their sense under a multiplicity of
associations.” The important point here is that as soon as a
poet moves too far in one direction—toward denotation or
connotation—the
language dies; the object, as Tate says, is to
occupy the entire scale.

Earlier in Seven Types, Empson takes a whack at his great
teacher at Cambridge
I. A. Richard for daring to suggest that the “Emotions of
words in poetry are independent of the Sense.”
Empson is quick to point out that Richards later “dropped
the idea that a writer of poetry had better not worry about
the Sense,” and, indeed, he ultimately argues “that the
only tolerable way to read poetry is to give the full Sense
a very sharp control over the Emotion.”

Winters, of all the so-called New Critics, was most
outspoken about the need in poetry to modulate and control
emotion. The management of emotion, Winters believed, constitutes
what he refers to as the “moral” element in poetry.
To understand Winters’s “moral” sense (a term with a
specific and idiosyncratic meaning for him), it is
necessary to begin with Winters’s basic
definition of poetry. A poem, for Winters, is a statement in
words about a human experience. So far so good. The
statement of the poem, as opposed to statements in prose,
pays particular attention to the emotional or connotative
dimensions of words. (Prose pays attention to them as well,
but verse heightens the relationships between words and
can marshal them with greater emotional precision.)

By weighing the emotional charge carried by words, Winters
is able to consider the appropriateness of every word in a
poem. Here’s how he puts it in his forward to In Defense
of Reason (1947):

Words are primarily conceptual, but through use and because
human experience is not purely conceptual, they have
acquired connotations of feeling. The poet makes his
statement in such a way as to employ both concept and
connotation as efficiently as possible. This poem is good in
so far as it makes a defensible rational statement about a
human experience (the experience need not be real but must
be in some sense possible) and at the same time communicates
the emotion which ought to be motivated by the rational
understanding of that experience.

This is where, for Winters, the moral element comes in: the
relationship of motive to emotion. In other words, the poet
must take pains to ensure that the emotional content of the
language does not exceed the motivating experience. An
extreme example would be describing a hangnail with the word
genocide; an actual example might be Sylvia Plath’s use of
fascist and Auschwitz to characterize her relationship
with he father. This kind of exorbitance—the disconnection
between emotion and experience—results in sentimentality,
or “unearned” emotion, which Winters saw as a moral weakness
in poetry. Winters believed the poet’s duty was to represent
emotion accurately. The poem must be a rational reflection
of a human experience; how else may one judge the aptness of
the feeling expressed?

Cleanth Brooks called Winters’s insistence on logical content (though
rational is perhaps a better word) the “heresy of
paraphrase,” insisting that you can’t sort out the
content of a poem in words other than the ones used by the
poem itself. The poem is exactly what it says; any statement
of the poem’s argument in different words does violence to
the poem. But Winters could find
serviceable paraphrases for obscure poems by Crane and
Tate, for example, without for a moment suggesting that the
paraphrase should compete with the poet’s original
expression.

Brooks’s “emphasis on the ‘fictionality’
of all art,” Wellek explains, “its world of illusion or semblance, cannot mean
a lack of relation to reality or a simple entrapment in
language.” What Winters refused to condone was sentimental blather
and willful, decadent obscurity, a view ultimately
shared by most of the New Critics (though they
never tired of squabbling over emphases
within the same argument). Even Brooks could applaud
Winters’s resistance to “mere impressionism in criticism,
which … ultimately leads to
relativism and the abandonment of universal standards. One
applauds too his attack on the fuzzier kinds of
Romanticism.”

In similar fashion, the Southerner John Crowe Ransom “had the idea of a poem as a great
‘paradox,’ a construct looking two ways, with logic trying
to dominate the metaphors, and metaphors trying to dominate
the logic.”
As Wellek writes, “he obviously, like Valéry, practiced
[poetry] as a balancing of sound and meaning, as continued
compromise between meter and sense, metaphor and argument.”
For Winters, the method best suited to working this
fault line between the connotative and denotative, the
associative and rational, was what he called the
“post-symbolist” method, as embodied by the greatest poems of
Valéry and Stevens. The post-symbolist poem adopts the rational
structure of the Renaissance lyric, while opening up the
poem to the greater range of connotation afforded by the
“pure” poetry of the Symbolists. “The method,” Winters wrote
with characteristic decisiveness, “is potentially the richest method to
appear.”

Tate, for his part, felt that Stevens, in
substituting the imagination for reality, had gone too far.
He reviled “that idolatrous dissolution of language from the
grammar of a possible world, which results from the belief
that language itself can be reality, or by incantation can
create reality: a superstition that comes down in the French
from Lautremont, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé to the Surrealists,
and in English to Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, and Dylan
Thomas.”

Superstitions were common among the modernists (in
painting as well as in poetry).
A profound mysticism and spiritual longing animated
much of the early twentieth-century avant-garde: think of Yeats’s private
mythology in A Vision, Eliot’s Anglicanism, Tate’s
Catholicism. Such systems were mined for their mystery and
potent symbolism. The New Critics were careful, however, to
draw a line safely on this side of unreason.

Contemporary poets have pushed this irrationalist-obscuratist tendency
in modernism to extremes. The result is a kind of
secular mysticism that poaches on the religious
impulse. At its best, it works a travesty
on the mysteries comprised by deism; at its worst, it is
an ironized shadow-play, in which the poet winks to
his knowing audience of experimentalists and
agnostics to acknowledge that the outmoded
traditions are over once and for all. In their place, they
substitute the vague charge that results when meaning is
drained from language, offering this cloud of unknowing as a
kind of sham religious experience.

The recipe for poetry of this kind is easy to follow.
As the critic David Orr wrote recently in The New York Times Book
Review, “the trendiest contemporary
style” relies “heavily on disconnected phrases, abrupt
syntactical shifts, attention-begging titles,
… quirky
diction, … flickering italics, oddball openings, …
and a tone ranging from daffy to plangent—basically, two
scoops of John Ashbery and a sprinkling of Gertrude Stein.”
For “daffy” read playfully opaque, the irrationality that
results when reason slips on a banana peal—a briefly
amusing, but ultimately cheap gag.

In fairness, artists should not be held accountable for the sins of their
epigones. If the modernists confirmed the trend (begun by
the Romantics) toward irrationalism, then they also understood its limits. Yeats
explored an alternate Theosophical realm, in which symbols
pointed toward mystical phenomena, but these phenomena, for
all of their idiosyncrasy, were meant to relate
ultimately (albeit tenuously) to the world. For some
New Critics, Yeats’s poetry paid the price for it
eccentricity. “Winters, like Auden and Eliot,” Wellek tells
us, “is greatly
bothered by the truth-value of Yeats’s phil-
osophical and political
views.” “The better one understands him,” Winters writes, “the
harder it is to take him seriously.”

In his essay on Poe in The Forlorn Demon, Tate
attributes poets’ disconnection from reality to the “angelic imagination”:
Since Poe, Tate argues,

refuses to see nature, he is doomed to see nothing. He has
overleaped and cheated the condition of man. The reach of
our imaginative enlargement is perhaps no longer than the
ladder of analogy, at the top of which we may see all, if we
still wish to see anything, that we have brought up with
us from the bottom, where lies the sensible world. If we
take nothing with us to the top but our emptied angelic
intellects, we shall see nothing when we get there.

Ransom says in The World’s Body that “art
gratifies a perceptual impulse and exhibits the minimum of
reason.” Still, it exhibits enough reason to keep the poem
from escaping the world and the laws of language entirely.
The downside of maintaining an
attachment to the world is a flattening out of
the very imaginative, musical, and emotional flights that constitute
the poetic in poetry. This flattening of emotion,
of course, is never the aim of any poet, least of all the
New Critics, who appreciated with such energy the new
vibrations set in motion by modernism. What they
wished to define with clarity and force was the limit after
which the poetic outpaces reality so utterly that is becomes a diminished
thing.

The essays in Praising It New still carry a potent charge
for anyone interested in what makes the best poems tick.
Davis has performed a service to readers (often in the face of
recalcitrant publishers unwilling to make works available for
reprint at reasonable rates), and the book will be of particular
interest to poets and students of poetry. Whether or not teachers will have the good
sense to assign it remains to be seen.

Notes
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1. 
   Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, edited by
   Garrick Davis; Swallow Press, 332 pages, $36.95 cloth,
   $18.95 paper.
   Go back to the text.