SOURCE: "Afterword: An Interview with Cleanth Brooks," in The New Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory, edited by William J. Spurlin and Michael Fisher, Garland Publishing, New York City, 1995, pp. 365-83.

[In the following interview, Brooks and Spurlin discuss the response of other writers to the New Criticism.]

The following conversation was conducted in the home of Cleanth Brooks in New Haven, Connecticut in October 1993. Prior to the meeting, Professor Brooks read the essays in Part III of this volume. Professor Brooks, after a distinguished writing and teaching career, died on May 10, 1994 at the age of eighty-seven. I am grateful for his comments and suggestions on the final draft of this interview.

[Spurlin:] Professor Brooks, your work and the work of your fellow New Critics has not only influenced other literary critics, theorists, and scholars, but generations of literature students and teachers; indeed, the close reading of texts is a method that many of us have grown up with. But at the same time, you, René Wellek, and others have expressed concern about the difficulty of grouping together the New Critics as a monolithic group. For instance, you have pointed out that Allen Tate was interested in literary history and biography and I. A. Richards paid a great deal of attention to the reader. How did the New Criticism get its name? Could you talk about how it got started as a movement and what you specifically contributed to it? Did it, as far as you remember, have a common pursuit or agenda?

[Brooks:] I can tell you that quite easily. John Ransom in 1941 published a book called The New Criticism. Its principal chapters deal with Yvor Winters, I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, William Empson, and the rest of us. If one reads with any care, one immediately sees that Ransom has several disagreements with these critics which he states in that book. His final chapter is called "Wanted: An Ontological Critic." I don't think he ever really gives a very clear definition of what he means by an ontological critic. "Ontological" here has to do with essence, the very being of literature. He thought that none of the critics with whom he was dealing in the book had really done that; one was too psychological, another was too historical, still another was too moralistic, and so on. The title of the essay implies that he has not found an ontological critic. What is it exactly that a New Critic does? Ransom never says.

Well, that book came out and the literary world was just aching for a name to attach to those names I just mentioned and to lesser folk like myself. We were all somehow out of line with how most graduate students had been trained. There was this funny thing going around and people asked, "What do you call this damn thing?" And they needed a term; no one at the time really knew what it meant, except that they didn't like what we were doing! Actually, had people been more careful about it, they would have noticed that these so-called New Critics differed among themselves.

As far as some sort of common pursuit is concerned, I think it is safe to say that these people generally took the text very seriously. One way to jump off of this is to assume that because of their primary interest in the text, the New Critics despised history. I don't despise history at all; I've written a hell of a lot of material on history as in my last book Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth-Century Poetry [University of Missouri Press, 1991]. When one looks at the last edition of Understanding Poetry, it is clear that Warren and I knew a lot of history and pointed out places where we thought it might be significant in relation to the text under study.

Ransom told me, not once but several times, that when he wrote The New Criticism he meant the kind of criticism that was being written by current critics of the time—Warren, Richards, Winters, Eliot, myself, and others. But the damage was done; I'm not blaming him for it, you understand. Anyway, he wrote a book called The New Criticism, and that's how the title got attached. It was not a name we used to describe ourselves. If one wants to attach a name to this group at all, then one must decide what are the things that bind it together; it's difficult because they're different in a lot of ways. I myself have felt for a long time, and still feel, that the term has done damage. It seems that none of us have ever claimed much about the newness or novelty of the New Criticism. What was so new about it? A lot of the things that we talked about are as old as Aristotle; for example, the worth of Oedipus Rex, or any play, is not in the artistic intentions of Sophocles or in the historical influences on him; the worth of the play is based on its cohesion, its complexity, its tightness, and so on. Now I don't say that everybody ought to agree with that. But my point is that this is not decidedly new if Aristotle also said these things, too. Also, it isn't fair to say that because the so-called New Critics didn't centrally address such factors as history, the socio-political influences on the author, and the effect of the work on the reader, it means that they were not at all interested in those things.

Wasn't Ransom your teacher at Vanderbilt?

Yes, though I had only one course with him. Actually, I took a previous course with him and I found it was over my head; I wasn't ready for it, so I dropped out! The course I took with him later was a course in creative writing; I hope it improved my writing … I don't know … I wrote some poems for him…. He was not a flamboyant teacher. But it was not until I had long left Vanderbilt and was teaching myself that I at last got to know John and we then became very good friends. Actually, I would say that I didn't get to know John Ransom until well after I had published my first critical book. When I was at Oxford, he was in England for a year. He came to visit me at Oxford. But my critical position is much different from his. In reading John, one notices that he is constantly talking about the difference between meaning (or sense) and other rhetorical qualities in poetry. I think this is dualism and I reject it. In poetry, I think form and content become pretty thoroughly merged and I prefer not to split them apart; they define each other. A good poem is an object in which form and content can be distinguished but cannot really be separated. For example, a good metaphor is not really "decorating" the sense of the poem, it is conveying the sense in a special way. Anyway, this is a major difference between the critical positions of John Ransom and my own.

The New Criticism was mainly concerned with the detail of the text which was very different from the kind of literary work that was going on before it. In one sense, perhaps, this is what made it so "new," but that needs to be further explored. The tone, rhythm, and the ways in which things are said convey meaning, too. Take Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn. I have much respect for T. S. Eliot as a critic, but I don't agree with his interpretation of this poem. At the end of the poem, we get the lines "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." To Eliot, Keats is becoming a philosopher and saying "Beauty is truth and truth is beauty," and in that sense that is all you're going to know about philosophy. And that's enough. But I think it is altogether different; that's too easy. The urn is the poem itself, from the beginning it is speaking to us. These last lines are not being spoken by Keats, but by the urn. What is a Greek urn, beautifully shaped, equipped to teach you? It will give you some perception of Greek culture and life, and perhaps of our own culture and life through its beautiful and accurate representation. This raises broader philosophical questions, such as what is the relationship between humankind and art. What can one expect to gain from art?

So as you have just illustrated with your reading of Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn and Eliot's reading, it is possible to have more than one reading of a text. One reaction against the New Criticism is that it proliferated monolithic, unitary, singular readings of texts….

Of course, there may be multiple readings. But of those multiple readings, you may find that some are much more satisfactory than others.

So, the notion of multiple readings doesn't imply that all readings are equally valid?

Oh, no. But as great a critic as Eliot was, I think my reading of the urn poem is better than his reading. It makes more sense in the poem, it sees it as a whole. I prefer to see it that way. I can make a good argument for that reading. I taught poems like this for many years starting at Louisiana State University. We were teaching LSU sophomores how to read poetry. But I couldn't claim as their teacher that I knew all the answers. I believe that as I went along I kept discovering things that I had earlier missed.

I think the decentering of the teacher's authority that you just mentioned is something that one doesn't normally associate with the New Criticism. This leads to my next question. Although the New Criticism has been under attack, which we will talk about shortly (and to which I am sure you have your own response!), the New Criticism began as a critique against the positivism of historical literary scholarship and the vagueness of impressionistic criticism. I think it is interesting that while many forms of current politically-oriented criticism, such as feṁinist criticism, lesbian and gay studies, African-American criticism, and the work of other minorities, hope to democratize the study of literature, the New Criticism in its own time attempted to make literary study available to a broader range of students. There was, I think, a democratic impulse although now that impulse has come to be understood and represented as a hegemonic one. I was wondering, assuming that my assumptions, both historical and philosophical, are accurate, if you think the New Criticism achieved its democratic aim?

Well, we still have historical criticism today, don't we, although with perhaps more of a political focus. Some people cast Shakespeare as an imperialist, asking why he gave us a Caliban, for instance. To be sure, literary works can have political influences or effects and/or be read through specific political or sociological frameworks. This is very different from the way that I have spoken of literature because I am concerned not with the political effect, but with the literary effect of the work concerned.

Concerning the historicists and philologists, we never intended to displace historical literary study. This notion that some group, some conspiracy, some clan, some elite club is trying to over-run the academy is nonsense; we were a bunch of people trying to make a living! We weren't demanding power. I got my first job at LSU in 1932 and [Robert Penn] Warren joined me there in 1934. He said he was fired from Vanderbilt. It was difficult during the Depression to get any kind of work. My friends and I, there were maybe a dozen of us in all, enjoyed reading literature, especially poetry, and we were discovering new ways of reading it freshly, and perhaps more powerfully, and sharing this with other people.

But maybe the intention of the New Critics was not to displace historical literary scholarship or to change the course of literary study. But can't we look back and study its effects, how it shaped and influenced literary studies?

Sure, and you're quite right to raise that. I do know that Warren and I reached a lot of people through our books, especially through Understanding Poetry. Perhaps these were the vehicles of dissemination. The approaches taken by many of the teachers who had been influenced by the books may have opened up new doors and windows to the study of literature. It's hard to say for sure….

But did the New Criticism, because it wasn't specifically geared to the literary specialist, enable people to read texts beyond the classroom so that perhaps the reading of literature became something more than just an academic exercise confined to the classroom, to the library, or to the university?

Yes, I think you're right. We didn't demand as much library or technical or historical work as other teachers might have at the time.

And closely related to this, the New Criticism theorized a close relation to pedagogy and teaching …

Yes, of course it did.

William Cain remarks in the essay he has written for this volume that both your and your colleague, Robert Penn Warren, originally prepared Understanding Poetry for your students at Louisiana State University, and that for Warren criticism was "an extension of teaching." But you have also written that the New Criticism has often been reduced or simplified to a classroom strategy. What are your thoughts on the relation between the critical disciplines of criticism and pedagogy?

I would say this. All of us have strategies for teaching. I have always enjoyed teaching, I've done it for more than fifty years; I don't think it should be a drudging art. I admit that sometimes the way it is done, it is a drudging art! While the New Criticism has often been ridiculed as being elitist, I think the worst kind of elitism is to scorn careful reading. The teacher needs to be able to have an understanding of literature in its many and diverse forms in order to be able to teach it. While it is important to listen to how students respond to texts, it is not sufficient to simply toss a text to a class and ask students what they think of it and stop there. The teacher, too, has to struggle with careful reading him/herself. It is an oversimplification to assume, on the other hand, that just because the text is important, other things, such as context, social issues, history, the reader, the biography and intentions of the author, and so on, are not. It doesn't follow that we can simply ignore these things in order to make the point that the text is important. At the time we were writing, the text was not getting the attention we thought it should be receiving.

In my own training at Vanderbilt, my course work in English was mostly what we then called the old-fashioned criticism. We learned about the author, the historical background, and the ideas of the time. When I did the B.A. (Hons.) degree at Oxford, we had the same kinds of courses. Things were starting to change at Cambridge with Richards and Empson there, but not at Oxford. Empson was an interesting person; he was one of Richards's students initially. Empson was also different; earlier I pointed out that there were differences among us. He was much more radical. He once shared with Richards a book he had read written in America by Laura Riding and Robert Graves entitled A Pamphlet Against Anthologies [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1928]. Riding and Graves had taken one of Shakespeare's sonnets to pieces and rebuilt it again to show how deep and how rich it was—in other words, they did what we might call a "New Critical" reading. But they didn't call it that, of course. Empson told Richards that he could do what Riding and Graves had done with one poem with any poem in the English language. Richards challenged him to go and do it, and three weeks later Empson had the groundwork for Seven Types of Ambiguity done!

Anyway, to get back to the point; I had a solid academic literary background, but something was missing. At Tulane, I was in a very good graduate class in eighteenth-century British literature. Once in a while, we had to write a paper on a particular author and off to the library we went to look up information about that author and his (or her, but, unfortunately, the authors we studied in this particular period were all men) work. At one point, I became friends with a very bright woman in the class. Sometimes she would ask me if I thought a particular author was a good author, if the works this particular person wrote were good or not. I suddenly realized that, as students, we were assuming that the only way to get to know if a work was a good one or not was to look up what other people had said about it or to depend on what the teacher told us about it in class. The classes we were attending were not providing us the opportunity to learn this for ourselves, to make judgments. I began to continually ask the question "What makes a good poem?" And if I liked it, I would then ask "Why do I like it?" "Why does it capture my attention?"

Perhaps the earlier way of teaching literature did not provide the opportunity, then, to ask these kinds of questions?

Well, you could, but no one was asking them then! And the books I was reading didn't address these questions.

Well, as you know, the topic for this volume is the connections and continuities between the New Criticism and contemporary theory. One connection that seems obvious to me, perhaps because of my own work in reader-oriented theories of literature, is the role of the reader in shaping, contributing to, or possibly configuring meaning. Do you, as you and your colleagues are often accused, consider the text to be autonomous in and of itself; is it an artifact to be contemplated with its own self-contained meaning, or is this an institutional simplification of the New Criticism (and, by implication, the affective fallacy)?

I think it is very interesting to ask how readings change over time and to try to account for the change. For example, the interpretations of a text, say, in the 1930s, may be dramatically different in the 1960s because of the influence of the social context in which the work is received. I can also imagine a situation where the writer comments on what he or she intended to convey through the work but the reader comes up with different readings. It is interesting to try to account for this gap. But this does not, and should not, replace close and careful reading.

So, there does seem to be some space for the reader to freely imagine, then, in transacting with the text at least in the way that you are theorizing reading. Often people cite the affective fallacy as proof that the New Critics believed that the reader's role is very minimal—to extract a pre-existing meaning.

As with the intentional fallacy, I think that Bill Wimsatt's [and Monroe C. Beardsley's] essays ["The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy"] aim to guard us from moving too far away from the text. They are not saying that authors don't have intentions and that we cannot try to study them, and they are certainly not implying that we are not affected by what we read. The reader's role is a very important one; it is to realize the work, to find a meaning, an experience, a judgment. And I would say that all three of these are interrelated, they don't exist separately. The text isn't realized as long as the words are just lying there on the page. The moment one looks at and tries to put it together, the moment when that transaction takes place, the process of realization begins.

I think a lot of the trouble and misunderstandings, like the one I just mentioned regarding the essays "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy," arise because people assumed that the New Criticism was a well-oiled machine that could crank out unproblematic meanings. I think many people still assume this about the New Criticism. But New Critical writing is more of a set of suggestions for reading.

Yes, and closely related to this point about the role of the reader, Patricia Clark Smith has identified her pedagogical space in the oscillation between teaching her students the tools of close reading and paying attention to detail, which she learned from the New Critics, and listening to the ideas and details students bring to the text, paying equal attention to what texts evoke in them. What do you think of her approach?

That's perfectly legitimate. As I've said, the reader's role is to realize the work. Often my own students would come to me and ask me what I thought of their interpretations and often I was surprised by the astuteness of their readings, of their seeing things that I had not seen before. But we have got to get out of the machine-age mentality. The New Criticism was not foolproof; there were plenty of opportunities for mistakes, errors, and omissions, which some of the work going on now has pointed out. The multicultural debates going on now are important, but I worry that they may run the risk of setting people apart rather than bringing them together. I would hate to think that we would get to the point where can no longer understand each other. We do see the world differently from our various perspectives, but we mustn't forget about how various groups may also be capable of more or less similar understandings.

Do you think that there is any risk of solipsism or an "anything goes" approach to literary study which is often the critique given to reader-oriented theories of literature and to classroom practices that attempt to create spaces for a more productive role on the part of the reader/student?

There is a risk to "anything goes" if we believe we can abandon altogether the text, history, and so on. Our technocratic world emphasizes means and how to get things done. We tend to think that we know what we want and it is just a matter of getting there; hence, the well-oiled machine of which I used to speak of the reception and use of the New Criticism earlier. But with this said, and getting back to this critique of reader-oriented theory as running the risk of an "anything goes" approach to reading and to literature, I believe that while we cannot discount the role of the text in reading, the text, at the same time, is not some kind of sanctified object outside of any relation to the world. That would be silly. What I'm trying to say is that we need to take the text seriously to avoid this "anything goes" you mention and then ask what responses are possible. We need to work hard and read hard.

This brings to mind an experience from my own teaching. For a while, after I had finished my undergraduate work, I taught Sixth Form English in Singapore. We were reading King Lear and one of my students theorized that Cordelia was the villain of the play. The student's defense was based on the high value given to filial piety in Eastern cultures, which she felt Cordelia should have observed. Her interpretation was also a critique of the high value we place on the individual over the social in the West. Not yet having the critical discourse of theory, I was somewhat jarred by this interpretation, mostly because it was so eloquently argued, because it made sense in the context of an Eastern culture, and because it made me realize the role culture plays in reading. More importantly, it brought my pedagogical authority to crisis; I began to question my position as a teacher from a Western culture approaching the play from a humanist perspective whereby Cordelia is thought to be virtuous and the means and source of Lear's deterioration and regeneration. Are issues such as these important to consider?

I've never heard that particular interpretation either. Culture does play a role and this is a point well worth making. If a culture places a high value on something such as piety to the parent, then this needs to be taken into account in terms of how people from that culture interpret the text.

Despite popular assumptions that deconstruction and the New Criticism are antithetical, some contemporary critics, such as Frank Lentricchia in After the New Criticism, Gerald Graff in Professing Literature, and in their essays in this volume, Paul Bové and William Cain, have commented on how deconstruction is not remarkably different from the New Criticism. In fact, Professor Cain has indicated in his essay that Robert Penn Warren accounted for the indeterminacy of language and the instabilities of poetic structures, and that these views would be used by later post-structuralists to contest New Critical authority. And a deconstructionist himself, J. Hillis Miller, in The Ethics of Reading and elsewhere, has argued that even though language is unstable and indeterminate, we are not exonerated from reading carefully, persistently, and patiently, which seems very similar to what you have said about reading a little while ago. How are the deconstructionists different from or similar to what you and your colleagues believed about language?

Yes, in saying that one cannot find a perfect meaning of a poem, or to say that language is unstable and indeterminate, does not mean that one cannot perform an adequate or careful reading. I don't think any and all readings are valid as I've said before. The text may set limits, but that still leaves the reader plenty of room. We can say "I think this poem has this meaning," but in this very utterance, we are not saying what a text means absolutely. Give yourself twenty-five years, and you may discover, as I have, that you see the poem in an entirely different way. We need to be open to other readings but not accept them wholeheartedly and uncritically. People need to come together with their divergent readings and discuss them and argue them out. Actually, someone is interested in publishing some of my correspondence with Robert Penn Warren. In one of his letters, Warren told me that criticism for him was a social act; what he said he liked best was to get together with someone in a room who was different from him and read a play, novel, poem, or whatever, and talk about it, and argue over it, and fight over it, and see where they agree and disagree. That, for him, was criticism.

Yes, well, earlier you mentioned that one reaction to the New Criticism was one of suspicion and disturbance. A lot of people have also reacted to post-modern theory that way as well …

Yes, I'm disturbed by the deconstructionists. And that's exactly what I call it—disturbance. I've tried to read them, it's impossible to understand them, and therefore I'm disturbed!

I see. So, history may be repeating itself then? The audiences that first received you as the New Criticism was gaining influence were very much "disturbed" and perhaps a bit intimidated by you and what you were up to….

But I'm such a mild little creature, really. A little white mouse …

But it wasn't you physically; what was frightening, perhaps, was the newness of your ideas which had tremendous in-fluence…. Well, I did say we would get to some of the critiques! Reginald Martin, in his essay "New Criticism and New Black Aesthetic Criticism: Debts and Disagreements," has criticized the New Criticism as self-reifying in practice, that is, that the "universality" of literature in general or a text or set of texts in particular was appropriated by the New Critics themselves which simultaneously, though perhaps unintentionally, excluded alternative forms of expression such as texts by black writers, as well as the experiences of blacks and meanings evoked in texts by black readers. How do you respond to the notion that what is posited as "universal" or "common" may be culturally loaded, subject to the biases of, let us say, Anglo-Americans in the case of literatures by ethnic minorities?

Yes, I see the point. But I've never considered myself to be in a position of power. In fact, Warren and I challenged a lot of old-fashioned powerful figures. If I could live longer, I would like to be able to contribute to a broader idea of the universal. I understand the difficulty; we need more voices represented. I think it is coming about however. I'm pleased that Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature last week. On the other hand, when I look over the list of English [course] offerings at Yale I am sometimes shocked. There is a lot in there that looks more like politics and sociology to me than literature.

But Virginia Woolf, for instance, in discussing Jane Austen in A Room of One's Own, describes how difficult it was for women to write in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and how Austen herself was confined to writing in the sitting-room, hiding her manuscripts from others, as if there was something discreditable in writing. Perhaps she internalized a social attitude toward women writing; we don't know for sure. Yet, despite this, and given her domestic duties and her overseeing of the household and the servants, which were obligatory for women of her social class, she still found time to write. While Austen has obviously left her mark on the English canon, Woolf hints, I think, that Austen could perhaps have been even a better writer had she been able to overcome the narrow life imposed upon her. Or, to give a better example, Woolf mentions how difficult, how impossible, it would have been for a woman in Shakespeare's time who had Shakespeare's literary ability to write; the social conditions of the sixteenth century did not provide that kind of artistic space for women. Does the "literary" have some relation to the political then? Mightn't literary study be part of a socialization into the dominant culture? Is that what it should do?

I'm not sure. We cannot dispute that mistakes have been made in the past. Two of my best friends were Eudora Welty and Katherine Anne Porter. They were both fine women writers. We tried to print as much of their work as we could in The Southern Review to help start their careers. I'm not taking credit for their success, you understand. But they were good writers and we were honored to have their work. We were not part of any conspiracy against women….

Yes, but I'd like to come back to this notion of the universal so that you have the opportunity to address some of the critiques of the New Criticism, which I don't think are meant to be malicious attacks, but ways to get us to consider the limits of formalism, and how race and gender, for example, may become critical questions in the study of literature without necessarily becoming exclusively political and having no relevance to literary study. Can culture or cultural works be conceived of in the absence of the social and political? Annette Kolodny, in the essay we have reprinted in this volume, as well as other feminist work, has mentioned how students are being taught to read texts from points of view that are put across as "universal," but are often very particular in that they may be masculinist, Western, white, and/or heterosexist.

Well, at the time we were writing, to be honest, it didn't occur to us to write about race and gender. This does not mean, however, that we were racist or sexist. Warren was especially involved in many of the political movements in the South. We tried to get as many female authors as possible published in The Southern Review. In my classes and seminars at Yale, I generally found my female students to be much more articulate, much more savvy than my male students. But you are right, I think, that the term "universal" might be loaded culturally, socially, and so on, and we have to use these terms loosely. Regarding your point about certain ideas being put across to students as universal, I think we need to get back to the idea of critical pedagogy. Once again, I think teachers tend to simplify in the classroom because they are in search of that elusive well-oiled machine that the New Criticism or any other method of reading simply cannot provide. We have to help students get really close to a text, to help them find something over which to ponder.

I think the last point you made is an important one and I would like to come back to it. Coming back to some of these social and political issues, which are very much at the fore-front of contemporary theory and literary and cultural studies, Michael Fischer, in his essay "The New Criticism in the New Historicism," speaks of Jerome McGann's implicit criticism of the New Criticism by arguing that if one pays attention primarily to the text, to its complexity, detail, and metaphorical richness, this could potentially mask certain other issues such as anti-Semitism, racism, fascism, and so on. Similarly, Patricia Clark Smith admits that as a student in 1959, she didn't have to think about Amy Lowell's lesbianism if texts existed independent of their authors; her New Critical training kind of got her "off the hook" in this regard. What are your thoughts on the idea that some texts may call for political rather than pure aesthetic responses?

That's a rather impossible thing to hand on anyone. Yes, in focusing on certain things, such as the complexity of a text, or the role of the reader, or the role of the author, and so on, we may neglect or not pay as close attention to other things. But the question is whether the masking that you mention is conscious or deliberate on the part of the critic. I think there is too much of an attempt to find as many things as possible wrong with this loose band of people we call the New Critics.

I don't think the issue is that the New Critics themselves consciously tried to mask political issues by arguing for close, careful readings of texts. But I think some people assume that if they focus, say, on the lesbianism of a poet, the New Critic will admonish them for committing the intentional fallacy. Mightn't this appeal to the intentional fallacy serve to effectively keep issues of race, gender, and sexuality safely out of discussion?

Of course the claim of lesbianism can be made. But one must argue, I think, how it operates in and relates to the text in question. We may learn much more about the author; we need to ask what more we learn about the poetry. It is too easy to slap labels on to things. Critical debates are not necessarily resolved by consulting the author. Years ago, in 1937, I wrote an account of Eliot's Waste Land. I wrote a letter to Eliot asking him to read it and to comment on it if he had the time. He wrote back and said that he thought my account was very good and that it was a good way to handle the poem. I decided not to print that letter because I did not want to bolster my interpretation by having the approval of the author. I also, quite honestly, didn't want to appear to be a young man riding on the coat-tails of this great poet. Many people still disagree with my reading of The Waste Land, and, for what it's worth, I've got the approval of the author. Do we necessarily resolve critical argument and debate by appealing to the author, his or her biography, and so on? It's an important question to ask.

Yes, I see your point. Throughout our discussion, you have mentioned that you do not undervalue the role of history in literary study. In their arguments over historicism in this book, Michael Fischer claims that you have minimized the importance of historical facts in poetry, and Jerome McGann has critiqued the historical determinacy of "facts" as "a function of the conceptual (ideological) frame in which they are viewed and manipulated." I was wondering if your views have in any way changed regarding the influence of the historical period in which the work was produced in the positivist sense, and whether you think the act of criticism can transcend the historical (and therefore political, ideological, material, and cultural) contingencies of reading, which is a question a New Historicist might ask.

I'll be brief. History means a story, it is a narrative, a text; it isn't necessarily claiming to be the truth. Some people may think history is true in an absolutist sense, but I don't think this is what history has ever tried to claim. I agree that we can only see the past through our own biases and perspectives in the present. But this should not exonerate us from the attempt to try and understand past events.

I'd like to come back to a point you made a little earlier about helping students get close to a text and find something over which to ponder because it brings us once again back to pedagogy, to the classroom, which is where I'd like to end. Patricia Clark Smith pays tribute to her teacher, W.K. Wimsatt, for teaching her to pay attention to detail. Her essay is also about her transition from being a graduate student at Yale to a young faculty member at the University of New Mexico where she also taught Native American students on a Navajo reservation. She acknowledges that her training in the New Criticism at Yale, while valuable, was not sufficient for her to teach literature in a multicultural context. Smith says she had to abandon her "prissiness about various heresies and fallacies" (perhaps invoking your essay "The Heresy of Paraphrase" and the Wimsatt and Beardsley essays "The Intentional Fallacy" and "The Affective Fallacy"). What are your thoughts on the New Criticism with regard to the teaching of literature to culturally diverse student populations?

The teacher would have to decide for him or herself what may be valuable from the New Criticism. The New Criticism is not asking the teacher to make the sign of the cross every time he or she comes to that word. It is very much interested in you as the teacher finding out not just what the words in the text may mean to you as a person, but what they may potentially mean for audiences to whom they are addressed, in this case students. We need to tell students honestly that what is said in class about the text is not necessarily the poem, the realization of the work. That's what I was trying to say about the heresy of paraphrase, because for a long time no distinction was made between the realization of the work and a paraphrase of the text. We mustn't forget the reader's role in the process just because we're concerned with looking closely at the text. There is a difference between looking closely at the text and looking at it exclusively and seeing nothing else.

So, once again, New Critical work was not exclusively concerned with the text itself. Since this book is about how the New Criticism has influenced contemporary theory, what are your final thoughts on theory; do you as a New Critic feel that you have been influenced in any way by theory as it is practiced today or in general?

Oh, yes. But, remember theory is by no means a recent phenomenon. Actually, we could say that everything one does in the field of literary studies is based on some sort of theoretical orientation. Now, I did not intend to write theory per se, but certainly a theory of literature, as well as a theory of reading, history, authorship, and so on, is implied in my work as we have been discussing this afternoon. Others, such as René Wellek and Austin Warren, in their book Theory of Literature [New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942], dealt more directly with philosophical and theoretical issues pertaining to the nature and function of literature and the relation of literary study to sociology, psychology, aesthetics, stylistics, etc. But, speaking for myself, the books I wrote derived a theory of literature from careful readings of texts, as well as from the work of the people who most influenced me—I.A. Richards, Robert Penn Warren, and René Wellek. So, in this sense, the New Criticism was not devoid of "theory." I hope this is helpful.

Yes, and it has been a pleasure. Thank you.