SOURCE: Asher, Kenneth. “T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism.” Essays in Literature 20, no. 2 (fall 1993): 292-309.

[In the following essay, Asher explores the relationship between the New Critics and T. S. Eliot.]

Nearly everyone who considers the history of modern literary criticism regards T. S. Eliot as one of the progenitors of the New Criticism. Typically, it will be pointed out that Eliot's theory of impersonality paved the way for the formalism of the New Critics and that his elevation of Donne and the metaphysical poets led to the New Critical valorization of wit and irony. Yet these lines of connection, accurate enough on the most general level, fail to take account of the substantial tension between Eliot and major New Critics. The most striking evidence of dissociation is Eliot's own unequivocal rejection of the notion that he helped father the New Criticism, or had any great regard for it. In 1956, long after New Criticism's theory and practice were well established, Eliot spoke disparagingly of it as “the lemon-squeezer school of criticism” and claimed that beyond giving some of its practitioners voice in The Criterion, he failed “to see any school of criticism which can be said to derive from myself.”¹ The New Critics, for their part, even if they were generally convinced of Eliot's paternity, were not always grateful children. John Crowe Ransom, one of the oldest New Critics and the one who gave popular currency to the name in The New Criticism (1941), found Eliot to be too “historical” and lamented his “theoretical innocence.”² The dyspeptic Yvor Winters, for whom Reason all too often seemed to be circumscribed by the boundaries of his own skull, did not spare Eliot in his general indictment of almost all rival thinkers:

Eliot is a theorist who has contradicted himself on every important issue that he has touched. … [O]ne might account for them [the contradictions] by a change of view if he showed any consciousness of contradiction; but many of them occur within the same book or even within the same essay.³

Similarly, though more gently, William Wimsatt, the most scrupulous of the New Critical theorists, believed that the seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” derived currency from its “highly ambiguous” central proposition of the impersonal poet, and he went on to remark that this ambiguity registered a lifelong inconsistency on this point in Eliot's thinking.⁴

Beyond the fact that Eliot and the New Critics were not completely enthralled with one another, Eliot harbored grave reservations about I. A. Richards, the critic usually paired with him as a formative influence on the New Criticism. Richards's belief that poetry, by inducing in us a state of psychic equilibrium, “is capable of saving us” did not impress Eliot, who looked for salvation in more orthodox places: “it is like saying the wallpaper will save us when the walls have crumbled.”⁵ Such differences and antagonisms led Robert Penn Warren, looking back on what seemed to him the lack of a common theory in the New Critics, to wonder how they came to be lumped together in the first place:

Let's name some of them—Richards, Eliot, Tate, Blackmur, Brooks, Leavis (I guess). How in God's name can you get that gang into the same bed? There is no bed big enough and no blanket would stay tucked.⁶

And we need only add the name of Winters to make these bedfellows seem all the odder.

In light of all these difficulties, perhaps instead of beginning with the respective theories and methodologies per se, a more fruitful point of departure would be to try to establish what Eliot and the New Critics were reacting against. Since enemies tend to be simplified as monoliths of wrongdoing there is much more likely to be a higher degree of agreement on problems than agreement on solutions. This is especially the case with Eliot and the New Critics, for as I hope to show, their literary theories and their versions of literary history are shaped in common by a profoundly reactionary stance traceable in its origins to French anti-Revolutionary thought.

This tradition begins with the embittered émigré and Catholic apologist Joseph de Maistre, whose eloquent apocalyptic vision set the tone for much of what followed. In sharp reaction to the rationalistic optimism of the revolutionaries, Maistre posits a much bleaker view of man as a creature indelibly and deeply tainted with original sin. Far more than just a nod in the direction of Catholic orthodoxy, Maistre's insistence on a fallen nature is the cornerstone of all his political and ethical speculations. He paints lurid Bosch-like visions of human life in a state of nature:

While the son kills his father to preserve him from the bothers of old age, his wife destroys in her womb the fruit of their brutal lust to escape the fatigues of suckling it. He tears out the bloody hair of his living enemy; he slits him open and roasts him and eats him while singing.⁷

That a “civilized” person does not follow the daily habits of these moral ancestors is due almost exclusively to the vast network of institutional restraints erected over time. It is precisely because of our frailty that God has interceded in human affairs to ordain these restraining institutions; history reflects, then, not just the continuous human will, which unaided from above would merely magnify its own perversity, but also and more importantly the divine will.⁸ Granted, with imperfect human agents of the divine will, revelation may manifest itself stutteringly, yet nine hundred years of throne and altar in France make the general plan clear enough. For the Revolution to sever this tradition is, therefore, not merely political folly, but sacrilege, and it is as such that Maistre denounces it: “There is a satanic element in the French Revolution which distinguishes it from any other revolution known or perhaps that will be known.”⁹

Beyond just serving the psychological need of his émigré audience, Maistre's underscoring of the malevolent singularity of the Revolution is intended to defend the conservative case at its weakest point. If God is active in history, why isn't the Revolution attributable to His will as well? To find an answer, Maistre is pushed in a direction where he was perhaps heading in any event: toward a mythic reading of events. The temptation to revolution is regarded as a divine test and one which the French have failed miserably. Thus the Revolution comes to be regarded as analogous to the Fall. It changes history but in its uniqueness stands outside history:

It is nothing less than the explosion of pure evil in time: “What distinguishes the French Revolution and what makes it an event unique in history is that it is radically evil: no element of good relieves the picture it presents; it reaches the highest point of corruption ever known; it is pure impurity.”¹⁰

The Biblical parallel can be pressed further, for to Maistre the easy euphoria promised Adam and Eve through knowledge is recapitulated in the meretricious appeal of the Enlightenment. The French forfeited the Eden of authoritarian institutions in grasping for a rule of Reason. And the author of the mischief, the intruder into the Garden—the serpent—is the Swiss J.-J. Rousseau from Protestant Geneva. Through the cunning of his specious logic, Rousseau caused the French to forget that human community was the result of obedience of the will and not a matter of individual contract, rationally assented to. For Maistre, Rousseau's notion of a pure democracy, much like evil for Augustine, cannot exist; it is merely the negation of the good: “I can define democracy as an association of men without sovereignty”¹¹—a psychological, and hence political, impossibility.

Maistre's position remained the foundation of counterrevolutionary thought, accreting compatible explanations in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first significant addition was provided by the erstwhile liberal, Ernest Renan, who, badly shaken by France's humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, abandoned his republican stance and threw his weight behind the conservative case for France's maladies. Beyond the familiar charge against Rousseau as architect of disorder, Renan sees his rampant individualism as preparation for the gross materialism of the bourgeoisie, whose orgy of self-indulgence allowed the more civic-minded and duty-bound Prussians to prevail. Feudalistic love of la France had given way to capitalistic love of le franc. Almost inevitably this suggestion of an imported economic parasitism which eroded ancestral allegiances would attract the strong French current of anti-Semitism, though Renan himself did not encourage this. The identification of the Jews as the motor behind capitalism was left to Edouard Drumont in his widely read La France juive (1886): “France, thanks to the principles of 1789 which the Jews had cleverly exploited, was disintegrating. Jews had taken control of the public purse, and invaded all sectors except the army.”¹² And finally when Dreyfus was convicted of treason as an officer of the French army, Drumont's last inviolate sanctuary, Maurice Barrès added his suave voice to the attack. Whether or not Dreyfus was guilty must be determined, Barrès maintained, not according to a “Kantian” notion of absolute justice, but according to “French” justice, which had as its sole criterion the welfare of the nation—and arraigned before this tribunal, Dreyfus most certainly must be condemned.¹³ It would be difficult to get much further from the Rights of Man.

At the end of the nineteenth century, then, the conservative position is made up of a loosely related series of fears: of the revolutionary spirit, liberalism, capitalism, progress, democracy, Rousseau, the Enlightenment, foreigners in general, and Jews in particular. Against this is poised the rather shaky counter-weight of a Catholicism which may be ardent (as in Maistre) or merely practical (as in Renan) and a monarchism out of date since the Restoration. That such a congeries of attitudes could pass viably into the new century and become a real political force is due primarily to the genius of one man, Charles Maurras, who managed to mold the conservative case into a coherent, or almost coherent, whole.

The source of Maurras's insight can be dated specifically to 1894, when, at the age of twenty-six, he read Fichte's Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808), a reveille to Germans' slumbering national consciousness in the face of the Napoleonic threat, and a call to his countrymen to fulfill their German destiny. Suddenly it was all clear to Maurras. Germany had indeed found its appropriate herald in Fichte, the philosopher who had spun a world out of the Transcendental Ego. This prophet of the unbridled Ich was quintessentially German, an anarchist who could trace his roots back to Luther and even further back, to the primitivistic Teutonic forests of Tacitus. It remained only for Maurras to give a name to this spirit of chaos: Romanticism. Half symbol, half analytic tool, this term allowed Maurras to look freely and indiscriminately across the realms of politics, religion, and literature, as well as backwards and forwards in time beyond the boundaries of what had traditionally constituted the Romantic period.

The daring of Maurras's maneuver consists not only in the breadth of his vision but also in the fact that he has done a complete volte-face on the conservative stance toward the Enlightenment. There is no question in his mind that the Revolution was every bit as pernicious as his predecessors claimed and that Rousseau had caused it almost single-handedly, but Maurras could detect little evidence of Reason in Rousseau and less in his handiwork. Wasn't it much rather the case, Maurras argued, that in Rousseau one might observe the eccentric, the man who heeded only the peculiar rhythm of his own untutored sensibility, in short, the proto-Romantic.¹⁴ Revolution, he concluded, is purely a romantic phenomenon, for “the Greco-Roman tradition is as innocent [of Revolution] as the spirit of the medieval Roman Catholic Church.”¹⁵

Having organized the adversarial position under the rubric of Romanticism, Maurras rallies the Right to the banner of classicism. While there was nothing original in the term as used in opposition to Romanticism, never had it been made to bear the freight Maurras placed on it. Like his use of the term Romanticism, it had a meaning far beyond the mere designation of an artistic mode. In fact, for Maurras, it was synonymous with nothing less than the tradition of Western Culture itself which, originating in Greece, passed to ancient Rome and hence, via the Roman Catholic Church, to Latin Europe, especially to France. The hallmark of this tradition was the courage to discriminate, resulting in political and religious hierarchy as well as artistic decorum, itself the elegance which comes from a recognition of the gradation of styles. Only cultured elites could guarantee social stability, artistic beauty. But Maurras, like all philosophically rigorous conservatives, was not content to rest here with a case based on sheer longevity or empirical survey of comparative excellences. To be fully persuasive there must be appeal to the nature of things, and this he produced by invoking the principle of “Order,” hypostatized as an ontological category: “… it remains for us to delineate what we envision as the normal form of the kingdom. We conceive of it as the regime of Order. By that we mean an Order conforming to the nature of the French nation and the laws of universal reason.”¹⁶ Order serves, then, in Maurras's cosmos with something of the same force as the form of the Good in Plato's; and, as in Plato, it is Reason—liberated by Maurras from complicity with Rousseau—that ratifies the whole.

Eliot was introduced as a graduate student at Harvard to the work of Charles Maurras by Irving Babbitt, who, dismayed at the lack of vigor in the mannered Genteel Tradition of fin de siècle America, was attracted by contrast to what he saw as the call to principled discipline by the French conservatives. An enthusiastic student of Greek and Latin who had ended up teaching French only because there was no opening in classics at Harvard, Babbitt responded strongly to the attack on an all-licensing Romanticism launched in the name of classical restraint and discrimination. Following the lead of Maurras and his disciple Pierre Laserre, Babbitt detected both in the sloppy emotionalism of American letters and in the sprawling industrialism blighting the landscape the signature of a formless Romanticism. Like his French mentors, Babbitt saw democracy merely as the political aspect of Romanticism, the pathetic attempt to place the right to discriminate in the hands of the the masses, whose combined ignorance supposedly would refine itself into a benevolent general will. The evident abrogation of enlightened authority had, moreover, permeated all facets of American life, even the confines of Harvard, whose innovative system of electives, snorted Babbitt, allowed “the wisdom of the ages to be as naught compared to the inclination of a sophomore.”¹⁷ Behind these woes, large and small, Babbitt, too, detected the ominous figure of Rousseau—and told his students so for the next quarter of a century.¹⁸

Eliot seemed to have little firsthand knowledge of Maurras until he spent the year 1910-1911 in Paris. There he experienced both the contemplative and active side of Maurras as he read L‘Avenir de l'Intelligence and found himself in the midst of the street theater provoked by the Maurras-inspired radical reactionary group L' Action Française. Many years later in a testimonial to the enduring influence of Maurras, Eliot would try to capture the excitement aroused in him and the like-minded by this initial encounter: “Maurras, for certain among us, was a kind of Virgil who led us to the gates of the temple.”¹⁹ On his return to Harvard he followed Maurras's career with great interest in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française, which in 1913 succinctly described the Maurrasien position as “classique, catholique, monarchique,” a credo Eliot later translated into his own ideological coat-of-arms when he announced himself “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, anglo-catholic in religion.”²⁰

What enabled Eliot to import this belligerent championship of Latin-Catholic Europe to English shores was the salesmanship of T. E. Hulme, who spent his short life expounding the French reactionaries to British literati. Over and over again Hulme insisted that the linchpin of reactionary thought was the belief in original sin—and that the necessity of taking a stance on this point transcended national boundaries. One either supported the classical or the romantic view, with major consequences:

… the classical, pessimistic, or, as its opponents would have it, the reactionary ideology … springs from the exactly contrary [to the romantic] conception of man; the conviction that man is by nature bad or limited, and can consequently only accomplish anything of value by disciplines, ethical, heroic, or political. In other words, it believes in Original Sin. We may define Romantics, then, as all who do not believe in the Fall of Man. It is this opposition which in reality lies at the root of most of the other divisions in social and political thought.²¹

It was, then, the universalizing Manichaean scope of the French reactionary worldview which allowed it to enjoy a hothouse existence in Protestant, Anglo-Saxon England. Without any obvious sense of distortion, Hulme announced himself a Maurrasien Tory.

Emboldened by this example, Eliot was confident enough to conduct a 1916 extension course in Yorkshire in which, armed with Hulme's insight and relying on a syllabus heavy with Rousseau, Maurras, Lasserre, and Babbitt, he set forth the French anti-Romantic position.²² From 1916-1919 Eliot published dozens of book reviews and essays in a variety of journals, but in all of these when he felt the need to place his remarks in a wider intellectual context, he invariably employed the French framework. That this has gone virtually unremarked in the early Eliot is due to the fact that he suppresses the partisan politics and wages the battle on almost purely aesthetic grounds. Thus, for example, in the seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), he criticizes the tendency to praise poets for their originality, stresses the importance of immersing oneself in the literary tradition, and, famously, calls for the poet to exercise “a continual extinction of personality.” While the immediate object of his displeasure is undoubtedly the gauzy sentimentalizing of many Georgian poets, the case against them is taken over wholesale from Maurras's identification of Rousseau's emotive individualism as the subversive force in French history. The Georgian poets are merely the sloppy dregs of Romanticism.

If we look at Eliot's essays from the early 1920s we can see him inching closer to the overtly political element in Maurras's thinking. In the well known review essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (October 20, 1921), Eliot posits for the first time his seminal idea of the “dissociation of sensibility,” a psychic sundering of thought from feeling “from which we have never recovered.” As everyone remembers, this occurs in the 17th century; as few remember, it parallels, according to Eliot, the revolution against the old monarchy: “the poets of the seventeenth century (up to the Revolution) were the direct and normal development of the precedent age.” While Eliot couches the loss in purely poetic terms—no longer could we exercise the fluid creativity of pre-Revolutionary poets who were capable of “constantly amalgamating disparate experiences”—a closer look at what this entails reveals that the loss is in essence something far greater. In all the touchstone passages Eliot quotes as evidence of the associated sensibility, the conjunction of dissimilar elements—metaphysical wit—is the result of gearing up and down the Great Chain of Being: eyes are like stars, globes are like tears, tears are like the opening of the heavens, etc. It is the classical-medieval worldview of cosmic hierarchy, Maurras's ontology of Order, that sustained our sensibility, guaranteed wholeness. When the egalitarian agitations of Puritans and parliamentarians overcame the tradition of religio-political hierarchy in the seventeenth century, this view dissolved, and we declined into the modern world.

On the basis of this observation, Eliot rewrites English literary history after a French model whereby 1688 corresponds to 1789 as the date of ejection from the Eden of psychic and civic well-being. Shakespeare, writing before the Fall, qualifies as “classical,” though the Romantics had championed him against neo-classical charges of unruliness; neo-classicists such as Pope, who would seem to be Eliot's natural allies, are viewed with suspicion and rarely mentioned, falling as they do on the romantic side of the great watershed. Swift has a “diseased character.”²³ And needless to say, the Puritan tradition from Milton (the English Rousseau) through Blake to Lawrence is viewed as eccentric and subversive in whatever delight it might convey. The obvious contortion involved in this revision leads Eliot to a further one when he announces to his readers early in the Criterion's career that the grand tradition need not be imported from France, for, though not many may have noticed, England is itself a Latin country!²⁴ The English burden in the twentieth century is therefore to reject the previous age's error and return to native, classical ways, the direction pointed out by Hulme:

… he [Hulme] appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which should be the twentieth century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of its own. Hulme is classical, reactionary, and revolutionary; he is the antipodes of the eclectic, tolerant, and democratic mind of the end of the last century.²⁵

Nor should we be misled by Eliot's later conversion to the Anglican Church into thinking that the classical cause was abandoned. A survey of his post-conversion criticism reveals that the classic-romantic dichotomy persists; it has merely been translated into a conflict between orthodoxy and heresy.²⁶

It is in defense of orthodoxy that Eliot ascends the platform to deliver the 1933 Page-Barbour lectures at the University of Virginia (subsequently published as After Strange Gods). He begins by cautioning his audience that he is speaking as “a moralist” and makes it quite clear that he expects his particular moral scrutiny to encounter great sympathy from his southern audience. Of course, if the real thrust of Eliot's remarks were to chastise on behalf of his limited version of religious orthodoxy, then one could hardly imagine a less receptive forum for a Torquemada of Anglo-Catholicism than the overwhelmingly Protestant, largely Baptist South. But Eliot has cannily sized up the substantial political affinity of his own reactionary position and that of many of his auditors. Three years earlier, a group of twelve southerners, including three of the New Criticism's future luminaries, Alan Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren, had contributed to a book of essays championing southern agrarian life against the despotic sway of northern industrial capitalism. Unlike the frantic, scurrying North where deracination seemed a small price to pay for material success, the Old South, according to these authors, offered the alternative life of a settled and leisurely contemplation of beauty. Slavery, when they grudgingly acknowledged it at all, appeared to them to be more an unfortunate accident of the Old South than the economic base which supported porchfulls of white-clad colonels and their ladies. All things considered, southern reverence for “the amenities of life” seemed to more than compensate for the foible of slavery, and it is on this basis that Ransom admonishes: “The South is unique on this continent for having founded and defended a culture which was according to the European principles of culture; and the European principles had better look to the South if they are to be perpetuated in this country.”²⁷

This identification of the agrarian South with pre-industrial Old World culture created an essential bond between the Southern New Critics and Eliot and made possible the importation of his Anglicized version of Maurras's doctrine. This time, however, a sea-change had to take place, for if the championship of ancient monarchy made little enough sense in England, it made none at all in America. Instead of indicting political levelers, then, for the destruction of the agrarian South, the Southern New Critics pointed the finger at the scientific mentality, which had spawned a rapacious (northern) industrialism that in turn generated the bazaar of dispensable commodities essential to capitalism. This was the true spirit of modernity; it was this that had all but destroyed the leisurely minuette of southern life with its venerable folkways and respect for the land.

The most pointed of the New Critics in elaborating this case was Ransom, who spoke out aggressively as a champion of southern regionalism, praising the Old South as a place of ritual and rich tradition felt in the bone.²⁸ Of course, this sort of complaint against an industrial rapaciousness could have been made as easily by communitarians on the left; what underscores its reactionary bent is the adoption of Eliot's Maurrasien credo of 1927:

A natural affiliation binds together the gentleman, the religious man, and the artist—punctilious characters, all of them, in their formalism. We have seen one distinguished figure in our time pronouncing on behalf of all three in one breath. In politics, royalism; in religion, Anglo-Catholic; in literature, classical. I am astonished upon discovering how comprehensively this formula covers the kingdom of aesthetic life as it is organized by the social tradition. I am so grateful that it is with hesitation that I pick a little quarrel with the terms. I would covet a program going something like this: In manners aristocratic; in religion, ritualistic; in art traditional. But I imagine the intent of Mr. Eliot's formula is about what I am representing. … The word for our generation in these matters is “formal,” and it might even bear the pointed qualification, “and reactionary.”²⁹

New Critical formalism is thus the American equivalent of Maurrasien classicism, though, now at two removes, the original source is obscured.

This ignorance of tradition on the part of these champions of tradition cuts them off from history to a degree far beyond the intended formalism of their project and it is this severance that accounts for the major weaknesses in their position. They universally accept Eliot's belief in a radical change of consciousness occurring in the seventeenth century (Winters, only, differs slightly in placing the break a little earlier, at the end of the sixteenth century), but with no stake in the rise and fall of monarchies, they must cast about to explain why such a rupture should have occurred. Unable to make anything of the baleful influence of Rousseau or Milton, the New Critics are disappointingly cursory and unconvincing in accounting for the phenomenon on which they base not only their literary history and their notion of poetic excellence, but also their view of the modern Western mind in general. Brooks, for example, places the blame for the fragmented modern sensibility squarely on the shoulders of Thomas Hobbes, conceivably a defensible position, but not without a great deal more evidence than is ever provided. Hobbes, we are told, and this is virtually all we are told, is guilty by virtue of his elevation of scientific discourse which reduced irony to imprecision, metaphor to fancy, and thereby did irreparable damage to the poetic imagination:

The weakening of metaphor, the development of a specifically “poetic” subject matter and diction, the emphasis on simplicity and clarity, the simplification of the poet's attitude, the segregation of the witty and ironical from the serious, the stricter separation of the genres—all these items testify to the monopoly of the scientific spirit. … The imagination was weakened from a “magic and synthetic” power to Hobbes' conception of it as the file-clerk of memory. It was obviously the antirationalistic magic that Hobbes was anxious to eliminate.³⁰

Gingerly and almost with embarrassment it seems, Wimsatt seconds this opinion in accounting for the dissociation of sensibility in a section he contributed to the collaborative effort with Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History.³¹ Hobbes's “new epistemology,” Wimsatt attests in passing, ushered in the modern era of “rationalism and prosaism.” That Hobbes is being used as a deus ex machina or, more accurately, as a diabolus ex machina, becomes clear when we consider that Winters, too, indicts him—but on the charge of instigating (along with Shaftesbury) “a rebellion against the authority of the rational mind.” Thus, Hobbes becomes an amazingly serviceable villain, capable of spawning whatever one dislikes about the modern era: excessive rationalism or excessive irrationalism.

Not only, of course, do the New Critics buy into the theory of a seventeenth century dissociation of sensibility, but they adopt as well the centrality of the metaphysical poets. Once again, however, they take up a vulnerable position because they cannot do much with Eliot's view that the metaphysicals are the final articulators of the grand Latin tradition, based on throne and altar. As a result, virtually the only strategy open to them is to abstract the poetic virtues of the metaphysicals—irony, paradox, and wit—and claim that these are the timeless benchmarks of all good poetry. This was something Eliot himself never maintained, as witness his enormous (and much greater) admiration for Virgil and Dante. Indeed, Eliot indicates that it is only because the metaphysicals come so late in the tradition that they have to resort to their trademark pyrotechnics. Their far-ranging figures are in part the bravado flourishes of those who need to convince themselves that such comparisons can still be made. As much as anything, then, the virtues that the New Critics value absolutely are for Eliot brilliant posturing in the face of impending decay.³²

A bizarre consequence of their unwavering commitment to the style of the metaphysical poets is that the New Critics are forced to demote the romantics, the very poets whose organic theory of poetry most nearly resembles their own. The individual New Critic might try to salvage a particular Romantic, but only after previously undiscovered metaphysical features have been identified, and even then the poet is presented as an aberration. Brooks, for example, after demonstrating the wit in “London,” tries to reclaim Blake in this way: “Blake is a metaphysical poet. But the elements which make him such a poet rarely appeared in the poetry of his period and never elsewhere in a form so extreme. He remains an isolated and exceptional figure.”³³ Shelley, the revolutionary atheist, whose philosophy Eliot found “repellent” and whose poetry he deemed almost unreadable as a consequence, is still a disparaged figure, but now because of his utter lack of the saving grace of irony.³⁴ Wordsworth's simple demotic poetry, “a man speaking to men,” appears hopelessly pedestrian—except where he was unintentionally paradoxical³⁵—and even Winters, who might have been attracted to a latter day version of morally informed plain style, finds Wordsworth “heavily didactic,” no more than “a very bad poet who wrote a few good lines.”³⁶

Because the New Critics divorce Eliot's view of literary history from the specific cultural history which supported it, metaphysical poetry becomes, not the index of what was lost, but the loss itself. Cultural politics is fought out completely on the field of aesthetics. Sensitive, however, to the complaint that they were arid formalists—a charge that dogged them from the very beginning—the New Critics chose to defend themselves by arguing that the essential nature of poetry, its figurative language, was revelatory of the deep structure of the world. Galileo had argued that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics; the New Critics responded that it was written in metaphor. The difficulty was, of course, that while Galileo could point to the movement of the heavens in support of his claim, what evidence could the New Critics adduce in support of theirs?

The weakest sense in which the New Critics tried to defend their position was that sketched by Brooks in The Well Wrought Urn. The world, in its complexity, demands a complex response, he argued. Consequently, univocal romantic lyrics, for example, betray the trust of poetry insofar as they suggest the adequacy of a simple response. In this regard, their emotional abstraction suffers from a deficiency akin to the scientist's rational abstraction: both belie the world's richness. Borrowing Richards's distinction between “poetry of inclusion” and “poetry of exclusion,” Brooks establishes a system of evaluation based on the amount of discordant material a poem contains. Only a heavily ironic poetry, he concludes, by constantly suggesting alternative readings can serve as adequate simulacrum of the variousness of the real world.

Criticism of this position was swift and telling, however. Brooks was jumped on, justly, by both David Daiches and Murray Krieger for the unavoidable implication that the more complexity a poem contained the better.³⁷ Krieger points out that the logical extension of such a position would be a poetry which duplicated the chaos of the world, nightmarishly providing the limiting case of Winters's “fallacy of imitative form.” To these voices was added that of R. S. Crane, who couched his complaint in Aristotelian terms. Brooks, he contends, errs by starting with a material explanation of poetry as something that is built out of ironic language rather than by looking for a definition that would begin with poetry's proper function in the world.³⁸ As a result, when Brooks finally does speak of poetry as providing “an insight which preserves the unity of experience,” this unity strikes Crane as much more that of poetic coherence than of fidelity to external reality. If a poem can cantilever ironies, the world (it is assumed) must confirm the construction.

A more sophisticated, but still overtly a historical and apolitical, account of poetry's relationship to the world beyond the text is put forward by Ransom. He avoids the material explanation with which Crane taxed Brooks by beginning his inquiry with the subject matter of poetry. This he divides into two types: on the one hand, a poetry of ideas in which images are in the service of allegory, rhetoric, and persuasion; on the other hand, a poetry of things which enables us to experience the textured Dinglichkeit of the world in its “rich and contingent materiality.” Clearly he prefers the second, and his preference serves a dual purpose. It serves first of all as an attempt to rescue affectively laden objects from the dispensable commodities of capitalism. These enduring products of a by-gone culture after which Ransom hankers constitute the real and abiding world. And at the same time he distances himself from the social realism of vulgar Marxism, the most pedestrian modern version of a poetry of ideas.

While Ransom's position, unlike Brooks's, does establish a recognizable avenue of traffic between poetry and the world, it is difficult to see how his insistence on physical poetry can be made to square with his decided taste for the metaphysical poets. Apparently aware of the problem, he nudges the term “metaphysical” toward its medieval religious associations and redefines it as “miraculous.” In poetry, the miraculous occurs when the nature of things is revealed via metaphor: “the miraculism arises when the poet discovers by analogy an identity between objects which is partial, though it should be considerable, and proceeds to an identification which is complete.” But even this move could not have prepared us for what follows when Ransom identifies the metaphorforging mind of the poet as the very source of religion, with religion gaining from the association:

From the strict point of view of literary criticism it must be insisted that the miraculism which produces the humblest conceit is the same miraculism which supplies to religions their substantive content. (This is said to assert the dignity not of the conceits but of the religions.) It is the poet and nobody else who gives to the God a nature, a form, faculties, and a history. … The myths are conceits, born of metaphors. Religions are periodically produced by poets and destroyed by naturalists. Religion depends for its ontological validity upon a literary understanding, and that is why it is frequently misunderstood.³⁹

Even pre-conversion Eliot never made literary classicism bear this much weight, and, as has already been mentioned, he grew increasingly scornful of those like Richards (and earlier Arnold) who suggested that poetry might supply the function of religion.

But cut adrift from Eliot's broader cultural context, the New Critics move further and further in this direction, culminating in the notion of the poem as icon. The term is derived by Ransom, though with significant change, from the work of the aesthetician Charles Morris. In his Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Morris had distinguished between the mere sign or “symbol” used by science and the iconic sign employed in artistic media. The first of these is purely referential, serving to denote the object to which it points. In contrast, the iconic sign “embodies … [value properties] … in some medium where they may be directly inspected (in short, the aesthetic sign is an iconic sign whose designatum is a value).”⁴⁰ But Ransom, though pleased with the obvious valorization of aesthetic representation, does not believe Morris has gone far enough in his definition of the iconic sign. If the iconic sign points to the world—though it be the values of the world—then it resembles the scientific symbol in providing a kind of knowledge. The icon, for Ransom, must do more. It does not just point to the values of the world but actually embodies these values. It does not just represent the value, it possesses the value: “the icon is a body imitating some actual embodiment of the value.”⁴¹ Like the well wrought and Grecian urns it describes, the poem, too, becomes the repository of value, a precious object in its own right. Moreover, because the poem condenses metaphorically, offers as it were a distillation and heightening of values, it constitutes—and I believe this is Ransom's ultimate claim—the most precious object, the world's body made luminous. The icon has assumed its religious function.

Understood in this way, the idea of poetry as icon becomes the organizing theme of Wimsatt's most sophisticated work. In 1954 he collects his theoretical essays of more than a decade under the title The Verbal Icon, along with the following definition: “The term icon is used today by semiotic writers to refer to a verbal sign which somehow shares the properties of, or resembles, the objects which it denotes.”⁴² But it is the vagueness recorded here in the italicized somehow that Wimsatt, a more philosophically conscientious theorist than Ransom, feels obliged to dispel. How exactly does the icon “share the properties of, or resemble, the objects which it denotes”?

The obvious difficulty of this position is that metaphor—the essence of poetry according to Wimsatt—is a literary figure having no ordinarily identifiable status outside the poem. The terms of the metaphor may be found ready-to-hand in the world, but what sense does it make to speak of their comparison as enjoying extraliterary existence? If Wimsatt had been content to claim that poetry provided a special kind of knowledge about the world, he might have argued that metaphor was the vehicle of this (non-discursive) knowledge. But like Ransom he is not content with this lesser claim, though for most theorists it would seem quite large enough and certainly hard enough to prove.⁴³ Alternatively, if Wimsatt were to fall back on the view that the metaphor is solely the poet's invention, then he would be trapped, philosophically in an idealism, artistically in a formalism, where the only criterion of value would be coherence. And clearly this is a route he does not want to take.⁴⁴

The near mysticism that Wimsatt is left with leads him back to the Middle Ages in search of a solution. He notes in passing that the seriousness with which he takes metaphor bears comparison to the analogical language of the patristic tradition, but this will not be—cannot be—the crux of his argument, for it does not explain how language embodies what it imitates.⁴⁵ Much more to his purpose is the Thomistic conception of epiphany, the manifestation of the divine in the mundane:

I allude to Maritain's stress on the radiance of a concrete, if ontologically secret or mysterious, kind of form. … It appears to me, by the way that James Joyce … has placed the correct accent on radiance or claritas—the radiant epiphany of the whole and structurally intelligible individual thing.⁴⁶

Although Joyce extended the use of epiphany in his work, the whole tradition has as its fountainhead the idea of the Incarnation, and Wellek is absolutely correct in seeing this as the ultimate likeness Wimsatt would establish for poetry's universalizing of the concrete.⁴⁷ Toward the end of his history of literary criticism, Wimsatt freely admits as much:

The writers of the present history have not been concerned to implicate literary theory with any kind of religious doctrine. It appears to us, however, relevant, as we near our conclusion, at least to confess an opinion that the kind of literary theory which seems to us to emerge the most plausibly from the long history of the debates is far more difficult to orient within any of the Platonic or Gnostic ideal world views, or within the Manichaean full dualism and strife of principles, than precisely within the vision of suffering, the optimism, the mystery which are embraced in the religious dogma of the Incarnation.⁴⁸

The divinity of the world, revealed through metaphor, transubstantiates the poetic artifact, rendering it iconic. If Wimsatt could be no clearer, he could draw consolation from the precedent of religious mystery he invoked.

Wimsatt arrives at the terminus of New Critical thinking on this matter, drawing out the religious implications of Ransom's icon and the more rudimentary pointings in the same direction of his own collaborator Brooks. After his conversion to Catholicism, Tate follows suit, though he chooses to cast the whole issue rather unhelpfully in terms of the problem of Cartesion dualism. (It is not coincidental that Descartes was a scientist). This allows him to romp through the Western tradition in order to demonstrate that poetry resolves the mind/body dichotomy, a vast extension of Eliot's comparatively tame idea of the dissociation of sensibility.⁴⁹ Those unsympathetic to Tate might dismiss his effortless solution as a reduction of poetry to the status of the pineal gland; he himself preferred to see it as the equivalent of religious atonement. Only Winters, as so often, stood apart from the others in shying away from grand religious claims for poetry. But again, as so often, he joined them through the back door, for his obsessive emphasis on the morality of poetry is prosecuted with a Calvinistic fervor: a sermon minus even the four bare walls.

The methodological consequences of their excessive claims for poetry led to a falling away from much of what was best in Eliot. Despite Eliot's talk of the impersonality of good poetry, few critics were more adept at getting at the essence of an author's oeuvre with free-ranging example. His essay on Tennyson is a brilliant instance. In contrast, the New Critics were theoretically excluded from any such helpful overview by their adherence to the intentional fallacy: their harvest was limited to the individual poem. Lost, too, was Eliot's comparative method in which he laid English poetry side by side with French or Italian counterparts. It took a great deal of trepidation for any New Critic to do the same, for the tremendous emphasis that their hermeticism forced them to place on the connotation of words would have required virtually perfect bilingualism in order to dissect a foreign poem. This had the unfortunate academic consequence of making English departments in this country unduly provincial during the reign of the New Criticism, hardly something the editor of The Criterion would have approved of. Finally, one misses in the major New Critics anything like Eliot's superb commentary on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. The Eliot who toward the end of his life came to prefer drama to the lyric could only have found Winters's Puritanical distrust of the theater benighted, though it might have confirmed his belief that the British Civil War continued. The other New Critics discussed here, while not morally offended as was Winters, nevertheless felt obviously uncomfortable equating dramatic tension with paradox, and made only passing reference to the stage. Possibly, too, in drama there was simply too much space between metaphors to account for. In all of these ways, then, the highly rarified view of poetry embraced by the New Critics issued in a methodological narrowness at odds with the fullness of the European tradition as Eliot understood it.

In sum, the New Criticism was essentially indebted to the French conservative legacy of Eliot for its central insights. The anti-Romanticism of Maurras that inspired Eliot's notion of the impersonality of the poet who searches for an objective correlative for his emotions becomes, in turn, the New Critical admonition against the Intentional Fallacy. This same suspicion of romantic subjectivity generated the twin warning against the Affective Fallacy. Both the creation and the criticism of poetry were thereby purged of autobiography. And, of course, behind the anti-Romanticism is Maurras's insistence on original sin, the thinly veiled fear of the reign of the tasteless, restless democratic masses, perpetually revolting in both senses of the word. This fear manifested itself for Eliot in an exclusive classicism and for the New Critics in exquisite textual strategies, which presupposed the correspondingly refined mind of the poet whose intentionality they could never openly acknowledge.⁵⁰ Eliot, however, gradually learned that it was possible to claim too much for poetry, but almost impossible to do so for religion, and his political, historical and cultural concerns became provinces of his Anglo-Catholicism. In this way he managed—barely—to hold together Maurras's classical compound. The New Critics, unable to translate to America the European history which generated much of their poetics, could not. Literature was made to swallow history and religion, and the poem swelled to an icon. As such, it demanded a depth of veneration neither Maurras nor Eliot, even in their most purely aesthetic moments, could have granted.

Notes

1. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957) 113 and 106.

2. See John Crowe Ransom, “T. S. Eliot: The Historical Critic” in The New Criticism (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941) esp. 135-45.

3. Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (Denver: Swallow Press, 1947) 460.

4. William Wimsatt, Day of the Leopards (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976) 14-15.

5. T. S. Eliot, “Literature, Science, and Dogma,” Dial 32 (March 1927): 243.

6. Quoted in René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986) 6:214.

7. The Works of Joseph de Maistre, trans. Jack Lively (New York: Macmillan, 1965) 204.

8. Maistre 214.

9. Maistre 71.

10. Maistre 69.

11. Maistre 120.

12. Edouard Drumont, The French Right, ed. J.S. McClelland (New York: Harper, 1970) 95.

13. McClelland 167-68.

14. See Charles Maurras, Romantisme et Révolution (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1922) esp. 1-24; this work contains the earlier Trois idées politiques (1898) and L‘Avenir de l ‘Intelligence (1904), introduced with a new preface.

15. Maurras, Romantisme et Revolution 4.

16. Charles Maurras, Oeuvres Capitales (Paris: Flammarion, 1954) 2:381.

17. Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College (Boston: Houghton, 1908) 47.

18. Babbitt 37.

19. T. S. Eliot, “l‘Hommage de l ‘Etranger” in Aspects de la France et du Monde (25 April 1948): 6.

20. See the Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1929).

21. T. E. Hulme, Speculations (London: Routledge, 1958) 256. The excerpt is from Hulme's critical introduction to his 1916 translation of Sorel's Réflexions sur la violence.

22. Ronald Schuchard, “Eliot and Hulme in 1916: Toward a Revaluation of Eliot's Critical and Spiritual Development,” PMLA 88 (1973): 1088-89.

23. T. S. Eliot, Essays Ancient and Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 1936) 160.

24. T. S. Eliot, Criterion (October 1923): 104-05. In the same year, more temperately, if not necessarily more believably, Eliot argues that classicism should have the same force in England as it does in the Latin countries: “And I cannot understand why the opposition between Classicism and Romanticism should be profound enough in Latin countries (Mr. Murray says it is) and yet of no significance among ourselves. For if the French are naturally classical, why should there be any ‘opposition’ in France, any more than there is here? And if Classicism is not natural to them, but something acquired, why not acquire it here? Were the French in the year 1600 classical, and the English in the same year romantic? A more important difference, to my mind, is that the French in the year 1600 had already a more mature prose” (“The Function of Criticism” in Selected Essays 17).

25. T. S. Eliot, Criterion 2 (April 1924): 231.

26. The most notorious example of this is, of course, After Strange Gods, but this series of lectures was singular only in its intemperateness, not in the essential position it outlined.

27. John Crowe Ransom, I'll Take My Stand—The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners (1930; rpt. New York: Peter Smith, 1951) 3.

28. See his essay “Reconstructed but Unregenerate” in I'll Take My Stand.

29. John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body, (New York: Scribner's, 1938) 41-42.

30. Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1939) 52.

31. William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Vintage 1957) 252-54.

32. This is the subject of the third of Eliot's unpublished Clark Lectures, a series delivered at Cambridge from January to March 1926. In this lecture, commenting on Donne's “The Ecstasy,” Eliot calls attention to “that over-emphasis, that strain to impress more than to state, which is the curse of seventeenth century verse not in England alone, but throughout Europe” (Clark Lectures, III: 16).

33. Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition 235.

34. Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition 237.

35. Brooks tries to rescue the “Intimations” ode for New Criticism but can do so only by positing a Wordsworth so dimly aware of his craft that the poem seems to have emerged despite the author. See The Well Wrought Urn (1947; rpt. New York: Harcourt 1975) 125, 126.

36. Yvor Winters, Forms of Discovery (n. p: Alan Swallow, 1967) 167.

37. David Daiches, Critical Approaches to Literature (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1956) 302. Murray Krieger, The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1956) 134.

38. R. S. Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1953) 105.

39. Ransom, The World's Body 140.

40. Quoted without reference in Ransom, The New Criticism 288.

41. Ransom, The New Criticism 289.

42. William Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Lexington, KY: U of Kentucky P, 1954) x.

43. Eliseo Vivas discussed briefly but pointedly some of the difficulties of both the lesser and greater claims in a review essay of Wimsatt's book reprinted. See The Artistic Transaction (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1963) 232-40.

44. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon 241.

45. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon 268-69.

46. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon 270.

47. Wellek 6:285.

48. Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History 746.

49. Allen Tate, Essays of Four Decades (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1968) 4-5 and 10 ff.

50. As far as I know Gerald Graff is the only one to draw the connection between Eliot and the New Critics on the basis of the doctrine of original sin. He traces it back to Hulme, but does not mention the French sources. See “What was New Criticism,” Salmagundi (1974) 78-79.