SOURCE: Jancovich, Mark. “Robert Penn Warren as New Critic: Against Propaganda and Irresponsibility.” Southern Literary Journal 24, no. 1 (fall 1991): 53-65.

[In the following essay, Jancovich concentrates on the work of Robert Penn Warren, writing that in contrast to many interpretations of New Critical theories as bourgeois. In fact, Warren and his interest in literature and theory was closely linked to a concern with social and economic development and the poet defined the writing of literature “as a form of social engagement.”]

In recent years there has been a concerted attack upon the American New Criticism as a movement,¹ and this attack has concentrated particularly on the New Critical interest in “irony.” The claim of modern critics is that in the New Criticism, “irony” operates as a way of sealing the text off from its context, converting it into a self-sufficient object. Hence, the New Critical conception of “irony” has been attacked both by post-structuralists (who regard it as a way of halting the productivity of language and identifying a theme or message) and by those concerned with the politics of literature, who claim that irony is used to alienate the text from its social and historical conditions. This latter position is developed by Richard Ohmann in his book, English in America, where he claims:

In the language of the New Criticism, ambiguity, tension, and irony all tend to work in the same direction—towards the neutralization of feeling by freezing into an artifact of eternity.²

Ohmann's strength is that his critique is historically specific. He attempts to situate the dominance of the New Criticism within the political and intellectual climate of post-war America, and he acknowledges that the New Criticism emphasized literary autonomy for social and political reasons. However, Ohmann contrasts the New Critics' position with that of Kenneth Burke, claiming that Burke's theories were concerned with the way in which textual strategies framed relations between the author and the reader. Ohmann's claim is that the New Critics did not pursue this theoretical line because they were not concerned to study the social and political relations which defined, and were defined by, literature. Instead he argues that the New Critics were concerned to define literary activity as an alternative to these relations. According to Ohmann, the New Critical position was as follows:

The world is complex, discordant, dazzling. We want desperately to know it as unified and meaningful, but action out in the world fails to reveal or bring about a satisfying order. The order we need is available in literature: therefore literature must be a better guide to truth than are experience and action.³

Ohmann makes it clear that he is not blaming the New Criticism for the political and intellectual problems of post-war America, but he does argue that it “presented itself as a timely instrument to serve purposes … of the larger society.”⁴

Ohmann claims that by the end of the war, the ironic frame of reference that had been developed by the New Critics could be appropriated by the academy as a way of defining literature and literary study as politically neutral activities which are unconcerned with social activity. However, while the New Criticism was largely appropriated in this way, Ohmann is wrong to claim that the New Criticism was therefore a part of the bourgeois liberal tradition. Hence, though he does acknowledge that the New Critics explicitly stated their objections to this tradition, he still maintains:

the criticism and literary theory, in sharp contrast to their political manifestoes and asides, are square in the middle of the bourgeois liberal tradition. The explicit politics of these men is pseudo-politics. It constitutes an enabling mythology that ties their criticism to social yearnings and nostalgia but not to any possibility of action or affiliation. And it has little or nothing to do with the implicit political content of their writings about literature. In implicit politics, all the competing criticisms of the fifties were pretty much the same. At the risk of vulgarization, I would say that the main political effect of our theories was to help enplant literary criticism, all with its producers, tightly and securely within the networks of bourgeois institutions.⁵

Ohmann's limitation is that he fails to acknowledge that the New Criticism's dominance within the academy does not necessarily make it bourgeois in form. Rather, it is my case that the New Criticism was explicitly anti-bourgeois, and that an adequate analysis of the politics of the New Criticism needs both acknowledge this fact, and so raise the question of why the dominant cultural theory in a flourishing bourgeois society should be explicitly anti-bourgeois.

In the following essay, I will concentrate on the work of Robert Penn Warren, who was one of the small group of New Critics who emerged from the American South during the first half of the twentieth century,⁶ and I aim to illustrate that his New Critical positions were not bourgeois in character, but that they were developed from the critique of capitalist relations which had been developed by the precapitalist planter class of the ante-bellum South.⁷ Thus, I aim to show that Warren's New Critical positions were defined during the late 1920s and early 1930s when he was involved in the Agrarian critique of industrial capitalism, and that they attempted not to alienate literary activity from its social and historical conditions but to present a critique of the ways in which capitalist relations defined literary activity. Furthermore, I aim to show that Warren's interest in literature, and particularly his interest in fiction, were linked to a concern with the representation of social life, or what might be referred to as the possibilities of realism; this is significant because it allowed Warren to define the writing of literature as a form of social engagement.

THE WRITER AND SOCIETY

Despite the claims of critics such as Ohmann, who maintain that the New Criticism alienated literature from its social and historical conditions, it is my case that Warren's criticism develops from a critique of modernity in social life, and its effect upon the forms of literature. This is particularly clear in his discussion of Ransom's poetry, where he argues that the “problem at the center of Ransom's work is specifically modern—at least we are accustomed to think so—but it implies some history.”⁸ The point is that Warren discusses the “effect of science on the poetic impulse,”⁹ but he argues that though the dominance of science gave rise to the dissociation of sensibility, this dissociation is not created by science alone because the “problem is, finally, social.”¹⁰ For Warren, then, the dissociation of sensibility is not merely a feature of the artist's sensibility, but it develops from specific types of social organization and the relations they establish between the writer and his public. Moreover, Warren argues that most of Ransom's writing is not poetry at all but social and cultural criticism; and in his essay “John Crowe Ransom: A Study in Irony,” Warren outlines Ransom's critique of the destruction of traditional ways of living within modern society. Like Ransom and Tate, Warren argues that the traditional society was able to relate its elements in a whole way of life, and so give them meaning; and he maintains that this involved a specifically religious attitude.¹¹ Warren's case is that the scientific forms of organization give rise to a situation in which the religious attitude breaks down, and in which a division develops between different activities within the way of life; and for Warren, this gives rise to a divorce between fact and value and a dissociation between the cultural and economic aspects of life.

Warren argues that in this situation the writer is frustrated by society, because that society limits the development of the sensibility, separating it from the activities of everyday life; and he explains Ransom's involvement in the Agrarian movement, arguing that this frustration leads the modern writer either to oppose modern society or to attempt to extricate himself from it.¹² Despite this, Warren points out that the Agrarians did not oppose science itself, but that they wanted to construct a social order in which the sensibility and the way of life were connected and mutually supportive, rather than threatening to each other.¹³ Thus, Warren relates Ransom's writing to its social situation rather than seeing it as a purely individual creation, and he argues that it was an attempt to deal with specific historical problems.

Warren claims that when modern writers attempt to develop a theme, they encounter a problem which was not encountered by writers of the past, for whom themes were more readily available within their tradition. Among these writers of the past, Warren includes Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, and James, and he argues that their strength derives from their culture, which was able to give meaning and significance to individual behavior rather than define it as simply a series of isolated events, or as passive reflections of some more general process. In so doing, Warren draws on Southern paternalism in order to develop a critique of positivism and the forms of individualism associated with it. He argues that the strength of traditional forms of culture was that they enabled the individual to define itself as a unique entity through its relations to the whole way of life.¹⁴ However, Warren maintains that this is not the situation of modern writers, and that while writers are faced with the problem of investigating their society and culture in all ages, this may develop in different forms and with different motives. Thus, Warren makes a distinction between two types of development. The first he regards as both the more traditional and the more desirable motive, because it links the writer's activities, and even his own personality, with his existence as a social being: the writer achieves objectivity through a form of writing which is concerned not only with the personal but with the relation of the personal to the supra-personal, or social.¹⁵ However, Warren argues that writers of the second type develop from an abstraction, because they are concerned not with their social relations but with their own individual, artistic activities, so that social themes are subordinated to the ultimate motive, which is identified with the writer's own personality. Warren does not favor this second position, however, and he maintains that while this type of writer may have very great literary powers, the final outcome is ultimately unsatisfactory.¹⁶ According to Warren, this second type is that of the modern writer who is detached or dissociated from a coherent culture that would enable him to make sense of both his own personal self and his writing, allowing him to regard them as more than instances of his own individuality.

As a result, Warren maintains that the problem faced by the modern writer is not technical but social, and he argues that while modern writers may be more technically able than writers such as Fielding, Hardy, and Hawthorne, they lack a way of making their own personalities meaningful as other than isolated cases. For Warren, it is this situation which leads modern writers either to retreat from society, into a concentration on their own personality, or to adopt an oppositional position in relation to that society. However, Warren maintains that the latter case also presents problems, because it may encourage the writer to adopt a social or political programme as the basis for artistic production in an attempt “to reason himself into the appropriate position, to perform the ritual to evoke the wayward spirit.”¹⁷ Warren identifies this tendency with the forms of regional and proletarian literature present in the 1930s, and he draws some distinctions between the two and examines some of their cross-criticisms. Notwithstanding, Warren's position in relation to these movements is interesting, because he is sympathetic, though critical, of both; and in the case of the proletarian literature movement, he argues that its problem is that it is too concerned with the general and reduces individuals to mere instances of larger processes. Warren therefore claims to prefer regionalism's local interests, and its preference for individuals, rather than the internationalism of proletarian literature and its preoccupation with classes. Yet he agrees with the proletarian movement's claim that many examples of regional literature are bourgeois, and that it is often concerned with class sentimentality or snobbery. However, it is the issue of property which Warren regards as the issue which really divides the two movements: he argues that the proletarian movement can only conceive of property in its abstract or capitalistic form, and that this movement is therefore critical of property in general, while the regionalist connects property “with his idea of the relation of man to place, for ownership gives a man a stake in a place and helps to define his, for the regional writer, organic relation to society.”¹⁸ Thus, Warren's social criticism is based on a critique of modern forms of property, which are identified as abstract and alien from both the individual and the whole way of life. As a result, he maintains that the solution to this problem is a reconstruction of property forms, which would involve the individual, and his livelihood, within the whole way of life; he is therefore opposed to the development of even greater centralization, which he identifies with the forms of collectivization favored by the proletarian writers of his period.

Despite this, Warren's position is more ambivalent than might be expected; he is attracted to the social and political involvement of proletarian literature, while acknowledging deficiencies in the specific ways in which it relates politics and literature, deficiencies which he also identifies with regional literature.¹⁹ Warren is, therefore, sympathetic to proletarian literature to the extent that it rejects contemporary forms of individualism, and is concerned to alter the relation of the writer to society. But he warns that both proletarian and regional literature cannot overcome the modern problem of finding a theme simply by adopting the right propaganda. Thus, he argues that the poet's

very sincerity, the very fact of the depth and mass of his concern, may not do more than imperil his achievement unless his sensibility is so attuned and his critical intelligence so developed that he can effect the true marriage of his convictions, his ideas, that is, his theme, with the concrete projection in experience, that is, his subject.²⁰

It is interesting, however, that it is regionalism on which Warren concentrates in his discussion of this problem, and he argues that whatever the strengths of regionalism as a social and cultural program, it presents problems when it is applied to the construction of literature; the “danger in regionalism lies in the last syllable, the ism. As a fad it is meaningless.”²¹ For Warren, regionalism can become a mere affectation rather than a fully developed attitude, and he argues that this is linked to a kind of “get-rich-quick psychology” that hopes to generate a theme by adopting an already formulated political or social position. Thus, he argues that while the previous generation was largely concerned with a critique of the “hick” character, the present one produces problems by engaging in the opposite activity.²² The problem is that as an affectation, this approach reproduces the problems of those who attacked the hick, because it fails to understand this character or make it meaningful. Furthermore, Warren argues that regionalism is not a position which can be self-consciously adopted or willed into being by adopting certain strategies, and he claims that it should neither concern itself with quaintness or local color for their own sake nor engage in “the literary exploitation of a race or society that has no cultural continuity with our own.”²³ He argues that a novel's quality cannot be defined by the social position of its characters, and that it should not aim to achieve a faked simple-mindedness. Warren's point is that by simply adopting specific features or strategies, the writer does not necessarily make them meaningful, and that the process of making literature meaningful requires a genuine involvement, in which the writer addresses himself to a public, rather than simply retreating into a concentration on the local and immediate.

Even literary regionalism is more than a literary matter, and is not even primarily a literary matter. If it is treated as a purely literary matter, it will promptly lose any meaning, for only in so far as literature springs from some reality in experience is it valuable to us. The regime for the regionalist who wanted to be a writer would have its public as well as its private aspect.²⁴

Warren therefore maintains that the adoption of social and literary formulae involves an abdication of social responsibility, and that it shares this with the forms of literature in which the writer concentrates on his role as an individual artist, detaching himself from social engagement.

MEANING AND FORM

Thus, Warren's critique of propaganda is not a rejection of political engagement in literature; on the contrary, it is an attempt to argue that the adoption of a political formula involves an abdication of social responsibility, because it enables writers to simplify the contradictions and complexities of social activity and to impose abstract formulae upon their material. In a sense, then, Warren links this form of writing with pure forms of literature, because they both involve abstractions which are not developed or tested in relation to experience. Warren also opposes forms of writing which are merely concerned with the particulars of life, because this approach is unable to make these details meaningful; and this leads him to consider the relation of form and realism. Warren maintains that the task of the writer is not merely a technical or transcriptive one; rather, it involves an attempt to make their materials meaningful by posing a series of questions of these materials.²⁵ The significance of these questions is that they attempt to make the details meaningful by regarding them as elements in a process which bears upon human interests; and Warren argues that these questions

will be asked by the writer, unless he is merely indulging in romance of the blue and the grey or of the leatherstocking; and they will be asked by the historian if he is enough of the poet to have interest beyond his crude mechanisms of particulars.²⁶

However, while he connects these questions with forms of historical literature, Warren associates them with the forms of Southern fiction in his own period, because he argues that Southern writers were concerned with tradition that relates all aspects of way of life and gives them meaning. As a result, he argues that these Southern writers were involved in a complex relation to their material, because they

feel that they cannot judge a situation or society, abstractly conceived, by an abstract set of values. … They are, rather, concerned with comprehension, and realize that such comprehension, which is their ideal art, cannot be achieved without consideration of both time and place in a very special sense.²⁷

Warren's defense of Southern literature is therefore related to the attitudes which are developed by specific forms of writing, rather than a defensive form of literary regionalism.

Moreover, it is in this sense that Warren criticizes the historical novel, because he criticizes forms of historical writing that concentrate on the details of the period—such as its manners—rather than on the order of values that gives them meaning: and the reason for this is that he maintains that the representation of history must involve an awareness of the historical processes active in the given period, in a way that reflects upon the situation of the present.²⁸ This position relates the evaluation of literary form to the way in which it represents the social world, valuing the ability to provide a “realistic” depiction of social activity. However, realism here is not concerned with the transcription of particulars but with the way these particulars are related to social values and historical processes.²⁹

Warren's position also involves a critique of the forms of representation that divorce individual experience from its complex social relations with others, because Warren maintains that these relations are fundamentally involved in the formation of the self. As a result, he criticizes MacLeish for his attempt to create a formal poetry that denies ideas and external reference. This leads Warren into a position which is interesting, given many critiques of the New Criticism, because while he agrees with MacLeish that a poem's justification should be related to its formal features rather than its external reference, or political program, he claims that MacLeish's avoidance of all abstract ideas is not the only alternative. Warren's point is that MacLeish relies on a false opposition, which results in a rejection of social responsibility. Furthermore, Warren, argues that this creates a formal problem in MacLeish's poetry, because it is so purged of ideas and social engagement that it lacks meaning and significance and becomes formless and vague.³⁰ Thus, Warren argues that MacLeish relies on the same oppositions and alternatives as those writers who were engaged with propagandist forms of literature, and that both groups maintain that the writer must either engage in propagandist forms of literature or abandon the use of ideas and forms of social engagement.³¹ As a result, Warren maintains that MacLeish's position has both positive and negative features, because while it respects the specificity of the poem as a form and refuses to reduce it to propaganda, it also leads him into an asocial position, from which he is unable to define a subject that would give his poetry a formal or structural coherence. Thus, by maintaining that poetry should not be evaluated with reference to non-formal or external criteria, Warren is not devaluing social engagement in literature. Instead he is criticizing literary forms in which the substance of the text only exists to illustrate a preformulated position.

For Warren, then, the formal approach is neither a rejection of social responsibility nor the imposition of a doctrine upon the material; rather it involves specific critical attitudes which are established through the linguistic forms of the text.³² In his consideration of Ransom's poetic form, he therefore investigates its use of irony in order to identify its “fundamental motive”: according to Warren, this use of irony involves a specific critique of the “dissociation of sensibility” because it highlights the situation of Ransom's characters, comparing the limitations of their situation with their potential.³³ Furthermore, he compares Ransom's use of irony with that of Eliot, arguing that while Ransom's use focuses on the psychological states of his characters, Eliot's use contrasts modern society with traditional forms of social order.³⁴ Warren therefore maintains that irony involves a critical attitude: it explores the limitations of given social forms. Thus, he claims that the concentration upon form can avoid the problems of propaganda without refusing social engagement.

As a result, Warren's criticism did relate literary forms to social and historical development, but during this period, unlike other New Critics such as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, he was not greatly preoccupied with defining the proper practice of criticism. Instead he was more concerned with the activity of writing and the way in which the social relations between the writer and his public affected this activity. For Warren, the absence of tradition in modern society made it difficult for writers to development a theme, and in this situation they were attracted to abstract programs, such as regionalism and proletarian literature, as a way of defining a position. However, he argues against this response both as an aesthetic procedure and as a form of social engagement because it does not justify these programs themselves by investigating them in relation to experience. Furthermore, he argues that the rejection of social engagement also leads to aesthetic failure because it results in a formless and meaningless activity. In distinguishing these approaches, he therefore argues that the writer must concentrate on the formal aspects of his writing, but he emphasizes that this should involve an investigation of the existing way of life, identifying its limits with a view to its reconstruction. In this way, Warren defined literature as a form of social engagement.

Notes

1. See Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); David Bleich, Subjective Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978); Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1971); Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); John Fekete, The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-American LIterary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980); Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980); Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977); Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974); Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (London: Methuen, 1983); Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1982); Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982); Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of Literature (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985).

2. Richard Ohmann, English in America: A Radical View of the Profession (New York: Oxford UP, 1976), p. 59.

3. P. 75.

4. P. 80.

5. P. 85.

6. See Mark Jancovich, Social and Cultural Thought in the Formation of the New Criticism: A Reappraisal of the Social Origins of American Literary Criticism, Thesis, The University of Kent at Canterbury, 1988; and John Crowe Ransom/Allen Tate/Robert Penn Warren: The Social Relations of the New Criticism forthcoming. In this work I have drawn upon the excellent work done on Ransom, Tate and Warren by Richard Gray, Richard Godden, and Richard King: Richard Gray, Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986); Richard Godden, Fictions of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer (Cambridge UP, 1990); and Richard King, A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South 1930-1955 (London: Oxford UP, 1980). I am very grateful for the ideas and encouragement which these writers have given me during my research in this area.

7. For an analysis of Southern paternalism, see Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York: Vintage Books, 1971); and Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1974).

8. Robert Penn Warren, “John Crowe Ransom: A Study in Irony,” Virginia Quarterly Review XI (Jan 1935), p. 93.

9. P. 93.

10. P. 95.

11. “A myth is a fiction, a construct, which expresses truth and affirms a value. It is not an illustration of doctrine. It differs from allegory in that its components, not to be equated with anything else, function in their own right. It is the dynamic truth, the dynamic value. The philosophy of a given myth may be defined, but the definition is no more the myth itself that the statement of the theme of a poem: in each instance the value becomes static, it may be discussed but not felt, the conviction of the experience is forfeited. (The position of the Platonic myth in relation to the particular topic of discussion is beautifully in point.) In other words, myth represents a primary exercise of sensibility in which thought and feeling are one: it is total communication” (p. 96).

12. Warren argues that, for Ransom, Agrarianism “would provide fuller opportunity for the play of man's sensibility, or in other words, for the play of his proper humanity. The essential qualities of that establishment—order, tradition, stability—are merely aspects of that sensibility” (p.100).

13. “[T]he objective is not the abolition, but the correction of industrialism, just as the objective on the theoretical side of Ransom's argument is not the abolition, but the correction of science; that is, the interpretation of science in the total context of human experience” (pp. 99-100).

14. “I have named these four writers because they, perhaps more than any other Americans, have done work that is defined, in its theme and essence, by a powerful and coherent culture. Whatever the limits of New England culture may have been, it did propose that a man's experience and behavior was not merely ‘interesting’ as a case, or type, or illustration, but was important in itself as part of an eternal drama” (Robert Penn Warren, “Literature as Symptom” in Allen Tate and Herbert Agar, eds., Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936], p. 266). Also published as “Some Recent Novels,” Southern Review I (1936), pp. 624-49.

15. For Warren, the writer motivated in this way “may engage himself in such an activity as a part, and perhaps the most significant part, of his role as a citizen and a human being. He is, then, motivated by the conviction that the study of human conduct is more important and positive because the human creature possesses an inalienable dignity and interest; and then, his effort to perform as an artist, to create from the premises of his speculations and the passions provoked by them, is in itself, finally, but a phase of his own conduct as a human being and, as a matter of fact, a citizen. His work, therefore, may more nearly achieve an objectivity and give an impression of fulfillment; it is not forever tied to his personality, and the act of parturition, is indeed complete. The work may be, therefore, a genuine creation” (p. 267).

16. For Warren, the second type of writer has a different motive to the first type because he does not see his writing as “a phase of his role as a human being or, perhaps, citizen. In that case, he may perform an abstraction, and may look about him merely in his role as an artist. That is, he is searching for a theme—something to give meaning to his impulse, a scaffolding or a stage on which he may parade, a device to permit the expression, ultimately, of his own personality. His speculative questions, then, are undertaken not because he holds that they, in themselves, are finally important; they are a means to an end. … That end is self-expression; just that. He has defined himself as an artist—a pard spirit, beautiful and swift and quite unlike other persons. His concerns are not their concerns, and he is inclined, with egotism of frail morality, to set a high valuation on his own concern. With his intelligence, his sensitivity, his literary genius even, he may do a great deal to make that valuation appear not too absurd. But he, our hypothetically contemporary writer, does not always seem throughly content” (pp. 267-68).

17. P. 270.

18. P. 273

19. “[T]here is one important aspect which the two movements, as literary movements, share in common: both are revolutionary. Both the proletarian and regional writer are dissatisfied with the present relation of the writer to society” (p. 276).

20. P. 278.

21. Robert Penn Warren, “Some Don'ts for Literary Regionalists,” American Review VIII (Dec 1936), pp. 142-50.

22. “The hick is not to be baited but pampered now, a process that may have its own dangers and many accomplish with a genial smile what ridicule and high-pressure salesmen left undone” (p. 145).

23. P. 149.

24. P. 150.

25. “A Warlike, various, and a tragical age is best to write of, but worst to write in, said Abraham Cowley. When a people looks back on such an age in its own history, another question is raised as it evokes in memory those wars, the turbulent variety, and the tragedy. From such reflections they will ask: what have these tumults wrought? what relation have we, their product, to them?” (Robert Penn Warren, “Not Local Color,” Virginia Quarterly Review VIII [Jan 1932], p. 153).

26. P. 153.

27. P. 154.

28. “The historical novel, as ordinarily conceived, is equally deficient in the same respect; manners tend to be substituted for value, and costume and decor for an essential relationship between man and his background, both natural and social. The result is another form of the quaint, again incomplete and unphilosophical” (p. 154).

29. For Warren, the transcription of historical particulars “is incomplete and unphilosophical; it does not provide a framework in which human activity has more than immediate and adventitious significance” (p. 154). This position is also rehearsed in relation to the writings of T. S. Stribling in Robert Penn Warren's “T. S. Stribling: A paragraph in the History of Critical Realism,” American Review II (1934), pp. 463-86.

30. For Warren, MacLeish's “poetry is a study in shading, not a study in resolution. In fact, his poetry is carefully purged of all opposing stresses; it is singularly undramatic. It is poetry of the single impulse, which requires no resolution. This implies a certain formlessness, a defect in logic. If the theme is vague (not difficult), there can be no suspense or progression; there can be little more than the incidental excitement of the poetic perceptions at creating which MacLeish is adept” (Robert Penn Warren, “Twelve Poets,” American Review III [May 1934], p. 214).

31. “In one poem MacLeish has said ‘a poem should not mean but be.’ This is perfectly true in one sense: the artist constructs a work which is self-contained, which does not demand external reference for its justification, in which idea is vindicated in terms of perception. Again he has asked: ‘Is it just to demand of us also to bear arms?’ But the alternatives, as he puts them are not necessary. The external reference of idea is propaganda; that is the poet bears arms. The option, the choice MacLeish had taken, is a poetry in which idea is reduced to a minimum, even as a structural element” (p. 216).

32. “Irony, like wit, may be used because the writer happens to be enamoured of the effect divorced from any persistent point of view … the irony of Ransom's poetry is not one of irresponsible contrasts and negations” (“John Crowe Ransom: A Study in Irony,” pp.102-3).

33. For Warren, Ransom's work involves “a commentary on the situation, its irony deriving from the fact that these perhaps otherwise admirable people ‘cannot fathom nor perform their own nature.’ In general they represent a disorder contrary to the principles of order which the poet, in his more explicit, non-poetical work, had defended (p. 103).

34. “Eliot and Ransom have been concerned with the same problem. The method of irony in Ransom's poetry, for want of a better word, may be called psychological. Factors in the make-up of his heroes which might work for strength actually work toward weakness. Eliot's method may be called historical: the ignoble present is suddenly thrust into contrast with the noble past (p.110).