SOURCE: Willingham, John R. “The New Criticism: Then and Now.” In Contemporary Literary Theory, G. Douglas Atkins and Laura Morrow, pp. 24-41. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Willingham follows the development of New Criticism from its earliest proponents in the 1930s to the later 1900s, detailing the evolution of the theory from its early days to the present, and offering a summary of the place New Criticism holds in modern literary studies.]

The term formalism, broad if not ambiguous, refers to the many critical dogmas and related “practical criticism” that accompanied the sea change from Anglo-American romanticism to the modernist avant-garde. Typically, formalism asserts the autonomy of the artifact, the preeminence of form and style over relationships of the work to “life,” and the irrelevance of older doctrines like mimesis or any idea that poetry's highest value is its reflection of the “real world.” Emphasizing form as what Mark Schorer memorably called “achieved content,” the twentieth-century formalists have opposed the separation of form and content. From epistemological bases in Kant and Coleridge and with the examples of Poe and Henry James often on their minds, they have erected systems upon idealistic concepts of the imagination and organic form, asserting the superiority of the language of art to that of science because art “transcends the limitations which are constitutionally a part of the language of science.”¹ Within such a context, questions of form and technique become paramount if not exclusive, for they embrace the special structures achieved only in art. By fiat, implication, or practice, formalists try to resist tainting the aesthetic dimension by moralism, didacticism, or intellectualism; their central concern is only form, the unifying principle within the work.

Emerging in London as early as 1907, out of the somewhat thin air of Pound's protomodernist effusions, formalism prospered throughout the first half of this century and dominated Anglo-American critical discourse for twenty-five years, since about 1935. Its major practitioners include T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and William K. Wimsatt; often the names of Yvor Winters, Kenneth Burke, R. P. Blackmur, F. R. Leavis, and William Empson are added, although the case for these five critics is fraught with abundant qualifications and their influence on “practical criticism” has been relatively slight. Ransom and the other American, or Southern, “New Critics” became familiar names, especially in academic parlance, and their critical theories and approaches apparently continue to guide, to “correct” classroom literary study.

All twentieth-century formalism has generally responded to intense pressures for explanations of Anglo-American avant-garde works, the modernist anthology or canon, and to derive from those explanations some coherent theoretical core. Such drives appear in the conversations of the Poets' Club in London about 1907, especially in the dicta of T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, and Ezra Pound. Pound from the beginning of his campaign sought to force dramatic changes in English poetry, to justify repudiation of threadbare romanticism (“spilled religion,” Hulme called it) and decadent Victorianism (a deadly amalgam of predictable technique and tiresome didacticism). Apparently no one noticed the paradoxical denunciation of romanticism despite heavy leaning on its poetics.

Nevertheless, the resulting theory, the fragmentary cumulations under Pound's hand, was doggedly formalistic and at least partly Coleridgean. In Pound's Imagist “manifesto” in Poetry (January 1913), the doctrine of the Image announced the priority of formal considerations—“direct treatment of the ‘thing,’” rigid economy in diction, organic rhythm, and the “image” itself, a highly charged fusion of idea and emotion—as the proper goal of the poet. Impatient with details of exposition or professional protocols and pressed for time to write his own ambitious, exploratory poems, however, Pound as theorist settled for aphoristic bits and pieces and simply promised that the new poetry would supply ample models of what “the age demanded.”

Eliot, with tidier habits and academic stance, reworked some of Pound's elliptical pronouncements, aligning them with his own disdain for romanticism, acquired mainly from Irving Babbitt at Harvard, from French symbolism mediated by Remy de Gourmont, and from his own discoveries as he worked out his poems before 1920 and the many essays he wrote in England. For Eliot, such combination was salutary, as is shown in his “position papers” in The Egoist and later in The Criterion, in which Eliot synthesized the London “vortex” of 1915-20.

Eliot's critical prose nearly always focused upon a single work or author; but the focus was reinforced by naming and defining basic modernist concepts like “tradition,” “objective correlative,” and “dissociation of sensibility”; by urging poets to ransack non-English literature for techniques; by advocating the poet's duty of “stealing” from other poets to gain a heavily allusive texture; by proclaiming the elevation of the English metaphysical poets and the consequent dismissal of Milton and Shelley; by persuading his readers to make the “correct” response to religious poetry and to see criticism as creative union with artists and the literary tradition as a simultaneous order. Eventually Eliot, of course, became the guru of modernist formalism; and every other critic would have to reckon with, if not defer to, Eliot's perspectives and to treat Eliot's poems as particularly privileged. His adroit irony further enhanced his appeal to other modernists. But even Eliot produced no systematic theory, no “practical” system for close, critical reading of texts.

About a decade after Pound's first literary high jinks in Kensington and alongside Eliot's emergence from obscurity, I. A. Richards began at Cambridge experiments linking psychology and literature, focusing on the act of reading poetry and the degree of success the reader objectively might claim in achieving what Richards called “balanced poise.” To some degree foreshadowing reader-response theory, Richards's investigations seemingly offered solid ground for at last a more “scientific” analysis of poetry. Collecting, classifying, and defining his subject-readers' responses to texts he had chosen, Richards developed in the 1920s the foundation for an otherwise absent “practical criticism” (a term later to be synonymous largely with New Critical “explication” and the title of Richards's most influential treatise on the analysis of poetry). In controlled experiments with students at Cambridge, Richards asked them to record faithfully their responses to “neutral texts” (unfamiliar poems without identification of authors, dates, or oddities of spelling and punctuation). Out of their responses, Richards sifted and identified the problems poems present to readers—problems of interpretation and of relationships between techniques and meanings. He identified the most successful texts as “poetry of inclusion,” which, he said, is inevitably characterized by the presence of an “irony” that allows successful readers to reach a state of “internal equilibrium” or “synaesthesia.”²

In Practical Criticism (1929), Richards identified for readers the levels of meaning in particular texts; kinds of problems readers of varying abilities encounter; use or misuse by poets of their creative liberty; the poet's deference or indifference to readers; relationships of thought and emotion; implications of variant readings; and, above all, benefits of meticulous scrutiny of texts. He warned against naive faith in the poet's “intention,” superficial awareness of techniques, or expectations of results.³ Ultimately, said Richards, poetry might replace religion—a kind of “positivism” abhorrent to Eliot.⁴ Richards did not burden his readers with any arcane critical vocabulary; he simply and gracefully endorsed and demonstrated critical exactness based in the details of the text.

More than a decade after his important work lay behind him and still without a strong following, Richards was identified by John Crowe Ransom as the “psychological critic” but denied, along with all the critics Ransom discussed in The New Criticism (1941), the stature of “ontological” or complete critic. Among Richards's shortcomings, Ransom pointed out his emphasis upon the reader's feelings and his admitted failure to settle on a method for analyzing the “opposed impulses” within the “poetry of inclusion.”⁵

But even as Richards was setting up his first experiments and in mutual unawareness, a beast in Nashville, Tennessee, was poised to spring. For in 1919 three enthusiastic teachers of English at Vanderbilt University, a fluctuating number of bookish townsmen, and eventually some bright undergraduates formed a little club to discuss topics of mutual, mainly philosophical, interest. These were the “Fugitives” of later renown. Gradually their discussions began to narrow to poetry and, finally, to the writing and criticism of their own poems. The senior faculty member, Ransom, shortly became the central figure.

Although he had drifted into teaching English instead of philosophy, his major in college, and lacked the usual academic background for a scholarteacher of English literature, Ransom had long been thinking about and writing poetry. About 1912, while reading philosophy as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Ransom had become intrigued by what he saw as a crucial but generally unremarked dichotomy between a poem's subject and its sounds (as tallied in diction, meter, and rhyme)—a duality always to be a central part of his own poetics and therefore naturally discussed by the club members. This preoccupation with poetry's dualities would be common as well to the formation of the critical school of “New Criticism,” though usually the other members of the group emphasized some means of resolution for the duality.

Between 1920 and 1925, even as he was writing his few most memorable poems—“Blue Girls,” “Captain Carpenter,” “Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter,” “Necrological,” “The Equilibrists,” and “Dead Boy”—Ransom solidified his serious commitment to the aims of the Fugitives by his theoretical insights rather than his creativity. One can scarcely avoid suspecting that all along Ransom's poems, fine as they are, were for him primarily experiments for testing and refining a poetics forming for him since about 1912. Once their purpose was achieved, he seemed to lose interest in his poems despite considerable praise from their readers and turned exclusively to critical prose.

The group's distinguished little magazine, The Fugitive, published between 1922 and 1925, required editorial duties of all the club members. Consequently, all perforce wrote on occasion short quasi-critical editorials and essays, which reflect the cumulative refinements in discussing their own and others' poems. In a series of articles under the collective title of “The Future of Poetry” (1924), Ransom formulated his basic ideas and an approach to criticism reflecting not only the mode of club discussions but a classroom manner—that of the subtly questioning eiron. Sounding sometimes like a testy Frost, he professed serious reservations about the abandonment by Imagists, Amygists, and “prairie poets” of traditional conventions, particularly meter. He was now ready to declare publicly that successful poetry has a dual nature: It produces “tension” between “logical sequence” (i.e., meaning) and “objective pattern” (sounds). Although clearly distinct, these two parts of the poem coexist successfully only through the “miracle,” which occurs with “the adaptation of the free inner life to the outward necessity of things.”⁶ By “miracle,” Ransom clearly meant something like what most New Critics would later call “form.” Ransom's insistence upon duality in poetry was to remain basic for him and set him accordingly apart from the later, younger New Critics, occasionally causing disagreements between him and the others. He anticipated a basic aversion of all the New Critics toward “microscopic analysis” of a poem for meaning alone, as if the poem were prose and had no “metrical distractions.”⁷ (Later, the New Critics would call such sole concern with “meaning” “the heresy of paraphrase.”)

A little earlier, in a review of Eliot's Waste Land for the New York Post in 1923, Ransom had advanced another principle adumbrating later New Criticism—the insistence that there is a profound distinction between the processes of art with their reliance upon the imagination and those of science with their incessant drive toward abstraction.⁸ In a testy, public exchange with Tate after the review appeared, Ransom made the distinction even more emphatic: Poetry, he declared, should never have as its primary goal the “pure presentation of ideas and sensations.”⁹

Allen Tate, then still an undergraduate studying under Ransom and Donald Davidson, almost immediately after joining the Fugitives in 1921 took up the role of gadfly, especially to Ransom. Even after Tate had received his degree and left Nashville, he would force Ransom in exchanged letters to clarify ideas but also to grumble rather helplessly about youthful zeal and resentment of former masters. Tate discovered French symbolism and the work of Eliot for the Fugitives and thereby brought into the Nashville ferment the avant-garde of London and, later, New York. By 1923 Tate had written two or three successful poems; and when one was published in The Double Dealer, elicited a letter of praise from Hart Crane observing Tate's apparent debt to Eliot, who was as yet quite unknown to the Nashville group. Tate immediately acquired and responded with delight to Eliot's poems, becoming overnight an ardent disciple of the London “vortex.” As a convert to Eliotic irony, allusiveness, textual density, and preference for metaphysical poetry and Jacobean drama and dramatic lyric, Tate found not only his own direction as poet and critic but also the compulsion to convert his fellow Fugitives.

Tate's intense partisanship led to the rift with Ransom over the latter's disapproving review of The Waste Land, in which he denounced the betrayal of Eliot's own prescriptions for form and the example of modernism's flagrant indifference to meter and traditional techniques generally. The ensuing heated exchange not only divided old friends for a time but also underscores the lasting distinction between the essentially conservative Ransom and the younger Fugitives and future New Critics. Ransom always preferred traditional conventions; the others, including Brooks, who joined the group after the breakup of the Fugitive Club, found that they shared ideas and attitudes with expatriate camps in London and Paris.

During the remainder of the 1920s, however, the Fugitives and reinforcements like Brooks and Andrew Lytle supplemented literary intensity with the defense of the South against what they interpreted as Northern subversion and the gradual replacement of the Southern way of life by the “American way,” attuned to capitalism and industrialism and consequent enmity toward traditional Southern culture. Out of the Fugitive stage had come, despite some amateurishness and controversy, general agreement about the dangers of an industrial order to poetry and art generally. Moreover, the Nashville poets began to associate their literary principles—technical integrity in poetry, the necessity of structure, a preference for the lyric mode and the ironic manner—with the “Southern way” they had all grown up with. They saw parallels between manners and meters, the agrarian life and religious values, precision in art and cultural integrity—all imperiled by a baneful “American way.”

Identified in the early 1930s as the “Southern Agrarians” because of their spirited defense of the South, the former Fugitives and future New Critics now embraced economic and social issues. They tried to point out that only a homogeneous culture like the South's, which honored tradition and rural life, could offer a favorable climate for the imagination, poetry, and religion. Only in the South could the correct relationship between God and man, between man and nature, between the individual and society exist and encourage the free play of the imagination, checked only by religion, tradition, and a code of manners. In The Critique of Humanism and the rather belligerent “manifesto,” I'll Take My Stand (both in 1930), the Agrarians pro tem challenged the forces they saw as enemies—the Marxists, the New Dealers, the neohumanists, the “boosters” of a mongrelized “New South,” and representatives of the “American tradition” claiming their descent from Emerson and Whitman—and by association lambasted liberalism, impressionism, sentimental “appreciation,” and journalistic superficiality. This short period of intense regional piety (it was over by 1935) was good preparation for the Nashville group's metamorphosis as New Critics: Their unity had been reinforced, and their sense of duty to Southern letters (specifically, to themselves) found them ready for serious criticism and pedagogy as antidotes to a national pursuit of mediocrity.

Moreover, discovering in rather short order that neither the South nor the nation at large felt much need for their socioeconomic leadership, the former Fugitives turned again to specifically literary preoccupations and to academic careers. As ardent pedagogues by the mid-1930s, they sought but could not find suitable textbooks for the courses in literary studies that they were assigned to teach, especially introductory courses to the literary genres. Brooks and Warren accordingly chose to write their own materials for their classes. Thus the mimeograph machines at Louisiana State University brought forth the first versions of a line of distinguished, exemplary textbooks, of which Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1941) were the first.

Brooks's extended essay about contemporary poetry, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), begun while he was still at Oxford and including the work of his old friends at Vanderbilt, appeared appropriately as a kind of prospectus for the New Criticism and for the textbooks he and the others would write. The timing was perfect for the alliance of impressive pedagogical pragmatism and scholarly theoretical substance—and for a quiet revolution in the study and teaching of literature at American colleges and universities. Literary studies have never been the same.

The series of textbooks—unpretentious, well-written, sequential, pragmatic—persuaded students and teachers to pay closer attention to the language of literary texts; to form habits of identifying and justifying their identifications of tone, mood, voice, metaphors and symbols; to perceive how formalizing principles unify content and meaning; to share the creative process that brought the work into existence; and to celebrate organic wholeness when it was discovered. Even the latest edition of Understanding Poetry—the fourth, in 1976—still asserts the original aim:

To begin with as full an immersion in the poem as possible; to continue by raising inductive questions that lead students to examine the material, the method, and their relations in the poem—that is, to make an appeal to students' “understanding” of the poetic process; then to return students as far as possible to the innocent immersion—but now with a somewhat instructed innocence to make deeper appreciation possible.¹⁰

The final incomplete comparison seems deliberate: Such responsible, sometimes rigorous study of a poem gives students (and teachers!) more insight into its formal dynamics than can any other approach, especially an approach that leaves the student with merely a “set of cliches that may be parroted about any poem.”¹¹

In the foreword to chapter 1, “Dramatic Situations,” the authors distinguish between journalistic or historical treatment of human experience and the “form” that only poetry may confer. This distinction strengthens and clarifies the contrast between poetry and science observed by Ransom early in the Fugitive years. Brooks and Warren argue that “form does more than ‘contain’ the poetic stuff: it organizes it; it shapes it; it defines its meaning.” Indeed, their whole critical system becomes an extension of that central concept of “form” permeating Understanding Poetry.

Brooks and Warren place the burden of careful reading and interpretation directly upon the student, who with some nudging by the editorial apparatus must work incrementally toward the integration of all technical features by and into form, the “governing idea of the massive unity of the good poem.” Searching questions surround poems carefully selected by the author-critic-pedagogues to reveal special properties of poetry—analogical language (metaphor and symbol), theme, tone, dramatic structure, and so on; to the book's appendixes are relegated concern with the poet's “intention” and metrics (far less important here than in Ransom's theory). Throughout the book appear concise instances of the kind of critical analysis, incrementally more complex, ultimately expected of the student. Understanding Poetry is another American “how-to-do-it” manual; and by way of emphasizing the necessity of the student's finally becoming independent of book and teacher, Brooks and Warren present an abundance of poems without editorial apparatus or pedagogical nudge (perhaps a recognition of Richards's effort) as materials for which students will construct their own analyses and interpretations. Understanding Poetry is unremittingly student-centered: The teacher's role is assumed to be that of the patient, quizzical, genial eiron (like Ransom at Vanderbilt), who almost imperceptibly guides the initiate toward the understanding and discovery of form.

Understanding Fiction (third edition, 1971) has always seemed less intense, less stylized, less adroit, even less consistent about the primacy of form, than its predecessor. It is more obviously an anthology; and the authors have less to say about the properties of fiction than they had about lyric poetry. Its intensity and precision, indeed its unique success, reinforces the frequent charge that the New Criticism is grounded in a poetics of lyric and that its application to other genres, fiction and drama, is often seemingly forced. After all, the foundations of the New Criticism came from the table talk of practicing poets and devotees of poetry, of whom only two—Warren and Tate—ever wrote fiction. Nevertheless, Brooks and Warren again tried to lead students (and their teachers) to discover how literary works mean by questions and brief discussions. Perhaps the strongest testimonial to the worth of Understanding Fiction is the endless stream of textbooks introducing fiction for freshmen and sophomores by other hands that have followed it. Moreover, early imitations came from ardent disciples of the New Criticism—for example, The Art of Modern Fiction (1949) by Robert Wooster Stallman—and from old friends—The House of Fiction (1950) by Caroline Tate with her then husband, Allen Tate.

With their two successful textbooks (followed by the collaboration of Brooks and Robert B. Heilman in Understanding Drama in 1948), Brooks and Warren had naturalized criticism in the college classroom, an impressive feat from any perspective and without previous parallel in the United States. They had created and packaged a totally new way of approaching literature that was pedagogically sound, attractive, pragmatic, productive of analysis, and to an impressive degree self-teaching. They made New Criticism famous by 1940, and they made responsible, painstaking analysis of literary texts the central, most attractive feature of English studies at both undergraduate and graduate levels. And they set off a burgeoning academic industry in literary studies that scholarly societies and journals alone never could have effected.

By the mid-1940s, as veterans of World War II swarmed onto campuses and into graduate programs in literary studies, young English faculty (many of them veterans too) were enthusiastically promoting and using the textbooks of Brooks and Warren or their imitators and the classroom devotion to the analysis of literary texts they sanctioned. New quarterlies espousing the New Criticism sprang up: At Baton Rouge, Brooks and Warren coedited the new Southern Review, established in 1936; Ransom founded and edited the Kenyon Review (1939); older journals such as the Sewanee Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Virginia Quarterly Review welcomed all the New Critics as contributors. In 1940 the Southern Review and the Kenyon Review jointly featured a symposium on the revolution in criticism and teaching methods in literary studies.

Special summer schools in English spread the principles and critical methodology of the Southern New Critics, explication, to faculty and graduate students from all over the United States. Enrollments in English courses increased sharply after 1945, and the waning of positivistic “scholarship”—philology, literary biography and history, and influence tracing—became a rout by the end of the forties. Criticism, now not only dominant in the classroom but also increasingly defiant of traditional scholarship, soon invaded conservative journals like PMLA, Modern Philology, and American Literature. The New Criticism competed with philology and history and usually won at regional and national meetings of the scholarly societies.

In the 1940s Cleanth Brooks appeared to be the quintessential New Critic, as even he has ruefully acknowledged in a recent essay.¹² In addition to collaborating on the textbooks, coediting the Southern Review, writing essays for the other quarterlies, and being increasingly the spokesman for New Criticism at professional and scholarly meetings, Brooks wrote two major statements of the new poetics, the previously mentioned Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn (1947). In the first, he was anxious to connect his old friends, the Fugitive poets, with the work of Richards and Eliot and the “great tradition” of English poetry and to promote what Frank Lentricchia identifies as “an idealistic theory of [literary] history through Eliot's notion of ‘unified sensibility.’”¹³ The chapters develop and synthesize not only Brooks's ideas but those of others he had adopted after his undergraduate days at Vanderbilt (i.e., since 1925): from Ransom, the view of poetry as the complex language of complex experience, the distinctions between abstract science and concrete poetry, and irony as the indispensable stance; from Tate, a Poesque insistence on meticulous craftsmanship and scorn of allegory; and from Eliot, the dramatic possibilities of the lyric, the poet's impersonality, and wit as the guarantee of seriousness.¹⁴ Tate later spoke in admiring wonder at Brooks's remarkable achievement in writing the book: It was, he said, a surprising but convincing synthesis of Eliot, Richards, Ransom, and Tate himself, which could not have been believed possible and which only Brooks could have brought off.¹⁵ Bradbury has called the book “all but indispensable for the comprehension of the ways and means of aesthetic formalist criticism.”¹⁶ A half-century later it still strikes us as a remarkably good study and, if one must choose among the many excellent critical works of the New Critics, it is the most satisfactory exhibit of the most influential critical movement of this century in the United States.

By 1942, when he turned to work on The Well Wrought Urn (1947), Brooks was no longer a junior camp follower of the Nashville Fugitives and Agrarians but the most systematic, committed, comprehensive exponent of New Criticism. His position, curiously and perhaps pointedly unremarked by Ransom in The New Criticism, turned out to be something of a boon, for it allowed him to distance his version of New Critical strategy and his authority from Ransom's. Clearly, Brooks seems in The Well Wrought Urn to have escaped Ransom's insistence on the “ontology” of the poem, the duality of structure and texture, or the superiority of Donne to Shakespeare. In minimizing what Ransom had called “logical unity” (and what Yvor Winters had called “rational meaning”), Brooks stresses “imaginative unity” and warns against the “heresy of paraphrase.” Characteristically, he insists that the “language of paradox” inevitably appears in mature poetry as the means by which a poem achieves structural unity.¹⁷ Brooks, already perhaps sensitive to charges that the New Critics were indifferent to or did not know literary history, took pains in this second treatise to include representative poets of each literary era since the Middle Ages: Shakespeare, Milton, Herrick, Pope, Gray, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, and Yeats. Each poem he considers is “successful,” because Brooks's analysis inevitably uncovers the presence of irony, paradox, ambiguity, dramatic context, and organic structure. Structural unity of a poem, he assures us, lies in its “unification of attitudes into a hierarchy, subordinated to a total and governing attitude.”¹⁸ “Attitude” thus becomes the emphatic control of all other features, the local equivalent of form, in his masterful disclosure of dramatic context in Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Although the theory of New Criticism was complete with The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks turned even more noticeably toward literary history in The Poems of Mr. John Milton (1951), which he and John Edward Hardy edited and for which they wrote analytical commentary on the individual poems. This work has been apparently, perhaps deliberately, overlooked by foes of the New Criticism eager to make the familiar, reductive charge that the New Critics ignore or do not know literary history and cannot cope with “scholarship.” Brooks further demonstrated his respect for and command of literary history with Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957), written with William K. Wimsatt; in his two volumes on Faulkner in 1963 and 1978; and in his multivolume edition of the letters of Thomas Percy. Such use of traditional scholarship surprises only those who fail to look beneath the surface of the writings of the New Critics or who know only the work of some of their less responsible disciples. All of the Nashville group had rigorously and thoroughly studied literary history and consequently buttressed their critical writing with historical detail whenever they wished; they opposed only the usurpation of texts by literary history and its substitution for close reading and painstaking analysis.

Throughout the New Criticism's long hegemony, Ransom was, at least to “watchers” of New Critics, the conservative voice, if not always the preferred spokesman. Two others from the Fugitive period—Warren and Tate—became increasingly vocal. In the 1930s Warren wrote two essays on Southern poets: one about Ransom's facility with irony; the other, comparing John Gould Fletcher's poetry with Davidson's and Ransom's. Fletcher, also a Southerner but a follower of Amy Lowell's reductive Imagism, wrote inferior verse, said Warren, because he lacked the technical grasp of irony and therefore failed to give “structure” to emotion and ended up with a poetry of “almost pure texture.”¹⁹ Davidson, though not an “ironist,” gives the effect of “shock and desperation” and therefore must be given to “ironic contemplation.” But Ransom's poetry succeeds because of his technical assurance—as we might expect, his skill with irony.²⁰ The old Fugitive predilection for irony had become a cardinal principle of New Criticism.

In the 1940s, in an essay contrasting “pure poetry” (that which “tries to be pure by excluding, more or less rigidly, certain elements which might qualify or contradict its original impulses”) and “impure poetry” (that which willingly and generously complicates its entire context with the wide range of complex human experience, thus necessarily summoning irony), Warren, like Brooks before him, and the Fugitives before Brooks, expressed his wholehearted agreement with the New Critical conviction that irony is the best guarantor of sincerity and vision.²¹ Still later, Warren too appears to have been somewhat anxious to demonstrate his command of conventional scholarly procedure; hence his long essay appended to a handsome edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, illustrated by Alexander Calder.²² Commending The Rime as “a poem of pure imagination,” Warren surveyed all the available scholarship on the poem to show that it had been seriously misinterpreted as lacking “meaning” or, worse, as embodying allegory; he argued that the poem is, however, “thoroughly consistent with Coleridge's basic theological and philosophical views as given to us in [his] sober prose, and that, without regard to the question of self-consciousness on the part of the poet at any given moment of composition, the theme is therefore ‘intended.’”²³ Armed with impeccable, even formidable scholarly apparatus—notes on Coleridge's life and abundant references to scholarship about Coleridge's canon—Warren unfolded a detailed analysis of the poem's symbolic system to bolster his discovery that indeed the Mariner's journey, far from being either allegorical or meaningless as interpreted by the scholars innocent of New Criticism, is a tightly, richly organized “paradoxical process” of the creative experience.²⁴ The essay of course evoked anger and derision from “the scholars” but served notice that New Critics did not feel obliged to limit themselves to the text but were quite capable of using “traditional” resources as they chose to strengthen explication.

As I stressed earlier, it was Allen Tate who established and strengthened the crucial link between the Fugitives in Tennessee and the modernists in London, Paris, and New York. His poetry and his other prose (he wrote two novels and two biographies) garnered adequate though restrained critical attention; but as literary commentator and critic—actually, man of letters—he has been highly respected. As poet, he is remembered mainly for “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” which he finally and notoriously had to explicate. As critic he was somewhat limited by his regional and philosophical prejudices, as in the case of his vicious attack on Hart Crane's Bridge, which Tate really did not understand and to which he curiously neglected to apply the principles or methodology of the New Criticism (Crane, he said, was simply allied with the wrong literary gang—Emerson, Whitman, etc.).

Tate defined one useful New Critical concept—that of “tension” in poetry—which resembles Ransom's notion of opposition between “structure” and “texture,” Brooks's emphasis on “paradox” and “irony,” and Warren's distinction between “pure” and “impure” poetry. But Tate's term and its application point more precisely to the healthy balance between a poem's “extension” (the body of abstraction, denotation, and literalness) and its “intension” (the concrete, the connotative, and the figurative details).

No account of the New Criticism and its immense (and, I believe, continuing) contribution to the prosperity of literary studies since World War II would be complete without mention of two late arrivals and major allies, William K. Wimsatt and René Wellek, both colleagues of Brooks's after he moved from Louisiana State University to Yale in 1947. Wellek, a distinguished literary historian, comparativist, scholar, and critic of critics, endorsed the New Criticism in his and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature (1949)—for two decades a basic textbook for graduate students in English—by praising an “intrinsic,” or contextual, approach in literary studies over “extrinsic,” clearly inferior biographical, historical, sociological, or psychological approaches. There and elsewhere Wellek lent his immense prestige to the clarification of terminology and issues in ways clearly favorable to the New Criticism.

Wimsatt helped by elaborating upon, with Monroe C. Beardsley in The Verbal Icon (1954), the “affective fallacy” and the “intentional fallacy,” both of constant, often implicit, concern to the New Critics. Moreover, in Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957), written in collaboration with Brooks, Wimsatt, who wrote twenty-five of the thirty-two chapters, adroitly persuades his reader to agree that formalistic criticism is the desired end toward which all earlier critical theory has been tending. He tries to bolster formalistic considerations by drawing an analogy between the poem as reconciliation of opposites in its text to an understanding of the dogma of the Incarnation.

Something also should be added about the roles of Yvor Winters and William Empson in New Criticism's heyday. Both are often associated with the movement, largely because Ransom included them in his purview called The New Criticism (which, however, declared that the New Critic had yet to appear). Winters can hardly be called a “compleat formalist” because of his demand that a critic is obliged to discover the “best poems” of all time, that the poet must make good sense and thus avoid technical arcana like Eliot's or Hopkins's. Moreover, as Hart Crane discovered traumatically, Winters took for the critic's duty the detection and denunciation of a poet's “immoral” tendencies.

Empson, Richards's student at Cambridge and excited by the work of Robert Graves and Laura Riding in analyzing “in word-by-word collaboration” English poems written since 1918, turned to the kind of scrupulous analysis we find in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), in which he, indeed formalistically, probed for tensions between words and for clues to structure. Subsequently, however, Empson found Marxist and Freudian issues quite as intriguing as formal considerations. And neither Winters nor Empson ever became resources for the classroom. F. R. Leavis is sometimes called a New Critic, but he was really always sui generis in practical criticism, and his idiosyncracy may be gauged by his enthusiasm for Lawrence and hostility to Joyce. Substantially, we are left with the Nashville group and their best disciples, almost altogether teachers and students, as the definitive voices of the New Criticism.

These days—since the early 1970s—formalism, especially the New Criticism, is often patronized and sometimes ridiculed. It has been declared intellectually naive and methodologically fruitless. Its putative aversion to extrinsic, extratextual, possibilities for illuminating the literary work (the old charge of omission of history and biography from the 1930s and 1940s); indifference to author and reader; undemocratic and elitist aura and protection of the teacher against the hapless student; ruthless drive to demonstrate organic unity; “privileging” of Elizabethan, metaphysical, and modernist lyric poetry; employment of mysterious terms (presumably, like structure, tension, tone, and texture)—all these charges are solemnly leveled and elaborated. Perhaps worst of all, the New Criticism has been called “boring” because it is tied to one interpretation, discourages students who do not perceive or care about a “right reading” or the process of responsible reading, finds irony, ambiguity, and paradox in unlikely places. It discourages students by requiring close reading. And it does not allow for “creativity” of the reader.

The vast, seemingly obvious, contributions by the New Critics to literary studies are increasingly denied or simply unmentioned. Perhaps many partisans of other approaches simply do not perceive that only after the New Criticism flowered did academic “literary” sovereignties—departments of English, modern languages, comparative literature, women's studies, black studies, even biblical studies—undertake some significant degree of literary discipline, flourish, and become bustling academic empires at the universities. The climate for the proliferation of scholarly associations, literary journals, foundations, and grants supporting literary scholars and endless projects in research is, in large part, the legacy of the New Criticism, which makes possible the kind of speculation and textual studies emerging as structuralism, reader response, and deconstruction. If their demand for responsibility in reading and interpretation be seen as authoritarian, then the New Critics may be fairly called “undemocratic,” but so may be any critical discipline requiring rigorous attention to words and their often mysterious interplay.

Late in these years of its “eclipse,” the New Criticism has been defended, effectively and appropriately, by its most enduring spokesman, Brooks himself. As in any respectable New Critical statement, the critic (unlike most structuralists and poststructuralists) turns quickly away from theory and toward explication. Although declaring that he writes in apologia for the enterprise called (wrongly, as he points out) the New Criticism, Brooks's point depends ultimately upon a successful demonstration of pure praxis—a methodical reading of Hardy's “Channel Firing”—to show how New Critics generally and simply tried only to achieve “a special emphasis on the literary work as distinguished from an emphasis on the writer or the reader.”²⁵ Briskly, he identifies the dramatic situation—context, setting in time and place, level and tone of dialogue: The dead in a particular churchyard comment wryly upon the monstrous machinery of the living combatants in World War I. Brooks finds the poem's effect dependent, not surprisingly, upon irony, verbal and dramatic; the most precise possible accounting for allusions to times and places—Stonehenge, Camelot, Stourton; the possible significance of Parson Thirdly's name in view of his utterance; possible, even likely, echoes from Swift and the Bible (even the easily overlooked choice of “Ha, Ha” for God's response to modern warfare instead of the less precise, less dramatic “No, No” in an earlier version of the poem); the relationship of metrical pattern and variation to “the effect of solemnity”; and thematic possibilities restricted in the light of the poem's texture and progression.

Moreover, Brooks shows that “outside” considerations—popular tropes (e.g., loudness that would awaken the dead, the poverty of church mice); historical facts (“Mad as hatters”); Mrs. Hardy's identification of the particular churchyard, Stinsford Church, correctly and reasonably close to Portsmouth, Stonehenge, and Camelot; textual changes—are quite compatible with an otherwise purely textual analysis. They need only the scholar's patience, intellectual assay, and pertinent associations. Having led his reader through careful examination and synthesis of all its details, Brooks concludes his task. He refuses to tell readers how they must judge the poem, for, as he remarks, readers who observe the meanings of words and deliberate upon figurative structures, modulations of tone, relationship of rhythm to “total effect,” will certainly know how to judge the poem for themselves. Thus Brooks disposes of attacks upon himself and the other New Critics.

If their approach seems always to “privilege” the text, to expect that careful readers will always arrive approximately at the same interpretation, and to see literature as more complex yet more precise than casual speech or the writing of most journalists, the New Critics never suggested otherwise. They merely taught, after all, that literature requires and deserves responsible reading and readable response.

Notes

1. William J. Handy, Kant and the Southern New Critics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), p. 10.

2. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 621.

3. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929; rpt., New York: Harvest, n.d.), p. 183.

4. David Ward, T. S. Eliot between Two Worlds: A Reading of T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 55-56.

5. John Crowe Ransom, “Roads Taken and Not Taken,” in Directions for Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger and L. S. Dembo (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), p. 39.

6. John Crowe Ransom, “The Future of Poetry,” The Fugitive, February 1924; quoted in Louise Cowan, The Fugitive Group: A Literary History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), p. 142. Later, of course, Ransom would refine his terms into “structure” and “texture,” though the meanings are essentially unchanged.

7. Ibid. Ransom also lamented the modern poets' lack of their predecessors' “sense of miracle” at the fusion of “inner meaning” and “objective form,” declaring that neither art nor religion is possible until we suppress “the enfant terrible of logic that plays havoc with the other faculties.”

8. Thomas Daniel Young, Gentleman in a Dustcoat (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), p. 152.

9. Cowan, Fugitive Group, p. 154.

10. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry, 4th ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), p. ix.

11. Ibid., p. 18.

12. Cleanth Brooks, “In Search of the New Criticism,” American Scholar 53 (Winter 1983/84): 41-53.

13. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 109.

14. John M. Bradbury, The Fugitives: A Critical Account (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958), p. 231.

15. Allen Tate, “What I Owe to Cleanth Brooks,” in The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work, ed. Lewis P. Simpson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), p. 126.

16. Bradbury, The Fugitives, p. 231.

17. Ibid., p. 240.

18. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, rev. ed. (London: D. Dobson, 1968), p. 104.

19. Bradbury, The Fugitives, p. 232.

20. Ibid., p. 240.

21. Robert Penn Warren, “Pure and Impure Poetry,” Kenyon Review 5 (Spring 1943): 229-54.

22. Robert Penn Warren, ed., The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946), pp. 61-148.

23. Ibid., p. 65. Warren assails the interpretations of the two foremost Coleridge scholars of that day, Earl Leslie Griggs, who had declared the poem to be a “journey into the supernatural for the sake of the journey,” and John Livingston Lowes, who had seen the poem as an “illusion for the sake of illusion.”

24. Ibid., pp. 1-6.

25. Brooks, “In Search of the New Criticism,” p. 47.

Selected Bibliography

Bradbury, John M. The Fugitives: A Critical Account. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958. A fine supplement to Louise Cowan's history of the Fugitives, Bradbury's approach analyzes their ideas and their critical statements. His book maintains an admirable balance between praise and disagreement.

Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959. Without peer as a complete chronicle and definition of the Nashville poet-critics from their first collegial stirrings of creativity and thought through their emergence as important modernist poets and theorists. Cowan has made the most of the rich archives at Vanderbilt and her friendships with the subjects themselves.

Elton, William. A Glossary of the New Criticism. Chicago: Modern Poetry Association, 1949. Originally published serially in Poetry from December 1948 through February 1949 and revised and enlarged for this printing as a pamphlet, the Glossary may seem odd and perhaps pretentious today, but its appearance and revisions reflect an extensive and genuine concern with understanding the large body of terms generated by New Critics by the end of the 1940s. Still a useful reference for those making a study of the movement.

Handy, William J. Kant and the Southern New Critics. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963. A relatively rare effort to track the epistemological backgrounds of Ransom's, Tate's, and Brooks's theories—“the direct influence of the Kantian generative idea,” which emphasizes “the celebration of man's qualitative experience.” Stresses ideas rather than practice.

Karanikas, Alexander. Tillers of a Myth: Southern Agrarians as Social and Literary Critics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. A history usefully supplementing Cowan's book by concentration on the interim between the Fugitive days and the New Criticism. Generous notes and bibliography take the reader fully into the Nashville group's ventures into social, economic, and political polemic and spirited apologia for the “Southern way” and consequent myth making which reinforced their ultimate return to and concentration upon literature from the mid-1930s onward. A final chapter charts the smooth transition from Agrarianism into full-fledged New Criticism.

Ransom, John Crowe. Beating the Bushes: Selected Essays, 1941-1970. New York: New Directions, 1972. These graceful essays span the thirty years including Ransom's command post as editor of the Kenyon Review and his occasional pieces afterward. They show Ransom's differences with the other New Critics as well as the many points of total agreement. Contains the indispensable “Wanted: An Ontological Critic” (1941), which largely defined the concerns of the just emerging New Criticism, and the previously unpublished, late essay on Hegel, “The Concrete Universal” (1970).

Schorer, Mark. “Technique as Discovery.” Hudson Review 1 (Spring 1948): 67-87. A concise, spirited, and very lucid statement of the central meaning of New Criticism and a relatively rare application of its methods to fiction. Schorer predictably claims the superiority of novels of “thickness and resonance” (i.e., the lineage of Henry James) to those of Fielding, Defoe, and H. G. Wells.

Simpson, Lewis P., ed. The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Tape-recorded conversations between Warren and Brooks, essays and affectionate recollections of other old friends, and critical assessments by eminent scholars (including Walter J. Ong, René Wellek, Thomas Daniel Young, and Monroe K. Spears) are assembled by Simpson to trace the career of Brooks, his ultimate role as chief spokesman for the New Criticism (especially for the academic community), and the durability of his work beyond the 1950s.